family business
TURNING BY-PRODUCTS INTO NEW PRODUCTS
California’s Napa Valley has a better quality of life, thanks to the multiple enterprises of the amazing Pestonis.

Everything we do in our businesses developed from something else we do,” reflects Bob Pestoni, whose father and grandfather planted grapes on the hillsides of California’s Napa Valley. They became winemakers, but Bob took a roundabout route before he founded Rutherford Grove Winery in 1993.

The 62-year-old Pestoni was making a good living in the 1960s raising 800 hogs in St. Helena, California. “I got involved with the other side of farming than my parents,” he says. “Back in 1959 when I got out of the military, I started feeding discarded food from bakeries, stores and markets to the pigs.” That experience in collection and recycling led him to start a full-fledged waste hauling business in 1963 that picks up household and commercial trash and recyclables in the Napa Valley communities of Calistoga, Angwin, Yountville, Rutherford and St. Helena. About that same time, he and his brother, Marvin, acquired and began operating a landfill. “Through early diversion of materials collected, we learned before recycling became a buzzword in the 1980s how to preserve a landfill as long as possible and hopefully receive the benefit of marketing recyclable products,” recalls Pestoni, who named his new company Upper Valley Recycling.

ANOTHER NATURAL TRANSITION

This background made for a natural transition in the late 1960s when the Pestonis took on reuse of area wine producers’ grape pomace — the skins, seeds and stems left after pressing that comprise about 15 percent of the original grape. “There was a need for services at some of the wineries that were having difficulties handling waste materials at harvest time,” explains Pestoni. “They used to pile this stuff on creek edges, roadsides and vineyard avenues, where it sat until spring.” Today, Upper Valley Recycling collects and composts 20,000 tons/year of pomace from 42 vineyards, selling the finished product back to many of them. About 85 percent of Harvest Compost (their brandname) is sold for $22 to $25/ton to vineyard growers, and the rest is marketed to local residents and nurseries. A few thousand tons are used on their own vineyard, Rutherford Grove Winery.

INNOVATING WITH GRAPESEED OIL

Seven years ago, continuing his established entrepreneurial style of innovating, Pestoni and his daughter Christy Abreu launched Napa Valley Grapeseed Oil, the only naturally cold-pressed American grapeseed oil made from wine grapes. “It’s an add-on business for us, after we found out there really was oil in grapeseed, and purchased a machine in Arizona that we use to squeeze oil out.” About 20,000 pounds of oil are made annually and marketed mostly in natural food stores.

A recent article in Alternative Medicine Digest reports the dietary advantages of grapeseed oil, providing these details: flavorful, without the heaviness of other oils and with ability to handle high temperatures during cooking without smoking, and provides two key nutrients, a high concentration of the antioxidant vitamin E and a highly concentrated source of linoleic acid, an essential fatty acid also known as omega-6. “Substituting grapeseed oil for your usual cooking or salad oil is an easy way of lowering the amount of saturated fats in your diet,” notes Digest, adding that it makes an excellent salad oil or dip for breads. Pestoni’s Grapeseed Oil company also gets high praise for the way it uses a low temperature, direct screw press for extraction — a gentle mechanical method that requires no chemical solvents or alcohol. With this method, 40 tons of grapes yield only six to ten gallons of oil. It is priced at $9 for a 250 ml bottle and $15 for a 500 ml bottle.

BACK TO THE WINERY

Even though wine making is a different game today, says Pestoni, “our vineyard takes us back to our roots, the days of our grandparents, and it fits.” Rutherford Grove Winery recently got high praise in a “Tastings” column in the Wall Street Journal that featured Napa and Sonoma wineries. Here are comments about Rutherford Grove: “Here, the woman behind the counter was happy to talk and pour for hours — and every wine was consistently excellent. ... This one (Petite Sirah) is remarkable; a deep, dark fruit bomb, like blackberry wine, but with a ‘finish’ that’s so clean and light that it keeps the wine from going over the edge. Great winemaking.”

Another article in an industry publication, The Wine News, subtitled “The Metamorphosis of Grape Pomace,” reviews the special niches which the Pestonis have created. “Their Swiss, Italian and Portuguese forebears once owned what is now the city of St. Helena’s water supply at Bell Canyon. This is a pioneer family that has lived through all the vagaries of agriculture, land use and tourism in the Napa Valley, and loves to tell the tales. ... Friends and family mean the world to the Pestonis — whose ties are inextricably bound to the valley in which they’ve made their living for the better part of a century.

‘The next generation is already beginning to take over the reins. ... My brother and I take great pleasure in the fact that our children are coming forth and getting involved in the family businesses,’ says Bob Pestoni, who isn’t quite ready to hang up all of his hats.”

Meanwhile, the Pestonis and their 53 employees continue doing their things that cover soil building, erosion control, waste management via recycling, wine making and grapeseed oil (did we forget something?). They truly have a knack for connecting by-products with new products. And just as their Harvest Compost improves the quality of the wines produced in the region (and solves disposal problems for the vintners), so does the presence of the Pestoni family add to Napa’s quality of life.

Upper Valley Recycling, St. Helena, California – (707) 963-7988; Rutherford Grove Winery and Napa Valley Grapeseed Oil Company, Rutherford, California – (707) 963-0544.