A journey that started 167 years ago in a vineyard my great-great-great-grandfather planted in San Jose ended yesterday morning on the stamped concrete driveway of my winery with the delivery of the first pallets of Lineage: Life and Love and Sixth Generations in California Wine.
As the oldest winemaking family in the US, there have been a lot of pins placed on our winemaking timeline. The publication of my first book is just the latest. What started out as very intermittent jottings over the course of the last 20 years, gained clarity and an open mental runway during Covid. Most nights in 2020, I’d stay up late with just Miles Davis to keep me company as I wrote about the most meaningful aspects of being in the wine life.
The simple, everyday magic to be found in hard, purposeful work as we shepherd unruly nature into bottomlessly beautiful wine is as much as I could want from this part of the journey.
The line connecting me, unendingly, to my thrice-removed grandfather and now to the generations after me – all of us in pursuit of making beauty and bringing joy and richness to peoples’ lives through wine – is stronger and more clearly defined than it has ever been. The road getting here has had many corners and led to a few empty rooms, but is comforting to know that is the right road after all.