Lisa Howard grew up on a farm in the Suisun Valley in Fairfield, but her passion was math. In the summer she would pester he mom to put together math worksheets.
“But when people would ask me, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ they never asked me, ‘Would you like to be an engineer?’ or ‘Would you want to be an architect?’ she recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, maybe one day, Lisa, you’ll be a teacher.’ Like they knew I liked math, but the closest thing they could get to that was a math teacher. Or a nurse, never the doctor.”
But in high school, Howard already knew that she wanted to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and study agricultural engineering. She got that degree and landed a job as an engineer in Arizona to build irrigation systems.
In Arizona, she met her husband, Cliff, a Phoenix police detective, who convinced her to return to her roots in the Suisun Valley. They did so in 2014 and are now co-owners of Tolenas Vineyards and Winery at 4185 Chadbourne Road in Fairfield. Lisa still uses her engineering knowledge in growing grapes. And she encourages other women to follow in her footsteps.
“For me, it’s really important to make sure that young girls are exposed to all the different career options that they can do and not pigeonhole them into something just because they are a girl,” she said.
She understands the challenges.
“There are starting to be more programs to accept women into college and into these certain careers,” she said. “But then, when they want to be in charge and run the business, that’s another hurdle. I would show up to a project management meeting, and other engineers would say, ‘Okay, we can start this meeting whenever the engineer is here.’ And I would say, ‘Um, that’s me. I’m here.'”
She said the biggest challenge for herself and other women is balancing a business with home life.
“I think a lot of women are scared to start their own business, especially if it’s not a home-based business, because a lot of us still want to be moms and we want to have a family,” she noted. “And you have to find a partner or a husband that is willing to help you at home and take on different roles than maybe they normally would… My husband is very supportive and willing to do anything. But you are still mom and your kids still want you and if you are out running a big business and it’s turning into something very demanding of your time, that balance is challenging.”
The Howards have three children, Jake, age 8, Amy, 6, and Katie, 4. Like Lisa with her parents, they are learning farm life hands-on.
“They have to be part of this life. Otherwise, it doesn’t work for us,” said Lisa. “They are part of what we do, all of the time. Katie was born right in the middle of harvest. And she lived in a backpack, I had my little pouch or she would be sleeping in a little carrier.”
Lisa’s parents, Steve and Linda Tenbrink, are first-generation farmers.
“We watched them as children create this business from scratch, acquiring property slowly and working their butts off,” said Lisa. “I didn’t know what it was like to grow up in town or have neighbors’ kids close by. As I got older and had to start being more and more part of the business, the more I realized that it was probably a little bit too hard of a life for me to want to be part of as an adult. So I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be part of the farming life and that I would get a really good job that paid a lot of money and had benefits and health care and all of that good stuff.”
That’s just what she did, landing that well-paying job in Arizona. But Cliff, who she married in 2011, knew where her heart was.
“Cliff has always been talented in the real estate market. He’s always watched it very carefully. He said, ‘I really think that if we ever want to move back to Suisun Valley we need to do this now. The market is going to go up and if we don’t move now I will just be on the path to becoming a career police officer and we will have more children and we won’t want to move them in high school, so let’s move back.'”
“My initial reaction was, ‘You’re crazy. We have such a good life here. Why would we want to leave?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but I just see it in you that Suisun Valley is in your heart and farming is in your heart and you want to carry on your family’s legacy and I just really have a sense that we should be back there.’”
Lisa reluctantly agreed, even though she had many tearful nights, thinking, “What are we doing? What are we giving up?” She admitted that she still had doubts after the move.
“I kept telling Cliff, ‘What did you do to us? This is horrible!'” she said. “But he was right. And honestly, if we had even waited another month on pulling the trigger on moving we wouldn’t have been able to afford the beautiful property that we were able to buy.”
They bought that 55-acre property in the northernmost section of the Suisun Valley in 2014 and attempted to farm the existing crops — grapes, prunes, pears and walnuts. But after two years, they realized it wasn’t enough to keep them afloat financially.
