read more - Ledson Winery and Vineyards

www.sonomamag.com
spring 2009 sonoma 1
King of
the castle
The hard work and
good life of Steve Ledson
DAVID BOLLING
photos robbi pengelly
story
www.sonomamag.com
spring 2009 sonoma 2
W
e are sitting at the counter
of Superburger on Fourth
Street in Santa Rosa.
It’s maybe not the venue you’d expect
for lunch with a multimillionare tycoon
who owns half a nearby city block, two
wineries, a construction company, several
homes, a Mendocino ranch, a luxury hotel,
a philanthropic foundation and his very
own castle.
I’m having a medium-rare burger, he’s
having a cheeseburger, a cup of chili and
a vanilla shake.
The calories don’t seem to concern him
and there’s no telltale roll beneath the
crisp white T-shirt he’s wearing with the
blue jeans that almost look ironed.
There’s an immaculately trimmed
moustache on his upper lip and not a hair
is out of place on his carefully groomed
head. He’s medium height with the taut
body of a guy who either works with his
hands, or works out, or both. He looks
more like a cowboy than a businessman,
and that’s an image he probably prefers.
His eyes are blue, intense, penetrating.
He’s not exactly imposing but when he
Family photos include the image
of little Steve on a tractor at
the age of five. At right is the
Armstrong Estates Victorian
mansion where he and Amy live.
www.sonomamag.com
spring 2009 sonoma 3
walks into a room you notice. It’s called
presence.
Outside on the curb is the big diesel,
a Ford F350 pickup protected by his
patient guard dog, a Pomeranian named
Missy who might weigh five pounds.
In the back of the truck is a large tank
of diesel fuel and a four-wheel Honda
ATV.
Halfway through the burgers his
iPhone rings and the screen flashes what
looks like a SportsCenter graphic. It’s
Orlando Cepeda. The Orlando Cepeda,
Hall of Famer and former baseball Giant.
“Orlando,” he says, “how are you
buddy?”
Welcome to the world of Steve
Ledson, King of the Castle.
www.sonomamag.com
Orlando
Cepeda
is on the
iPhone
and
Missy is
guarding
the truck.
spring 2009 sonoma 4
He
sketched
the HGTV
Dream
House in
a couple
of hours
at the
kitchen
table.
www.sonomamag.com
That iPhone is the conduit to a universe
of activity that stretches conventional
boundaries, and because he has his
fingers, almost literally, in so many pies,
Steve Ledson’s world is both very visible
and increasingly hard to ignore.
It includes one of Santa Rosa’s historic
landmarks just down the street from
Superburger, the art deco Rosenberg
department store building, housing a
Barnes & Noble and Ledson’s executive
offices. The building and half the block are
his, and so is the parking lot in back where
a single orange cone guards his personal
parking space. (You can actually see it—the
cone—on Google Earth.)
Go back down Highway 12 toward Glen
Ellen and you’ll pass part of his heritage,
1,600 acres that were once a family ranch
and now are parts of Oakmont and
Annadel State Park. Before you reach
Kenwood you’ll be accosted by the Castle,
a gabled, turreted, multichimneyed,
16,000-square-foot Gothic/Normandy-style
edifice that, however it strikes you, cannot
be ignored.
Some people see a thing of beauty,
others see the Adams family peering
through the windows. But upward
of 100,000 people visit it every year
and almost everyone sees something
fascinating, provocative, compelling
and, of course, big. Even before it was
finished people lined the drive to look at
it. It was going to be the Ledson Dream
House but then reality registered, the
Castle became too public a place to be
a family home and so, following a few
use permit U-turns, it morphed into the
Ledson Winery with what are arguably
the most distinctive tasting rooms in the
Valley. Steve designed the whole thing,
partly in his sleep.
Drive into Sonoma, cruise around the
Plaza, head for the historic Sebastiani
Theatre, and you’ll find nearby the
historic-looking Ledson Hotel, a six-yearold boutique hostelry that could have
been built in the 1800s. Conde Nast
Traveler called it one of the world’s top
100 hotels within weeks of its opening.
Five blocks away is Armstrong Estates,
one of Sonoma’s newest and most
exclusive neighborhoods, big houses
with real porches on wide streets,
organized around a stunning, three-acre
Victorian estate Ledson restored after a
decade of effort to acquire the property.
But that’s only part of the Ledson
empire. There’s another winery and a
5,500-acre ranch in Mendocino County,
a houseboat on Trinity Lake, a planned
spring 2009 sonoma 5
Landmarks of his
life: The HGTV
Dream House
(left) was a
perfect fit for
the Ledson
mold. The
iPhone manages
every minute of
his day. Steve
was going to live
in the Castle but
the public got
in the way.
