Winemaker-turned-McMinnville Mayor Remy Drabkin ’09 is always connecting the dots
As Remy Drabkin’s many titles — McMinnville mayor, founder and winemaker at Remy Wines, co-founder of Wine Country Pride and host of the world’s first Queer Wine Festival — suggest, she is someone who can do a lot.
Speaking to her can be dizzying in the best way. Within a single sentence, she’ll explain the connections between three or four different topics in very surprising ways. In the next sentence, she’ll do it all over again with new subjects.
“It’s not that I’m doing a million things,” the 2009 alumnus said. “It’s that I see the spiderweb of connection between it all — how tourism connects to economic development connects to sustainability connects to environmental stewardship connects to equity connects to health connects to innovation. Part of my job is to adjust the lighting so other people can see — well, I won’t say spiderwebs, some people don’t like spiderwebs — the netting that kind of holds us all together.”
Her fascination with an interdisciplinary approach grew as she studied social and behavioral science.
“The type of education I received at Linfield put me in the position of being challenged a lot,” she said. “I worked with professors who wanted to challenge me, make me work harder … they saw that I could do the basic work without much effort, so I was coached to exact more of myself and my work. There was a lot of back and forth in the writing of my thesis … that made me start the work of understanding how to communicate while listening at the same time. It started that process of thinking about not just how you do things, but how you help others around you to also do more.”
By the time she graduated from college, she was already running Remy Wines, and a few years later, she brought that experience back to Linfield. She served as an advisory board member for the Linfield Center for the Northwest. The LCN provided grants to create partnerships with external organizations and to establish student internships, collaborative research and service-learning opportunities for students. It also eventually led to the creation of the Evenstad Center for Wine Education.
During the process, she realized that everything has something to do with wine and vice versa.
“Wine is interdisciplinary,” she said. “As we looked at the course catalog, we realized that each area of study that Linfield had connected to wine. You could get a degree in any number of things — chemistry, philosophy, sociology — and it would have a relevant touch in the wine industry.”
It was this insight, in part, that led to the first multi-disciplinary wine education program in the country. While students learn the classic elements of winemaking, they also spend their time learning the business of wine — marketing, operations and logistics, retail and design.
“There are so many fields and supportive industries that surround (winemaking),” she said. “And there are important questions of how we design our buildings, and how we are good environmental stewards inside the wineries and outside. We need good people with solid business knowledge and strategy that know how to build sustainable business models.”
Then, there’s the whole mayoral element to her life. On a recent day at City Hall, she couldn’t resist unpacking how McMinnville itself is interdisciplinary.
“We are a really interesting city, a full-service city of 35,000,” she said. “We publicly own a shared water and electricity utility; we have the steel mill, which is industry; we have higher education; we have the world’s most beautiful downtown; we have wine.”
