Members of the Komes family gather around grapes freshly picked on their 650-acre Flora Springs vineyard in the Napa Valley. Some 80 percent of their harvest is sold to other winemakers.
In the early 1970s, John Komes was the owner of a successful construction company in the East Bay area of San Francisco. As the son of Jerry Komes, president of the giant Bechtel Construction Co., he had no reason to suppose he would ever move on from the family business.
Then, one day, his wife, trying to come up with something new for his birthday, bought him a ticket to a wine-appreciation class. John had only a mild interest in winemaking at the time, yet the class completely changed his life.
When his father retired in 1977, Komes Sr. decided to buy a 12,000-sq.ft. estate house in St. Helena that had originally been the Napa Valley home of winemaker Louis Martini. It happened that the deal also included an abandoned winery and vineyards, and this was enough to get Komes Jr. remembering what he had learned at the wine classes. With his father’s help, he began making plans to revive the winery, naming it after Jerry’s wife and John’s mother, Flora.
Read the entire article in the January 2008 issue
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