AUTUMN 2006 SPEAKERS

On November 2, 2006, Greg La Follette from (Tandem Winery), and a consultant for 16 winery world wide was our first speaker.
Greg was born in Europe, growing up with an old-world view that wine is raised rather than "made”. After
studying ancient Burgundian techniques at UC Davis, he continued on-the-job studies at Beaulieu Vineyard as
research viticulturist/enologist with wine master, André Tchelistcheff.
From BV, Greg went to work at Kendall-Jackson where he was responsible for gathering and disseminating the
best and latest thoughts on vine/wine quality as in-house troubleshooter/consultant.
La Follette then turned his talents to Flowers Vineyard & Winery where he was the winemaker and general manager, launching one of the most successful small Pinot labels to date. The winery he built at Flowers is still considered one of the very best gravity-flow, gas-assist green wineries in the world.


On November 9th Courtney Kingston from Kingston Vineyards, Chile came to speak to our students. Courtney manages the importing, sales, and marketing for her small wine business. In 1994, Courtney and her brother Tim came up with the far-fetched idea to plant a vineyard on the family's farm in Casablanca, Chile.
Courtney graduated from Princeton University and wrote the business plan for the Kingston vineyard while at
Stanford Business School. Courtney lives in Northern California with her husband Andy Pflaum and daughter
Annie.



On November 16 Dylan Sheldon from Sheldon Winery Sebastopol (http://www.sheldonwines.com/about.html) was our thrid visiting speaker. He told us that he and his wife each worked two full time jobs, auctioning off the wine cellar, selling their cars, and pretty much anything that "wasn't nailed down" to fund the first vintage, which produced 420 cases from 2003. In 2004 they "ramped up" production to just over 700 cases, and for 2005 they hope to break into the 1,000 case mark. They want to stay a small two-person operation, to be able to know what's going on in every row of every vineyard they use, to sort each cluster by hand, to focus on the subtle nuance of every individual barrel. For them, winemaking is not about aggressive manipulation or beverage manufacturing. Winemaking at Sheldon wines is about
building the aromas and flavors in the vineyards, then ushering them from grape to glass.

Our last speaker visited us on November 30. David Bruce from David Bruce Winery Santa Cruz Mountain.
The winery was founded in the remote Santa Cruz Mountains in the early 1960s and was one of the first of a new generation of wineries that would lead a modern resurgence of premium winemaking in the region. Founding the winery was a young dermatologist named David Bruce. Although raised in a teetotaler family, David discovered wine while a medical student at Stanford University through his interest in food and cooking. After completing his medical residency, he purchased 40 acres of land above the fog line in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He cleared the land himself and
planted the vineyard by hand. At the time there were only one or two other working wineries in the region.
During the first 25 years of the winery, David divided his time, maintaining a fulltime dermatology practice in Los Gatos and running the winery, until his retirement from his medical practice in 1985.