It’s hard to pin down what allowed this small-town boy from Gonzales, California to pursue a dream to make wine that would become known across the globe. Maybe it was the early 1900s-era home of his great aunt where he would often play as a child that spurred his idea. He has now lived in that same home for nearly 50 years, with its dirt-floor cellar for storing wine barrels.  Maybe family tradition helped sustain him—he began making wine for friends in the 1970s in an antique tank his grandparents used to craft their own wine for the family during Prohibition. It didn’t hurt that while barely out of his teens, he encountered a sommelier for the first time while in Puerto Rico on a trip to sell onions from his parents’ vegetable farm in the Salinas Valley. Observing the sommelier do his work, Gary thought that with time, effort, and education, he might also learn to swirl, taste, and judge what distinguishes the best bottles from the rest.

Achieving glamorous dreams like Gary’s isn’t solely a matter of good mentorship, though. Working to do something frowned upon—something new—also requires seriousness of purpose and unusual strength of character. And Gary was an iconoclast born rather than made. In college, while most of his San Jose State classmates contented themselves with hauling kegs of beer to parties, Gary signed up for a tasting class on campus so that he could sample wines from regions across the globe. By the early 1980s, he was bringing his dog-eared copy of Michael Broadbent’s famous The Great Vintage Wine Book along when he chose bottles at his favorite wine shops in Monterey and San Francisco. Before he was thirty, he had bought just about every book on wine and read them all.

Tasting the great wines of the world helped to develop Gary’s palate. But there was something besides a wide-ranging perspective that drove him to insist on hand farming methods to achieve the highest quality fruit. It was a commitment and respect to the land and the vines, and a trust that with the right care, they would produce wine on par with those bottles he drank in his old college classroom. More than any other single quality, what strikes people most about Gary is love for life and how much he enjoys sharing a glass of wine with friends and touring guests through the vineyard in his jeep.  It’s this love for his family’s acreage in the Santa Lucia Highlands that helped spur Gary’s innate talents as a winemaker. Child’s play, he thought, in the end, to surmount obstacles when your goal is to make wine that communicates the distinctive character of this land.