Tim Bucher was only about 8 years old, checking on his family's cattle grazing out in Dry Creek Valley in the early 1970s, when he told his dad he was going to live there one day.
His father Joe, a Swiss immigrant, had started Bucher Farms, a 360-acre family dairy farm on Westside Road, in 1958, back when the Russian River Valley was still predominantly prune and dairy farms. But as the younger of two sons, little Tim knew he was probably never going to run the farm, which is in operation to this day as an important supplier of milk to Clover Stornetta.
He loved that Dry Creek was a true valley with sweeping views from side to side and a varying climate. Today Bucher is living out his dream with the development of Trattore Estate Wines, a 40-acre vineyard and winery atop a west-facing bench where Dry Creek Road meets Yoakim Bridge.
With a little prodding from his mother, Annemarie, when he was 16, Bucher and his older brother and sister pooled their money to buy a 2-acre plot of grapes in Dry Creek Valley. Growing on it were old-vine zinfandel and French Colombard. Bucher sold the zin to the Italian dad of a buddy of his at Cardinal Newman High School and tried his hand at making his first wine out of the French Colombard.
One of his other close friends at school was Pete Seghesio Jr., and it was at the Seghesio family's home ranch where Bucher got his first real exposure to the wine world.
"We'd play in the vineyards. I just thought vines were fascinating," Bucher said.
Having grown up around agriculture and acting as his family's ranch mechanic over the years, Bucher next went off to U.C. Davis to study agricultural engineering. His dream was to become the world's greatest tractor designer. But instead, he fell in love with computer science and changed his major.
"My dad found out on graduation day," Bucher said. "Agricultural engineering at least had the word agriculture in it. He (had been) of the mind that if you're going to go to college, you're going to study something you can bring back to this little farm. But he was proud."
Bucher, now 47, went on to earn advanced engineering degrees at Stanford University and then joined a "real small startup" in the 1980s called Sun Microsystems.
After Sun, Bucher joined Steve Jobs to start NeXT Computer, which was later sold to Apple, then helped Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, create a videogame company called 3DO. After that, he co-founded WebTV, which was sold to Microsoft, where he worked as vice president of consumer products for five years in Silicon Valley.
His career continued in that vein - he joined Jobs for a second tour of duty at Apple, started a digital music company in 2005 later sold to Dell Inc. All the while, he faithfully made his way up to Healdsburg on weekends to tend to his two acres in Dry Creek. One day, he resigned from the tech world.
"I resigned because I had been working on Tastingroom.com technology for about a year," he said. "And I realized, oops, I think I'm onto something."
Tastingroom.com is a new online service that allows consumers to buy little bottles of wine from a host of major producers to try before they buy bigger bottles. He runs Tastingroom.com from Silicon Valley, though the company's operations center is based near the Sonoma County Airport.
The siblings eventually sold their two acres and Bucher used some of his proceeds in 1999 to buy what is now Trattore (Italian for tractor) Estate Wines. It was a hilly piece of raw land, overgrown with manzanita, with no power or water.
"In your life you can only do a couple of 15-year projects and this is going to be a 15-year project," he said. "I hope longer than that. The oldest vines are 10 years old and I'm growing everything I use."
That includes a core of zinfandel grapes, some of which are sold to Seghesio Vineyards, and a handful of Rhone varieties, from grenache to marsanne, roussanne and viognier.
The first wines were released in 2008, priced from $16 to $35 and available from a small tasting room at 4791 Dry Creek Road where Bucher has set up shop until a larger facility up on his property is ready to open, most likely in 2012.
"I love to create value products," says Bucher, who staffs his tasting room every weekend. "My wines are $16 and I have some lower priced ones planned. Everyone tells me I'm crazy, (but) we want to prove the product first. I learned that from Steve (Jobs). If you have the story and you have the quality product, it's almost a guaranteed recipe for success."
The 4791 Dry Creek Road spot is also home to Dry Creek Olive Company, a second business of Bucher's inspired by 200-year-old olive trees he found on his vineyard.
"I really believe in expanding your horizons," he said. "You can apply that to anything, whether it's olive oil or wine. These are sensory products you have to experience to decide if you have an emotional connection."
Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com.
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