Finding Eden

Immigrant goes from making cabinets to crafting cabernet

By JACK HEEGER
Register Staff Writer

As Elaine Villamin tells the story, her father wanted to plant something in his backyard.

The fact that he had never even grown a tomato plant didn’t deter him — he wanted to put something in the ground on the family’s property in Creston, in San Luis Obispo County.

When he told his family he wanted to plant wine grapes, they figured that “a vine or two seemed reasonable.” But the “vine or two” turned out to be five acres of cabernet sauvignon, and those five acres became the start of Eden Canyon Vineyards, producer of about 750 cases of wine last year.

Elaine and her father, Danilo “Danny” Villamin, have gained notoriety in their short wine careers as one of the few father-daughter combinations that operate a winery, and Eden Canyon is believed to be the only estate winery owned by a Filipino family.

“We had no idea that we were the first of anything,” Elaine said. “We didn’t do it for that.”

She uses her Filipino heritage to show how wine pairs with Filipino food — at various events featuring Filipino cuisine, the next at Poleng Lounge, a Filipino restaurant in San Francisco on June 19.

The success story almost didn’t happen, though.

Danny planted his vines in 1996, and just a few months later, a forest fire broke out in the adjoining Los Padres National Forest and destroyed more than 106,000 acres, including Danny’s five.

After the embers cooled and they surveyed the damage, Danny wanted to re-plant, saying said the soil would be richer because of the nutrients put into it from the fire.

This caused arguments within the family, Elaine said. Elaine, her mother and her sister “insisted that he take the insurance money and give up his crazy idea.”

But he re-planted six acres the next spring. He subsequently has added four more acres of vines.

That determination is typical of Danny.

Danny was born in Manila and at age 7 became the head of his family when his father died. He shined shoes in the mornings and sold sweets and attended school in the afternoon. Later he worked at a woodworking company during the day and for the telephone company at night. “I think his work ethic came from that,” Elaine said. “... He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his family — he wanted to leave something for us.”

Elaine’s mother, Nieves, was chief accountant and taught at a college when Danny saw her through a window. “I asked the registrar what was her name. She asked, ‘Why do you want to know?” I said, ‘I want to marry her.’ Then Nieves wouldn’t acknowledge me or talk to me. So I cut all the telephone lines of the department. Then I fixed it. Nieves answered the phone and I got a chance to talk to her.”

He said he sat in on a history class she was teaching about Jose Rizal, a Filipino national hero, and she asked what Rizal said before he died. “I raised my hand and said, ‘Ouch.’”

After a courtship, they married and left the Philippines for the U.S. in 1972 with one daughter, Vivian, and Elaine soon to be born. They settled in San Lorenzo in the East Bay, and Danny eventually open a woodworking business.

When Vivian enrolled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, they “fell in love with the area,” Elaine said. They bought a 60-acre piece of property off Highway 58, and Danny started raising cows.

He built a new woodworking shop. “His work has been on the cover of Architectural Digest,” Elaine said with pride.

Danny made room for another hobby, too. He is a competition shooter and built a shooting range on the property.

He made friends with neighboring viticulturists and watched as the area fill with vineyards. He figured the property was perfect for grapes — at 1,800 feet and composed of sandstone and granite. Summers average 94 degrees (last year’s high was 114) and coolest months average 33 degrees.

His friends didn’t think it was a good idea. Despite their recommendations that he not plant grapes, they helped him put in a quadrilateral trellising system and other aspects of the vineyard.

Then the fire struck.

The re-planted vineyard’s grapes were sold to area wineries, and Elaine was “blown away by how good it was. The cellar master told me, ‘Your father grows some great grapes.’

“That happened at a time when (the industry) was going through a depression in grape sales,” she said.

They talked about making wine, and she said, “Let’s give it a try.”

Danny started building the winery and bought all the equipment, so they could have control over the wine from the vineyard to the bottle. They used a mobile bottler, but did everything else themselves.

“I’m the mouth of the operation, and he’s the hands,” Elaine said.

“I make all the taste decisions — when to pick, acid levels, barrels — and he makes all the vineyard decisions. Everything outside the property is my decision, but I don’t like to make the final decision without consulting with him, and even some others.”

In addition to making wine, Elaine handles marketing, spending about 80 percent of her time calling on restaurants, which account for about 60 percent of sales, but she’s trying to reduce her travel time to 50 percent.

The wine is distributed in California, Nevada and Canada. It is available in Napa at Copia.

The Villamins have already achieved some notoriety — their 2004 cabernet sauvignon won a silver medal in the San Francisco Chronicle wine competition. Their wine was given to all nominees and presenters at the last Grammy Awards, and Elaine was asked to pour wine for a tasting hosted by Lisa Marie Presley.

Neither Danny nor Elaine had any formal training before they planted the vineyard. They took correspondence courses through UC Davis, and they went to seminars together. Elaine traveled to Bordeaux for a two-week crash course, visiting vineyards and wineries, and took a course in Spain.

“Everything fell into place,” she said. “But we’re pretty much self-taught.”

She credits a UC Berkeley wine appreciation course with awakening her interest in wine. It was taught by Eugenio Jardin, the sommelier at Jardiniere restaurant in San Francisco.

“I couldn’t even pronounce the names right,” she said. “I was transformed by Eugenio. He made wine approachable. He got me to understand what wine is. It was then that I realized I had a palate.”

She spent three years with Barclay’s Bank, where she said she learned the importance of market research. When she came home she helped her father in the vineyard.

During a visit with her parents in 2004, Danny told her he could use some full-time help with the new venture. She took him up on his offer.

Although Danny and Elaine are the faces of Eden Canyon Vineyards, it is a family affair.

The name Eden Canyon comes from the first letters of each of the family’s names — Elaine, Danny, Edna and Nieves. (Vivian is actually Edna’s middle name.)

The label was Nieves’ idea and was created by Vivian, a professional designer. It is based on the symbolism of a Filipino nipa hut.

“The stars are the two sisters,” Elaine said. “The bigger one is Vivian because she’s the older one.”

“When my folks were married, the priest told them that my father was the post (of the hut), to keep the family strong. The tree on the label represents my dad,” Elaine said. “The moon represents my mother. The priest told her that she was the light of the family.”

Without the pole the house would collapse, without the light, it would be dark, she said.

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