Bob & Marilyn Thaden met on the first day of college at Macalester College way back in 1966. Inseparable since then, they've gardened, traveled, made wine, gardened, made wine, traveled, made wine, etc. along with raising their two children.
Marilyn chose speech pathology to support her vices of gardening, music, traveling, wine drinking, parenting and community service. Bob spent 30 years as a United Church of Christ pastor in the upper west, and after achieving burnout, chose to pursue a different 'spirit' to uplift people's souls. Now he spends his summers weeding, training vines, weeding, pruning, weeding some more, and does a few weddings at the vineyard. He has been a winemaker for 50 years.
Son Josh joined the crew full-time in late 2010 to make it possible to keep up with all the hand labor. For as a boutique winery, all the summer work in the vineyard and all the winemaking, bottling, corking and labeling is done by hand. Josh is stronger than his father, meticulous to detail and can heft two cases of wine upstairs at a time, which his father won't even try! Since Oct 2015, Josh has been the head winemaker, and master of bottling and labeling leaving Bob free to do most of the work in the vineyard.