Sonoma Vintner’s Team Crafts Pricey Wines, Funds Wheelchairs

Feb. 28 (Bloomberg) — Former Wall Street publisher turned vintner Gordon L. Holmes has a unique concept in philanthropy: For each bottle of wine you purchase as futures from his Lookout Ridge Winery, he donates a wheelchair in your name to one of the world’s 100 million needy people desperate for mobility.

These wines aren’t plonk for charity. Holmes, 57, has enlisted California winemaking stars to make small lots of cult- quality cabernet, pinot and syrah under his label. One of them, Andy Erickson, makes hard-to-obtain Screaming Eagle, the most expensive California cab around.

Curious how Holmes started the project, I drive up a winding road of hairpin curves to his Sonoma winery high in the Mayacamas Mountains. The panoramic views, hung with clouds, are splendid.

The bearded, fifth-generation Californian, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, checked shirt and striking tortoise-shell glasses, greets me at a cubelike concrete house that serves as an office. Holmes made his name in New York by publishing investment magazines, then sold them all in 1998 to follow his dream of making wine at this property.

“That same year, unfortunately, my wife, Kari, was diagnosed with a rare form of debilitating MS,” or multiple sclerosis, Holmes explains as he gives me a tour of his newly built wine cave. “I learned firsthand how important a wheelchair can be.”

Top Winemaker

By 2000, Holmes was planting vineyards and hired top winemaker Greg La Follette to help him make wine from purchased grapes. Four years later he met California real-estate developer and philanthropist Ken Behring, who started the Wheelchair Foundation. That chance encounter and his wife’s situation inspired his Wine for Wheels effort.

“The first time we distributed wheelchairs, in Mexico, I saw how one could instantly change someone’s life,” he says. “I picked up a little boy whose dad was wheeling him in a wheelbarrow and sat him in a wheelchair. The look on his face now that he could get around by himself — wow.”

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