26-home subdivision on West MacArthur
and, lest we forget, the latest HGTV
“Dream House,” an elegant Victorian he
sketched at his kitchen table in a couple
of hours that more than 4,000 people had
toured by the time the TV drawing closed,
raising $85,000 for charity.
It’s a lot of stuff, an impressive portfolio,
and inevitably it triggers talk. Some people
who don’t know him speculate on the
source of Ledson’s wealth, complain about
the scale of his ambition, wonder how he
manages to do so consistently well. There
are stories, rumors, fragments of fantasy
that float about the Valley bearing his
www.sonomamag.com
name. Try to corner them, pin them down,
unwrap the rumors, and they drift away
like smoke.
But talk to some of the people who do
know him, who have worked for him—and
therefore beside him—and they describe
an intense, focused, driven, demanding,
obsessed-with-detail, usually right,
painstakingly fair, frequently generous,
enormously hard-working guy who, save for
all those previous qualities and a lot more
money, is pretty much just like them. He
gets his boots muddy and his hands dirty,
he drives the trucks and the tractors, and
if somebody has to grade the pad for a new
spring 2009 sonoma 6
“The quality of the winemaking, the team building.
There’s a lot of high energy.” – Jerry Padilla
PHOTO BY DAVID BOLLING
house, as often as not it’s Steve who climbs
up and runs the Cat.
Spend a day with him, in and out of
the cab of that big Ford pickup, and you
struggle to understand how he keeps track
of it all—the construction jobs, the right
harvest time for each vineyard, when to
crush which block, where to move which
truck or tractor to which property for
which job. The pieces of his life pile up
around you like the lumber and the bricks
and the shingles at a Ledson construction
site. And after a day at his side it’s pretty
clear how he got rich. He did it the oldfashioned way—he worked his butt off.
How he manages the details without
an entourage of underlings is baffling,
but not to Steve. “It seems like I can see
360 degrees,” he says. “I see thousands of
things at one time. It’s like I put it in a
little chip in my brain.”
Another part of the success equation is
a three-letter word—fun. Jerry Padilla was a
Napa Valley cellar rat when Steve hired him
over the phone. Now he’s an assistant to the
winemaker, works on the blends and markets
the wine to a list of preferred customers
from Ledson’s 15,000-member wine club.
“It’s been a fun ride, really fun,” says Padilla.
www.sonomamag.com
“The quality of the winemaking, the teambuilding. There’s a lot of high energy. And
then there’s Steve. He’s a visionary.”
For further understanding, here’s a
little history.
Steve Ledson was born in 1952, grew
up on a Sonoma Valley ranch and built
his first house at the age of five. Really.
It was a multilevel, prune-crate castle.
Unfortunately, he built it in front of the
barn door, his father had to tear it down
and young Steve learned—as that old saw
says—the first three lessons in real estate:
location, location, location.
He was driving a tractor and a hay baler
the same year, standing on the clutch with
both feet to disengage the gear shift, and
in the ninth grade he owned 52 head of
cattle that he grazed on leased land around
Sugarloaf Mountain.
That in itself tells you more than a
Myers-Briggs personality test. A ninth grade
cattle rancher bespeaks a certain intensity
of purpose. Ask yourself what you were
doing in the ninth grade and the odds are
it wasn’t raising steers. Young Steve also
learned how to rebuild the engines of that
tractor and a pickup truck almost before
he was old enough to legally drive, and
although he says that during his entire
childhood his father never gave him more
than $12, his dad did give him the hay
baler, a mower and a rake, which helped
him earn enough money so that by the time
he was a student at Santa Rosa High he was
the only kid in school with his own Chevy
Corvette. (Give a man a fish, feed him for a
day, teach him how to fish….)
When he was 20 he owned his own
drywall business, with more than 100
employees, and built his first (real) house.
He was a partner in his own construction
company by the time he was 21. He says he
got good grades but never graduated from
high school. There seems to have been
some rowdiness, some, shall we say, points
of contention with the administration.
Besides, he was already too busy ranching
and building and making a life. And, he
says, his dad told him, “You don’t need any
more school.”
Clearly his father was right, although
Ledson admits a little sheepishly he pretty
much can’t spell worth a damn.
He is now 56 years old, divorced, with
two grown children, he water-skis barefoot,
continues to build exquisitely detailed
homes, makes 77 varieties of outstanding
wine, surrounds himself with the minutia
of family history and plans to get married,
for the second time, this summer. (More
about that in a minute.)
Ledson samples the
ripeness of his merlot
grapes. He makes the
decision when to pick.
