Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers

Chapter One: In the Old Country

11 chapter one In the Old Country “Quien trabaja con plantas, las conoce. Pero ¿y si no la conoces? Entonces debes saber cómo sentir su fuerza vital.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, La Hija de la Chuparrosa* In September 1982, Moe Momtazi sat on a motorcycle with his heart in his throat and his hands gripping the waist of a drug runner. A few possessions—clothes, some food—were stowed on another bike. On a third, her swollen belly pressed against the back of another smuggler, was his beautiful wife, Flora, eight months pregnant with their first child. The Russian motorcycles were built for tough terrain, but in places, they were no match for the rocky footpaths climbing the desolate Siahan (or “Black”) Range. When the trail became too narrow or the broken shale too jagged under the tires, the riders would dismount and walk. At times, when their speed felt reckless, Moe would feign clumsiness and drop the green bag he clutched, so their guides would be forced to stop and Flora could rest a little. When they finally crossed the border into Pakistan, Moe’s driver whooped with excitement and accelerated, promptly speeding blindly off a ten-foot embankment. The moment the bike had landed—safely, in sand—Moe turned and screamed for Flora’s driver to stop. His shouts weren’t heard over the engine’s roar. Flora flew off her motorcycle and into the sand, dazed. The baby stopped kicking. This journey had not been part of the plan for Moe Momtazi, a bright and ambitious young Iranian who had recently founded his own firm after studying civil engineering in the United States and working for a prominent construction company in Tehran and Zanjan. But fate and politics had intervened. Three years previously, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Then, from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, a group * In English: “To work with plants, you must know plants. But what if you don’t already know a plant? Then you must know how to feel its life force.” —The Hummingbird’s Daughter voodoo vintners 12 of Islamic militants had held fifty-three Americans hostage, bringing about American economic sanctions that had crippled the nation’s economy. Suddenly, the new revolutionary government teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to pay Momtazi for construction projects his firm had completed. His business prospects dimmed as he fruitlessly tried to reason with newly appointed fundamentalist bureaucrats. “The sector of the government I was dealing with, telecommunication, was all run by twenty-something-year-old kids, fanatics, who had no idea what they were talking about. They couldn’t make any sense of a blueprint,” he recalls. Meanwhile, the proud Persian society he had known since childhood was crumbling all around him. Friends and cousins were being imprisoned and executed by the state. If Moe and Flora were going to have any future, they had to get out of Iran. The opportunity to flee came up when Moe Momtazi’s brother Ahmad, an orthopedic surgeon, was serving his medical residency in the remote eastern region of Baluchestan. Ahmad operated on a crippled boy, enabling his patient to walk. Afterward, the child’s family thanked him in a cryptic manner. “The relatives of this kid came to my brother and said if he needed anything, they would take care of it. Then he found out that they were drug runners, who would smuggle not only drugs but human beings,” Momtazi recalls. Despite the tales they had heard about families disappearing during dangerous border crossings, Moe and Flora decided to take up this opportunity to escape. Moe tucked approximately $3,000 of travel money into a simple green woven bag and climbed on the back of a motorcycle, placing the fate of himself, his wife, and his unborn child in the hands of a gang of drug smugglers. Once across the Pakistan border, Moe climbed into the back of a tiny compact pickup truck, a space he—impossibly, it seemed—shared with fifteen other passengers. Flora sat silently in the cab. They stopped in a village, where a midwife examined her. “I think your baby is going to be OK,” she tentatively assured the terrified young mother. Four days after they had first set out from Iran, the truck pulled into the city of Quetta. Moe reached into his green bag and paid each In...