Award Winners

Award Winning Articles

  • Coop Scoop: Backyard Homesteads Take Roost in Urban and Wine Country Coops

    Oregon Wine Press, September 2010

    2011 Apicius Scholarship Winner for Voice and Food Writing, Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers

    The most sublime Pinot Noir to grace your glass may be one of the hottest topics of conversation at the International Pinot Noir Celebration held every July since 1987 in McMinnville. But also swirling around the Riedels this year were the cast of characters at one wine country luncheon that had guests all aflutter. Brian Marcy and Clare Carver of Big Table Farm hosted attendees for a noontime affair that began with a blending seminar set in a charming barn, hay bales stacked high. Orchestrated clucks chattered from the nearby hen house. As if on cue, a gregarious rooster would cock-a-doodle-doo. One free ranging chicken burrowing in the towering hay, tail feathers out, provided a photogenic distraction as many wine lovers aimed digital devices at the iconic farm animal hoping to capture this slice of Americana.

  • Vintage Oregon: Taming the Grape

    Acura Lifestyle Magazine, Summer 2010

    2011 Honorable Mention for Best Feature Article at the Magnum Opus Awards

    The Frenchman is fashionably late. Laurent Montalieu, the winemaker at Solena Estate, dashes through the double doors at Penner-Ash Wine Cellars in the heart of the Willamette Valley, two bottles in hand. The room is abuzz with a handful of chattering winemakers. Outside the window, gnarled grapevines arch and twist like modern dancers. Vibrant green rows splash down the hillside like thick brushstrokes in Vincent van Gogh’s The Green Vineyard. They’re here to compare the contents of Wine A versus Wine B. One is made from machine-harvested fruit; the other from grapes picked the old-fashioned way. The questions today — can anybody taste the difference?

  • A Roof is not Enough: Two Oregon Nonprofits help to build community by providing safe and affordable in-town housing for farmworkers

    Edible Portland, Summer 2010

    2011 Edible Communities, EDDY Award Winner, Best Editorial – Political or Social Issue Coverage

    Special Mention: James Patrick McDermott Scholarship for Social Change through Food Writing, Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers 2010

    Reynaldo Robles is a retired Oregon farmworker. His eyes crinkle to the roots of his salt-and-pepper hair. A neatly trimmed moustache trembles when he laughs. When he speaks, he punctuates the air with his hands while a torrent of Spanish words surge like an undammed river. He pauses only to make sure Jaime Arredondo, acting as translator, can keep up.

  • Vital Stats from the Field: Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center’s Outreach Team travels to farm camps, providing healthcare for 1,800 migrant farmworkers each year.

    Edible Portland, Fall 2009

    2010 Edible Communities, EDDY Award Finalist, Best Editorial Political or Social Issue Coverage

    Special Mention: Greenbrier Scholarship, Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers 2009

    Rosalia Ginsberg sits under a canopy of cottonwoods, the summer sun still high in the sky. When balmy wind blows, the shiny leaves ripple together and make a distinctive sound similar to the sea at a distance. This is Cornelius, however, in Yamhill County, and it is too far away to hear the melody of the sea. Ginsberg is at Casa Blanca, a migrant farmworker camp, one of fifteen in the area.

    At an intersection of country roads that evokes Americana, a church billboard proclaims: God Bless America. Hand-etched produce signs, fields of green and nostalgic barns paint the agrarian landscape, reminiscent of The Saturday Evening Post. Old pick-up trucks roll past distant mountain peaks and big blue sky. This is Oregon farm country and at first glance, it appears little has changed in the past 30 years.

  • Sea-salt Kiss

    Edible Portland, Winter 2009

    2010 Edible Communities, EDDY Award Winner: Best Editorial Food or Cooking Focused

    Special Mention: Greenbrier Scholarship, Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers 2008

    Perhaps Seamus Heaney captures the allure of the oyster best in his poetry when he writes, “My tongue was a filling estuary/My palate hung with starlight/As I tasted the salty Pleiades/Orion dipped his foot into the water.” Ah, yes, that sea-salt kiss, fleeting bliss from the ocean. I don’t remember when I first fell for the oyster, but once I did, there was no turning back.

    Slurping from the half-shell, I always pictured oyster beds like a rampant blackberry patch, growing with wild abandon – each shell an effortless pluck from the sea, set on ice, with a squeeze of lemon, and a dash of mignonette.