“When we were trying to decide what we were going to do with this property, how we were going to pay this mortgage, Chuck Wagner of Caymus Winery came into Suisun Valley and was showing interest in the area,” said Lisa. “My sister worked for the Napa Jet Center at the time and Chuck tends to fly in and out of there and we said, ‘Gosh, how are we going to get his attention? How can we get him to come out and talk to us about leasing our property?’ Cliff wrote up a letter and my sister snuck it on the airplane on his seat on one of his flights. And he picked up the letter and the next time we saw Chuck, he said, “Oh, I know who you are!’ And we were able to secure a lease.”
So Caymus ripped out the existing crops, planted the new vineyard and made a deal with the Howards to buy back some grapes but also allow the couple to harvest some of their own grapes.
Another connection helped the Howards secure the building they use as the winery. Lisa knew Bob Hansen, who managed a building next door to the Suisun Valley Fruit Growers cooperative off of Rockville Road. She would go with her dad to pick up supplies there when she was a little girl.
“And so when we were interested in the property,” said Lisa, “I wrote him a letter that said, I know that there are a lot of other people interested in your property. But I vow to keep it in agriculture and to keep the legacy of Suisun Valley going and to make him proud that he was giving an opportunity to somebody who grew up here and not just somebody with millions of dollars.”
Hansen sold them the property which now houses their winery.
Lisa noted that she learned the old-school method of making wine from her parents, but her parents learned it from Abe Schoener, the assistant winemaker at Luna Vineyards in Napa. At a farmers ‘ market, he met Lisa’s mom, Linda, where Lisa had a sign that said, “Wine grapes for sale.” Schoener asked skeptically, “Are you really trying to sell wine grapes in Napa while you’re selling fruit in a farmers market?”
According to Lisa, her mom looked him straight in the eye and said, “Well, you think that my husband’s peaches and vegetables and tomatoes are the best things that you’ve tasted in your life. What makes you think that he can’t grow the best wine grapes?” So Schoener took a look at the Tenbrinks’ property and asked them to build him a winery that he would rent from them. He bought the grapes from them and also taught them how to make wine.
“And so my dad would make wine every year,” said Lisa. “And whenever I would come home to visit, especially if it were during harvest, I would pop in there and it would definitely light something up inside of me.”
That light burned until Lisa decided to move back home, where her parents taught her and Cliff the art of winemaking.
“We really are very low intervention,” said Lisa of their approach to making wine. “So for a lot of our red wines we used native yeast, native fermentation. Sometimes they call that spontaneous fermentation. It’s risky. When you innoculate with a commercial yeast, you have that one yeast that does all of the work from beginning to end. With native yeast it’s not one species, it’s all these different ones that do these different jobs at different times. So when it’s cold there is yeast that is working. As it starts to warm up and the alcohol gets higher, a different yeast takes over and it’s this whole population of lots of different yeasts, which allows for a more complex flavor. It has more dimension to it.
“And we are very gentle in our winemaking. We really don’t have a lot of automation, a lot of fancy equipment. It’s very hands-on, very old school. But I’m still an engineer by trade and I love technology and I love science and I love improvement so I’m always trying to bring in a little twist on that, kind of old school meets new school kind of mentality.”
The Howards won a gold medal at the 2019 International Women’s Wine Competition for their white pinot noir. Lisa said that hit them with the realization that “this is real, this is really a business. We are really doing this, and all of this hard work that we are pumping into this is going to pay off and to just keep going.”
She now has no regrets that she returned home to work the land.
“Our hearts will always be about agriculture,” she said. “Sometimes in the wine world and winemaking and winetasting, people forget that it really is an agricultural product. And that’s where our hearts are.”
To learn more, visit www.tolenaswinery.com.
June 28, 2021 at 11:22PM
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Lisa Howard makes her mark in the world of wine - Vacaville Reporter
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