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November-December 2006
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Making It
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| Philip Tonks sells the fruits of his experimental labors. |
| Photograph by Jim Harrison |
“People think of [non-grape] fruit and flower wines as overly sweet and low in alcohol content,” says Tonks. “But there is no reason to make them that way. Our pear wines are light and delicate and go well with Brie before dinner. The blueberry, on the other hand, has a good tannin component, like a red wine, and is great with smoked cheeses. Or the sparkling version can be eaten with wedding cake.” Tonks put Chem 20 and his biology concentration to use creating jams and wines for fun for 30 years before starting the winery in 1996. He has developed at least 18 different fruit wines, including one from a “fabulous, aromatic cold-climate plum.” Currently wines made from rhubarb, apples, Montmorency cherries, raspberries, elderberries, and several grape varieties (Maréchal Foch, Seyval, and Riesling among them) are sold through local retailers, the tasting room in Waterbury Center, and at the winery itself, next door to his home (www.grandviewwinery.com). “It’s a little too close and convenient,” says Tonks, who finds his “retirement” business anything but leisurely.
Tonks and his wife, Julie, live on 30 hilly acres, a couple of which are covered with berry bushes, rows of rhubarb, and apple trees. Most of the fruit used for the wine is bought from in-state farmers. Tonks reasons that he does more to promote local agriculture than if he grew it himself. The pears from southern Vermont, for example, are “funny-looking, dented ones that are not table quality—so we’re paying for fruit that could’ve been left in the orchard,” he explains. “The owner adds value to his farm by grinding and pressing them and brings me the juice so I don’t have to handle all that fruit. But the juice is delicate; we make the wine right away and age it for a year before bottling it.”
A spirit of cooperation exists among the small growers and makers of specialty food in Vermont: it’s the second-largest manufacturing classification in the state (next to electronics, thanks to IBM), Tonks says. He has bought black currants from women intent on rehabilitating old farmland along Lake Champlain, and he gets strawberries from another farm down the hill. He has also worked out an attractive day-trip scenario with Bragg Farm Sugar House and Cabot Creamery, which he promotes to local inns and ski resorts “because people traveling these days want something active to do, to learn about something interesting,” he says. “I feel sorry for people who come to Vermont, go to Ben and Jerry’s, and go home. They haven’t seen Vermont.”
For Tonks, who spent a decade of his career developing the North American market for British Aga cookstoves, being a solo practitioner has its benefits. “Even for chefs, when they produce something, they don’t often get to hear the ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaaahs’ that I do when I’m pouring a wine and someone tastes it for the first time,” he says. “A lot of people in the business world need to get that ‘ooooh and aaaaah’ a little more.”
Coastal Goods; cookbook author, chef
Barnstable, Massachusetts
There once was a time on Nantucket when someone fresh out of college could open a small business in town and make a living from it, just as Sarah Leah Chase ’79 did with her gourmet food shop, Que Sera Sarah. “I had a passion for Nantucket and for food, for European travel and bike touring,” she says. “I loved the way you could bike into a sleepy French village and pick up provisions and have a grand al fresco picnic. At that time, there were no stores in the United States that would allow you to do that.” People vacationing on Nantucket, she figured correctly, were sophisticated enough to appreciate her more eclectic, European cuisine (which included a Moroccan-style carrot dish and the then-esoteric hummus). She ran the labor-intensive business through the 1980s before selling it to pursue “fingernails and a personal life.” For the next decade she catered, wrote cookbooks, taught cooking classes, and traveled around the country. She also met her future husband, Nigel Dyche, at a winter wine tasting at 21 Federal, a popular Nantucket restautant, and had a son, Oliver, in 1997.
Island life lost its luster after Dyche struggled through three tick-borne diseases and motherhood triggered in Chase an aversion to frequent flying in small planes through dense fog over water. These days, the couple are building a new business, Coastal Goods, which sells specialty salts from Provence, spices, herbs, and sauces. (The Meyer lemon cocktail sauce, for instance, she describes as “a shelf-stable product with a real kick of horseradish, like what you would buy fresh in a seafood market.”) They do business with Crate and Barrel, Williams Sonoma, and Whole Foods—some of whose West Coast stores actually offer “salt bars”— and sell to individuals through www.coastalgoods.com. “I do the creative end of the business, the cuisine, the recipes,” she says. “We’re in the process of trying to make the company less entrepreneurial and raise more capital”—and getting advice from classmate Michael J. Roberts, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
Chase has always loved to cook. At Harvard, she studied European intellectual history, worked in local restaurants, and made meals for a psychiatrist who lived across the street from Julia Child. “I was always hoping I could go and borrow a cup of sugar,” she says, “but it never happened.” Packing up at the end of her senior year, she noticed that her stack of Gourmet magazines towered over the research books for her thesis (which argued that Proust, Wittgenstein, and Lévi-Strauss all expressed the notion that chaos was its own form of order). “I thought the magazines were a good clue about what I wanted to do in my life,” she says.
