By Janet Eastman
It is only fitting that I met Dick Troon, one of the fathers of modern-day wine in the Rogue Valley, on Father’s Day.
Stories have been told about Dick Troon. Some call him a curmudgeon, and he’ll admit, with a twinkle in his blue eyes, that he has been outspoken and, sometimes, he has let his ego lead the way.
But he needed both boldness and confidence almost 40 years ago when he had the crazy notion to plant a vineyard in the Applegate.
Dick is 84 now or maybe 85, depending, he says, on if he believes his mother or his father. The two didn’t agree on much. They divorced when Dick was young. As the Great Depression continued to batter the two breadwinners, Dick left home when he was 10 to work on a South Dakota ranch. It was here, he says, he fell in love with farming.
WWII interrupted his high school years. He enlisted in the Marines and was in charge of President Harry Truman’s military guard at the Little White House in Key West. Afterward, the G.I. Bill sent Dick back to school, this time in California, where he took engineering classes at USC. He married, became a father and traveled to Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg and other missile bases to lay infrastructure.
One day, after spending Labor Day in Grants Pass and thinking this was a great place to raise his four daughters, he accepted a job here, quit his old job and bought land. He worked on roads, then he was a cattle rancher, and a hay and alfalfa farmer. Farming, he jokes, is an easy way to lose money. The girls grew up.
In 1967, three events changed his life. Dick met the woman who would become his second wife. Her name was Virginia but everyone had been calling her “Jinx” since she was in the second grade. When Jinx was sick that year, Dick started making bird carvings at her bedside. Since then, he has made 3,000 woodcarvings. And, that year, he took Jinx to Portland where he tasted a Chateauneuf-du-Pape and decided he liked wine.
He married Jinx in 1968 and they visited then-unknown wineries in Sonoma. He tried a Zinfandel in Healdsburg that he said was “unbelievable.” He compared the crops, climate and growing seasons there to the Applegate, and “being a Scotsman, I decided I could grow better. I was correct,” he says now.
In 1972, he bought 32 acres in Grants Pass and planted the varietals he liked to drink: Zin, Cab and Chardonnay. He knew it would take at least four years for the grapes to make good wine, so he hung up an optimistic sign: “Purveyor of Fine Wines Since 1976.” His enology prediction was off by two decades.
He sold his grapes to others during that time and didn’t start Troon winery until 1993, using a backbreaking, old press that leaked 30 gallons for every 140 gallons it produced. Winegrape growing, he says, is a quicker way to lose money. He said that he came within $30,000 of breaking even during his last year in business.
Dick Troon is credited with getting Chuck Coury, who had a master’s degree in viticulture from UC Davis, to teach a course at Rogue Community College in 1972. Dick and eight others enrolled, included Frank Wisnovsky, who would start Valley View Winery. Seven planted vineyards; four eventually started wineries.
Jinx passed away in 1987. A father and son connected to Opus One wanted to buy Dick’s vineyard. Instead, in 2003, he sold it to another father-and-son team, Larry and Chris Martin.
Dick moved a few houses away, into a two-story clapboard painted the color of French vanilla ice cream. He likes the neighborhood. Musician Kevin Carr lives next door. On Father’s Day afternoon, the sounds of Carr’s bagpipes wafted up to Dick Troon’s deck.
Dick has played percussions in the band Charanga with Carr. They have performed at Troon, Tease restaurant in Ashland and the Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle.
Dick says he started the tradition of ringing in the New Year with bagpipes to honor his Scottish heritage. He ancestors arrived in what would become the United States before the revolution. They stayed, prospered, raised children. And helped launch industries.
A new report to be released by the Oregon Wine Board states that the wine industry adds $3 billion to Oregon. The state has many people to thank for that, including Dick Troon. He’s thankful, too.
“The wine industry has been good to southern Oregon,” Dick Troon says. “I feel fortunate to have been here at the beginning. I never had a tasting room, but I had lots of friends when I had a winery.”
Today, his girls are mothers. Two don’t drink alcohol at all; two drink wine occasionally. But really, planting the vineyard was never about wine as much as it was about family.