Net industry veterans savor switch to wine making.
“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.
But a friend, well-known vineyard manager David Abreu, came over to see the house and observed the Bresslers had some of the best land in the valley for grapes. He asked whether they would be interested in planting vines. “We said something like ‘Oh, sure,’ and the next thing we knew David’s crew showed up and started clearing land and planting,” Bressler says.
An exception to this group of high-tech veterans is Dan Lynch, self-described dilettante-slacker, another early ARPANet veteran, creator of the annual Interop show, and now owner of Lynch Vineyards in Napa Valley. For one thing, he’s a California native and for another he’s the only one of the four with even a modest background in agriculture. As a grammar school student, he had a passion for growing mint, which he acknowledges is as difficult as growing dandelions. But he was soon making room for an even greater passion. “I love growing cactus,” he says. “I had thousands of plants by the time I was in high school.”
Lynch recalls with perfect clarity his wine epiphany, that magical moment when he realized wine could be something special. In 1973, he was talking to his neighbor, a maitre d’ at a local restaurant. Lynch offered him a drink of the wine he had in his fridge. “I think it was Mateus,” he says, referring to a popular, and inexpensive, 1970s imported rosé.
His neighbor responded by uncorking a bottle of Lafite Rothschild, one of the most illustrious names in French Bordeaux. “I took a sip of that: Holy Cow!” Lynch recalls, an almost reverential hush in his voice. That bottle was about $100, at a time when “good wine in America was $3,” he says. By comparison, a bottle by the same vintner from the grape harvest in the year of Lynch’s epiphany was recently auctioned off at winecommune.com for $800.
“That’s when I knew there is a reason to be rich: to buy this kind of wine and not worry about the price,” Lynch says. When he sold Interop to Ziff-Davis “for a ridiculous amount of money,” he went to the local liquor store, ordered a quarter of a million dollars worth of French wine, and had a wine cellar built in his home. By the early ’90s he wanted to do more and bought land in Napa and planted vines.
In general, none of these winemakers has introduced high technology into the grape-growing and wine-making parts of this business. The intuitive nature of wine making – judging when the grapes are ready, how long they should be cold soaked right after being crushed, the subtleties of blending and aging wine – is part of its appeal for these men.
“When we craft our wines, when we grow them, when we decided whether to add water to the soil, do the leaf pulling and so on, we’re always asking, ‘How will this affect the mouth feel, or the flavor profile of the finished wine?’ ” Halleck says.
Bressler has used his background in the Internet to help wineries market, sell and most recently ship wine. “I’ve been working with companies that take wine orders and ship wine, to get them connected via XML,” he says. One goal has been to make the shipment’s tracking number available to wine buyers.
He’s also tracking the evolving wireless sensor technologies as a way to collect and relay data such as moisture content in the soil or in the vines. Other interests are ultra wideband, for blanketing a vineyard with a wireless network, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. “In a big winery, you have hundreds of barrels and you’re constantly moving them,” he says. “Barrels get lost. RFID tags would be a huge help in that.”
There is little enthusiasm for turning their businesses into bleeding-edge technology showpieces. That’s partly because they savor the rhythm of ripening grapes, of fermenting the wine and aging it. They savor the realization that time is an ally in their vocation, not as in Silicon Valley, an enemy.
“In Silicon Valley everything is about speed. The entire valley runs on adrenaline and hypertime,” McMinn says. “In Napa, from the time you plant a grapevine to the time you sell the first bottle of wine from that vine it’s seven years. Here, you don’t control the time. No matter what you do, you only get one crop per year.”
