LEHRER FAMILY VINEYARD East County Wine Revolution
	NOVEMBER 2004

by Ron Lehrer
Photos by Russell Byrne

For two decades I’ve been the owner of a Contra Costa County construction company with a well-earned reputation for quality, which has landed me such honors as a guest spot on a radio talk show and my business being featured in West County’s Diablo Magazine, articles in Contra Costa Times, etc.

I have a passion for doing things right and have always avoided shortcuts and halfway measures that would diminish the quality of whatever I do. I carry my love for excellence over to my wine interests. I’ve been a wine-collector and connoisseur for many years and have a cellar full of the stuff — some of it representing very excellent product indeed.

In particular, I’m instilling high standards in our newest project, Lehrer Family Vineyards.

Planning for Success
I know some of the Napa Valley wine-makers personally, since my company has carried out a number of construction projects for several of them. When I began planning my own vineyards I was able to leverage my relationships with these insiders in learning some of the requirements for creating a quality vintage.

I invested the time and expense required to grow excellent grapes. I learned that good wines begin with superior vines. More fundamental than that is the requirement for the vines to be planted in soil that contains sufficient quantities of nutrients to yield a superior harvest. The most basic set of requirements of all is that the vineyard be situated in a climate having the proper seasonal mixtures of sun, rain, and temperatures.

Lehrer Family Vineyards is located in an ideal place to fulfill all those requirements. For one thing, the microclimate prevalent in our East Brentwood property is wonderfully suited to growing good grapes. In addition, the topsoil is composed of up to seven feet of rich sediment deposited from the ancient floods that regularly covered our land leaving behind sufficient nutrients to grow any crop we might ever plant.

We fulfilled the only remaining requirement for a wonderful wine harvest by purchasing high-quality plants that could take advantage of our nearly perfect East County environment. We selected a truly superior strand of Sarah vines by combining the results of our research with sufficient financial resources permitting us to secure the best available vines that would take advantage of our superior East County soil and climate.

The harvest is the central occasion in the vineyard year — and the most fleeting, it seems. An entire year’s effort is crowned by this brief event. We get out in the fields before sunrise, work a couple hours, and the harvest is on its way to crush before noon.

Of course, producing a harvest of superior grapes represents only the preliminary steps in creating a great bottle of wine. The rest of the process belongs in the hands of the vintner. Lehrer Family Farms was fortunate in being able to secure the services of Dennis Johns, one of the top five wine-makers in the Valley and the owner of White Cottage Ranch Winery.

Everyone in the industry knows of Dennis Johns and the reputation he has earned in producing exceptional vintages in rather small quantities.

A good winemaker is a skilled chemist who is called upon to make such decisions as the quality of the oak barrels and the length of time the wine will remain in them before bottling. Dennis uses his skill in monitoring the stability of the wine while it’s in the barrels, selects procedures to be performed on the barreled wine, and even makes decisions about the bottling process.

Preparing for the Growth of a Wine Industry
It appears to us that people in the East County are warming up to the idea of having wine made in our own region. The area vineyards and the Brentwood Wine Store, for example, are influencing local consumers and educating the East County palate for fine wines.

Raising the area standard for wine is good strategy from our point of view because a number of us are planning to go beyond developing wine of marketable quality — we want to create a good bottle of wine! A great bottle, even!

Continuing to lift the level of East County wine connoisseurship will have the affect of creating a better local market for our improved local wine products.

Some of us share a rich vision of Brentwood one day becoming a little Napa Valley East where both residents and tourists can enjoy boutique wineries and take tours of a number of local winemaking facilities.

Now we are enthusiastically sharing this bright dream with other people in the community. We fully expect that our vision will become reality sooner rather than later.

A number of pioneering people are joining together with us in bringing the dream to reality, including local government officials who are doing their part to allow the dream to take place. The County is becoming a positive influence in aiding our efforts. Local politicians know, as all of us do, that what we are proposing will be a wonderful thing for our community. It will benefit us all.

The vision goes beyond commercial justification, because we are driven by our passion for wine. There will be advantages for everyone in a truly win-win situation. Rosenblum Cellars and Ca’na Vineyards are planning to build wineries. They will be the first wineries to be located in our East County, but they surely won’t be the last!

