Steven Wolfe

Chief Technology Officer

"Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been."
~Albert Einstein

Steven Wolfe was born in Albany, NY, and was raised in a 250 year-old farmhouse full of history and adventure. Much of his childhood was spent playing on the neighbor’s tractors and helping his father renovate the old house. He has always been fascinated by how things work – from antique clocks to the machinery of the universe. When he left Albany it was to attend the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering. During his studies at UNC he worked as an intern at two different power generating stations that were part of the Duke Energy system.

After college, Steven moved to Florida and took a position in the Space Systems Division at Honeywell. Living his life-long dream, Steven became a rocket scientist, designing integrated circuits for single-board computers on satellites. Space is an inhospitable place, and Steven learned to make very complicated things work under the most extreme conditions.

Steven met Heather Porter while he was in Florida, and had the good sense to marry her. When the Porter family purchased the vineyard in Napa, Steven and Heather decided to join the adventure and move to Napa. It was not long before Steven started a new company that offered a much higher degree of technological innovation to the wine industry. His R&D facility is the Porter vineyard and winery, which he helped design and implement.

Winemaking consists of taking a natural product and using a natural process to convert that product, grape juice, into something very different: wine. Steven has dedicated himself to eliminating a lot of the variables that affect the process…while still maintaining great reverence for the magic of nature that created it.

And he still likes to play on the tractors.