Big Yellow – The Story Behind Naming Our New Traminette Wine

On honest feedback, a gravel parking lot, a flower field, and what happens when you choose to let God work with the hard things.

If there's one thing that's certain in this life, no matter who you are, it's that you have and are going to continue to face troubles. Life has taught me that and it's a truth the Bible doesn't shy away from either (see John 16:33 as an example).

Shortly after the birth of our son, a crisis upended our world, led my wife and I to faith, & changed my career course forever (read my Cultivated Ground post for more on that). During that very difficult season, when trouble after trouble washed over me like the waves in a rough sea, I found a deep comfort in Romans 8:28:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  — Romans 8:28

I clung to it and it became the first verse I ever memorized. A promise, not that we wouldn't face troubles, but that any troubles we did face would be used for good.

Trouble is a part of life and we shouldn’t be surprised when it arrives.

That the trouble, the friction, the moments we fall short — all of it is material in the hands of a God who is willing and able to turn it into something good. Romans 8:28 gives us a new perspective on troubles and it also gives us a choice.

One of the greatest gifts we’ve been given as humans is the freedom to decide how we respond to the things. We rarely get to choose the things themselves. But the response? That’s ours, every time. We get knocked down — how do we respond? Do we get bitter or do we get curious? Do we abandon the things we believe in or do we ask what God might be working through the difficulty?

Romans 8:28 doesn’t ask us to be cheerful about hard things. It asks us to trust that none of them are outside of God’s reach. That’s a different and much more honest promise. And it’s the promise that held us together during one particular week that we’ve been wanting to tell you about.

It starts with a review.

A piece of feedback worth being grateful for

About a year ago, a customer left us a one-star review. I'm grateful for their honesty and for leaving us their feedback but IT STUNG! A deep sting that comes from pouring everything you have into something for 5+ years only to fall flat on your face and fail someone. I spent the next several days obsessing over ever word, replying the interaction in my head, wondering how I'd been so oblivious to the customer's dissatisfaction, and trying to figure out what we could do differently both make it up to the customer and ensure we didn't fail another customer.

"They need to pave their parking lot."

Totally valid feedback. Gravel like a lawn with dandelions or clover is a choice, but probably not one everyone will appreciate. A gravel lot isn’t for everyone. It can feel and look rough or unrefine. It can feel like an oversight. If it diminished someone’s experience of a place they drove to visit, that matters to us — genuinely — and we’re sorry it did. Every person who comes here deserves to feel welcomed from the moment they arrive. We failed that customer, and we carry that tension.

The tension that we want to create an elevated and welcoming atmosphere for guests while at the same time doing what's right for the envirnoment. Just as the "pristine" look of a lawn free from dandelions and clover comes at a cost to the environment, so does paving a parking lot. While pavement may look clearner, it suffocates the soil beneath it, disrupts the water cycle, and creates runoff that harms the environment. Gravel breathes. It drains. It lets the land beneath it stay alive. We chose it deliberately, as part of a commitment to stewardship that runs through every decision we make here — from the grapes we grow to the products we use to the way we manage this land across every season. We didn’t put up a sign explaining it. We didn’t expect everyone to know. But the choice was made with care, and we’d make it again.

What the review did — unexpectedly, and in retrospect, generously — was hold up a mirror. When you’re deep in the work of building a place like this, it’s easy to move fast and forget why the slow, deliberate choices were made in the first place. This person handed us that mirror without knowing it. And when we looked into it, we saw our values looking back. Intact. Worth defending. Worth explaining.

A friend, listening to me process all of this, laughed and quipped: “Pave paradise to put up a parking lot.”

That song had meant something to me since I was young but it had been so long since I'd heard the Counting Crow's rendition. It’s a song about a particular kind of grief: the grief of progress that costs more than it was worth. Of fixing things that weren’t broken. Of choosing convenience over beauty and realizing too late what you gave up. And it was so spot on for what I had been wrestlign with.

We hadn’t paved paradise. We had refused to. And somehow, the very act of refusing had painfully lead to a bad experience for someone who had visited our winery.

