Bellaire High grad who became California winemaker comes home to Texas.
Bellaire High grad Tom Parmeson sees opportunity to expand more affordably
In his previous existence, Tom Parmeson was a precociously successful but too frequently over-stressed software engineer for Halliburton and a resolute beer drinker. Then his wife, Katie, convinced him that a few days spent decompressing in Napa and Sonoma, Calif., would do them both good. For those of us who love wine and wine culture, things played out in a predictable fashion.
Parmeson didn’t quit his day job straight away, but the die was cast immediately. What began as “an innocent wine trip” in 2005 turned into a career-altering, “complete-180 life-changing” adventure for the Bellaire High School (class of ’89) and Texas A&M University graduate. The harder he worked behind his desk after he and Katie returned to Houston, the more restless he became, and the more his mind would wander back to how much at peace he had felt surrounded by those vineyards.
“What I was doing wasn’t making me very happy,” Parmeson said. “When you’re developing software, nobody’s calling you up and saying, “Hey, great job!’ They’re only calling you up if there’s a problem. My work was (crucial) to these big oil companies and, when something went bad, it was bad. You weren’t usually dealing with customers in their best state.”
Thoughts of what might be possible for him with wine “kept nagging at me,” he said, and they finally made their second trip in 2007. While tasting zinfandel at Acorn Winery in the Russian River Valley, they hit it off with the owners, Bill and Betsy Nauchbaur. He asked the Nauchbaurs if they ever accepted volunteer help.
“‘Free labor? Sure, come on out for the next harvest,’ they told me,” Parmeson said. “So I did. I took a week’s vacation, put on my work boots and just loved it. I was doing everything I could, getting up before the sun came up and going to bed at midnight exhausted. It was great. I didn’t want to leave.”
He worked gratis at Acorn for three autumns and was eventually “spending as much time in California as my wife would tolerate. But she has been my biggest supporter through this whole thing.”
“This whole thing” is now the family business, and the Parmeson wine brand is well regarded — the Chronicle’s tasting panel recently scored Parmeson’s pinot noir ($41.96 at Village Liquor) highly enough for it to be chosen as our Pick of the Week. An impressive effort for someone this new to the business.
Parmeson also makes a zinfandel — with fruit from the same Acorn property where he spent so much time getting dirty back in the day — that received a unanimous thumbs-up from the Chronicle team. A cabernet, a sauvignon blanc, a chardonnay and a rosé, which has evolved into a unique blend of zinfandel, pinot noir and malbec, will be put through their official paces by our panel soon, although I personally tasted each with him last week and found them to be no less compelling wines than the pinot and the zin. All can be purchased through the Houston Wine Merchant.
The grapes are deftly sourced from across Sonoma County. Parmeson makes the wines at Clay Mauritson’s cellars in Dry Creek Valley, calling Mauritson, a sixth-generation grape grower there, “a great mentor and resource.” And Parmeson joined with eight other boutique vintners in a collective public tasting room in Geyserville called Locals. Economies of scale matter when you’re “pretty much a one-man show,” as he describes himself. However, they’ve got three young sons who may join the team one day.
Parmeson “went all in” by making 700 total cases of his first-vintage wines, 2013, and that has now increased to about 1,000. The next phase will be establishing a footprint in Texas. Why? Sonoma housing costs and North Coast grape prices. It’s a rich man’s game in that neighborhood, no two ways about it, so the Parmesons are relocating to Dripping Springs, south of Austin, where they intend to open a tasting room featuring the California portfolio — he insists it will remain the heart and soul of the business — but also, eventually, Texas juice.
Traveling to Northern California even once a month yearround and spending the harvest season on the ground there will still be cheaper than trying to carry a mortgage in the environs of Healdsburg, where they have been renting a home. Katie’s job in software development, fortunately, allows her to work from anywhere she has good internet access.
“I think the opportunity for getting our wines in the Texas market will be amazing,” Parmeson said, adding: “And I’ve always wanted to make a vermentino.”
An astute call, that. The grape thrives in the High Plains, where there’s almost infinite room to expand.
“I’ve met some of the growers going to conferences,” he said. “A couple of them told me they’d pulled out whatever row crop was there and planted 800 acres of grapes. Eight-hundred acres? That’s a lot of grapes.”
Opportunity beckons. And, for him anyway, it’s not in software development. That train has left the station.