Through the course of drinking that bottle of champagne on top of the vineyard’s highest hill, Ken started to feel a little more philosophical and daring. He still had no intention of buying a vineyard. Ken decided to drink a bottle of champagne in the vineyard to celebrate the fact that he had found the place he thought would grow great Pinot Noir. It had continuously produced grapes since 1863, had just been planted out as Pinot Noir - and was for sale. The site was on Jarvis Road in the Vine Hill district of Santa Cruz County. On one of these trips to the Santa Cruz Mountains, he finally found a site that met all of his criteria. He felt these would be the best places to grow Pinot Noir in California. Very quickly, his main areas of focus became the Russian River Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains. During these trips to Northern California, he started looking at properties that might meet those criteria. He had developed a list of about 13 criteria that he felt were necessary for a given vineyard site to produce top-quality Pinot Noir. The way he puts it, he never had any conscious intention of starting a winery. Purely as an excuse to travel to beautiful locations in northern California, his hobby became exploring different areas that he thought would be excellent for growing great quality Pinot Noir. He owned an industrial contracting firm and ran a restaurant called The Hobbit, which he founded. Ken lived in Orange County, southern California. He started to look at regions in California that might be better suited to good quality Pinot Noir.
Through his research, Ken came to the conclusion that the reason most California Pinot Noir was so bad was that it was grown on the floor of Napa Valley, which was the wrong climate to grow Pinot Noir. A great majority of the wine produced in California came out of Napa Valley, including most California Pinot Noir.
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