Category: Features

Last Tuesday my friend and day job manager, Walter and I had the privilege of a private harvest tour of a bustling Crushpad, courtesy of Leon Glover, owner and winemaker for the upstart Lionheart Wines. Leon and I have maintained a continued correspondence since my first tour and our subsequent joint tasting at Artisan this past summer. He was gracious enough to extend an invitation for a harvest tour back in September, but I was swamped with other activities and it wasn't until this latest surge in fruit that I was able to partake of his kind offer. Walter and I finished our lab work and then headed out that evening towards the Dogpatch in SF and our meetup with Leon. We found him arms' deep in a 1 ton fermenter of Pinot, working through the 6pm punchdowns. He greeted us with a sort of apologetic and newly sanitized air fist bump and suggested that we cruise around and bide our time while he finished the hour's activities. After perusing the hundreds of bottles of wines that have been vinted on-site, we happened to run into a former co-worker of mine that has since taken the leap and changed careers into winemaking, Chris Nelson. He and I used to damage lab equipment, TGIF's and opposing pitchers in the mighty South San Francisco Biotech Softball League while developing small molecule drugs for cancer indications at the original kinase inhibitor biotech company, SUGEN.