Author: Senlin Means

Felicia Warburg Rogan, founder of Oakencroft Vineyard and Winery, is one of a handful of people who can rightfully be said to have helped create the Virginia Wine industry. Oakencroft is not only the closest winery to Charlottesville, it is the oldest winery in Albemarle County, and Mrs. Rogan’s list of accomplishments is long: First chairman of the Virginia Wine Grape Growers Advisory Board, founder of the Jeffersonian Wine Grape Growers Society, and create the Monticello AVA. She has been a tireless promoter of Virginia Wines, even traveling, in 1988, as far away as Taiwan.

Big gulp: As hard as it is to believe, Oakencroft will be shutting its doors after 25 years. “I think we’ve been an icon,” founder Felicia Rogan says.

But now, after 25 years, Oakencroft is shutting its doors on December 31. As I talked with Mrs. Rogan about what those years have meant, she regularly drew my attention to the various waterfowl surrounding the lake, including a magnificent blue Heron and a gaggle of Chinese geese. She’d been up at 7:30 that morning to feed the geese, who, she said, ran after her like dogs. Oakencroft is one of the only wineries in the state that is an actual working farm, and there is something about the winery and its owner, some marriage of agriculture with high culture, that is to me quintessential Charlottesville.

C-VILLE: Why are you closing Oakencroft?

Felicia Warburg Rogan: Oakencroft is going to be closing because, as many people know, we’re the oldest winery in Charlottesville. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary, and as the Walrus said, “The time has come to talk of many things,” and many things includes a wonderful 25 years. …The winery has been very exciting, the most exciting part of my life.

Twenty five years ago there was probably quite a different wine culture here.

There wasn’t a wine culture here. I remember having lived in New York City, we drank wine regularly for dinner, and when I came down here, people said, “What would you like to drink?” and I’d say, “A glass of white wine.” It was as though I’d asked for Pernod or something. People were drinking hard liquor.

You must feel an enormous amount of pride about how far the industry has come.

I do, tremendous pride. I always visualized this area as the Napa Valley of the East.

In those 25 years you’ve seen wine become a big tourist draw for the state.

Oh, absolutely. It’s agri-tourism! That word didn’t exist when I moved here in ’76 and it’s a whole new way of tourism. Unfortunately, the economy is terrible and gas is awful, but here, why not just stay here in Virginia and do wine touring? I mean it’s just perfect. You could spend a whole summer just visiting the hundred wineries or so that we have here.

Do you feel that the reliance on tourism may hinder the quality of the wine at our wineries?

You mean to make an inferior wine because, in theory, anybody’s just gonna buy wine no matter what the quality?

That’s harsher than I would have put it.

But realistic. No. I don’t think that anybody has made a point of lowering their standards to meet the tourist trade. A lot of the tourists come because they’ve heard about the countryside and the wineries, and a lot of them don’t know much about wine, but I’ve always felt that it was our role to educate them, and in educating them you make the best quality wine that you can.

What do you think has been the most important element in Virginia wine gaining the respect it has?

I think it’s the dedication of the people who’ve put down roots here, who have made a great effort to study, which [we didn’t do] in the beginning, the kind of rootstock that’s necessary to plant, the site selection. There was nobody when we all started, we felt our way. And now everybody has the benefit of what we have learned. There are some very, very knowledgeable vineyard people, and of course winemakers. Every region is different. You can grow grapes probably almost anywhere, but you have to know the micro-climates and you have to know the elevation. I’ve always said this is a three-tier business: it’s agriculture, it’s the growing of the grapes; it’s the making of the wine, which is a very technical quality that you have to know; and then it’s marketing. You’re nothing if you don’t know how to market your product.

What’s the next step for Virginia wine?

I see the industry only growing in stature, in hiring people who are knowledgeable. A lot of the wineries in the beginning started with families, and there are still a lot of families, where the family does all the work. I must say they are probably financially the most successful. I mean, I don’t have any family who work here, and of course having a large staff with all the incumbent financial problems makes it very difficult to make any money. But small families who are willing to invest time and money and to find out where the best of everything is to make their winery positively financially successful—that’s where I see people learning more.

What will be missing from the Virginia Wine industry when Oakencroft is gone?

