Steve knows firsthand about vins de garage, having made wine in several garages and carports. He’s been making wine for over 20 years, first with friends and later at Robert Mondavi Winery in the Napa Valley. After working at Mondavi for 14 years, he left in 1999 to devote full time to our wine and his own small wine consulting business.
Steve is also the consulting winemaker for Rocking Horse, a small producer of Napa Valley Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Despite long hours spent sniffing barrels and toiling in the vineyard, he still finds time for pickup basketball.
Carole has kept her day job. Since 1980 she has been a professor in the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis. She survives the long commute between Napa and Davis by means of books on tape and cappucino. In addition to teaching courses at Davis, she conducts research in grape genetics. Carole’s research group has used DNA typing methods to discover the origins of some of the greatest old wine varieties, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Syrah, and most recently Zinfandel.
We bought our property in 1986, planted our first vines in 1994 and released our first wine in 2000. So it took us a long time to get here. Unlike some Napa Valley wine producers, we did not start out with a lot of money, only our paychecks. We have no partners or investors, no employees or consultants. We grow the grapes ourselves. We make the wine ourselves.
