Rivella is a three time National Grand Champion Mare
She is classified Gold at 81.2 pts
She's from one of the greatest Haflinger families in the world
Her offspring have been consistent champions

The Story of River: How we fell for this young stallion.

Making a good plan (even if we can't follow one)

We hadn’t planned to purchase a stud. My father wasn’t planning to retire for several more years. We thought that maybe when he retired we would have time to deal with a stallion. But, we just weren’t ready yet. However, every night as we did our horse chores together, we enjoyed discussing what type of stud we would eventually like to get. We agreed that we would not settle for an ordinary, well bred horse to be the flagship of our breeding program. In fact, we hadn’t really ever seen a stallion for sale that fit our needs. We would wait until we found a stallion that was truly world class. We also agreed that we preferred not to import our stallion. Sure, we haul the kids around in a Honda Odyssey, but we just felt it was time to go with an American made model. Top American breeders have been bringing some of Europe’s best genetics to this country for decades. There should be no reason we couldn’t find a horse bred here that could compete with the best Europe has to offer. At least that was our goal.

Always start with a truly great sire: Walzertakt

The next and most difficult step in our hypothetical stallion search was to choose the horse that was qualified to be the sire of our stud. We have our own short list of stallions that we truly admire. But our mares already have pedigrees full of these stallions. We needed something a little different. Suddenly, we rediscovered Walzertakt. It all started when one of the top Haflingers judges in the country told us how much he respected Walzertakt after seeing many of his offspring. We realized that we also shared this admiration. Walzertakt only stood in the U.S. for a few years, so he doesn’t have great numbers of offspring. But, his offspring were starting to do amazing things. The first thing that caught our attention was when his daughter Poetry in Motion VHH became the first horse in 3 years to be classified Gold in 2005. Amazingly, Walzertakt repeated his success in 2006 when his daughter, Angel of Tressana TOF became the second horse in 4 years to go Gold. Then, Poetry in Motion won National Grand Champion Mare in 2006. We really started noticing other great Walzertakt offspring around the country including a gorgeous gelding we purchased at the Land of Lincoln Haflinger sale. He just came strolling by with a cart and blew us away. We could see that Walzertakt was really starting to prove himself in a big way, and we now knew that we wanted a Walzertakt son.

The best dams are all about the best dam families: Rivella

We still were not really in the market for a stud, but we thought that it would be fun to see what caliber of Walzertakt sons were out there. We found a few decent ones, but we didn’t see any out of any mares that really got us excited. Then one day my dad came over to do chores and told me, “Rivella has a Walzertakt out there somewhere.” Wow, that was big news to us. In our opinion, and the opinion of many others, Rivella is hands down the top mare in North America. It’s not just that she was National Junior Champion followed by three times as National Grand Champion Mare. It’s also that she is a tremendously consistent producer of top offspring. I found out that at least 5 of her offspring were national champions or reserve champions at some point in their show career. Her father, mother, and full brother are also famous as some of the truly elite horses of Europe. Its all about family.

Stick with your beliefs

The strongest belief of our breeding philosophy is that there is nothing that compares with the genetic power of a consistent family of great horses. We always stick with the greatest families rather than the greatest individuals. A Walzertakt son out of Rivella would be a genetic force that we just couldn’t pass up. We didn't know if he was for sale, but we were hoping we could at least get some daughters from him.

He's everything we'd hoped for

Next, luck turned in our favor. We found the stallion. It turns out he lived only three hours north of us, with Johanna Doty in Green Lake, WI. We called to ask if he was available to outside mares. It turns out that Johanna was in the process of selling her farm and moving to get closer to her parents. To our surprise she said that she would consider selling him to us because her new facility would not be as large as her current one. We knew we had discovered an incredible opportunity, but we didn't have much time to act. I called her on Friday, and she told me she would start hauling her horses to their new home on Sunday at 9:00 AM. I told her we would be there early Sunday morning to look at him. We were also lucky that he turned out to be such a gorgeous, well mannered stallion, because we were pretty hooked on him before we ever saw him. As I mentioned, we believe very strongly in pedigree, and this guy had a pedigree that just couldn’t be beat. We were elated that his looks were just what we would expect from Rivella’s Walzertakt son. He is a strong, well balanced horse with exquisite movement. We encourage everyone to come see him in person. We’re sure you’ll be impressed too.