Not far from today's busy,
often disconnected world, you'll find
a farm community,
striving to do what's right.
Not only for themselves,
but for neighbors, the land,
and for generations to come.
He was
going to be famous Ben Kolber was.
I'm a trained musician from Berklee College
of Music with big plans to become a rock star,
famous musician, or whatever it
became to be. Whatever it became to be turned
out to be a winemaking internship on
the edge of the Pacific and a girl named
Madelyn.
We had a lot of enthusiasm about what we were doing. We
were young, we were excited about trying something new.
We were learning a lot. The setting that
we were in was a great setting for Mel and
I to fall in love. I mean it was gorgeous right? Lived on a the
edge of a cliff in a trailer. Everything was
new to me: driving forklifts - fantastic! I
mean I get to drive equipment. I loved it. I loved it.
They say wine and romance go hand in hand,
which in turn got Ben to take a life-changing
step. After our internship I
decided I wanted to be in Lodi. I
wanted to be by Madelyn. She had an opportunity to start
her family winery as the winemaker and I
had to find something to do. That something presented itself
the night a harvester broke down in the field.
So I remember it vividly laying down underneath someone
else's harvester and the grape juice kind of dripping on
our our faces and Kris cursing every
nut and bolt that we had to take off. And I'm sitting here holding the
flashlight and he looks at me and goes I hate working
on other people's equipment! And I go, "Let's buy one".
I don't even know what a grape harvester was at the time, but that was
my idea. I said let's let's buy one.
and
that's what we bought right there,
that was our first harvester.
Now 20 years later and with
a fleet of equipment, managing 3,200 acres, KG
isn't so much a company, as it
is a community. These families, these people that
offer their support for us to get started are our
very close friends now. It's a nice
community because people pull together and they want to help each other out.
It's become more than just work.
It's a way of life.
At KG, we all fall in line because Ben is
a great leader. He does it with a smile and he's
fun. And that's a big part of music is you
need a good drummer to keep time and Ben does
a great job of that. It was another musician, John
Lennon, who said "Life is
what happens when you're busy making other plans". For
Ben and Madelyn,
Plan B has worked out to be just fine.