The weekend has arrived, yet farm work knows no end. I was so tired last night from all the cleaning that I crashed around 10:30pm and Eleanor let me sleep in until 9 the next morning. I don’t know where she gets all the energy; she considers ice cider her retirement, but she never stops working. We followed up yesterday’s cleaning by running a peroxide mix through the tanks and then rinsing with distilled water. Tomorrow, we will begin melting the frozen juice and collecting the concentrate to put in our newly sanitized tanks.
Albert, Eleanor’s husband, just arrived a few minutes ago from New Hampshire. I don’t know how this couple manages the distance, especially for all these years. Their story is quite romantic. Albert is from Canada. After attempting to make the Canadian Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team, he enrolled at a junior college in Quebec.
One day he was talking to his brother-in-law who was a Harvard alumnus, and he told Albert that he was too smart to waste his time at a junior college and that he should apply to Harvard. He did, and got in with a full scholarship. He and Eleanor then met on a freshman pre-orientation program, backpacking throughout Maine. Eleanor dated a heavyweight English Canadian rower, among others in college, who was on the backpacking trip with her, but their senior year Albert and Eleanor finally got together and the Christmas after graduation, he proposed. They never lived together before they got married. Directly after college, he studied at the University of New Brunswick for his Master’s degree and she worked for Bain in Boston, finding success in the corporate world. They had their wedding and honeymooned in Canada, but on the way back across the border, immigration stopped them. They had to pull out his student identification and all the paperwork to prove that yes, they were married, but no, Albert didn’t have a reason to be in America. Eleanor is still an American citizen, and he is living in the U.S. on a green card while their children enjoy dual citizenship.
Albert finished up his Master’s degree in Canada, and they both moved to Baltimore so that he could study at John’s Hopkins and Eleanor could obtain an MBA at Wharton, the business school at University of Pennsylvania. She commuted to Philadelphia during the weekday and stayed with her aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania and then spent weekends in Baltimore with Albert. Not ideal, but better than driving seven hours across international borders to see each other.
Between her first and second year of business school, Eleanor had Caroline, their first child. Eleanor took off a year and a half to raise Caroline and picked up an investment banking job in Baltimore. After two years, they moved to Philadelphia so that Eleanor could finish her MBA while raising one child and being pregnant with another. Tom, their last child, was born between two midterms. Eleanor had Tom on February 16, 1991; friends visited to drop off flowers, baby toys, and class notes, and the very next day Eleanor took her exam.
Then, with a Ph.D. in geology and an MBA in hand, the couple took on New York City. Eleanor worked for Mercer in management consulting in their financial services practices and Albert at Columbia University, working toward his post-doc. After eighteen months, Albert finished his post-doc and worked at the Museum of Natural History as a curatorial fellow.
Albert became bored with research and decided to follow his passion as an educator. The couple moved to New Jersey so that he could take a job at Montclair Kimberly Academy while Eleanor commuted to New York. Albert doesn’t have his teaching license, but private high schools are quite receptive to Ph.D.-holding scientists. In 1999 Eleanor quit the insurance company that she was working for and joined a small startup in Connecticut. The family yet again moved their lives, and Albert took a job at Hopkins in New Haven, one of the nation’s oldest high schools (I actually have friends at Harvard who went to school there and know their kids).
Life seemed good because the family was all in one state, but then Intuit bought the small startup and Eleanor found herself flying to California every other week to work. Albert has always fully supported Eleanor’s busy corporate schedule and hectic work weeks, but, as Eleanor told me, his only requirement was that they be together. She quit her job at Intuit and the family moved to New Hampshire. The move served the whole family well—Albert taught chemistry at Philips Exeter, Caroline and Tom received free tuition at the nation’s premier prep school, and Eleanor had the freedom to work remotely on independent consulting projects, making the occasional short journey to New York to put out any fires. They had always loved food and wine, and when they tasted ice cider while visiting Albert’s sister in Montreal (ice cider is considerably more popular among our neighbors to the north), they knew they had found their retirement. They purchased a farm in West Charleston, and although the students will miss their humorous, intelligent professor, Albert will start working at the winery fulltime after this school year.
So that’s how Eden's owners got from two Harvard degrees to making wine. It’s not exactly a relaxing retirement, but they are the kind of people who love doing stuff. They see the wine industry not as a job but as a way of life. They get to meet people and talk about their favorite topic, food. Here in Vermont, they have a beautiful house, two grown children, and each other. No wonder they call it Eden.
Comments