Dan Lynch

"NAPA DAN": In His Element

Dan Lynch can often be found walking his vineyards in dusty loafers, with a pair of clippers in his back pocket and a refractometer close at hand. Dan's a plant guy ("They stay where you put them and generally respond to love," he quips) and has been ever since growing up east of Los Angeles and accumulating one of the largest cactus collections in North America. The plants took up his family's whole back yard and earned Dan a back-hall pass at the famous botanical gardens at the Huntington Library near Pasadena.

As committed as he was to the collection, he displayed characteristic decisiveness in letting it go. "When your mind's made up, do it, darn it," he says articulating a cornerstone of his life philosophy, and when he left home to attend Loyola University in Los Angeles, he donated his collection to Claremont College and never looked back. "I just couldn't get it into my head to start again," he says. "But who knows, maybe when I'm old I'll become a crazy cactophile again."

He intended to study botanical pathology at university and become a plant doctor, but that major didn't exist, so he decided to sign up for pre-med and take the hard sciences he'd need. Impulsively, to avoid a long line to register for pre-med, he moved to the nearly empty line for mathematics and majored in that instead. After graduating, he "fell into computer programming and ended up working with the people who would create the Internet."

Like so many in the wine industry, Dan's moment of viniferal truth came with his first taste of fine Bordeaux. He had invited his neighbor, a restaurant maître d', over for a glass of wine. When Dan pulled out a bottle of Lancers, the neighbor balked and told him to wait while he fetched something better. He came back with a bottle of Lafite-Rothschild. "It was a full-blown mouth explosion," Dan recalls. "It was the best thing I had ever tasted."

While working at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s, Dan fell in with some fellow scientists who had a "hobby" vineyard named Ridge. Though tightly allocated at the time, Dan recalls, "Ridge Geyserville Zin and Montebello Cab were our "house' wines."Ridge founder Charlie Rosen provided them at a discount and encouraged Dan to branch out and try other good wines.

After finding success in the 1980s with a tradeshow he created to teach major corporations to use the emerging Internet technology, Dan's wine frontiers expanded. He started taking annual trips to Napa, and in 1991 he attended his first Napa Valley Wine Auction. Soon he was thinking about owning a winery and starting to look for land. It was Sunday of the 1994 auction when a friend told him about a property on Spring Mountain. Dan drove up, took a look and instantly knew he'd found the place. By Monday he held the title to the bare 18-acre plot. Today the property reflects both his passions and his past.

He's at home among the five acres of vinifera, and he roams the rows with the conviction of a man who believes it in his core when he says,"Every single grape vine is significant." An art lover, Dan has commissioned several pieces that now adorn the property, along with a fleet of salvaged antique trucks set in locations that create the questions, "How did it get there? Where is it going?" Dan likes to play with context. One art work by Jack Chandler consists of a series of large steel hoops and what resemble giant bowling balls poised on steel tracks set onto the side of a slope. "It looks like a bowling alley falling off a hill," says Dan. "I like that they seem to have just dropped from the sky. I like the appearance of chaos next to these perfect rows of vines."

Elsewhere, a few computer relics placed on the property challenge context, reflect Dan's high-tech past and even serve as inspiration. Among them are an Apple Mac Classic and something called an IP Switch, one of only two such computers built. "These machines were designed to be the best in the world I came from," he says. "They remind me of the importance of reaching for the stars." And that's what he's doing at Lynch Vineyards - though rooted firmly in the land he loves so much.