The amazing story of the Sonoma farmer who is growing the state’s best grapes.
The amazing story of Chuy Ordaz, the farmer who grows California’s best grapes.
When successful business owners talk about what they did before entering the wine industry, a few origin stories start to sound familiar. Real estate development. Private equity. Even, increasingly, professional sports (see: Yao Ming, Tom Seaver, Arnold Palmer).
What you don’t often hear is this: “Border control caught me 33 times before I made it into the U.S.”
That’s the story of Jesus Ordaz. Better known as Chuy (CHEW-ey), he is one of California wine’s most unlikely success stories.
His Palo Alto Vineyard Management company, named for his hometown in Michoacán, farms 500 acres of wine grapes across Sonoma County. In the 1970s, he planted several of Sonoma Valley’s benchmark vineyards, such as Montecillo and Vendimia. He was a pioneer here in organic farming, compelled by a concern to protect farm workers from unsafe chemicals. His formidable client list includes DuMol, Failla, Neyers, Turley, Arnot-Roberts, Bedrock and Scholium Project.
So inextricable is Ordaz from his farming sites that many wine producers have taken to naming their wines after him — an unprecedented nod to a vineyard manager.
“Around here, Chuy is known as a genius,” says Kaarin Lee, who owns the Montecillo Vineyard. “There’s no one in our area who commands more respect.”
But while Ordaz controls some of Sonoma’s most valuable commodities, the grapes are not his own: All of the vineyards are either leased or contract-farmed. Now 63, he is working with his sons Chuy Jr. and Epifanio (“Eppie”) to establish a winery of their own, Ordaz Family Wines. The final frontier, he hopes, will be land ownership.
But the road has been long — and it began with running across a bridge in Tijuana.
Ordaz is a grape grower — a farmer. A compact, sturdy man, he seems to swim in his own clothing, with a baseball cap that obscures his eyes and pants hanging so low they look like they might slip. The first thing you notice upon meeting him is his smile, so relentless as to border on mischievous, and yet he’s reserved, quick to answer questions but content to be quiet otherwise. “I’ve never known a man so comfortable in his own skin,” says Tadeo Borchardt, winemaker at Neyers Vineyards, which buys fruit from Ordaz.
Farming is the foundation of wine production, but the grinding work is worlds away from the plush settings of wine sale and consumption. An essential component of many vineyards is undocumented immigrant labor, the often invisible underpinning of the industry. Ordaz was once one of them. He grew up with 10 siblings on a farm in Palo Alto, a town in southwestern Mexico. As a teenager he worked at his family’s fruit stand. When he was 20, he got word from an older brother, who had emigrated to the U.S., that there was work to be found pruning in California.
“Immigration was pretty hot that year I come to the United States,” says Ordaz. He and his 13-year-old brother José traveled to Tijuana, where they hoped to gain entry to California by running across a bridge. Every day, they’d try running across once or twice, day and night. Border Patrol would catch them and send them back across the Mexican border. Smaller and presumably swifter, José made it across without being caught weeks before his older brother.
“The guy that used to do my paperwork, that was a nice guy,” Ordaz recalls, grinning. “He’d send me back to Mexico and say, ‘Oh, one day you’ll make it.’
“I say, ‘Yes, I will.’ ”
The 33rd time was the charm — and once Ordaz had made it into the U.S., a coyote brought him somewhere secluded enough that immigration was unlikely to catch him: Korbel Cellars, in the Sonoma County backwoods. (Total coyote bill in 1972: $300.) At Korbel, a highvolume producer of inexpensive brandy and sparkling wine, he got a gig chopping wood for $150 a day.
Six months in, Ordaz noticed a sign outside Kenwood Winery advertising for grape pickers. He answered it, and John Sheela — who had just opened Kenwood two years earlier with his brothers-in-law Mike and Marty Lee — hired him on the spot.
Ordaz immediately stood out. “I could tell pretty early on that Chuy had the trust of the other pickers,” Sheela says. “He was smart, and they listened to him.” Most of the crew spoke no English; Ordaz spoke a little bit, so he became the spokesperson.
But it wasn’t until the next year’s harvest that Sheela realized Ordaz had an uncommon knack for leadership.
“We were making $18 a ton (of grapes picked), and the guys wanted $20,” Ordaz says. “So I said, OK, we’ll go on strike.”
It was peak harvest season — with a big storm in the forecast — and the crew sat idly in the vineyard. Sheela rushed over.
“They were all just sitting around, and I asked what was going on,” Sheela says. “Everyone pointed at Chuy.” Worried about the consequences of letting the grapes hang in the upcoming storm, Sheela relented to the pay increase immediately. “That’s when I understood that Chuy was the leader: Once he said vámonos, away they went.” The same day, Sheela made Ordaz foreman.
