All it took was a one kiss and Tobe and Dylan Sheldon, owners of Sheldon Wines, were off on a wild wine adventure.
“It was a whirlwind romance for sure,” says Tobe, 40, about the couple’s marriage in wine nearly a decade ago.
The couple met at Posh, a wine bar in Carmel, Calf., at the time, Dylan, 37, who designed and opened the bar for its owner, had just returned from working at an Australian winery when Tobe, and a friend, sat down across the bar from him. Tobe, a wine bar veteran herself with 18 years working behind the bar, was plotting a solo winery globetrot and they struck up a conversation.
Dylan poured her glasses of Champagne and wine as they talked throughout the night. Before the night was over he kissed her. Five weeks later they were engaged and packed up for a yearlong adventure working at wineries around the world.
The couple married nine months later in a Malbec vineyard at a New Zealand winery. They continued their working wine tour through Australia, Thialand, Bali, Singapore, Greece, Italy, and France. It wasn’t all work and no play, the couple wrapped up their journey visiting friends in Belgium and Germany.
One of the lessons the couple learned during their wine globetrotting adventure was the diverse approaches to making wine.
“As many different wines that are out there, there are [different] ways to make it. You have to choose what feels right for you,” says Tobe, who doesn’t have a favorite wine. “There are so many great wines that are out there, as long as they have character and balance then they are going to be enjoyed”
Wine calls to Tobe, she has many favorite wines depending on the time, day, and event.
“My favorite wine changes daily. If you compared it to clothes, my little black dress wine is a good Champaign. My favorite blue jean wine is a nice Grenache. My favorite sweater is Petite Shiraz,” says Tobe.
Let’s make wine!
The couple returned to the states with $60 in their pockets and $10,000 in debt, “basically, what was in our backpacks.” No car, home, or job, the couple decided to open their own winery.
Dylan and Tobe received support from their family and a little assistance from a small inheritance from Tobe’s grandmother. Tobe took a day job at a wine and cheese shop and Dylan found work too.
Soon after, the couple had a little luck. They snapped up a winery on the selling block. The first year they camped out at the winery, borrowed equipment, bought fruit, worked night and day, and custom foot stomped 1,500 cases of wine, 420 of which was their first vintage, in 2003. The rest was purchased by another label.
Last fall Sheldon Wines moved into Santa Rosa’s Urban Wine Village, where it produced an estimated 500 cases of its 2010 vintage.
“This whole venture of having a winery was my idea. I never stopped to think that it was impossible to do. I just figured I wanted to do it and I was going to do it. That’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life,” says Tobe the resident wino and fearless leader of the family-owned winery, about the venture.
Hippy wine
“Our family motto is, ‘Alive, awake, free … most likely delusional!’ We just like doing these insane projects”, she says laughing and joking that her husband and her were both raised by a “wild pack of hippies.”
The wild hippies haven’t left the camp. Tobe’s mother designed the label for the winery’s Weatherly Cuvee label, which depicts a naked woman dancing around a campfire. The label is a joke and a way to honor Tobe’s parents based on their own mythology of how they met.
My dad is a “storyteller he likes to tell people that when he met my mother she was dancing naked around the campfire,” in reality it was a high school art class. Ironically, their first project together was designing a wine label. Neither one of her parent’s recall what the label actually was though, Tobe says.
The couple’s unconventional upbringing has allowed them to take risks in life and with their wines. They are guided by the philosophy, “unfiltered and unrefined, because those [other] wines have no soul,” she says talking about wines that undergo complex processes.
“If you do the right thing in the vineyards then you are going to have great fruit and it [will] make it much easier to make wine simply and have it be delicious. You don’t have to manipulate it starting from square one,” says Tobe, who creates the wines by hand alongside Dylan.
Tobe’s biggest challenge with running the family’s winery is the paperwork, but the challenge and fun of learning stomps away the drudgery.
“There are challenging parts to it, but the fun really outweighs any negative parts,” says Tobe.
At the end of the day, wine is about relationships and people.
“It is a beverage to enjoy as a community. It brings people together and creates stories and memories. It’s really sort of a staple for our life, especially since it is how we met [and] how we live. Everything we do revolves around wine,” says Tobe, who counts the couples’ friends as their “biggest success” in life.
“It’s all about the people that we’ve met along the way that have become intricate parts of our lives,” she says. “We’ve created a spot where we get to meet all of these fabulous people and make lasting friendships as well.”
Swing by Sheldon Wines’ tasting room Urban Wine Village or visit: www.sheldonwines.com.
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