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Home > Blogs > Uncorked > Archives > 2010 > October > 28 > Entry
Dayton natives find a home in the vineyards
Here’s a sneak peek at a story scheduled to run in tomorrow’s (10-29-10) Dayton Daily News Life section.
Don’t misunderstand: they all love Dayton. They’re just not ready to pick up and come back to their hometown. Not just yet, anyway.
The wine industry is teeming with Miami Valley natives who found greener pastures — vineyards, actually — on the West Coast. And while many have fond memories of their youth, and occasionally return to visit family and friends here, they don’t appear to be chomping at the bit to abandon the wine-country lifestyle to return to their roots in the Dayton area.
“I love working here,” says Dave Hickey, a 1972 Belmont High School graduate who makes sparkling wines for Laetitia Vineyard and Winery near Arroyo Grande in central California. “It’s an amazing industry. I’ve met such fascinating people. I’ve been to such fascinating places, and I’ve been able to taste some fantastic wines.”
Julia Staigers, a Cedarville native and 1976 Wright State University graduate, notes that the Oregon winery that she owns with her husband and fellow WSU graduate Gerard Koschal — Crumbled Rock Winery — is located one hour from the Pacific Ocean, one hour from a snow-ski resort, and minutes from a small Oregon town just named by national magazine as among the best “foodie” towns in the country.
“Plus, there’s the wine.” Staigers said.
Here’s a glimpse into the lives of four “ex-pats” from the Dayton area whose careers have flowed into the West Coast wine business. If you or someone you know followed a similar career path as these Miami Valley natives, share the story via e-mail to mfisher @daytondailynews.com.
Making the connection
Dave Hickey said he got into the business “quite by chance,” and his is a career path that may never be duplicated.
After his graduation from Belmont in 1972, Hickey served a four-year apprenticeship and became a journeyman electrician. He decided to take his wife, Carmen, a Patterson Co-Op High School graduate, and the couple’s young children and to “hit the road and see some more of the USA.”
By 1985, he and his family were living in Arroyo Grande, Calif. and he was running a small carpet- cleaning and janitorial business. He did some construction cleanup work for a new local winery, Maison Deutz, which had been launched by a French champagne maker. The winery would later change its name to Laetitia Vineyards and Winery.
“There was only one employee at the winery — an American winemaker — and he liked me and offered me a part-time job,” Hickey recalled. “He was also an excellent teacher, and I was an eager student.”
He learned the wily ways of making sparkling wine for more than a decade, and when his mentor took another job, “to my great surprise, I was promoted” to oversee all aspects of making 6,000 cases of seven different sparkling wines at Laetitia. Hickey’s son, Eric, followed him into the business and makes Laetitia’s still wines.
Hickey still has cousins in the Dayton area that he keeps in contact with, and he keeps up with hometown news on the internet. But he’s still pinching himself that his construction cleanup job led to a winemaking position that led to a career that he shares with his son.
“I have absolutely enjoyed the ride,” Hickey said.
California dreamin’
Like his fellow Dayton-area natives, wine-industry veterans profiled here, Matt Unverferth has fully embraced the wine-country lifestyle. The Oakwood native and 1975 graduate of Alter High School, did, in fact, return to Dayton this week — only just to introduce his wine company’s Eric K. James wines to the Dayton area. Then it’s back on a plane to return to his job as director of operations for the Napa-Sonoma Vineyard Group.
Unverferth’s career path did not follow a straight line into wine. He headed to southern California shortly after he graduated from Ohio University with a degree in film. He had in mind a career in motion pictures.
“I failed miserably,” he said.
To make ends meet, he started working for a restaurant chain called the Rusty Pelican, and moved up to a position training employees of new restaurants — many of them in northern California. In 1986, he relocated to northern California permanently, worked as a bar manager, and started learning about wine. The subject was hardly foreign to him: He grew up in what he called a wine family, helping his German grandfather make wine by squishing grapes between his toes when he was a child.
He worked for a decade for a large wine wholesaler-distributor, and later for a distillery, traveling around the West Coast promoting wine and spirits. He joined the Napa-Sonoma Vineyard Group a year ago, and chose Ohio as the first target for expansion beyond California for the wine company’s products.
