October 23, 2018 Flying Solo

The Liberty Gazette

October 23, 2018

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: There are such things as wine flights and wine tasting flying tours. Wine flights have nothing to do with aviation. It’s just what they call a few samples one can order instead of a regular glass, if one wants to taste a small amount of different wines.

Wine tasting flying tours on the other hand do indeed involve aviation. One could either hire a company to take them on a tour or, if one is a pilot, one may soar above the vineyards, the boss of one’s own schedule. Helicopter companies offer charter flights around popular vineyards in Napa Valley and the Pacific Northwest.

In the summer of 2015 several friends took off from their home airports and met on the west coast to fly their own airplanes on a wine flying tour. Of course, flying and alcohol don’t mix, so when they sampled a vineyard, they stayed the night.

While we didn’t stop for a tour, I remember flying over Napa Valley, finding the landscape to be a lovely wave of green carpet.

Reminds me of the island of Vis in the Adriatic, off the coast of Croatia. We toured a beautiful vineyard and winery there after trudging through underground bunkers used during World War II. There are grape fields everywhere, but there is no longer an airport on Vis. The land was vineyard first, and to the vine it has returned. Yet their young generation seems uninterested in inheriting family farms. Many of those once-fruitful fields are now overgrown terraced weeds.

Back at home, as I rounded the corner to the last aisle in the grocery store I entered the wine and cheese area. This was the kind of store that has a bar inside. Among the shelves filled with drink, and right at reading level, was a bottle that caught my eye.

“Flying Solo” had a beautiful label in the style of a vintage postage stamp with a drawing that looks like a Ryan, except that it doesn’t have that big round engine. Charles Lindbergh flew his Ryan, “Spirit of St. Louis,” across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. If you can picture that, you have an idea of what was drawn on this label. I have no idea how the wine tastes, but I was interested in the story behind the name.

Turns out the company, Domaine Gayda, is in France and their Flying Solo “celebrates the intrepid ‘Aéropostale’ pilots who risked life and limb to ensure postal deliveries in the 1920s.”

Flying the mail in the 1920s was daring. Lindbergh had been a mail pilot and on his trans-Atlantic flight he fought against fatigue and nasty weather. He landed safely in Paris after flying over 3,600 miles in thirty-three and a half hours, the first to go solo over the ocean.

Becoming an aviator had changed him. “In flying,” he said, “I tasted a wine of the gods of which people on the ground could know nothing.” Now there’s a “wine” we give five stars.

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