No rat race, no sour grapes

"It's hard to love enterprise software." That's half the reason why so many network industry veterans seem to end up squinting into the California sun, weighing a handful of stony soil, standing between rows of grapes. The other half is that "wine is one of those things that sort of gets under your skin."

So says Ross Halleck, owner of 1-acre Halleck Vineyards in Sebastopol.

Before subjecting himself to a life in agriculture, he was founder of Halleck, Inc., one of the best-known Silicon Valley marketing services firms. He helped launch three early releases of the Netscape Web browser, and his was one of the first such firms to have a Web site.

But it's not just the fermented, bottled fruit of the vine that has netheads such as Halleck turning in their IT hat for one with a wider brim. There's a whole lot more to the touchy-feelyness of wine than tending the vines, picking the grapes, crushing them or quaffing the results. All of these activities involve people, a community that, despite its connotations of wealth and snobbery, is highly democratic.

"If I'm on an airplane, and I tell the person next to me, 'we do broadband connections,' they go back to reading their Forbes or People," says Chuck McMinn, co-founder in the mid-1990s and chairman of one of the earliest DSL broadband vendors, Covad. Today, he's also owner of two vineyards near St. Helena in Napa Valley: Vineyard 29 and Aida. "If I tell them I'm in the wine business, then we have a two-hour conversation. They identify with the making of wine, with the consuming of wine. It's a very social thing."

One vital characteristic of that "social thing" is the difference between living and working in Silicon Valley, and living and working in one of the wine valleys. As these high fliers talk, nearly all of them express a sense of coming home to a place far from the frenzy, fear and loathing of high-tech competition.

"In Silicon Valley, you have to be very careful to protect trade secrets," says Bob Bressler, who moved from early work on ARPANet to being chief scientist at Sun, where he focused on the issues of networking computers. He and his wife Stacey own Bressler Vineyards, 5 acres of grapes near downtown St. Helena. "But here, you go into a local restaurant and you trade secrets. . . . [People here] want everyone to succeed."

Neophytes

This is good because when most of these newcomers started, the only thing they knew how to grow was revenue, and how to get wine out of a bottle, not into it. Halleck had several vineyards as clients, and was commuting to Napa for years before he decided to find a property and plant his own grapes.

Originally from Madison, N.J., and an Ivy League graduate, McMinn has a background in Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups and venture funding during the Internet boom.

Bressler also grew up in New Jersey and endured frozen New England winters for years before moving to California, where he became involved with the Napa Valley Wine Auction, an annual charity fundraiser. The Bresslers initially bought their Napa property with retirement in mind and to be close to be part of a community used to drinking good wine.