Wines, With Notes of M.B.A. - NYTimes.com

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By KATHRYN JONES
Rutherford, Calif.

KATHRYN HALL, a former ambassador to Austria, and her husband, Craig, an entrepreneur and real estate developer, sit on the balcony of their namesake winery, Hall Wines, sipping a red and admiring the mountain-fringed backdrop of Napa Valley. It’s early October, and purple clusters of ripening cabernet sauvignon grapes hang from rows of trellised vines, waiting for the harvest.

The Halls are a long way from Dallas, where Mr. Hall made — and lost much of — a fortune in real estate and investments in the 1980s. Mrs. Hall learned a thing or two about the wine business while growing up around her family’s vineyard in Mendocino County. But her husband didn’t know a cabernet from a chardonnay when they met almost 20 years ago, she says with a laugh.

He does now. The Halls bought their first vineyard in Napa in 1995 and, after setbacks that included a fire that destroyed their first vintage, have bought four more vineyards since 2002. They also built the winery here in Rutherford, and commissioned the redesign of a second by the architect Frank Gehry in St. Helena.

Farmers — the kind of people who have “their feet in the soil,” as described by Margrit Mondavi, the 84-year-old matriarch of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley — once dominated grape-growing and winemaking. But the Halls are part of a recent wave of M.B.A.’s, bankers, architects, engineers and others who are taking over or starting wineries and infusing small boutique labels with a level of business expertise usually found only at big brands.

“It’s a very common second career,” says Bill Nelson, president of WineAmerica, a national trade association with more than 800 member wineries. “Often, people get the financial wherewithal from the first career to get started ...

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