Vaquero. Vintner. Landman. Leader.

Vaquero. Vintner.
Landman. Leader.

Could James Ontiveros Be the Most
Important Man in West Coast Wine?

By Matt Kettmann | Photos by Macduff Everton
February 27, 2025

If you just stick to the nine generations of California family history and first 35 years in the life of James Ontiveros, there’s enough to qualify this vaquero-vintner as a bona fide Golden State legend. That version is a heartwarming hometown tale of local-boy-done-good, about a rodeo rider who discovered wine in college, attracted unprecedented acclaim for his native Santa Maria Valley, and built an honest, humble wine brand called Native 9 that’s respected far and wide. 

But the modern Ontiveros saga was only just beginning. Over the past dozen years, this Righetti High and Cal Poly grad emerged as a cunning landman and consummate dealmaker, attracting investment from the world’s wealthiest institutions to develop more than 10,000 acres of prime vineyard land from California to Oregon. Armed with country charm, a crisp Stetson, and a warm handshake, Ontiveros and his business partner Matt Turrentine built Grapevine Capital Partners into one of the most important growers on the entire West Coast, selling grapes and bulk wine to the biggest — as well as some of the smaller — brands on the planet.

Being big is not the point.

Ontiveros is determined to figure out what the modern wine consumer wants, and then to provide the grapes that wineries need to deliver as much. That’s making Grapevine Capital a leader on all fronts, from selecting strategic sites that have optimal soils and water supplies to innovating their vineyards to produce exceptional grapes at prices that everyday Americans can afford.

“Size doesn’t motivate us. We don’t need to be big,” said Ontiveros, who oversees vineyards across the Central Coast, up through Napa and Mendocino, and into the Willamette and Umpqua valleys of Oregon. “We knew that if we could have really high-quality vineyards in each AVA that mattered, that would be the easiest way for bigger wineries to go, ‘These guys just have everything we need.’ ”

Adding to the drama is that Ontiveros is reaching this pinnacle right as the wine industry teeters on the brink of, if not collapse, a precarious fall from the comfortable pedestal it’s enjoyed since the early 1990s. Wine in 2025 is fighting headwinds from every direction. As their older, reliable consumers fade away, younger consumers are inundated with other options, from ready-to-drink cocktails and hard seltzer to legal cannabis and quasi-legal psychedelics. There’s a growing temperance movement that’s further fueled by controversial and disputed government warnings. The cost of labor and required goods are exploding. And the overabundance of existing wine with decreasing thirst is throwing the supply-demand curve for a loop.

Straddling the economic chasm between the institution-backed Grapevine and the hands-on nature of Native 9, Ontiveros is one of the few American vintners deeply entrenched in both the massive and tiny sides of the industry.

“Most people can’t play in both worlds, and he moves through them seamlessly and really effortlessly,” said winemaker Trey Fletcher, who worked briefly with Ontiveros and then became a close friend. “He can speak both languages, and sincerely. It’s really rare and hard to do.”

That also means Ontiveros feels these current pains more sharply than maybe anyone, which makes him all the more eager to salve them.

During a recent visit to his home ranch in the gentle hills on the southern side of the Santa Maria Valley, Ontiveros pointed toward 75 acres of vineyard that he was ripping out. The 15-year-old pinot noir should have lasted another decade, but it was showing signs of leaf roll disease and, more critically, just was not paying the bills. This removal reduced his personal vineyard holdings — which he cherry-picked for his Native 9 and Ranchos de Ontiveros brands and then sold the vast majority of the rest — from 167 peak acres down to a mere 50, erasing millions of dollars of future personal earnings.

“This is what I thought would be my retirement,” Ontiveros told me as baby sheep and goats chewed up the recently emptied field, where he figured grape sales would fund his last chapters. “It’s all in a pile.” The land will all be raspberries soon, a “higher and better use,” a phrase Ontiveros and countless other farmers are prone to say.

While Grapevine Capital appears to have achieved a scale that’s well prepared to weather the incoming storms, Ontiveros fears for the future of small, family-owned brands like Native 9 that make fewer than 5,000 cases of wine annually. Though these wineries are small individually, together they amount to more than two-thirds of the American wine industry.

“I’m a believer this will turn around, but our challenge is that we make really good wines, and we struggle to sell them,” said Ontiveros of how hard it is to make this once-sustainable business model work in today’s market. “This industry is at a point now where there has to be reckoning. This has built up so much, it needs to soufflé.”

To the Ninth Degree

The wine spark for James Ontiveros came in the mid-1990s. While a student at Cal Poly, it dawned on him that his parents’ property was directly across the Santa Maria Valley from the coveted grapevines of Bien Nacido, Nielson, and Cambria vineyards. 

“We overlook the greatest vineyards in California — that’s the entire viewshed,” he explained. “I started thinking that this place can’t be that different from over there. Why couldn’t we do this here?”

So, in 1997, Ontiveros — whose family came to the New World in the late 1500s, moved to California in 1781, and became the Santa Maria Valley’s first farmers in the 1850s — planted five acres of pinot noir on what his family called Rancho Ontiveros. “For a 23-year-old kid, that was pretty unique,” he said. “The wine business wasn’t really a thing in Santa Barbara County at that point yet. There weren’t all these young people doing it. Aside from Andrew Murray, I was arguably the only other young person who was digging in on their own.”

He was continuing a family farming tradition that stretches back to Sinaloa, Mexico, where his ancestors arrived from Spain in the late 1500s. In 1781, Josef Ontiveros came to California as a soldier with the second overland expedition of Spanish colonists. After Mexico won its independence from Spain, Josef’s grandson, Juan Pacifico, who had been baptized by Father Junipero Serra, bought a land grant that covered most of modern-day Orange County.

