Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/111102
and overgrown farms. Until the 1990s, those acres were covered with beans, corn, wheat, soybeans and hay – even chickens. It seemed there would be little chance that Galen's father, Calvin, would be able to pass the farm on to his hardworking son. As a young man with a degree in mechanical engineering and what seemed a lifetime of farm work under his belt, Galen wanted to do something different, and worked for a toolmaker not far away. He and Sarah, who worked as a chemist with a pharmaceutical company, lived in suburban Philadelphia and started a family. The toolmaker was Germanowned, so Galen traveled to Europe for work, with Sarah tagging along. She still laughs when talking about her first winery visit in Baden in the early 1990s, happening upon a group of young Germans who removed the back seat of a small car to fit cases of wine required for a chess club. Sarah tasted silvaner, riesling and müller-thurgau, and was allowed to linger and roam. On another visit, the Troxells jumped the Alps and visited wineries in Italy. When Galen shook hands with one owner, both men immediately recognized they had something in common. Both had lost the same finger on the same hand. "He treated me like a lost brother and gave us the run of the place," Galen said. After the introduction to wine culture, the Troxells began to think about making wine, discovering Pennsylvania's four-decade-old, yet still nascent, wine industry. "Back then, you just didn't think of wine coming from Pennsylvania," Galen said. They planted the first grapes in 1995. Galen showed his farm-boy improvisation, cutting a stick from a cherry tree to measure distance between vines and making a vine Galen Glen's cherry branch logo is a reference to Galen's improvised use of a similar stick to measure the distance between the winery's first vines. planter out of 50 pounds of welding rods. The cherry branch became a winery logo, the crooked stick seen in the winery's iconography. The first iteration of the vineyard had lots of Cayuga, chambourcin and steuben. They pulled trees from the big hillside, which Galen burned in dramatic piles, but unknowingly left nitrogen pockets, traced by vine vigor in the vineyard. The mix has changed, thanks to the words of another wine sage, Richard Smart, addressing Pennsylvania winemakers. Chardonnay and cabernet are taken, he said. If an upstart state wants to distinguish itself, it has to build a reputation on an unclaimed variety. A WHITE-WINE HOUSE The breakthrough came as Sarah paged through Food & Wine magazine in 2000 and happened across an article about the spicy 48 V I N E YARD & WINERY MANAGEMENT | Mar - Apr 2013 w w w. v w m m e d i a . c o m