There is no other product that contributes so fundamentally to potential happiness with as deep a connection to esthetics, history, culture, religion, science, art, hospitality, agriculture, and food as wine.

I have had the great fortune to be born into a family of winemakers. The Mirassou family is the oldest winemaking family in the United States, having made wine in California six years before Abraham Lincoln was President. I grew up in the family winery, wanted to pursue the written word and teaching in college and graduate school, then found myself back in the bosom of the family enterprise ten years later.

I am the sixth-generation winemaker of the family (my son, Aidan, is the 7th), and there is no greater working reward than to be amongst and inspired by, the vines and the barrels of a family enterprise.

I spend a great deal of time making things…20 or so wines a year, tens of thousands of words strung together into hopefully coherent observations, and the thing that gets me off the most is the challenge, through both wine and word, of giving Beauty her due. Wine is a product to be sure; there are tens of thousands of perfectly fine wines to be drunk and forgot. The real esthetic goal though is to make one or two wines that can never be forgotten, wines that illuminate those special days on individual timelines, wines that change the drinker’s perspective on a grape or a region, wines that help to create new relationships while cementing the old ones, wines that ravish with their organoleptic perfection, wines that lift the cares of the day; wines that save lives.