Engineers do not live by airplanes alone: Meet the members of the Boeing Wine Club.

by Patrick Comiskey
Spring 2005

BEN Smith is an engineer who happens to make wine. OR PERHAPS HE’S a winemaker who happens to be an engineer. For a dozen years, Smith’s role as an engineer was unequivocal. He worked for the Boeing Company in Seattle, where he conducted risk assessment on the flight control systems for Boeing’s 737 and 757 commercial jets. One Thanksgiving, he was poured a glass of Washington State cabernet from Quilceda Creek, which moved him deeply. Smith describes this wine epiphany with his customary restraint, calling it “pretty all right.”

That pretty all right experience was enough motivation for Smith to join Boeing’s wine club in 1993. Encouraged by his initial efforts, Smith entered his first wines into the club’s annual competition in 1995, and won Best of Show. He won Best of Show again in 1996. In 1997, when the four wines he entered each won their category and had to compete against one another for Best of Show, he started to think that maybe he ought to change professions.

The following year, with his wife, Gaye McNutt, he founded Cadence Winery, producing 600 cases. “It wasn’t a lot of wine,” he says, “so I thought we’d do all right.” In fact, they did better than that. Their 1998 cabernets and blends were sold in Seattle’s finest restaurants and wine shops. The following year, Smith’s wines caught the eye of national critics, earning respectable scores in Wine Spectator and the International Wine Cellar; and, just two years after the winery’s founding, Wine & Spirits magazine named Cadence a Winery of the Year.

In any large company, there are plenty of extracurriculars to vie for what remains of an employee’s attention in the off hours.With a workforce that consists of hundreds of engineers and technicians, it’s probably in Boeing’s best interest to offer a few creative outlets and get that brain trust out of its head a bit. This is the reason for Recreation Building #1736, tucked away in one of Boeing’s several sprawling campuses, where employees can devote themselves to martial arts and archery, perfect model railroad building skills, explore anything from mineralogy to photography—there is even a club devoted entirely to the appreciation of tropical aquariums.

But one of the company’s most active recreation organizations is the Boeing Employees Wine and Beer Club, now in its 34th year. What sets this club apart from the others is the phenomenal success of its members. They’ve been known to make some pretty good wine—so good, in fact, that nine of them have opened bonded commercial wineries, and another half dozen are poised to do the same. And a few of these have done so well that they’ve been able to leave the four-square world of engineering altogether to become full-fledged winemakers.

When you meet these guys, you’d hardly think their path was possible. Every winemaker brings a touch of gonzo to the job; there’s an obsessive, somewhat impulsive, side to what they do, fueled by passion and an overarching sense that it’s all in the service of pleasure. But the members of the Boeing Wine Club wouldn’t know gonzo if it were served up on a cracker. They’re engineers, after all: bookish, measured, thoughtful. They cite laws of physics in everyday conversation. As work habits go, they’re methodical and thorough. Gonzo doesn’t fit the bill.

But for engineers, obsession takes a slightly different form. They embrace things they don’t understand and try to comprehend them. This curiosity, backed up by meticulous analysis, is precisely what makes engineers well-suited to the task of winemaking.

This year, propulsion engineer John Bell retired from Boeing to found Willis Hall Winery. “When I started out, I didn’t know the difference between a red wine and a white,” says Bell. But after trying a few wines he liked, and, as he says, “annoying a lot of sommeliers” at Seattle restaurants, he joined the club and began to slake his curiosity. “I’d taste a great wine and want to know how they did that,” he says. “I’m an engineer. I couldn’t accept not knowing this body of knowledge.”

Like Bell, programmer analyst Tim Narby of Nota Bene Cellars wanted to master the process. As a home winemaker, he found it frustrating to be limited by one harvest per year. “You get just one chance,” he says, “and if you make a mistake, you have to wait a year to fix it. And then you might make another mistake. The only way to learn,” he concluded, “was to do multiple fermentations.”

Or look over someone else’s shoulder. One of the great virtues of Boeing’s wine club is having dozens of unusually brilliant minds at work on the same problem: how to make wine taste good. One of Narby’s early mentors was Steve Foisie, a photographic technician (he records crash tests, among other things, at 100,000 frames a second). Foisie has been with the club since 1979 and teaches most of the club’s winemaking classes.