Over the next three decades, Sheela, Ordaz and the Lees built Kenwood Winery from an unknown entity in a fledgling regional industry into one of Sonoma wine’s great power players. Ordaz oversaw all of the vineyards that Kenwood owned or purchased fruit from. He farmed for the equivalent of 100,000 cases of wine, taking special care with planting the high-elevation vineyards off Sonoma Valley’s Nelligan Road (now the Moon Mountain AVA) that went into Kenwood’s iconic Artist Series Cabernet.
These new vines in the ’70s were dry-farmed from their first plantings — a daunting task even by today’s sustainability standards. (Dry farming eschews irrigation, leaving the plant to make do with residual moisture from the soil.) Ordaz farmed 700 acres of vines organically, achieving organic certification for 215 acres in the early 1980s. “It seemed wacky and wild,” recalls Jeff McBride, then a winemaker at Kenwood (and Eppie Ordaz’s godfather). “But Chuy convinced John that since we had the labor, we didn’t need pesticides to do the work. It was his culture.” Ordaz insists he simply didn’t want to expose himself or his crew to unsafe chemicals.
Ordaz met and married Beverly Young, an American, soon after arriving in Sonoma, thereby attaining legal status. (Beverly now does the bookkeeping for Palo Alto; the couple have six children.) But many of the workers he supervised at Kenwood were not so lucky. Immigration authorities would periodically conduct raids on vineyards. “I had fun with Immigration,” Ordaz remembers, with his characteristic grin. He would run away to distract the agents while his undocumented counterparts could flee unseen. Sometimes he would spend all day outrunning the agents; other times, they’d arrest him and bring him to jail, only to discover, to their chagrin, his green card.
Under his sponsorship, all but two of Ordaz’s siblings eventually came to the United States to work. His younger brother José — whom he accompanied here all those years ago — is still his foreman.
In the late ’90s, Sheela and the Lees sold Kenwood to Gary Heck, the owner of Korbel. Ordaz didn’t flinch. With no desire to chop wood again, he got his farm labor contractor license and set out to create his own vineyard-management company. Instantly, he got 400 acres worth of business: All of the independent vineyard owners who had sold fruit to Kenwood wanted him to continue farming their land.
“All the vineyards that I farmed with Kenwood, we still farm,” Ordaz says. Though he’s never owned any of them, he planted many of them, and knows the sites with the intimacy of a parent.
Among these is the Montecillo Vineyard, which Kenwood founder Mike Lee and his wife, Kaarin, purchased after the sale to Korbel. Montecillo’s crown jewel is a 12-acre block of dry-farmed Cabernet, on its own roots, planted in 1969. A few years ago, the winery client that was buying the Cabernet asked for it to be replanted, because it yielded so little.
“I told them I’m not going to pull those vines; I’m going to fix them,” says Ordaz. He released that winery from its purchasing agreement and immediately found other clients who wanted the old-vine fruit — and were willing to pay more for it.
So closely has Ordaz become associated with these Nelligan vineyards — Montecillo, Vendimia, Fredericks — that winemakers have taken to labeling their single-vineyard bottlings “Chuy,” instead of with the vineyard names. He is likely the first vineyard manager to receive this honor.
Still, Ordaz assumes the posture of his most junior employee. “Most company owners never picked a day in their life,” he admits. He prunes, thins and plants alongside his crew. Vine cultivation is the language he speaks most fluently. “I’ll drive past and see Chuy’s truck parked outside the vineyard,” describes Borchardt. “And he’s out there alone, tucking leaf shoots.”
Palo Alto Vineyard Management keeps a year-round crew of about 40 workers, some of whom have been with Ordaz since the 1970s — including one 72-year-old employee, who now “gets the easy jobs,” like tying vines, Ordaz says. The competition to keep competent grape workers is tough, notes Chuy Jr.: “Before, a lot of illegals would hide in a vineyard, but now they can work in restaurants, hotels. So we increase our pay.” Their base pay rate now is $13 an hour.
In some ways, Ordaz never really left Michoacán. He does business exclusively by handshake. “It’s gotten me in trouble,” he laughs. Borchardt, the Neyers winemaker, has never exchanged papers with Ordaz for his fruit purchases: “It’s all a verbal agreement. Chuy just works with people he trusts.”
Recently, Ordaz came close to purchasing his first vineyard, in the Kenwood area. But at the last minute, the owners reneged. It was going to be the foundation for Ordaz Family Wines, now Eppie’s project. Ordaz is still looking for some land of his own.
But if anyone can bounce back from disappointment, it’s Chuy Ordaz. In his accounts of his own life, all of it — the prejudices and successes, the lucky breaks and harrowing setbacks — are delivered through his infectious grin. To know him is to know this smile.
“We keep telling him it’s time for him to step back,” says Eppie. “But I don’t think he knows how.”
“Around here, Chuy is known as a genius. There’s no one in our area who commands more respect.” Kaarin Lee, owner of Montecillo Vineyard