Annie Shull is quick to admit that she is not from a wine family and didn't care much for the stuff herself as a young adult. So how did the Twin Cities native end up co-owning a winery in Oregon, much less tasting through as many as 50 barrels in a day?
By coming home, at least in a figurative sense.
Shull (then Christensen) grew up in the almost impossibly quaint little pocket of St. Paul called St. Anthony Park. Mayor George Latimer used to drive her to preschool. But after attending Murray Junior High, Como Park High School and the University of Minnesota, she went coastal, to Massachusetts for college and then to Northern California for high-tech work.
Then and there, her wanderlust morphed into "a yearning for a place that felt like home," she said.
"When I visited Oregon on business trips, everyone was friendly, people said hello and asked -- genuinely wanting to know -- how are you? I found this very much like Minnesota."
So she moved there and, while working at Sequent, fell in love with a fellow employee. Turned out that Scott Shull had winemaking aspirations, and he spent a long lunch in the office cafeteria delineating for Annie "all the government agencies he had just garnered approval from to transform Raptor Ridge from amateur winemaking to a fully licensed commercial winemaking venture."
Not what you'd call the most romantic rendezvous, but soon both a marriage and a winery emerged in the Chehalem Mountains, about 20 miles southwest of Portland.
Annie, a tall, dark-haired, handsome woman, did some organic gardening and beekeeping on the property, selling Raptor Ridge honey and helping with the winemaking in a converted barn. She kept her high-tech job until 2000, when the winery had grown to a 1,000-case-per-year output and needed a sales and marketing wiz such as herself.
