Frank & Cheryl Birnie
Frank grew up working on his grandparents’ sharecropper farm. It was there that he fell in love with gardening and cultivating fruit trees. The farm’s cash crop was corn, which was purchased mostly by bourbon distillers. In that sense, Frank’s passion for growing grapes is the inevitable extension of a young life spent cultivating the family’s favorite crop.
Cheryl, on the other hand, was hoping that Travail would become a grand garden of rose cultivars. But a visiting winemaker friend convinced her that the land was begging for grapes, not roses. And so she turned her attention, and her palate, to winemaking. If you visit Travail, you'll likely see Cheryl with her two yellow labs, Tucker and Lovey, in tow.