Well, I think we’ve been an icon, and I think we’ve gained the respect of the industry and the people I’ve had work for me everybody thinks very highly of. We’ve set a standard, and I think they’ll miss that standard—everything that I’ve tried to do, we’ve tried to do, with this lovely setting and making it appealing for people to come and sit and sip wine here. We’re not modern. There are many wineries that have all modern equipment and have chefs working there. I really wanted to keep it as a simple and beautiful farm winery. And that will be missed because I don’t know any wineries that are working farms in this area.

Who, beside yourself, would you list as the giants of Virginia wine?

Oh well, Gabriele Rausse without any question. He comes to mind immediately. And Mrs. Furness who had the Piedmont Winery in Northern Virginia. She was one of the first to plant Vinifera vines. Extraordinary lady. The winery has been sold and now a German couple own it. But she proved to people that Vinifera could be grown here. I think those two, though there are a lot of other people who started at the time I did. And there’s certainly people in the restaurant business who were bold enough to put Virginia wines on their list. I certainly would like to see, in the future, certainly in the state of Virginia, but just locally in Albemarle County, more variety of Virginia wines on the menus in restaurants rather than so many different ones. I think the restaurants could do more to promote Virginia wines. They haven’t quite done it yet.

Any last words?

Sounds like my epitaph.

I didn’t mean it that way!

I’ve been so fortunate to be able to do this. It has been a dream come true, and my sadness is that so many of the people that have brought it to fruition are going to have to leave because of my closing it.

The seeds you’ve sown…

Yes. Will grow further from the roots. There’s no question about it.

Fake wine is all the rage lately. In April of this year, 22 bottles from top Burgundy producer, Domaine Ponsot, appeared for sale at a Manhattan auction with a hoped-for price of $603,000. But the wines were withdrawn when the winery owner, Laurent Ponsot, pointed out that several of the bottles were dated up to 37 years before the Domaine had ever produced those particular wines. The same auction house, Acker Merrall & Condit, is currently being sued for allegedly selling fake wine to Bill Koch, one of the protagonists of a new book by Benjamin Wallace called The Billionaire’s Vinegar.

The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the story of several bottles of 18th century wine purported to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson—a story also told in a New Yorker article last September. The bottles were found by a German man with the (fake) name of Hardy Rodenstock, who throughout the ’80s and ’90s made a career of finding miraculous caches of stupendously rare wine and selling them for a lot of money. The first of the Jefferson bottles to sell at auction (a 1787 Lafite), was purchased by Malcolm Forbes in 1985 for the still record price of $156,450, and was carried out of Christie’s by his son in a bag emblazoned with the Forbes’ motto: “Capitalist Tool.”

But the Jefferson wines might very well be fakes, and if so, then Rodenstock has succeeded in making fools not only of some of the world’s richest people, but of its greatest wine experts as well.

Jefferson’s involvement is both the reason that the bottles are so valuable, and the reason that fakes are so hard to get away with. As one figure in the story says, “Jefferson was anal,” recording, in triplicate, every wine purchase he ever made. Again and again the exactitude of the third president, and the exhaustive work of the scholars at Monticello, is challenged by the wine lovers, who wield nothing more than their magical palates. At one point, Serena Sutcliffe, the head of wine sales for Sotheby’s auction house, and a Master of Wine, responds to doubts raised by Monticello about a bottle of Madeira claimed to have been Jefferson’s by saying, “There are many ‘Jefferson scholars,’ just as there are many Rembrandt scholars! Not to mention the Jane Austin Tribe.”

The Billionaire’s Vinegar is a lesson in the fallibility of Taste, and true obsessives’ aching desire to believe. As such, it serves as a good reminder to all wine “experts” (myself included) that our only real expertise is in drinking. We are, after all, merely scholars of taste, members only of the academy of decadence.

And there is decadence aplenty in this book, from wine tastings that last for seven days, to multithousand dollar bottles opened for breakfast. It is a tale of men so wealthy, and so covetous, that they spend $622,000 on JFK’s cigar humidor, and have wine collections that number 35,000 bottles, more than any man could drink in a lifetime. It’s a tale of rotting, bloated, gangrenous excess, of greed and pretension on a titanic scale. Perhaps in that it is perfect for our time.

I enjoyed the book immensely, yet it made me want to line the wine experts, collectors and critics up against a wall and shoot them. Partly because they are so arrogant and foolish, and partly because I’ve never been invited to any of their parties.

