In 1974, Wilfred and Margaret purchased twenty acres of forested land on Las Posadas Road in Angwin, California and built a family home. Disguised as a waterskiing vacation to Lake Berryessa, Wilfred and Margaret planned a family trip to Angwin which proved to be the beginning of a life rooted on Howell Mountain.
Valerie grew up on the family farm characterized by a balance between rural freedom and traditional Seventh Day Adventist values. The Huse family developed their homestead over many years, building their home, planting a subsistence farm and orchard, felling trees for a wood-burning stove to heat their home, and reveling in the natural beauty of the landscape. Over the years, there were goats to milk, cats to eat mice, dogs for companionship, and horses to ride.
In 1956, after graduating from medical school in post war England, Valerie’s parents, Wilfred Huse and Margaret Palmer got married and took a boat across the Atlantic to New York and immigrated to Glendale, California to practice medicine and raise a family. Valerie, the youngest of five children, developed a love of farming while visiting her grandparent’s orchard and gardens in Redlands, California.
Valerie and her father planted a two-acre orchard of apples, pears, figs, persimmons, walnuts, and plums, a large vegetable garden as well as a barn for Valerie’s two horses, Lucky and Mindy. They also built the horse barn which today is used for canning and making fruit juice and processing honey.
Valerie, an avid horse rider, spent the nights of her youth curled up in the barn with Lucky and Mindy and weekends were spent working in the orchard harvesting fruit and honey, as well as corn, tomatoes, potatoes, melons, squash and so much more. As a child, growing up in Angwin, Valerie found many Native American arrowheads on the land.
In 1984, Nick and Valerie met at Pacific Union College, located about a mile away in Angwin and shared a love of horse riding, often riding late into the night through the forest. After Nick and Valerie were married in 1991, they moved to the east coast and the Midwest where Nick pursued his Deloitte career.
In 2014, Nick and Valerie moved back to Northern California and in 2016, they developed Great Oak Vineyard. Over the course of several years, they revitalized the garden and orchard, renovated the barn and Valerie’s childhood home, installed solar power and fiber broadband, and developed Great Oak Vineyard.
In developing the vineyard, the large, majestic black oak tree was spared and today lives in the middle of the vineyard. Through the seasons, the vineyard’s namesake, Great Oak, stands tall amidst grapes, watching over land written with stories of love, hardship, adventure, and many quiet, wondrous lives that rise and rest in the Napa Valley.
