Vintage Rice

By Laura Taxel

Fueled by a passion for wine, these Rice graduates left the office for the vineyard.

If you tell people you’re an accountant, insurance adjuster or computer programmer, it’s unlikely they’ll want to chat about your line of work. But if you let it slip that you’re a winemaker, their eyes are apt to light up. In the past 30 years, the fruit of the vine and everything connected to it have taken on a romance and cachet. The public now views growing grapes and transforming them into rosés, cabernets and chardonnays more as art than agriculture. Wineries have become travel destinations, and winemakers celebrities.

Three Rice alumni have joined the growing number of Americans producing, bottling and selling award-winning small-batch artisanal wines. But the three have another thing in common—they already were established and successful in very different professions before choosing to restart their careers as vintners.

While all three insist their new jobs are neither glamorous nor the stuff of novels and movies, none regret making the leap. John Livingston ’64 studied geology and was running an oil exploration and consulting company when he established a limited-production family winery in California’s famed Napa Valley. Gaye McNutt ’84, formerly a corporate attorney, owns a winery in Seattle with her husband and a vineyard three hours east on Red Mountain. Scott Betton ’99 walked away from a position as a chemical engineer to join his cousins in a fledgling winery on 80 rugged, undeveloped acres in the Sacramento Valley. While they’ve strayed far from their original careers, all agree that their Rice education and previous job experiences proved to be assets in their new lives as wine entrepreneurs.

• Growing a Second Career: John Livingston puts success in a bottle.
• Pouring with Passion: Winemaking helps Gaye McNutt’s family drink in the good life.
• Family Matters: Scott Betton engineers an escape from the daily grind.
  

The Rice Wine Club

Rice students are interested in the commercial side of wine as well as in the pleasures of drinking it.

The M.B.A. Wine Club, started in 2004 at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, sponsors tastings each semester and recently earned official recognition from the university. “We focus on education,” says current club president Anna Carter Reeve ’07, “and right now, we have more than 50 members.” The club holds seminars and other events, such as the panel discussion “The Business of Beer and Wine,” hosted by the Ideas to Action Club of the Jones School. John Livingston and Gaye McNutt were on the panel, along with another Rice alum, Brock Wagner ’87, co-founder of St. Arnold’s Brewery in Houston, and each shared fascinating stories and samples of their products.