The bed was an island in a sea of open wine bottles and sloshing spit buckets crowded into a room in a modernist high rise in Paris. It was an absolutely beautiful day, and outside, tout le Paris seemed to be enjoying the weather. Inside, however, three Virginians were following their dream, a dream that had led them from the restaurants and wine shops of Charlottesville to this Parisian hotel room, where, shunning the daylight, they hunkered down to taste wine. Two hundred and twenty five wines in three days. It was not, strictly speaking, fun. “It was a lot of work,” Nicolas Mestre tells me, “and a lot of work for the maid.” Welcome to the wild and crazy life of a wine importer.

Mestre and friends Andrew Greene and Ted Burns, (who, I must add in the interest of full disclosure, are all my friends as well), are taking their passion for wine to another level, by starting an importing company called Williams Corner Wine. This entrepreneurial venture is an ideological one, too.

The three guys that make up Williams Corner Wine, Andrew Greene, Ted Burns and Nicolas Mestre (left to right), have some wild, crazy and really cool ideas about how to run their business.

“We have a no-Spoof philosophy,” Mestre explains. That’s “Spoof” as in “Spoofulated,” a real wine-geek term for overmanipulated Franken-wines that are carefully constructed with the consumer in mind. The wines that the three of them spent those beautiful days tasting in that Paris hotel room are the exact opposite. They’re hand-harvested, unadulterated and unique. They come from wineries where the owners, Mestre says, “don’t come into the wine business having already made it…they’re born into it.”

Ninety percent of the wines that they’ll be bringing into the country are organic or biodynamic—a kind of über-organic method of farming that involves planting via astronomical charts. And it doesn’t stop there. Williams Corner Wine LLC uses recycled paper, is looking into a tree planting program to offset its carbon output, and hopes to find a biodiesel van to use for deliveries. Above my head in the cold warehouse where the wine is stashed, one of the lights has a compact florescent bulb. Word.

And so, Mestre, Greene and Burns, the Three Amigos who met because of wine and who share a secret wine cellar in a labyrinth underneath the Downtown Mall (I have been know to lurk there), are now jetting off to France and Austria to taste wine and meet winemakers. But starting a wine-importing business at a time when the Euro is kicking sand in the dollar’s face and the American economy is staggering around like John Belushi at the Chateau Marmont—doesn’t that seem more than a little crazy?

Maybe not. Williams Corner Wine is the third wine importer to locate in Charlottesville, behind Simon N Cellars and Margaux & Company, and to me this is a great sign. Every new winery, wine bar, wine column, or private wine guild that opens in Charlottesville brings with it a few new wine lovers. The wines that Williams Corner Wine wants to bring to town are not big names and don’t have big scores. Many of them are unusual, lesser known, and not “perfect” by the standards of the mainstream wine industry. But where better to open up a niche wine company than Charlottesville, Virginia, the new wine capital of the East Coast?

“I got nothing to say about these things I write, I mean, I just write ’em.”—Bob Dylan, England, 1965.

One hundred percent of winemakers will tell you that “great wine is made in the vineyard” and for 90 percent of them, it’s complete bullshit. Jim Law, however, embodies the remaining 10 percent. He doesn’t go to festivals or allow tour groups at his Front Royal winery. He doesn’t advertise. He also doesn’t call himself a winemaker. He’s a winegrower, and he mostly tends to the grapes, the vines, and the very dirt in which they grow.

A self-described member of the back-to-the-land movement, the 53-year-old Law came to Virginia in 1981. Four years later, he planted the vines that comprise Hardscrabble Vineyard, an 18-acre swath of granitic dirt that surrounds his winery. “Hardscrabble” is apt; it’s the kind of meager, rocky land where Southern Gothic dirt farmers die slow deaths. But grapevines love that kind of soil, and Jim Law, more Ken Kesey-esque than Faulknerian, has thrived there. Linden Vineyards may well be the best winery in Virginia.

The simple answer: To make his wines, Jim Law doesn’t add sugar or oak chips or anything else. He just grows better grapes.

