Younger generations: The fresh faces taking charge at family wineries

How would you like to work with your mum and dad? And then take over after they’ve stepped back? Five minutes spent thinking about this prospect will reveal, I suspect, the shock of the challenge. (I loved my mum and dad – but I’d have flunked.)

Not many of us, though, are born into small family businesses, where every nuance of our parents’ working lives provides the backdrop to our childhood. Fewer still into farming businesses, rooted in land, place, origin, a local culture, a partnership with the environment.

Fewer yet again into a farming business where the primary crop is not only grown but transformed, crafted, aged, packaged and sold, sometimes to a global marketplace. The life of a wine-grower is the life less ordinary. Imagine yourself into that life and you can see why the pull might be strong.

You’ll have watched the struggles of your parents and grandparents; you’ll know the intimacies of ownership, for better and worse. The domaine, the quinta or the tenuta isn’t just a business; it’s more like an eternal child, continually growing into something new, and requiring constant love and care to ensure that this process is successful.

The decision about what you do with your life is marbled with responsibility: can you really walk away from that child? Hence the fascination of the stories in the profiles that follow.