Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/912565
62 / the tasting panel / december 2017 COVER STORY small coal-mining town of Bridgeport, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA. While at the helm of the Monterey Farming Corporation, he also worked as an investment banker and ran two biotech companies. I asked Al about working with his family, to which he replied, "The good news is they joined the company not under duress or any pressure from me." Scott Scheid may not have had to dig his way out of the same disadvantages as his father, but he certainly inherited Al's ambition. Tall in stature, Scott looked down at me with a bit of a smirk and said, "The joke around here is that I missed my calling and I should have been an engineer. But I studied economics instead, and it's a great combination here because there's so much innovation and engineering that goes into making quality wine and getting those grapes into the bottle." According to Scott, his father actu- ally never intended for Scheid to evolve as a family business; instead, they were "a finance family who found our way into a great industry." Scott was actu- ally working at E.F. Hutton & Company primarily as an options trader when his father called to propose he join Scheid Vineyards back in 1986. He took a sabbatical from Wall Street and never looked back. "My dad's philosophy that no matter what, you've got to go out and make your way in the world before you come back and get into a family business, has been to the benefit of this company," he said. In fact, Scott notes that some of the most successful wineries they've observed over the years are run by "people who came from other places with other disciplines." "I think we've made a lot of solid plans, and because of that we've grown with the Monterey and California industries as needed," he explained. "We've certainly rolled the dice, but we're not gamblers, and we've seen a number of agricultural companies go out of business by over- extending themselves. That's where I'm grateful that we're finance people who found their way into farming and wine grapes, rather than farmers who had some success and had to learn finance." This reminded me of our dinner with the whole family the night before. It's here we got to know the youngest, Tyler Scheid, who works as a Project Manager at the company. With his casual demeanor, Tyler seems the least likely of the Scheids to imbue the entrepreneurial spirit, but he swiftly proved me wrong: Our "polite dinner conversation" revolves around data collection, analytics, harvest logistics, and total vertical integration. "There's a lot of IT work in what I do. I work under Kurt, the COO, as the company has grown into the new lines of business. When I first started in vine- yard operations in 2011, the company was just getting into the branded goods business and finished goods production, so with that comes a lot of change and adding onto the business process—you know, really thinking through setting Kurt Gollnick, COO; Al Scheid, Founder and Chairman of the Board; Heidi Scheid, Senior Vice President; Tyler Scheid, Project Manager; and Scott Scheid, CEO.