On a whim, I ask him to drive an hour and a half down to Charlottesville to have dinner, and he agrees, bringing with him a selection of his wines stretching back 20 years. There are six people present for dinner, seven if you include Elizabeth, a dog that on a dark night could be mistaken for a horse. Over about four hours and nine wines, we experience what my friend Jeff, the host and evening’s cook, pronounces “an historic occasion in Virginia Wine.” Hyperbole? Not in the slightest.

Jim pours the first of his wines, a 1993 Chardonnay. Blind, I would have guessed it was a white Burgundy and at least 10 years younger. Next up, the 1998 Hardscrabble Chardonnay is a different wine altogether—strong and beautiful, tasting like a marble fist.

People always ask Jim why his wines age so well, and for a long time he had to tell them that he honestly didn’t know. Now, however, he believes he has the answer. “I’m a really lazy winemaker,” he says. “I’d rather be out in the vineyard than down in the cellar.” To make his wines, he doesn’t add tannin, tartaric acid, malic acid, citric acid, glycerine, oak essence, oak chips, grape concentrate, sugar or any of the other additives winemakers use to “fix” their wines. He just grows better grapes; the wines make themselves.

We start the reds with a bottle of his 1988 Cabernet Sauvignon, the second vintage at Linden, and although still dark and structured, it’s showing its age (Jim still bottled by hand in the ’80s, and he feels the wines may have aged faster for that reason). The 1990 Cab is silky and smooth with soft fruit, and the 1991 amazes—dark and rich with plenty of life left. The elegant 1997 reserve red, with a more floral nose than the others, is still quite young and brooding.

Jim grew up listening to Bob Dylan, whose genius often arises from his music’s very imperfection. Similarly, Jim likens “perfect” wines to Muzak piped into elevators. On the other hand, he calls wines that express something else—something unique, natural and expressive of the place they come from (warts and all)—“Dylan wines.”

Case in point: the 1999 Hardscrabble Red. It’s Dylan gone electric—monumental, with a color like the inside of a deep cave, and a pruney richness I’ve never had in a Virginia wine before. Everyone goes spastic trying to express how good it is. Jim just smiles. He’s serene and sober as a monk (he’s been spitting his wine out all evening on account of the long drive back). Not so the rest of us. We are drinking, and laughing, and conversing, in a ragged, Dylan-esque kind of way.

The bus is 45 minutes late picking me up due to the ladies on board needing Starbucks, but I don’t mind. The Washington Wine Academy and Reston Limousine have started bringing groups from Washington D.C. to Charlottesville to tour wine country, and intrigued by reports of Long Island wine tours gone mad (drunken bachelorette parties! Table dancing! Nudity!), and by a recent Leesburg Today article claiming that “Virginia wine success will come from tourism,” I decided to get on the bus and see for myself what this approaching success will look like. Imagine my delight when I stepped on board and saw 11 young female wine enthusiasts in sundresses and sandals, all eager to help our wine industry make it big.

Don’t drink and drive, but do ride and drink: Groups from Washington D.C. can now get a taste of our area wine country, thanks to the Washington Wine Academy and Reston Limousine.

It’s Kelly’s birthday. She is turning (shut up! Don’t say it!) 29, and so all the girls have gotten together for a Charlottesville wine tour. Visit two Charlottesville area wineries! Lunch and shopping at the historic Downtown Mall! I am assured by WWA president Jim Barker and Kristin Tanzi, the business development coordinator for Reston Limousine, that the kind of party-bus mentality that’s causing wineries all over the country to post “No Limos” signs is strictly prohibited here. That’s great, I think, as the bus flies past our turn and heads for Fluvanna County. I point this out to the grizzled driver, Chuck, who calmly replies, “WHAT! I’M JUST GOING THE WAY I KNOW HOW! WHERE WAS I SUPPOSED TO TURN?”

We arrive at Blenheim winery late and the bulk of the ladies head immediately to the deck to take in the view. Greg, on the tour with his wife, Alma, moved to D.C. from California and remembers his grandparents taking him to Napa Valley before it began to choke on its own tourist vomit. His assessment of the difference between here and there is that “Napa has lost that small town feel.”

We are late getting into Charlottesville for lunch and shopping. Chuck takes another wrong turn and when I point this out to him, he thoughtfully says, “WHAT!” and jackknifes the bus across the median.

