As Julio Covarrubias stood at the foot of a row of grapevines in the Livermore Valley where he has spent the last half-century toiling in the vines, there was a sense that all he now surveyed was his. 

Covarrubias has spent the last 52 years working in Livermore’s wine grape industry – a staggering 49 of them at iconic Wente Vineyards, where he started at the age of 17 and climbed the ladder from laborer to senior management. 

“Everything that I know I learned because of them,” said Covarrubias of his former employers. 

Since retiring from Wente two years ago, Covarrubias has worked solely for himself. A little over two decades back, he bought a 20-acre plot of vineyard land from the Wente family and now tends his own vines on his own soil. He calls the family vineyard Casa de Viñas. 

Every day, Covarrubias walks the rows of his vines, applying his half-century worth of knowledge to the tending of his grapes. He can tell by looking at the vines if something is wrong or something is right. He’s accompanied in the vineyards by a soundtrack of chirping birds and the occasional car whizzing down the country road that fronts his home. 

“When I’m here in the vineyards, it’s just me and the vineyards,” Covarrubias said. “It gives me the opportunity to be thankful for the things I have.” 

There was a time when the Covarrubias family didn’t have much. Covarrubias was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. The family moved to Tracy in 1967 when he was a kid, arriving with no English under his belt. As an immigrant family, it was difficult to find landlords willing to rent to them.

“When I came to this country, my father, he had no money, he had no car, he had no driver’s license,” Covarrubias said. “For him, it was starting on the very bottom.” 

Covarrubias’ father also worked in the vineyards. Covarrubias’ opportunity came when a cousin landed a job at Wente Vineyards but at the last minute decided not to take it and urged Covarrubias to report in his stead. 

Covarrubias landed the Wente job at age 17, and with incredible foresight for a teenager, immediately bought his first house. Over the years as he started his own family, he and his wife would buy more houses to use as rentals. Back in the early days of his career, his biggest dream was to one day own a motorhome. The idea of owning his own vineyard wasn’t even an inkling. 

“It’s like trying to go to another planet,” he laughed. 

When the opportunity came in 2003 to buy Casa de Viñas from the Wente family, he sold off all of his investment properties in order to buy his own land.  

“I gave all of that away just to own this vineyard,” he said surrounded by clusters of fat purple grapes nearly ready for harvest. “Being able to just enjoy every day being around the vineyards.” 

Covarrubias speaks with great reverence of his decades with the Wente family when he developed a passion for winemaking. But he remembers a period early on when he considered pursuing a different career to try to earn more money. His father talked him into staying. 

“He told me to stay,” Covarrubias recalled. “He said, ‘Money is not everything in the world, especially when you love and you have a passion for what you love.’” 

These days, the passion is still there for Covarrubias. He especially loves harvest time, when the grapes are bursting with sugar, ready for their transformation from field to tank to bottle. Covarrubias savors the moments pacing his rows of vines, tasting the grapes — finding that moment when the sugar has reached perfection. 

His palate has been honed over five decades of vineyard work. Maybe it’s a metaphor for his own life — working and waiting patiently until it’s reached the perfect harmony of sweet and acidic. 

“You just do it hoping that tomorrow is better, hoping that tomorrow is not going to be so warm, hoping that tomorrow is not going to be windy,” Covarrubias opined. “That hope is what is going to get you to the end of the season.”