Unverferth poured three of his company’s bottlings — the Eric K. James 2007 Carneros Pinot Noir, 2009 Carneros Chardonnay and 2009 Syrah Rose — on Wednesday night at the Oregon Express, owned by his Alter High School classmates Joe and Susan Bavaro. The wines are just being introduced into the southwest Ohio market, and the wines’ coming-out party will continue from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 30, when Unverferth will pour samples of the wines during a drop-in tasting at Arrow Wine & Spirits’ Washington Twp. store. (Note: Looks like Unverferth’s wines also will be poured at the Tuesday wine tasting at Rue Dumaine.)
He has family all over the Miami Valley — Centerville, Miamisburg, Waynesville — and said his only regret about leaving the Dayton area for California is the separation from his family. “But I wasn’t thinking about that when I was 23 and life was going 100 miles per hour,” he said.
Shared vision
Julia Staigers, a 1961 Cedarville High School graduate, and her husband were living and working in Albuquerque when they got the urge to do something different. Staigers’ three daughters had left home, and the couple were looking for a new adventure. They had dreamed of owning their own business that would allow them to pursue shared interests that included wine and cooking.
Why not purchase a vineyard?
Staigers’ husband, Gerard Koschal — the couple met in the mid-1970s when both were students at Wright State — is a geologist by training, so he researched vineyard land in New Mexico, California and the Pacific Northwest before settling on Oregon’s Willamette Valley. They purchased a 10-acre site with a house, shed, fruit trees and more than four acres of miscellaneous grapevines, which came to be known as the Juliard Vineyard, blending the couple’s names.
The couple replanted the vineyard’s white-wine grapes to pinot noir, the red-wine grape Oregon is best known for, and for years sold their vineyard’s grapes to other wineries. In 2007, they again ventured out on their own by forming their own winery, Crumbled Rock, and they now produce more than 800 cases a year — small by Pacific northwest standards, but growing. And their Crumbled Rock Pinot Noir has just been picked up by an Ohio wholesaler for distribution in the Dayton area and elsewhere in Ohio.
The couple live in a rural area that reminds Staigers of Ohio — although the weather is not as extreme, “and I like the food out here a lot better than Ohio.”
She still makes it back here, though, and will return to Dayton in the coming weeks for her mother’s 94th birthday. (Note: in addition,Staigers will be at the Winds Wine Cellar, in Yellow Springs,on Friday, November 12 to taste the Crumbled Rock “Juliard Vineyard” Pinot Noir 2008 from 5-7 pm., and will make an appearance at Dorothy Lane Market Springboro on Saturday, Nov. 13 from 3:30 pm-6 pm.)
Crumbled Rock “Juliard Vineyard” Pinot Noir 2008 will be featured and offered by the glass and by the bottle at the Winds Café starting Tuesday, November 2, 2010 and continuing through the end of the year.
Some of Staigers’ friends do tend to idealize buying a vineyard and operating a winery. “They underestimate the paperwork that’s involved and the business end of things,” Staigers said. “But basically, it’s a pretty comfortable lifestyle.”
More than a business
Don Holbrook, a Butler Twp. native and 1979 graduate of Butler High School in Vandalia, is co-owner of the Red Zeppelin winery in Paso Robles, Calif. His wife Laurie, a Minneapolis native, is more involved in the winery than he is, Holbrook said. “I just like to drink wine,” he said.
A developer, he has plenty of other business interests that form the bulk of his professional career, but the wine industry “just kind of sucked me in,” said Holbrook, whose parents still live in Butler Twp. Holbrook and his wife now live in Las Vegas, but he found an opportunity to invest in Red Zeppelin — which is transitioning to simply the Zeppelin winery — irresistible.
“At first, I looked at this as purely a financial transaction,” Holbrook said. “But it was evolved into much more than that.”
When reached earlier this week, Holbrook and his wife had just arrived in southern Australia, where they toured vineyards and visited wineries in the Barossa Valley wine country.
“I love everything about this industry,” Holbrook said. “And we get invited everywhere.”
(Each photo was contributed by the subjects.)
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