Rooted in the land.

At Grapestake Cellars, we bring together a lifetime of viticultural knowledge, a passion for handcrafted wine, and a family winemaking tradition centuries in the making. From our estate vineyard in Paso Robles, I have the pleasure of carrying that heritage forward, one vintage at a time.

The Barbera and Zinfandel vines from my grandfather's winery in Morgan Hill, California, are still producing grapes more than a century after they were first planted. The original winery itself is long gone, but those old vines remain a living testament to our family's winemaking heritage, a tradition that began long before my grandparents ever set foot in California.

Our story begins in Giaglione, a small Alpine village nestled in the Val di Susa along the northern Italian-French border. Here, in the foothills of the Alps, grapes have been cultivated since antiquity, with vineyards terraced high into the steep mountainsides despite the challenging terrain. Our own family's roots in Giaglione reach back centuries, across generations of winemakers. For my family, winemaking is a tradition that has endured through centuries of change, carried forward by each generation in its own way.

In 1901, my grandparents left Giaglione for California, bringing with them the knowledge and traditions of their Alpine homeland. They settled in the Santa Clara Valley, where my grandfather established a small winery in Morgan Hill with my father and uncles. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of spending time around that winery, helping in the vineyard and getting to smell and taste the wines they made. The sights and smells of the winery, the feel of the soil, and those early experiences of winemaking never left me, although I couldn't have known at the time how much they would come to shape my own life.

My father continued the tradition, making a couple of barrels of wine every year in his tractor barn. Wine was never something reserved for special occasions in our family. It was something we made, enjoyed, and shared. Looking back, I realize how fortunate I was to grow up with that connection, learning an appreciation for wine not from a bottle on a store shelf, but from the people who grew the grapes and made it themselves.

Little wonder, then, that my years at UC Davis found me studying viticulture, enology, and fermentation science as part of my undergraduate and graduate training. My education gave me a scientific understanding of the craft I had experienced growing up, from the complexities of crop cultivation to the transformations that take place during fermentation. While the thought of owning a vineyard had always been in the back of my mind, I had little idea that I would someday put that knowledge into practice.

When I finally retired, that longstanding ambition had an opportunity to become something more. We were fortunate to find a beautiful vineyard on the west side of Paso Robles, within the renowned Templeton Gap District, where cooling coastal breezes and calcareous soils provide exceptional growing conditions for our grapes. It was the ideal setting to begin a new chapter.

I will admit that I had a few sleepless nights during my first growing season. Despite a lifetime spent in the agricultural industry, tending my own vineyard brought an entirely different sense of responsibility and satisfaction. But the leap to growing grapes proved less daunting than I had imagined. Before long, I was recognized with the honor of Grower of the Year (2016) by Justin Vineyards & Winery.

Although my initial goal was to farm grapes, I found myself increasingly drawn to making wine from the grapes I was growing, and Grapestake Cellars was born.

Today, I personally craft a limited production of wines from our small, award-winning estate vineyard. Working on this scale allows me to remain closely involved in the process, from the vineyard through the cellar, with the attention and care that I believe good wine deserves. My goal has always been straightforward — to grow exceptional grapes and make wines that express their quality, character, and the care that went into producing them.

The name Grapestake itself is a nod to the simple wooden stakes that have supported grapevines for centuries. To me, they represent something essential about winemaking — that the finest wines begin in the vineyard, and our responsibility is to nurture the fruit and allow its character to shine through.

I often think about the generations of our family who made wine in Giaglione, my grandfather's winery in Morgan Hill, and the barrels my father made in his barn. The setting has changed, and so have the methods and opportunities, but the passion for making and sharing good wine has remained remarkably constant.

For me, Grapestake Cellars represents both a personal achievement and the continuation of something much older. It brings together centuries of European family heritage, generations of California winemaking, and a lifetime of knowledge and experience in agriculture and food science. I take great pleasure in knowing that the tradition I grew up with is still very much alive, and that I now have the opportunity to give it my own expression.

Uncork a bottle and share my passion.

Owen
Winemaker