| Columns by The Wine Tutor
(This is the second in a series of occasional articles profiling young Napa Valley natives who have either stayed on a course toward wine or come back from fledgling careers in other fields to work at family wineries. The columns appear in the St. Helena Star, (www.sthelenastar.com).
Family businesses. They can pose opportunities, challenges and can give extraordinary, even non-tangible, yields. Occasionally, just occasionally, family members sour on one another. Ideally, grape growing and winemaking families would work together as naturally as a good vineyard yields barrels of fine maturing wine.
So, it seems, is the case with Saddleback Cellars and Venge Vineyards, the father-son combination of Nils and Kirk Venge. Nils, whose Danish father was a wine and spirits distributor, came from a childhood in San Gabriel Valley. His father, Per, sent Nils to U.C. Davis to prepare him for the wine business. However, Nils found himself studying with and befriending a group of winegrowing neophytes. They were called the “New Breed”, ground breaking in a literal sense. He decided to forego wine distribution in favor of winegrowing. The new breed planted and replanted the vineyards in ways that would start defining the Napa Valley as we know it today.
Nils worked with a series of wineries. At first, in 1970-72 with Charles Krug, he planted vineyards in Los Carneros (a novelty at the time) and he worked with Sterling. Then he planted new vineyards for Villa Mt. Eden. In 1976 he and his father-in-law bought a 17 acre vineyard off Money Road. It would become Saddleback Vineyards. That is the year Kirk Venge was born.
When Nils and Kirk were asked how the business relationship developed between father and son, both were nonplussed, as if other options simply didn’t exist. Given Kirk’s penchant for the vineyard – at age 4, Kirk regularly “hung out” at Saddleback and at  age 10 he was ready to drive the tractor, a red Farmall – only the details of some eventual collaboration had to be worked out.
During high school Kirk worked occasionally at Groth Vineyards where Nils was winemaker (while at Groth Nils garnered the first 100 point score that wine critic Robert Parker gave to a California wine) and later Kirk worked several harvests at Mumm, Napa Valley, first in the summers while he attended U.C. Davis and full time after he graduated. He also logged a harvest in New Zealand.
In 1999 Kirk finally went to work with father Nils, taking on a major league challenge for a 23-year old: developing a second winery, one devoted to the Venge Family Reserve wines. The Venges had purchased a “ghost winery”, the Rossini Ranch on Crystal Springs Road. As is fairly well known locally, getting winery projects fully permitted and in compliance with layers of regulations are never easy. Restoring and preserving a historically significant building takes even more diligence and patience. Kirk did it in two years. Meeting upon hearing, advisors upon consultants, he managed without lawyers and gained a very marketable business skill beyond his knowledge of vineyards and wine.
While the production of the two wineries adds up to only 10,000 cases – Saddleback makes 7,500 and Venge Family only 2,500 – father and son have full palettes. At Venge Family, Kirk makes seven wines; at Saddleback, Nils creates another seven. But each of them busies himself with consulting for other labels – in most years Kirk handles nine outside clients and Nils works with six – and the total production of those wineries far exceed the family case count.
When each is asked to name his most favorite aspect of their complicated lives with vines, wine and people challenges (marketing and promotion keeps them on the road over four months of the year), it’s clear that the fruit does not fall far from the tree. Nils loves tasting and blending, especially of Scout’s Honor, a Venge Vineyards wine named after a favorite family black Laborador. Inescapable office work is the beast that drives Nils nuts.  Kirk similarly dislikes having to be a office boss. It’s frustrating chore. Interestingly, he most enjoys bottling, not in the sense of running the bottling line (which most winemaker dread) but in the sense of tasting a wine and knowing it is “finished wine”, as winemakers say, polished and ready for the bottle. He feels a kind of creative closure. It seems a bit like parenting.
Both wineries are open to the public but by appointment only. Saddleback is a haven of rusticity; Venge Vineyards a tasteful study in preservation. More information can be found on their web sites www.vengevineyards.com and www.saddlebackcellars.com.
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