Early on a late September morning, I stood in a vineyard with a plastic bucket and clippers picking grapes. After clipping the fruit that was easy to find, I pulled back the leaves to find the grapes that had matured in the shadows of the vine.

Above left: Bob Leidigh, shown here, is enjoying his 24th vintage as a home winemaker. Above right: Helping out at Chateau Leidigh is a stress reliever for Bob Alderette.
Bob Leidigh, center, and his wife, Barbara, received 11 medals in the State Fair’s home wine judging competition.

As the morning quietly progressed, more workers began arriving. Gradually, the vineyard began to fill up with lawyers - yes, lawyers - as well as Ph.Ds and various other kinds of professionals. The 15 members of our unusual picking crew had one thing in common: we were all friends of Bob and Barbara Leidigh.

Lawyers for the State of California by day, the Leidighs spend their spare time making award-winning wines on their property in the Sierra foothills near Placerville. The Leidighs make exceptional wines, wines that are often as good or better than wines made by commercial wineries.

But perhaps what is as extraordinary as the quality of their wines is how two lawyers with full-time jobs accomplish this feat. The Leidighs are not wealthy lawyers who can dabble in winemaking in the manner that some people buy racehorses or baseball teams. Rather, Bob, a Deputy Attorney General, and Barbara, an attorney for the State Water Resources Control Board, are personally involved in every phase of winemaking, from growing their own grapes through bottling their wine under the Chateau Leidigh label. Now in their 24th vintage of home winemaking, they produce 750 to 900 bottles in an average year. An enormous amount of work is involved.

To paraphrase the Beatles, the Leidighs have figured out how to get by with a little help from their friends. Through the years, Bob and Barbara have been assisted in their labors by a large group of friends who come help during the crush season and later return to help bottle the finished product. The group now numbers more than 50, with different groups of friends coming on different dates to help out. Most of the friends return year after year to help the Leidighs, and some help out on more than one weekend per season.

This unique arrangement, relying on friends to provide manual labor, was inspired by an advertisement that Bob saw in the Travel section of the Sacramento Bee several years ago. The advertisement offered readers an opportunity to spend a week performing light duties at a winery in Oregon. The cost, which included lodging and meals, was $995 per person.

Upon seeing the ad, Bob thought he could offer his friends a much better deal. So he put together a flier offering a chance to assist in the light duties of winemaking for free and sent it to his friends. Many of them took him up on the offer, and the group has grown over time.

To thank participants for their labor, Barbara provides participants with a lunch or dinner of homegrown lamb or beef and vegetables. The Leidighs also later on give participants shirts commemorating their participation and some bottles of wine they’ve helped to make.

Jennifer Rockwell, who works with Bob at the Attorney General’s Office, said she enjoyed helping the Leidighs make wine because it let her see the science involved in winemaking. “ It was really nice to see, up close, how it gets done,” she said.

Another one of Bob’s colleagues, Steve Egan, said he appreciated Bob’s patience and willingness to explain the process in minute detail. Participating in the winemaking process is a great stress reliever in addition to being a learning experience, said Robert Alderette, director of the Equal Employment Rights and Resolution Office for the Department of Justice.

Leading that learning experience also makes the process more enjoyable for Bob Leidigh. “I really enjoy showing friends who like wine how it is made and what all is involved in the process,” he said. “My ultimate satisfaction comes from ‘mentoring’ others as they go beyond just being associate home winemakers here to become home winemakers on their own.”

The Leidighs’ interest in winemaking began in the summer of 1980 when they visited their friends, Ed and Anne Conry, in Logan, Utah. The Conrys, who had trouble finding alcoholic beverages in that mostly-dry state, had started making wine from reconstituted raisins. They explained the winemaking process to the Leidighs. Upon their return to their Carmichael home, the Leidighs made some red wine from some Concord drapes in their backyard.

That first wine wasn’t very good, but Bob proceeded to take a basic winemaking course at UC Davis. More courses at UC Davis followed, and the Leidighs also joined the Sacramento Home Winemakers’ Club in an effort to learn more about home winemaking.

In 1987, the Leidighs bought five acres in the foothills. They have planted hundreds of vines on a quarter of their property. At one point, the Leidighs had as many as 25 different varieties of grapes growing on their property as they experimented to see what varietals do best at their site.

While Bob does most of the farming related to the vines, Barbara, who earned a master’s degree in zoology before attending law school, does most of the chemistry in the winemaking process. Through the years, the Leidighs’ wines have won more than 200 gold, silver and bronze awards in home wine judging competitions. At the 2003 California State Fair, their wines earned 11 awards including double gold medals for their Zinfandel and their Bordeaux Blend. (According to the Sacramento Home Winemakers’ website, a double gold is awarded when all three judges on a panel believe that a particular wine should receive a gold medal.)

Sacramento wine expert Darryl Corti of Corti Brothers, who has tasted wines made by the Sacramento Home Winemakers for more than 25 years, said the Leidighs’ wines “have improved quite dramatically over the years” to the point that “sometimes the wines are better than commercial quality wines.”

Corti said that the Leidighs were also notable in that they make wine using grapes from a vineyard that they planted themselves. “ There are people who start their own vineyards and never make wine,” he said.

The day that I participated in the grape harvest was a somewhat typical harvest day. I helped pick Cabernet Sauvignon grapes at a small vineyard.

After filling our buckets with grapes, we emptied the buckets into tubs at the end of each row of vines. The tubs were hauled in carts to the front of the vineyard, where Bob and others used a machine called a de-stemmer/crusher to crush the grapes and separate out the stems. The grape juice, seeds and skins were gathered in plastic containers for the beginning of the complicated process of winemaking. At the end of the morning, the Leidighs set out a wonderful lunch for their picking crew.

All the effort is worthwhile, according to the Leidighs, who met as freshmen at UC Davis. “I enjoy doing something that is totally unrelated to my profession,” Bob said. “That’s why people do hobbies. Many times its an escape from the workaday world. . . . And unlike a lot of hobbies, you can enjoy the final product.”

Barbara said that, while she enjoys the social aspect of winemaking, her husband “is crazy about it. I like the result. The product is good, the quality is nice. Its fun to work with other people.” Bob says that he hopes someday (when he retires) to turn Chateau Leidigh into a commercial enterprise as a boutique winery. Regardless of when that day arrives, the Leidighs have already achieved a great deal. Not only do they make wonderful wine, they have found a way to share their time and two decades of expertise with their friends and colleagues. That’s quite a bountiful harvest, indeed!