After lunch and no shopping (we’re running late), the ladies sleep, chat about how best to pack for a flight to Cabo, and listen to their iPods. Chuck expertly steers the bus down the narrow roads leading to Barboursville Vineyards as oncoming cars pull over onto the shoulder, honking their horns in friendly greeting.
 
Barboursville is packed. We get off the bus and stand in line at the entrance. “That’s the downside of the growth of Napa,” Greg says pointing at the rolling hills, “they don’t have any of this.” But inside, the theme park cum food court vibe prevails. Luckily, the winery is having its spring barrel tasting, and we indulge in verticals of the Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon reserve, and taste the 2007 Octagon, which has yet to be bottled.

So, whither cometh our success? After tasting Barboursville wines dating back to 1991, and stretching forward to the unreleased ‘07 vintage, I know the answer I would give: the wine. But economically, I guess it’s not that simple. The day winding down, three of the ladies sit sulkily on a brick wall and smoke. I ask if the birthday girl had fun. “Yeah,” one of them says, not looking at me behind her large round sunglasses, “I guess she’s enjoying it.”

As this year’s All Night Long after-prom party begins at midnight, music pounds throughout U-Hall, which feels empty despite the hundreds of kids from Western Albemarle, Albemarle, Charlottesville and Monticello highs, arriving post-prom in various states of formal undress, white tuxes paired with pink ties and pink waistcoats being this year’s sartorial cutting edge. At the entrance, the teens are greeted by a table of Army recruiters with an array of Army brochures, packs of Army playing cards, Army pens and Army key-chains—a real sign of our times. I ask a volunteer why the Army is recruiting at the high school after-prom party and she says they’re not supposed to be “recruiting,” just helping (which seems to mostly take the form of playing basketball all night in their desert camo and combat boots). So I ask a female Army person why the Army is here at a high school after-prom party and she tenses up, not looking at me, and says they’re a sponsor and are just chaperoning. I ask if she’s having fun, to which, still not looking at me, she replies, “It’s O.K.”

What: All Night Long, alcohol-free after-prom party Where: U-Hall When: Sunday, April 27, midnight-5 a.m.

The basketball court is filled with giant, inflatable, bouncy rubber edifices, a live karaoke band and a DJ, the prevailing vibe being “slumber party w/amusement rides.” Poker tables, an airbrush tattoo parlor, and two huge TVs plugged into Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band are arrayed along the circular concourse, while downstairs there is the “food court”: a grotesque buffet with candy spilling across tables, a trough of pudding, slowly browning fruit, fried chicken, hardening spaghetti, bowls of burgers, and pizza piled up in heaps, etc. etc. And the whole thing will go on All Night Long, from 1:30 when the doors close (you can check out anytime you like, but you can’t come back in) until 5 in the morning, you better believe it.

In order to best celebrate the substance-free event, the DJ plays classic odes to getting wasted, from Clapton’s “Cocaine” to Winehouse’s “Rehab.” The staggering array of different clothes, body shapes, hairstyles, and types of kids is a study in pubescence in all its awkward glory. Everything happens in groups—of two, four, 10—and the groups float, collide and break up, in a kind of bee-dance spelling out a message, I’m sure, but what? A t-shirt that reads “Video games ruined my life…good thing I have 2 extra lives” provides a clue, and the Rock Band/Dance Dance videogame area is a hive of activity, with certain kids pretty much camping out, including one girl who, I swear, is there all night long Dancing, Dancing, Revolting.

Most kids went to private parties after prom, but when asked why they came here instead, two All Night Long attendees replied in unison, “There’s food!”

“You’ve been doing this all night!”

Smile, nod, “I know!” but the eyes never leave the screen and the feet never stop stepping.

“Are you getting better?”

Smile, nod, “Uh huh!”

Some kids do one thing all night, other kids do everything, and although by 3am there are only about 50 or so left, those that remain are committed to staying until 5, catching up with friends from other schools, scarfing the free food, and genuinely enjoying the alcohol-free aspect, which, as one 17-year-old girl with way cool multi-colored glasses explains, lets them be themselves and have fun without any pressure or “threats.” It is her first time staying up all night and her knee never stops bouncing as she sits in the bleachers watching her boyfriend dominate the laser tag.