Jerry Padilla sings
Ledson’s praise and
calls him “a visionary.”
spring 2009 sonoma 7
He says he has more than 3,000
historic family photos, which sounds like
a lot until you learn his family tree goes
back five generations in Sonoma County.
The walls of that immaculate, 7,400-squarefoot Victorian he restored and occupies
in the center of Armstrong Estates are
festooned with large, historical photos in
virtually every room. And in most of those
rooms there is at least one large family
portrait that disappears at the push of a
button revealing a recessed, thoroughly
modern, flat-screen TV.
In the basement there’s a gym with
weight racks, treadmills and another TV.
Around the corner is a wine cellar the
size of my living room, and when I ask
how many bottles we’re looking at, he
turns to Amy Ackerman, his accountant,
administrator, I-T consultant, biking buddy
and soon-to-be wife. “Find out, will you
sweetheart?”
Amy, the I-T whiz, has Steve’s whole life
in her laptop.
Later, back in the F350, the iPhone
rings. It’s Amy with the answer to my
inconsequential question. “It’s 420 cases,”
she says over the truck’s built-in speaker
phone. I do the math in my head. It comes
to more than 5,000 bottles.
Ledson speaks of life on his childhood
ranch as a kind of Eden. The concept of
family included everyone who worked
there or came to visit. There was a lot of
hard work and hard play. His father was
demanding but not harsh, firm but fair,
although a story Steve tells leaves the
listener a little unsettled.
While he was still five (it must have
been a busy year) he and his father took
a Christmas-time hike up Adobe Canyon
along Bear Creek. Steve slipped, fell 30 feet
into the rain-swollen flume and caromed
a quarter-mile downstream, tumbling over
rocks before his father could pluck him
out. His father, Steve says, told him to “be
a man” and walk home. But once they got
there Steve collapsed into a coma and was
hospitalized for a month with multiple
skull fractures.
What doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger, and Steve Ledson has built on his
strengths.
But while Ledson is a true poster boy for
the American Dream, he’s not necessarily
an easy guy to know. Behind those
big blues and the expensive sunglasses
that often shield them, there is a very
busy mind that is constantly listening,
evaluating, measuring, calculating, filing
and remembering information. There
doesn’t seem to be a rest mode. Lance
Armstrong comes to mind, and it makes
you wonder if a mind like that ever sleeps.
On the surface, at least, he doesn’t feel like
the kind of guy who’s going to share the
deepest secrets of his soul unless, maybe,
your name is Amy.
Steve hired her when he bought the
Rosenberg building, and she had worked
The Ledson Hotel offers
sidewalk ambiance, six
luxury rooms and period
jazz concerts in the
heart of Sonoma.
www.sonomamag.com
spring 2009 sonoma 8
LEDSON continued
there about a year when he pulled up one
day on his Harley and she asked him, “Aren’t
you ever going to take me for a ride?”
So he did, and they’ve been riding
together more or less ever since. The
wedding is set for July 25.
We’re having another lunch, this time
in Kenwood, and I ask Amy about Steve’s
work schedule. “Oh, it’s about 12 to 14
hours a day, seven days a week,” she says
matter-of-factly. “It’s constant.”
Amy is 30-something, Steve has more
than 20 years on her, but they’re clearly a
comfortable fit. “Amy,” he asks, “why do
we get along?”
She thinks about it. “It’s probably the
way I was brought up. Like you. I was
brought up to work. My family didn’t have
a lot of money.”
That prompts an Amy story. “How about
the time you wrecked your truck?” he says.
“Spun it out in the school parking lot and
hit a curb. The frame was bent. You did
the repair work herself.”
“I couldn’t afford not to,” she says.
Imbedded in that anecdote is a big
chunk of Ledson truth. There’s nothing
you can’t do with enough effort, enough
imagination and a good strong foundation.
Steve’s big on foundations, which leads
him to the Harmony Foundation, a nonprofit he founded and funds to benefit
children in need. He has somehow enlisted
a slate of impressive notables, including
49er Dwight Clark, musician Michael
McDonald and actor Jeff Bridges. All have
contributed special commemorative wines,
blended with Steve’s help, to be auctioned
and sold to benefit kids.
He’s closing on a commemorative bottle
with Orlando Cepeda, and another with
Gene Cernan, the Apollo astronaut who
was the last man to walk on the moon.
It’s a nice life, building meticulously
crafted homes and meticulously crafted
wine, hanging out with Cepeda and
Bridges and Cernan. And Steve Ledson
knows it.
“I worked hard for everything I’ve
got. I have to work for it. And now, I’m
emotionally sound, physically sound,
financially sound. I don’t need anything.”
Except, of course, Amy. S
www.sonomamag.com
spring 2009 sonoma 9