Why Wine? An interview with Lisa Strid of Aridus Wine Company
Was there a specific wine, moment or place that unlocked your passion?
The place would be my uncle’s “hobby” vineyard outside of Winlock, WA. (When you have as many vines planted and purchase as many tons of grapes as he does, the word hobby just doesn’t quite fit right.) It took me about a year of helping him out with harvesting, winemaking, pruning, bottling, etc, to figure out that it was what I wanted to be doing with my life.
What did you study in school and what were you doing before you started in the wine industry?
I first studied Russian and Creative Writing in undergrad, and worked a variety of jobs in the writing field prior to getting into winemaking, the most recent being writing for Rural Electrification Administration publications. However, after writing for other people for nearly ten years, I was burned out with it looking for a change. I moved to Oregon, started helping said uncle out at his vineyard, and then enrolled in OSU’s Food Science program. They offer a concentration in Enology and Viticulture, and at the time had a 100% job placement rate, which was the percentage I was looking for. I went right from that program into the wine industry.
How has being in the wine industry changed you?
It’s made me very comfortable with uncertainty and mistakes. With so many moving parts, and the fact that you’re dealing with biological systems, there’s always something unexpected bound to come up. Whether it’s a power outage that takes down your chilling for the day, or missing a nutrient add, you learn to take what comes, adjust, and not get too hung up on things not going exactly to plan. I guess to boil it down, I’ve become more resilient.
What’s your favorite part of being in the wine industry?
The people. I’ve had the pleasure of working with so many wonderful folks.
Looking back, was there something in your past that led you to wine?
It feels a bit like a culmination of many things for me – I’ve always enjoyed having a lot of variety in my days, as I get very easily bored with too much of one type of task. I’ve always been a compulsive list-maker and derive a lot of satisfaction from checking things off my “to do” list, and you get to do a lot of that with winemaking. I was the sort of kid who would measure the length of the gutter, and then time how long it took a stick to reach the drain to figure out how fast the water was flowing after a rain, so I’ve had a longstanding interest in scientific puzzles. It really feels like a lot of things came together and just fit for me when it comes to wine as a career.
That said, my coworkers and I were joking the other day that perhaps I was somehow steered in the direction of winemaking by the government in order to neutralize me, and that seems just as plausible as anything else.
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