On a day filled with opportunities for excess (from Foxfield to the proms—and yes, some kids were drunk and stoned at prom), these mini-Britneys and Amy Ws and P Diddys, I can see as the hours melt, are only impersonating young adults. They are really here to play, with that wide-open look on their faces that kids get when they are honestly being kids. Nobody is drinking or snorting Ritalin or smoking Salvia or having sex. There are no fights or accidents (other than one cut finger), just pajama pants and discrete kisses and sprints through the halls and a two-liter Pepsi bottle in each hand (“this is like three hours worth of soda!”) held aloft in triumph.

At the end of the night, the basketball game still rages as does Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band. The sombrero-wearing kid who seemed glued to the bleachers has finally gotten up, and the floor is littered with discarded shoes. Kids collapse exhausted on the giant, inflatable, bouncy rubber edifices. “You made it!” I say to way-cool-multi-colored-glasses and she says, “I did! My father was wrong!” And one girl, a slip of a thing in a purple top with fake diamonds and a fake tattoo, remains strapped into the gyroscope, spinning beautifully upside down, curly pony tail flopping and head thrown back in glee.

Eco-friendly winemaking is all the rage. In October 2007, wine-geek-with-a-Ph.D. Tyler Colman co-wrote a paper detailing the wine industry’s carbon footprint, in which he pointed out that if you live east of Ohio, it’s more eco-friendly to buy French wine than Californian. Why? Because French wine travels mostly by boat instead of truck. In February 2008 this idea was pushed ad absurdum when a French shipping company announced it was going to begin shipping wines via innovative 19th century technology, namely an 1896 sailing ship. The first shipment of 60,000 bottles took a week longer than normal to arrive, but saved 18,375 pounds of carbon.    

It has long been gospel that Virginia wines will never be organic; the sheer number of bugs and mildews pretty much necessitate spraying. But organic is sooo hippy dippy 1990s anyway; sustainability is what’s hot, as exemplified by industry giant Fetzer, which has been doing the green thing since the mid ’80s. Their numbers are tight and right: 100 percent renewable energy for all the winery operations, 95 percent waste free, carbon negative to the nth degree…the list goes on. Out in Nelson County, Claude DelFosse has been paying attention and he’s taking the first steps towards the greening of DelFosse Vineyards.

Flower child: “We have the bones, now we have to add the meat,” Claude DelFosse says about long-term sustainability at his vineyards.

On a rainy Monday afternoon, Mr. DelFosse is poring over the results of a carbon footprint assessment of the winery, while his vineyard manager, Grayson Poats, awaits a delivery of hay from a local farmer to help combat erosion on the steep, terraced vineyards. Soon, local sheep will be grazing among the vines, a common practice in New Zealand, the sheep acting as natural lawnmowers and fertilizers. Currently, the 32 sheep are eating and pooping in a rejuvenated organic apple orchard behind the winery. The Wintergreen Nature Foundation plans to build native flowerbeds to help attract beneficial bugs, and the Virginia Bluebird Society has established a series of bluebird houses, the occupants of which will, it’s hoped, eat harmful insects. Both projects aim to reduce the amount of insecticide DelFosse needs to spray each year.

In addition to the carbon analysis, DelFosse has also hired a forester to create a stewardship plan for the woods that surround the winery. Of the 320 total acres, over 200 are forested, making the winery seriously carbon negative. But still, the DelFosse family and Poats want to do more, so they are looking into using the many streams on the property to generate micro-hydro energy. They have already begun using recycled shipping products and are examining how they can reduce the winery’s total waste.

The greening of DelFosse Vineyards is not perfect. The biggest eco issue in winemaking, as shown by Colman’s study, is transportation, and as Mr. DelFosse and Poats talk carbon, a big flatbed truck hauling a small Caterpillar tractor lumbers up the mountain. The organic apple orchard functions at this point merely as a source of more fertilizer; they haven’t yet found an outlet for the apples. But, it’s a start. “We have the bones, now we have to add the meat,” DelFosse says.

In many ways, DelFosse Vineyards is like all the rest: tourist accessible and wedding friendly. Yes, there is a lake and a pavilion and statues and tiled plazas and elaborate stonework. But there are also five and a half miles of wild trails, built and maintained by Nelson County, that are open to the public 9am to 5pm every day, and an ongoing commitment to keeping the land as green as possible. “Sustainability is not an event,” DelFosse says, “it’s a long term thing.”