Vintage Values

A scene from the good life: Garen and Shari Staglin go out for an evening at Charlie Trotter's five-star restaurant in Chicago. Getting a table at the always-booked eatery is itself a treat. But the Staglins are given a special menu, complete with meticulously chosen wine pairings, and don't receive a bill. Then the good life gets better: Charlie Trotter spends an evening at the Staglins' home, an 11,000-square-foot Italian-style villa set on a 62-acre ranch in Napa Valley. The couple's annual music festival for mental health, which raised $2.1 million last year alone, finds celebrity chefs in the kitchen, art by contemporary masters like Chuck Close on the walls, and the likes of Boston Philharmonic maestro Ben Zander directing musicians from the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra near the vineyard.

It's a popular dream, almost a cliché: Hard-charging businesspeople buy a Napa Valley vineyard and live a life of grape expectations. But for Garen and Shari Staglin, proprietors of the Staglin Family Vineyard, it is neither a dream nor a cliché -- and it's as demanding as it is glamorous. The Staglins are a two-CEO family. Shari left her job as an executive recruiter to run their wine business -- which means waking up at 3 AM during harvest season and traversing the country on marketing missions. Garen runs eONE Global, an electronic-payments company with 1,100 employees. Its corporate headquarters is in Napa, which allows Garen, a seasoned venture capitalist and the former CEO of Safelite Glass Corp., to stay close to the grapes, even as he masters Internet competition. "Being a global company makes it easier to be in a location like Napa," he says. "We've got business in Stuttgart, Germany; Singapore; Cincinnati; and Denver. So why not run the show from here?"

The Staglins' kids are in the game too. Daughter Shannon, 23, is training to take over the business from her mother one day, going on sales calls, hosting dinners, even cleaning out the tanks after fermenting. Son Brandon, 30, a Web designer, created and maintains the winery's Internet site. The family factor is a big part of the Staglin formula. "As a family," says Shari, "we can do things with the best quality, because there's nobody telling us to do things in a different way."

THE ROOTS OF SUCCESS
Garen and Shari Staglin bought their vineyard in 1985, but the roots of their fascination with wine reach much farther back. They met as UCLA undergraduates. Garen, who grew up in a family where wine was on the table every night, got Shari enthused about his passion for grapes. When he enrolled at Stanford Business School, he took her on visits to Napa. The two agreed on a dream: Retire from the technology business at 40, and start a new life squeezing grapes instead of squeezing profits out of companies.

When 40 came around, the Staglins had the money to buy a vineyard and leave the high-tech rat race behind. But Garen wasn't ready to give up on Silicon Valley. Nor were he and Shari prepared to defer their dreams of Napa. The solution? Do both. "We were seduced by a new idea," says Shari. "Why should we have to retire to live in this wonderful place?"

Their friends thought they were crazy to buy 62 acres of land when land went for $20,000 an acre, especially when they had no experience in the wine-making business. As it turned out, the Staglins bought into Napa just as the Valley was poised for takeoff. There were fewer than 50 wineries in Napa in 1985. Today, there are more than 300, and land goes for as much as $250,000 an acre. Francis Ford Coppola's Niebaum-Coppola vineyard is just up the road from the Staglins', while Robert Mondavi's Opus One is across the street.

And the neophytes truly have become the toast of wine-making circles. Early on, Shari went back to school to study viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. During their first harvest, the Staglins, along with friends, picked and stomped the grapes themselves, producing only 75 cases of wine. Today, the Staglin vineyard is one of the few entirely family-owned wineries of its size in Napa, with 50 acres of vines that produce 7,000 cases a year of ultrapremium cabernets and chardonnays.

At last year's Napa Valley wine auction, a barrel of their 1998 Cabernet Sauvignon went for $102,000, making it the top bid in the barrel auction. The 1999 Cabernet Sauvignon sells for $85 a bottle. It's a remarkable track record about which Shari is remarkably modest. "The grapes are so good, they're hard to ruin," she says. "It's really hard to make bad wine with good grapes."

LABOR OF LOVE
For the Staglins, wine making is a labor of love -- with "labor" deserving equal billing. "Vineyard" is really a fancy word for grape farm, as Shari learns every year during the September harvest. She gets up at 3 AM to make coffee for the workers in the field, who start picking at 4 AM. Meanwhile, daughter Shannon has been known to work 14-hour days as a "cellar rat," doing all of the scut work that wine maker Andy Erickson can hand out, including hosing down the floors to wash away stray seeds and stems.