Many of you who have come to visit us over the years have gotten to meet our friend Millie. If not at the winery, then at our home over a bottle of wine.
Millie has been helping us from the very start of Stefania Wine. There is literally not a single vine nor single bottle that she has not personally touched along the way. She’s put in vineyard posts for us, planted vines, pruned, sprayed, driven the tractor a hundred times. She’s bucketed wine at the press and done punch-downs on every lot. She’s put wine into barrel and been there for bottling day.
She’s hooked up electricity when we’ve needed it and built or fixed dozen of things we use in the vineyard and winery. Her usual job at bottling was to lift every single case of glass and start it on the bottling line. She’s been covered in dirt, and sweat and wine more than once. There’s no one we owe more to than Millie.
So many of you know Millie because she is so easy to talk too, quick to make a friend and generous in her spirit. There’s nothing she enjoyed more than hanging out in our backyard and talking wine with people from all over the country.
This month Millie decided to move to Colorado to help her sister with a new house she’d purchased. We had a going away party for her and gathered friends to say good bye. We all hope that she’ll decided to come back and that her stay is just temporary. Everyone will miss her a great deal.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve gotten together with other friends and of course they’ve asked about Millie and we’ve told them about her move. Our friend from Tennessee asked Stefania and I how we’d cope with her being gone in the winery and vineyards. We didn’t have an answer for him. It was in fact the first time we’d even thought about it. For us we’ve just been completely focused on her friendship. Getting her off on her trip safely and encouraging her to come back and visit us. We’d only missed her as a friend and hadn’t thought about how it would impact the business.
We know that Stefania Wine will cope and we will figure out a way. For both Stefania and I though the personal relationship is so much more important. We wish Millie the best in Colorado. We do hope she will come back to us some day and we always will value her friendship, her great heart and all she’s done for us.
Paul and Millie.