Dona Stella coming to the homestead

WAITSBURG - The late Jim Hansen and his wife, Geraine, custom-harvested wheat and raised Black Angus on their family farm on the South Fork Coppei Creek from 1947 until the sale of the cropland in 2009. They harvested over 14,000 acres a summer for themselves and others in the area. Their enterprise employed 20 to 25 crew members each summer.

Daughter Cheryl returned to the family home in 2017 to take care of Geraine. Honoring her family's history, Hansen renovated the property to create Stella's Homestead, offering accommodations, trails, and an entertainment venue. Stella was an old mare that her father had used to haul hay for the other livestock. It is also the nickname Cheryl was given on a high school ski trip.

Hansen is bringing farming back to her family home, turning a .4-acre plot into a working vineyard. After rototilling the family orchard four years ago, she planted Riesling grapes. This will be the first year Hansen will harvest the grapes. Rob Wohr, one of the owners and winemakers at TruthTeller Winery, will process the grapes, and Sella will soon have her wine bottled.

It is not a quick process to see results from a new vineyard; it takes at least three years for the grapes to mature. Then, a producer must gather the county, federal, and state permits to sell wine, followed by approximately five months to process the grapes.

On Saturday, September 28, Hansen and friends gathered in the vineyard to harvest the grapes. After Wohr showed the group what to pick and what to discard, the crew of Paul and Lynn Mantz-Powers, Jim Cornelius, Jollie Welch, Scott Napier, and Hansen's niece Corrie began harvesting. Terry Hofer drove the trailer loaded with buckets of picked grapes to the bin.

The next day, Wohr started the process of turning the grapes into wine at TruthTeller Winery. There are five or six steps to transform the grapes into wine after they arrive at the winery. The process starts with sorting, pressing, and then letting the juice settle before racking. The juice will be inoculated with yeast, go through slow fermentation, checked for sugar content, settle some more, have cold stabilization, rack again, and be held until bottled.

By the end of January, if the permitting is complete, Hansen will label her new wine, Dona Stella, which means Madam Stella. Another nickname, Dona Stella, was what Hansen was called by her students in Goiania, Brazil, where she taught English from 1989 to 1991.

"I am proud of making this happen," said Stella. "Who would have thought a test plot would turn into a vineyard? It just takes money, time and work to continue the farming legacy."