Five years later, while running Que Sera Sarah, she made a name for herself by working on the influential Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, which “revolutionized peoples’ consciousness about food,” she says. “Julia Child’s books were very serious. This was a fun book with funny names and quirky drawings with a home-made look and ingredients that were just starting to become available—like fla- v ored mustards and raspberry vinegar.” She went on to write her own cookbooks, including Saltwater Seasonings—Good Food from Coastal Maine with her brother, Jonathan Chase ’77 (now the chef at The Lookout in Brooklin, Maine). “Many cookbooks these days are produced almost like movies, there are superstar chefs and there’s all this hype,” she says, when asked about a new cookbook in the works. “I’m one of those people who still believe in doing everything myself—shopping for all the food, cooking it all up, and cleaning up after everything. So I really know the recipes. They have come out of my life.”
Mountain Meadows Farm
Sudbury and South Newfane,
Vermont
Boston pathologist Amiel Cooper spends his weekdays peering into a microscope. On weekends, he trades that view for the hilly horizons of his Vermont cattle farms. With 900 cows, “Our operation is a drop in the bucket for Texas and Nebraska,” he says, “but we’re actually the largest organic beef farm in the Northeast.”
Since he started the first farm in 1996, national sales of organic food have risen 20 percent, he reports, with organic meat sales alone jumping by 55 percent from 2004 to 2005. Such demand helps justify the risks and workload intrinsic to Cooper’s “obsessive passion.” “Most people who know me would put the emphasis on ‘obsessive,’” he adds. “To me, that’s not an insult. I’m interested in making beef as healthy and as good as possible.”
Between 5 and 8 percent of breast cancers, his professional specialty, are hereditary, he says; the balance are acquired. “The prevailing causes are not known, but multiple environmental factors are suspected. I’d prefer that for myself, my family members and friends, and anyone else who asked me, the food ingested have as few synthetic chemicals as possible, such as the herbicides and pesticides that are used in most conventional farms in the United States.”
Cooper also cooks. “I would not say I live to eat, but it’s close,” he reports. His wife, pathologist Lori Adcock, takes little interest in the farms’ operations, but conceded the endeavor worthwhile after savoring a steak au poivre Cooper served her on Valentine’s Day a few years back. “I think of beef as the king of foods,” he muses, “although I also love lobster.”
Most of his stock (Charolais heifers, Angus bulls, and their offspring) are pastured on 1,000 acres in Sudbury and Orwell (the smaller, original farm is in South Newfane). Cooper spends about 40 hours a week on farm-related business, in concert with a general manager who oversees daily operations on site. Daily discussions, sometimes held by phone from his lab at Faulkner Hospital, can focus on when to cut the 1,500 acres of hay fields, which fences need to be fixed, and where to spread the manure. From April through October the cows are outside eating clover and grass; those close to market are “finished off” with an additional grain mix of wheat, spelt, barley, and corn, Cooper says. Up to 6,000 tons of fermented haylage culled annually from the farmland and compressed by a tractor—the old-fashioned way—feed the stock through the winter. “The cows love it and it keeps its high-protein value,” he explains. “Each storage bunk has its own flavor, like tobacco, and it smells beautiful.”
It takes about three years to grow a steer for market; Cooper sells about five a week to Whole Foods stores in Massachusetts and Manhattan. “It’s just the antithesis of standard commercial beef farms, where everything is about rapid turnaround,” he says. “There, calves are weaned and sent to a feedlot, where the aim is to get them out at 14 or 15 months by essentially heavily feeding them corn and byproducts. Often they have 5,000 to 10,000 cows in a multi-pen feed lot in the mud doing nothing but eating.”
Cooper’s way is slow, more costly, and labor-intensive; it’s the difference between any traditional product and its mass-produced cousin. “The challenge is to do something that is totally different from anything else I had ever done in life, and something difficult that not many people are willing to undertake,” he says. “And it keeps me grounded. When you live in a fancy city like Boston and have the choice to do or eat anything you want at any moment, you tend to forget where all your food comes from—and how difficult it is to make.”
Nell Porter Brown is the assistant editor of this magazine.