The current upsurge of interest in wine products is itself a harvest grown from seeds that were planted by local wine pioneers Jeff Tamayo, Neil Cohen, Ron Enos, and others. Through our own label, Lehrer Family Vineyards, we have also played a part in laying the groundwork for the current surge of interest.

We’re on the threshold of achieving real status and significance in the industry. Nearly forty of us local growers and other stakeholders have banded together to form an association for the purpose of nurturing the East County wine industry. We’re starting to reap the benefits as East County labels are beginning to get noted in wine-related media around the country.

We are planning for Lehrer Family Farms to play a leading role in bringing about the revolution we envision. One day soon, for example we plan to have our own tasting room.

Doing Wine Right as a Family Affair
At Lehrer Family Vineyards, in particular, we are working diligently to ensure that we sell a quality wine. I enforce high standards about this, and will never create a bottle of wine that I wouldn’t drink myself. My short-term goal is to create a great Sarah. Not simply something that will sell, but a bottle embodying excellence.

The three passions in my life include construction, wine, and family — in reverse order of importance. Our whole family lives here in East County. The newest family members include our grandchildren, Jordan, 18 months old, and Blake, seven months. They participated in their first harvest this fall.

The grandkids are taking to life among the grapevines with great enthusiasm. When baby Jordan is grumpy, we stick him on our little tractor, called “The Gator,” and he quiets right down. He likes to toddle into the vineyard, pick a grape, and enthusiastically stick it into his mouth.

We’re an extremely close-knit family and all of us are involved in both our construction and our vineyard businesses. For example, my son, Jason, and my son-in-law and daughter, Corey and Desiree Funkner, all work with wine sales. My mom and dad work with Northern California wine sales. Jason’s wife, Jennifer, manages the office and is the person without whom nothing would ever get done.

Even the grandchildren get involved when the harvest time comes around. My son, son-in-law, and I, in particular, go to the crush and carefully supervise the process.

My youngest daughter, Megan, is 13 years old and works in the vineyard with us after school. My granddaughter, Coreyna Funkner is also 13. The two of them are eighth graders in the Excelsior School in Byron. They skipped school for a couple hours in the morning in order to work in the harvest with us.

Even at their young age the two girls are already are getting a sense of good wines. They know how to say, “Grandpa would not accept anything less than a good bottle of wine.” And they know what that means; they are catching the vision, as well.

The members of the Lehrer family are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in facing up to the challenges, demands, and pitfalls of our vineyard business. We are all learning and growing through these activities. The project is not about making easy money — far from it, since we’re still investing money — but it is all about catching a vision of something wonderful and then working to make the vision come true.

So we’re in this thing for what we believe to be the right reasons — our passion for the whole wine experience together with the family values and attributes that hold us together.

Each cork on every bottle from our vineyards bears the words, “Enjoy From Our Family to Yours.” That slogan really does describe our goal as our family vineyard provides a quality wine that family and friends can share together with a meal.

All of us are glad to make the required investment of time and money because we all share the conviction that what is good for the Lehrer Family Vineyard is good for The Lehrer family itself.

East County Pioneers
We moved to Discovery Bay from Walnut Creek in 1979 because we wanted our kids to go to a country school. Back in those days you could hardly give lots away in Discovery Bay. We had some culture shock when we moved in. We had to go to Brentwood to find a grocery store or gas station, but Brentwood itself was just a farm community with a hand-full of businesses and not a single streetlight. We had to go to Concord for a meal.

For many years we wondered whether we made the right move. We watched people move into the community only to turn around and move back out a few years later. “This is too rural,” they said. “It is too far to go for groceries. No good restaurants.” They were out of here.

Now we feel that we have been privileged to watch this area develop into a thriving, booming economy — with great cultural and economic advancements beginning to come up over the horizon.

Hanging in there and playing our part in the evolution of the community has fueled our passion to really put our East County community on the map.

I’m amazed at the changes I’ve seen in the 26 years that we’ve lived in this community. I’m proud to be part of the area, glad to develop our wine out here. We’re never going to pull back or to do less than accept the best results from our winemaking dream.

Before long people will be traveling here from all over the Western United States to participate in the agrarian revolution that will be going on in our area. Wineries, vineyard tours, farm tours, and shopping excursions will be luring people to come play and shop in our sunny, friendly East County.

East County is becoming a wonderful place to live and work these days.

And we’re just getting started!