Chuck and Anne McMinn – Owners

Chuck is a startup junkie. He has over twenty five years of experience in creating, financing, working in and advising startup high technology companies. Chuck is currently the part time chairman of Covad Communications, which he co-founded in 1996 to provide broadband data services to homes and businesses using DSL technology. He is also the founder of Certive Corporation, a provider of a new generation of real time business information analysis tools. Prior to founding Covad and Certive, Chuck managed his own consulting firm, Cefac Consulting, and was a consultant at Gemini Consulting. Chuck was also the President & CEO of Visioneer Communications and was a general partner at the venture capital firm, InterWest Partners. Chuck began his Silicon Valley career as the product manager for the 8086 microprocessor at Intel. Chuck has a BSEE from Brown University, an MSEE from Syracuse University and an MBA from Harvard University.

Chuck's wine interests date back to his arrival in California in 1978 from New Jersey, at which time he learned that not all wine comes in cardboard cartons or straw wrapped bottles. His approach to wine at Vineyard 29 is to combine time tested traditional techniques for winemaking with the best facilities and equipment to produce the best wine possible. Drawing from his early semiconductor processing days, he has a keen interest in measuring every aspect of Vineyard 29's operations. One of Intel's mottos was always "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it", a philosophy that he is putting into practice at Vineyard 29.

Anne graduated in 1975 from Mount Holyoke College and taught junior high students with learning disabilities for two years before she and Chuck started their own family. Over the years she's had a variety of volunteer commitments, many of them in the classroom, including eight years as an Art Docent in the Los Altos elementary schools. Anne got a taste of startup companies herself by working part-time for four years for Banner Blue, the company that produced the leading organization chart and genealogy chart software, among other products. In recent years her interest in gardening has led to taking classes in Horticulture at Foothill College, volunteering at the Los Altos History House garden, and volunteering at MACSA Adult Day Health Care Center in San Jose where she gardened with the clients and maintained the patio garden. She completed a course of study in Horticultural Therapy (the use of gardening for therapeutic purposes) after a year-long internship.

Chuck and Anne moved to Saint Helena full time in time in July 2004 after four years of commuting back and forth to Los Altos.

The McMinn family also includes two sons, Dan and Brad, and their wives.

Dan graduated in 1999 from UC Berkeley, having majored in History and minored in Business. In June 2003 he completed a two-year commitment serving in the Peace Corps in Kherson, Ukraine (Yes, Peace Corps training began with intensive Russian language study!). He met and married his wife, Lesya Krikun, there and they are both now in the process of working through the paperwork to allow Lesya to come to the US. In the mean time Dan is working as a journalist and editor and Lesya is working on software development for several Ukrainian businesses.

Brad graduated from Duke University in 2002 with a degree in Computer Science and Economics, married fellow Dukie Melanie Truesdale, and is now working for AMS, a consulting firm in Fairfax, Virginia. Melanie is working hard as a medical student at George Washington University Medical School. Brad and Melanie’s participation in the Marching and Pep Bands (of which Brad was a drum major and Melanie a trumpet player) has led to the whole family becoming eager Duke basketball fans!