I could have responded by caving. By paving. By deciding the friction wasn’t worth it. But Romans 8:28 kept coming back — not as a theological argument, but as a question: what is this for? What is God working through this tension, this moment of feeling like our values were at best invisible and at worst failing the people we were trying to serve?

I didn’t have the answer yet. But the next morning, the flowers did.

The whisper in the flower field

I drove in early, still carrying the weight of it. Feeling really down still. I parked on the gravel — as always — and before going inside something pulled me out toward the flower field.

The field was doing what it always does: alive with pollinators and birds and the particular beautiful disorder that only grows when you leave space for it. Butterflies moving between blooms. The sounds of birds singing. The smell of everything open and living. And something in me just released. Not because I’d thought my way through the problem. Not because I’d won the argument in my head. But because the answer was right there in front of me, had been standing there all along, and I’d been too inside my own frustration to see it.

This. This is what the choices are for. Not for the people who already understand. For the chance that someone might come here, stand somewhere like this, and feel what I felt that morning — a deep, settling calm. A sense that the world is richer and more alive than our routines allow us to notice. That the things worth protecting are worth the cost of protecting them.

It was a big hug from God. I don’t know a more precise way to put it. Not vindication. Not an argument won. Just a reminder, offered gently, that the mission was still intact — and that it was standing in front of me in full bloom, entirely unbothered by the review.

I thought of Elijah. Not the Elijah of Mount Carmel, calling down fire in a moment of grand vindication. The Elijah afterward — so distraught that he said under a broom tree and prayed for death. God doesn’t answer him in the shattering wind, or the trembling earthquake, or the roar of the fire. Instead He answers in a whisper. A still, small voice.

“And after the fire there was a sound of a gentle blowing... and behold, a voice came to him.”  — 1 Kings 19:12–13

God tells Elijah to go back the way he came. In other words to stick to his values and the things that carried him this far. That morning in the flower field, God whispered to me in much the same way. In the flowers, and the butterflies, and the smell of the living land we’d spent five years trying to quietly cultivate.

The review didn’t change our values. It clarified them. That’s Romans 8:28 in practice — not a promise that the hard thing won’t happen, but a promise that God is already in it, already working, already making something good out of what felt like a step backward. Our job was to choose to receive it. But wait, as only God can do, there's more...

The lightning bolt

Earlier that same week, Emily and I had been wrestling with our picnic packages — how to get people Interested I them and out in the field to connect with nature. We believed in the experience deeply. We weren’t sure people knew it existed.

After the tranquility of the flower field, I felt inspired. I felt God whipsering to me that our world, with all the hustle and bustle needed these sorts of experiences for the soul.

As I began preparing the winery for opening, I put “Big Yellow Taxi” on repeat. And somewhere in the third or fourth listen, a lyric landed differently than it ever had before:

“They took all the trees , and put' em in a tree museum, and they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them.”

And like lightning it hit me. Everyone deserved to experience that tranquility of nature out by the flower field. We weren’t going to charge to experience this. We weren’t going to put paradise behind a ticket booth or turn it into a curated attraction. If we wanted to make a positive impact on the environment, what better way then to connect people with it.

The experience of being out in the land — with the butterflies, the blooms, the quiet — was going to be free. Freely offered, the way it had been freely given to us.

Free picnic packages were born that morning. Not as a marketing decision. As a mission statement.

We serve a God who knows every hair on our heads. We figured He’d want us to extend the same kind of lavish, unheld generosity to the people He sends our way.

Months later: our traminette wine gets its name

The story might have settled there — a hard week redeemed, a renewed zeal for our mission, and an offering born out of a moment of stillness. But a few months later, we were tasting our new Traminette wine and trying to come up with a name.

Traminette is Indiana’s state grape — and if you want the full story on the grape itself, the science behind it, and why we grow it here, head over to our first Big Yellow post. But the short version relevant to this story is this: Traminette is one of the most intensely aromatic white wines you can grow. Rose petal. Lychee. White pepper. Apricot. It smells, uncannily, like a flower field in full bloom.

When we started talking about what to call this wine, that morning came back immediately. The calm. The smell of it. The way I reminded me of the flower field and how the song had reminded us of our mission. And there was the name — sitting quietly where my friend had left it months before, waiting.

