This morning we got an email from Brian Smith of Wendelin Vines in Kansas. That’s not unusual. Brian occasionally pops into the winery inbox to ask questions… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Brian had just done a podcast — The Wine Pair Podcast, hosted by Joe and Carmele Mele of Seattle — and wanted us to know that about halfway through, he’d brought up Dave and shared a little bit of his story. He signed off thanking Dave for putting up with what he called his “dumb emails” over the years.
We went and found the episode. Brian and his wife Jessica were interviewed about being part of a small group of growers bringing winemaking back to a state that was, improbably, one of the country’s top wine producers back in the 1800s. And sure enough, right around the ten-minute mark, Brian tossed out Dave’s name.
Our Dave. (The Man. The Myth. The Winemaker.)
A Cold Email About Seyval Blanc
Brian’s road to Kansas winemaking started in a Bangalore hotel room, watching his son’s wrestling tournament on a livestream because a corporate travel schedule had put an ocean between him and the things that mattered. COVID sent him home, and home was acreage on his in-laws’ Kansas farm. He started digging into whether it could ever grow wine grapes — and discovered that Kansas actually had a real wine history, over a century old, that almost nobody remembered.
While researching French hybrid grape varieties suited to his climate, he kept circling back to Seyval Blanc. And when he went looking for anyone who’d done something interesting with it, he found a small winery outside Newberg, Oregon that had won awards with the grape: Bells Up.
So he did what a lot of people in his position do — he sent a cold email to a guy named Dave.
Dave wrote back. Not long after, Brian and Jessica made a trip out to the Willamette Valley and spent time with him in person, picking his brain on the details that actually matter in the vineyard: when to harvest, what pH to target, what brix to pick at. Brian describes Dave as someone who’s patiently fielded plenty of what he calls off-the-wall questions ever since.
“He Probably Doesn’t Even Know”
Here’s the line that stopped us cold. Talking about how much Dave’s answers and encouragement meant to their own leap out of corporate life and into a vineyard, Brian said something to the effect that Dave probably has no idea how much of an impact he’s had: That Dave would likely brush it off as just answering a few emails from some guy in Kansas.
That’s exactly right. And it’s why his email caught us off guard as much as it did. Dave didn’t know he’d made the cut of that conversation until Brian told him himself.
The Thing About Small Answers
It’s easy to forget, in the middle of punch-downs and pruning and the hundredth conversation about why we grow the ONLY Seyval Blanc in the Willamette Valley (and only the second planting of that varietal in Oregon), that someone might actually be paying attention.
Not in a spotlight, “we’re being interviewed” way, but in the quieter way that actually counts. A cold email answered instead of ignored. An afternoon spent walking someone through harvest numbers because they asked nicely and clearly were interested and planned to do something with the information.
We planted Seyval Blanc because we believed in it. It’s a hybrid grape capable of more than the “safe bet” reputation it sometimes carries. We didn’t do it expecting the story to travel. We just liked proving people wrong about what a grape (or winegrowing region) “should” be able to do.
Turns out some of that traveled about 1,600 miles east, to a couple clearing their own land, enrolling back in college in their 40s to learn viticulture from scratch, and betting a chunk of their life on the idea that good wine can come from somewhere people don’t expect it (kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it?). Four years and four acres later, Wendelin Vines bottled its first vintage in 2025 — and somewhere in that journey, a handful of emails from a Bells Up inbox turned out to matter more than we knew.
You Never Know Who’s Listening
Believe us when we tell you that we never set out to be mentioned on a podcast about Kansas winemaking. We were just doing the work every small winery does — mostly out of sight, with no idea who might be reading, listening, or filing it away for later.
That’s the thing about impact. It rarely announces itself in the moment. You just keep answering the emails, keep making the wine you believe in, keep telling people why you do it the way you do. Then, years later, it shows up in a conversation you weren’t even part of, quietly shaping someone else’s path.
So to Brian and Jessica: thank you for the mention, and genuinely, congratulations on that first vintage. Kansas deserves its wine history back, and you two are exactly the right kind of stubborn to help bring it there.
And to anyone else building something quietly, without an audience: keep going. You never know who’s listening at the ten-minute mark.
You can hear Brian and Jessica’s full story on The Wine Pair Podcast.
