Eleanor Mirikatani a very good lawyer wanted to be one of CHC's cooperative gardeners. So we gave her a strawberry patch. Lawyers are very busy and do not have time for pruning and weeding so we took the patch away. So Eleanor decided to plant some grapes in the visitors demonstration coldAg bed. She got three small cuttings of the very best wine grapes (pinot noir, chardonnay, merlot). Alas the bed got salted and all the vines seemed to die. We were going to pull them out but Eleanor got a writ of habeus corpus for the Chardonnay and it was left to perish in the desert heat.
But it did not perish and soon a small green
leaf appeared. For almost a year it remained as a symbol of
survival. Then tragedy struck again - or so it seemed. The cold
water was turned off for about a week. There was no rain - hot sun
- a desert drought- and the plant seemed to die again. Then the
cold water was restored and that tiny little plant, that miserable
little plant put out flowers and blooms and soon thirty clusters of
chardonnay grapes were clinging to the vine. Now Craven knew
nothing about viniculture (Craven knew nothing about lettuce. So he contacted Orville Magoon (a
great son of Hawaii) who owns the Guenoc winery in California.
Magoon flew out to Hawaii and invited Craven to dinner at the
famous Duc Restaurant. He brought with him two bottles of his
internatinal prize winning cabernet sauvignon wine. Craven began to
tell him about the Mirikitani miracle but Magoon told him "Craven
I know all about your coldwater agriculture, I read your paper in
the Marine
Technology Society Journal. I said "there is Craven writing in
a field he knows nothing about, damn Craven he's right, damn
Craven, I should have written the article, damn him he has
discoverd the secret of my prize winning grapes."
Craven was overjoyed "would not Mr. Magoon invest in a project to grow grapes on a coastal desert?"
"Of course not, one way or another Craven, you will succeed and one way or another without my support, the wine business will be revolutionized."
The great wines will still grow in Napa valley, but equally great and much lower cost grapes will be growing on every coastal desert and the geographic location of the world's wine country will shift to the coastal desert zones. So CHC will start its first environmentally sustainable coldwater agriculture vineyard on its own. ON August 16th CHC will plant 30 vines in its dispay farm at Ke ahole point.
Sylvia Earle of the CHC Board of Directors will invite a select set of individuals who have played a role in CHC's development to be a sponsor of one of the vines so that history will record their contribution to humanity. Readers of this web page will, of course want to participate. If you will send us a message with a convincing reason why you should be a sponsor, we will add you to the list even if it means expanding the vineyard to fifty or one hundred or one thousand plants. But all of you who wish to share in the common heritage of humanity are invited to sponsor other projects of CHC. In any event check out our other miracles or return to the Common Heritage Corp page or the Common Heritage Page for further enlightenment..