Bo Barret

Bo Barrett thought he would follow in his father's footsteps and become an attorney, but he wound up following his father in a different way. In the early seventies, Bo's first job was pulling weeds and picking up rocks at his father's recently purchased vineyard, Chateau Montelena, a Napa Valley winery best known for its 1973 Chardonnay that won the 1976 Judgment of Paris wine tasting. Even though dad was his boss, Bo had to start at the bottom.

"I was like the lowest-level peon down at the bottom," Bo said. "My father said, 'You start at the bottom.'

He’d been in the Navy, so you start at the bottom, man your shovel, and start digging, and that’s how you learn the business. I worked my way up year after year."

Forty years later, Bo is the CEO and master winemaker of the same vineyard he says his father purchased as an escape from the law business. Bo had assumed he would go into law, so he started at the University of Utah, taking general education classes that "started after two o'clock in the afternoon so I could ski all day." Increasingly drawn to winemaking, Bo then transferred to Fresno State to study viticulture and oenology.

“The wine business, it’s a really creative and dynamic industry, and it’s hard to explain, but it just gets in your blood. So some people just get sucked in, and so I got in it. I started in it just as a way to make money, and then it turned out to be something that really soothed my personal dynamics, my interests," he said.

Listen to the interview to find out how being colorblind influenced Bo's career path, what it means to work one's way up the ladder at a winery, and why it's important to learn from other people's experiences, especially their mistakes.

Highlights

Parent's expectations: My grandfather was an Irish immigrant, and so my father always said, "You gotta work, and if you wanna live in this house, you have to have a full-time job, be a full-time student," that type of thing.

What Bo's degree means to him: I learned the language, I learned where to look stuff up, and I learned how to learn. And that was the best thing.

College degree as union card: I took Chaucer at night because it's a credit. You're just trying to go through school, get your credits stacked up so you can get in, get out, get your union card. 'Cause I do think the university degree is like a union card. It gets you interviewed better and one whole layer up in the hiring circuit.