Cleavage Creek Wines: Uncorking A Cure

breast cancer, Cleavage Creek Cellar, breast cancer, Arlene Brown

I'm fighting the disease my own way. Each bottle features a story of survival.

My mission is to provide information for women that their doctors don’t necessarily tell them. I want to give them a better chance to understand what they’re up against.

Budge Brown

Date Posted: 12/07/07

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I’m 75 years old and I’ve been a farmer for 54 years. Twenty-five years ago, we planted a vineyard, so I’ve been in the grape growing business a long time. I started Cleavage Creek Cellars because of my wife of 48 years, Arlene, who succumbed to breast cancer in 2005. I became determined to fight the disease that took her away. Our wine labels each feature a woman who has survived her battle with breast cancer and ten per cent of the gross dollar amount of Cleavage Creek wines is donated to cutting edge research to fight the disease. Live to love life is our motto.

My wife Arlene was a wonderful woman and we had a fabulous marriage. What can I say? She was just delightful. We enjoyed wine together. She didn’t drink a lot, but she drank some, and I collected wines.

Some studies say that too much wine causes increased cancer in women. While my wife lived to love life, she knew it was everything in moderation, and that’s what I have to say about that.

The news media jumps on all kinds of things, but I take it all with a grain of salt. If we eat too much salt, we’ll die. A year ago, if you ate too much butter, you died. Apples were going to kill us one year and watermelons would do us in the next. All those things are blown out of proportion. There is also research that shows that wine in small amounts is good for you and good for your heart.

Breast cancer, on the other hand, is very bad for the heart. When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer it was frightening. She fought it for seven years and we were told that at the end of five years of her treatment, she would be cancer free. At the end of five years though, she had tumors on her brain and her liver and had bone cancer.

That was the big lie, and the more I think about it, the more I get upset. A lot of women are told lies during treatment. They’re not told that they could have it recurring sooner rather than later. There are a lot of things women aren’t told, and I believe if we’d been told more, my wife may have survived.

My mission is to provide information for women that their doctors don’t necessarily tell them.