When Michael Collins first started gardening, he was very close to the ground. “I can remember being in diapers and rubber pants,” he says, “and being in the garden.” This was in San Francisco, in the back yard of his grandmother’s house on Church Street. Michael had been born in the city in 1950, the oldest of four children. Inspired by his beloved grandmother, Nellie Murphy Herlihy, he was soon hooked on the magic of growing things. “Even in grammar school,” he says, “I was fascinated by wine.”

College took him to the East Coast. He earned his way through the University of Massachusetts by working on the railroads that brought steel from Pittsburgh to New York and on the barges that floated it across the Hudson to build the World Trade Center. Michael doesn’t boast, but if he wanted to, he could claim to be the only person in the world who both helped to build the World Trade Center and whose wine was served at Windows on the World, at the top of the North Tower. On September 11, 2001, when the tower fell, two cases of Limerick Lane wine fell with it.

After college, Michael returned to California and worked as a realtor for five or six years. “I learned a lot about business,” he says, “and I found myself selling a lot of grape ranches.” In 1978, with family members, he bought a grape ranch instead, 30 acres and a house on Limerick Lane, outside Healdsburg.

Despite its rich soil (which would “grow almost any varietal,” Michael says) and splendid location, the ranch was a mess. It had been on the market for over a year because no one wanted it. “The vineyard was a joke,” Michael says. “It looked like Tobacco Road. The house had to be completely redone. There was a broken-down chicken coop. There were people living in a bus down by the creek.”

Visit Limerick Lane today, with this in mind, and you’ll see the miracles accomplished by hard work and love of the land. From the restored house (whose swimming pool has two L’s, for Limerick Lane, on the bottom), you can see some of the old vines planted by the Del Fava family in 1910, which Michael revived, as well as the new vines that he planted. He did most of this work with his brother, Tom, a San Francisco fireman.

A few years after buying the land, they were selling Collins Vineyard grapes to local wineries. In 1986, they produced their first wine, a Sauvignon Blanc, custom-crushed at a Geyserville winery. In 1993, having built a winery on the property, Michael crushed his first vintage. “Now we use all our own grapes, which makes us an estate producer, and we don’t usually sell to other wineries,” he says.

It’s not an easy time in which to be an estate producer. “It’s grinding and difficult financially,” Michael says wryly. “It’s not all romance and walking through the vineyards.” What keeps him going? “Optimism. Stubbornness. Passion. I believe that despite our economic problems, Healdsburg is gold. And I love making wine. I never planned to do anything else, and I hope to keep doing this for a long time to come.”

Limerick Lane Cellars
1023 Limerick Lane
Healdsburg, Ca 95448
(707) 433-9211
(707) 433-1652 (fax)
limerick@monitor.net