Foisie attributes members’ recent successes to technical advances in home winemaking. But the main reason the club is successful, he thinks, is because it’s a club. “It’s a nurturing environment,” he says, “a place to critique and be critiqued. I can send out an email on a problem fermentation and get a dozen responses within the hour.”

And then there’s the fruit. Washington’s better vineyards lie east of the towering Cascade Mountains, which serve as a natural barrier for nearly all of the region’s moisture. (Seattle, of course, gets plenty of rain.) Summers are long, hot and dry, and at this northern latitude, the sun shines late into the evening. Add a little irrigation, and Eastern Washington becomes an ideal place to grow grapes.

Boeing’s wine club was founded just as plantings began. Consequently, the club got in on the ground floor, with small lot contracts from some of the state’s most prestigious vineyards, including Champoux, Klipsun, Boushey and Taptiel. “Wineries can’t get the grapes we get,” says Foisie with satisfaction.

In part, Tim Narby started his winery because his access to great fruit—fruit he could regularly source in minute quantities with the wine club—was about to close off as demand grew. “Ciel du Cheval was going to fill up,” he explains, referring to its list of grape recipients. “If I didn’t move, I wouldn’t get in the door.”

Several wineries from wine club members have launched since Cadence’s success. None has done quite as well, but Bell’s and Narby’s ventures show great promise, as does Ron Yabut’s Austin Robaire. (And a fourth, Dave Larsen’s Soos Creek, founded in 1989, also seems poised to break out.) None of these guys is likely to make a living as a winery owner; in fact, the odds are that most will confirm the old adage that to make a small fortune in the wine business, you need to start with a large one. So, why do they do it? Perhaps it’s something more intangible.

The first club member ever to found a winery was Eugene Foote, in 1979. Foote worked in aerospace, analyzing payloads flown into the upper atmosphere—a fairly consuming task, by the sound of it. But it took him one harvest to realize he had to pursue winemaking, that he had no choice. “The first time I ever made wine and saw that red juice pouring out the press…” says Foote, and pauses. “I’m a fairly introspective person—I’m an engineer, after all—but this was almost a spiritual experience for me.”

Perhaps spiritual experiences occur more powerfully for those who aren’t inclined to seek them out. Perhaps for this reason, engineers—seemingly so buttoned-up from nine to five—are drawn to the mysterious processes that transform grapes into wine. And perhaps what they find along the way is an element of passion coursing where none before existed, a glimpse into the soul of an artist. At harvest, says John Bell, sounding nothing like the engineer he is, “I ask myself the question, ‘What do these grapes want to be?’ If they taste like earth, what can I do to bring out that earthiness? Then it’s the engineer in me that figures out what the artist discovers.”

Ben Smith left his job at Boeing in 2000. He can’t say if he’s more of an artist now than he was before. “In winemaking,” he says, “I found a creative outlet I didn’t have, didn’t even know I missed. Both sides of my brain get engaged. That’s something Boeing didn’t give me.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Boeing gave him.

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Patrick Comiskey is based in Los Angeles and is an editor at Wine & Spirits magazine. Email Patrick at editor@executivetravelmag.com.

Ready for takeoff Below are the commercial wineries that have been started by members of the Boeing Wine Club. In each case, commercial production is very small and distribution is limited, but the Web sites listed below will provide information on locating the wines. Austin Robaire Vintners Ron Yabut* www.austinrobaire.com Cadence Winery Ben Smith www.cadencewinery.com Cedar Ridge Winery Richard Fairfield* first release July 2005 www.cedarridgewinery.com E.B. Foote Eugene Foote (Note: E.B. Foote is no longer owned by Mr. Foote, who retired from the wine trade in 1994.) 206-242-3852 Griffins Crossing Winery Max Jensen* first release Spring 2005 griffinswine@aol.com Nota Bene Cellars Tim Narby* www.notabenecellars.com Pleasant Hill Estate Larry Lindvig www.pleasanthillestate.com Soos Creek Wine Cellars Dave Larsen www.sooscreekwine.com Willis Hall Winery John Bell www.willishall.com * Still employed at Boeing.