Big Yellow. Not as a lament, the way the song is — mourning what gets paved over and lost. But as a choice. As a daily declaration. We’re not going to pave it. We’re going to tend it, protect it, pour it into a glass, and invite anyone who wants to come sit in the middle of it.

That’s what we believe we’re called to. Not just to make good wine — though we’re working hard on that, too — but to be stewards of something worth stewarding. To make choices that reflect the care of a God who knows every square foot of this land as well as He knows us. To let the beauty we’ve been entrusted with remain beautiful. And to trust that even the hard weeks — the failed experiences, the days under the broom tree — are working for our good.

Read Post 1: Want to know more about the wine itself — the tasting notes, food pairings, and the fascinating science behind Traminette as Indiana’s state grape? All of that lives in our first Big Yellow post. Read it here →

Finding the Good In All Things

If we’re honest, most of us wouldn’t choose the hard parts of our story. The delays. The disappointments. The moments that feel like they’re going nowhere.

And yet—those are often the very places where something meaningful begins to take shape. As I reflect on my life it was in the struggles that I have grown the most. And that's what makes Romans 8:28 so beatiful to me. Not just the easy things. Not just the wins. All things God works together for the good.

“Big Yellow” didn’t start as a perfect plan. It came together through struggles, questions, pivots, and moments that didn’t always make sense at the time. But looking back, it’s clear—what felt uncertain was actually being woven into something intentional.

Maybe you’re in a season like that right now. A season where things feel unclear. Where the outcome doesn’t match the expectation. Where you’re wondering how this could possibly lead to anything good. If that’s you, this is your reminder:

The story isn’t finished.

The same God who brings life from the soil, who turns grapes into something worth celebrating, is still at work in your story too. Even here. Even now. So take a breath. Keep going. Trust His process.

And to all my fellow nerds out there, who have been so patiently reading through the troubles that are my blog ramblings...here's some science on "The LOVER" effect. Enjoy! ;)

🤓 NERD ALERT ⚠️

Things are about to get delightfully dorky. Side-effects may include (but are not limited to): spontaneous laughter, accidental learning, curiosity cravings, and an uncontrollable urge to share fun facts with friends.

Traminette is one of the most intensely aromatic white wines you can pour. The rose petal, the lychee, the white pepper, the hint of apricot — these aren't subtle. They arrive before the glass even reaches your lips, and they tend to do something to people. Something a little disorienting in the best way. Something that feels, oddly, like remembering.

That's not poetic license. That's neuroscience.

Of all five senses, smell is the only one with a direct anatomical shortcut to the brain's memory and emotion centers. Every other sense — sight, sound, touch, taste — must first route through the thalamus before reaching the amygdala and hippocampus. Smell bypasses all of that. Researchers at Harvard Medical School describe the olfactory system as essentially hardwired to our emotional memory centers — which is why a particular scent can drop you into a memory with a vividness and emotional weight that a photograph or a song simply cannot match. It's why the smell of cookies baking can put you back in your grandmother's kitchen more completely than any words could. It's why the scent of sunscreen can make you feel a summer you haven't thought about in decades.

The science, briefly

Researchers call this the "LOVER" effect — odor-triggered memories tend to be Limbic (emotionally loaded), Old (often rooted in early life), Vivid (recalled with unusual clarity), Emotional (felt more than remembered), and Rare (infrequent, which is part of why they hit so hard when they do arrive). Source: Harvard Medicine Magazine — The Connections Between Smell, Memory, and Health

The morning the name for this wine clicked into place, the floral aromas of the wine triggered an emotional memory. The air smelled like — well, like a Traminette wine, actually. Floral and alive and a little overwhelming in the most wonderful way. And something in that moment just settled. A calm that didn't come from logic.

We've thought a lot about that since. About how the aromas in this glass are, in a very real neurological sense, a bridge between the present and something older — something felt before it's understood. That's what we hope Big Yellow does for you. The next time your smelling a glass of wine, forgot about aromas, close your eyes and as you sniff think about how it makes your feel and what memories it envokes. Let the wine aromas take you somewhere. A field, maybe. A memory. A moment you didn't know you were carrying.

Love what we're doing?

Subscribe to our newsletter and follow along with our adventures in cultivating life for central Indiana.