We had no clue that my first vintage of making wine would be during my dad’s last year on earth.
We didn’t know that during the summer morning of 2012, when he helped me tend to our Syrah vines in the Sta. Rita Hills under unseasonably warm, sunny skies. We didn’t know that in the fall, when my dad harvested his own grapes of Merlot and Syrah at my childhood home in the hilly suburbs of East San Jose, where I’d convinced him to plant the otherwise useless backyard slope in vines.
And we didn’t know that as the calendar approached winter, when my own son—then just on the verge of turning three years old—hopped into our bin at Ampelos Cellars in Lompoc to foot-stomp my first harvest, adding a third generation of Kettmanns to the bottling.
But come May 26, 2013, just two weeks after my parents took us all to Disneyland, my dad was gone, having succumbed at just 63 years of age to a typically treatable leukemia that he’d been secretly fighting for a decade. His silence—and my mom’s—around the disease was because the doctors said he should live well into his 70s. Given that kind of prognosis, he didn’t want others to worry about him, to ask him incessantly how he was doing, to change their lives because of him.
No one expected the cancer to turn so suddenly for the worse. What I also didn’t expect was how his absence would lead me to search, albeit in subtle, even subconscious ways, for new father figures in my life. Men who could continue to lead me along my own path into middle age and parenthood.
Three generations of Kettmanns (from left, Matt, Mason, and Dennis) in the pool with the East San Jose vines in the background. – Image Courtesy of Matt Kettmann, Getty Images
Thankfully, me and my dad’s relationship was always tight. My mom’s ascension from-receptionist-to-top-floor in Silicon Valley enabled him to mostly retire for the better part of two decades, not having to return to the tech lab grind of his first career when his struggling golf shop closed.
He was the one who drove my brother and I to school nearly every day until friends turned 16, enduring our endless cassette loops of A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory (which he tolerated more than The Pharcyde and Snoop Dogg).
We were lucky enough to take family vacations abroad every few years. When I was 14, I watched him try to grab his first Guinness pour in Ireland way before it had time to properly settle. A few years later, we hunted for the best gazpacho in Portugal together. We frequently crammed our family of four (and sometimes more) into a tiny seaside studio near Santa Cruz, and golfed together a lot, including on some of the world’s most iconic holes.
When I graduated college, I sought a more grown-up connection. So, I bought him a homebrewing kit, just like the one he’d helped me get when I was 21.
The first harvest of the Clover Oak Drive vineyard in East San Jose. – Image Courtesy of Matt Kettmann, Getty Images
Then I learned, mostly through my mom, that he really didn’t drink that much beer anymore. And certainly not the high potency, occasionally funky stuff that comes out of homebrew kits. (As a mid-forty-something myself now, I no longer drink much of that kind of beer, either.) Instead, as my work as a journalist in Santa Barbara dove deeper and deeper into wine, we connected over that, hence the vines he planted in the backyard.
I’m still a journalist, and never intended to be a winemaker. But I figured that the best way to learn about my preferred topic of writing was to make some myself.
That led me and my good friend Giuseppe Bonfiglio to a partnership with Peter Work, the cheerful, professorial vintner behind Ampelos Cellars who owns a beautiful vineyard in the heart of the Sta. Rita Hills.
Even before my dad passed, I saw Work as a father figure of sorts, holding my hand through the various stages of a biodynamic vineyard’s year, and then opening my eyes to the ways of a cellar. We eventually made more than a half-dozen wines together, including a few, like our 2018 Carignan, that changed his own outlook on wine and opened his eyes to a new varietal for his brand.
After my dad died, more fathers emerged. There were my many uncles—one of whom delivered a ton of under-ripe Cabernet Sauvignon from Lake County to me that next vintage, a hilarious tale all its own.
Dennis Kettmann’s backyard vineyard of Merlot and Syrah in the hills of East San Jose, the home where Matt grew up. – Image Courtesy of Matt Kettmann, Getty Images
But many came straight from the world of wine.
There’s my Wine Enthusiast assistant, Chris Coffman, the retired father of my good friend, who helped me erect a stone bench in my backyard where I laid my dad’s ashes, and who helps me process hundreds of reviews every month.
There’s the photographer Macduff Everton, who pushed me to do a book with him, providing sage guidance the whole way toward publishing Vines & Vision: The Winemakers of Santa Barbara County.
And then there’s the legendary Richard Sanford, the man who proved Pinot Noir could work in Santa Barbara County in the 1970s. My dad died a few days after an anniversary tasting was held at the old Sanford & Benedict barn, and Sanford was the first to emphasize to me how life-changing it is to lose a parent.
He was also the first to congratulate me when I was hired by Wine Enthusiast in 2014, and later even “knighted” me with a few of his favorite bow ties. To this day, he reminds me of my unique responsibility as an official scribe for this industry, for this region and for this era.
I was blessed enough to have a fantastic dad from birth. But it’s been rewarding to appreciate how my life, through wine, has been enriched by so many others, friends and mentors who serve as fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. I’m not sure if that happens so much in other industries. Maybe it does.
As to the actual wines of 2012? A bit of a mixed bag. I hand-bottled the inaugural vintage of Merlot and Syrah that my dad harvested from our San Jose backyard, after he’d put in it carboys and served the blend at his memorial. The wine was horrible, and we all had a good laugh.
Image Courtesy of Dorenda Kettmann, Getty Images
But our Sta. Rita Hills Syrah from the Ampelos Vineyard was magical, mixing cooler-climate qualities of pepper and bloody game with riper, rich black fruits from a generously warmer vintage. It really tastes of life and death at once.
I called my brand Periodista, which means “journalist” in Spanish (another different, hilarious tale), and labeled the Syrah as the “Big D,” which was my dad’s nickname. In smaller type, it says “Touched by Three Generations — A Toast to Dennis Kettmann 1949-2013.”
It’s the best wine we ever made, something that my extended family relies on to remember my dad. It’s also the vintage that marked the end of one relationship, and the start of many more.
More Stories About Dads and Wine
In “Father Knows Best: Advice on Life, Love and Wine,” writer Daniela Serrano explores the best dating advice she received from her father through the lens of wine suggestions.
Writer Ted Simmons explores his relationship with his father in the aftermath of Jimmy Buffet’s death in “Long Live Margaritaville: The Undying Emotional Appeal of Jimmy Buffett.”
To celebrate the drinks-loving man in your life, take a look at this hand-picked gift guide.
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