MooseVine.com
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It all became quite clear recently -- how it all got started. Denise’s parents sent a picture of her at age two, proudly perched on a rocking horse with a very contented look (as you can see in the picture at the bottom of the page) on her face. It was obvious from this early photo that horses were going to be a very big part of her life.
MooseVine Ranch, the name derived from the combination of Denise’s fetish with moose (what is it with hoofed mammals?) and Craig’s occupation as a winemaker, has gone through many changes over the years. It started with a halter purchased by a teenage girl with dreams of someday having a horse to put it on. At one point MooseVine Ranch owned two horses and no saddles. A year later, they owned three saddles and no horses. Hey, they were new at this ranch thing. Unfortunately, Denise never did get to use that original halter. It turns out that the halter was for a draft horse and it never fit any of the horses they had. It is now being used by Queenie, a Clydesdale living in Western New York. Maybe they should have kept it as it would probably fit the moose that Denise is yearning to have as a pet.
Denise and Craig purchased what is now MooseVine Ranch on Slug Gulch Road near the Town of Fair Play, California (really, these names are not made up) in 1997. Located in the Sierra Foothills at an elevation of 2500 feet with a great westerly view, it is a modest five acres, although they have been eyeballing an adjacent 11 acre parcel. One thing they've learned is that you can never have too much land or too many horses (at least that's what Denise has convinced Craig). One of the best things about their location is that they have several neighbors that fight over the right to the manure they generate. On their old business cards, Denise and Craig referred to themselves as 'Entremanures', which non-horse types just didn't understand.