The ambitious Californio also married Maria Osuna, the stepdaughter of Tomas Olivera, a wealthy supervisor of Santa Barbara’s three mission ranches. In 1853, Ontiveros sold off most of the Orange County land and, two years later, bought the nearly 9,000-acre Rancho Tepusquet from his in-laws.

In 1856, Ontiveros drove thousands of cattle to his new rancho north of Santa Barbara, arriving on St. Mary’s Day, thereby christening the Santa Maria Valley. From then until he died in 1877, Juan Pacifico Ontiveros lived in his impressive adobe home, which still stands in the middle of Bien Nacido Vineyard.

But the disastrous drought of the 1860s decimated the region’s cattle business and broke up many of the historic properties. “That ended the rancho way of life,” said James Ontiveros wistfully. “My great-grandfather was the last to hold any significant chunk of Rancho Tepusquet.”

The valley’s crops went from cattle to grain to sugar beets to, in the 1960s, wine grapes. In fact, within the boundaries of the original Tepusquet sit the modern vineyards of Nielson, Bien Nacido, Cambria, Byron, Riverbench, Goodchild, and Rancho Viñedo. The latter was planted by the Woods family in 1973 but leased by James Ontiveros in 2012, marking a return of sorts to his family’s historic holdings. Under Grapevine Capital, Ontiveros also now controls the old Nielson Vineyard and former Byron Winery.

While they lost their land for a while, the Ontiveros family never left Santa Maria. In 1985, James’s parents bought a property that sits just south of the historic Tepusquet, where they raised cattle and sheep. The land would become known as Rancho Ontiveros, the site of those first vines that Ontiveros planted while in college. 

“I didn’t even really want to go to school — I just wanted to go to work,” said Ontiveros. But Cal Poly gave him a scholarship for rodeo, so he studied animal science. “It’s a lot more science than it is animals,” he explained, so he switched to crop and fruit science and took his first viticultural class in 1995. Two years later, he was working seasonally for Kendall-Jackson, traveling to vineyards across California, and took a similar grower relations job with Gallo upon graduating in 1999, when he moved to Healdsburg. “Between 1996 and 2000, those were the halcyon years,” said Ontiveros of his early days in the business. “That’s when California’s wine grape acreage doubled.”

At the very first World of Pinot Noir in Pismo Beach in 2001, he ran into the Miller family, who own Bien Nacido Vineyard, where his ancestor’s adobe still stands. “What’s a Santa Barbara boy doing working in Sonoma County?” they asked him. “Why not come work for us?” His mom had just been in a bad car crash, so Ontiveros was already looking to come home.

For a dozen years, Ontiveros served as the Miller family’s director of sales and marketing, primarily in charge of selling Bien Nacido grapes to wineries whose products could elevate the vineyard’s reputation. His success was unprecedented, as Bien Nacido became known as the “most vineyard-designated vineyard” in the world.

“A large part of that was James really being able to put it together and find the right people and right wineries,” explained his friend Fletcher, who came from the Sonoma Coast to Bien Nacido in 2012. Fletcher witnessed Ontiveros in action, walking the vineyard with prospective grape buyers from around the state. “James Ontiveros is no dummy,” said Fletcher, now the winemaker for Sanford Winery. “A lot of people can be entranced by his country charm, but he’s highly intelligent, really thoughtful, and really motivated.”

Ontiveros helped show Nicholas Miller the ropes when he joined the family business in the mid-2000s. “He was a fantastic ambassador for me entering the industry,” said Miller, who came to appreciate the authentic, if uncommon, way that Ontiveros came to wine. “Most people in wine start with wine, and they arrive somewhere because of wine and then put down their roots. James’s perspective is different. He started with California and then found his way into wine.”

That Ontiveros’s success continued after leaving Bien Nacido was no surprise, but his method and speed of doing so under Grapevine Capital certainly was. “I don’t think anyone in the industry saw that coming,” said Miller. “That was a novel idea that James and Matt put together.”

Growing Grapevine

Though not quite up to nine, Matt Turrentine is the third generation of his family to be in the wine business. His grandfather, Dan Turrentine, a journalist turned California wine industry marketing machine, started Turrentine Brokerage as a retirement project in 1973.

“It was an excuse to drive around Napa and Sonoma, drop off samples, and stay in touch with friends,” explained Matt of the Marin-based brokerage, which serves as a middleman between independent farmers who grow grapes and the wineries that buy them. When Matt’s father, Bill Turrentine, signed on in 1977, he grew Turrentine Brokerage into one of the two primary brokerages for grapes and bulk wine in California. (Ciatti is the other.)

Soon after Matt started working at Turrentine in 2004, Bill asked his friend James Ontiveros to introduce his son to the Central Coast. James, who is 51, and Matt, who is 44, clicked right away.

“We quickly developed a lot of mutual respect and an appreciation for our complementary skillsets,” said Turrentine. “I’m not a farmer. I don’t know how to drive a tractor. I’ve always been more of the business and sales side. James is more focused on the farming and real estate side.”

With the wine business mostly thriving through the 2000s, they watched as big money came down from Napa to buy up Central Coast ranches. “We were effectively running businesses for other people, and in some cases, I was helping large growers get new investors and raise capital,” said Turrentine. “Ultimately, I realized, ‘Why am I doing this for someone else?’ ”

The two took the leap in 2012, leaving their jobs to start Grapevine Capital Partners. The goal was to develop vineyards on behalf of institutional investors, such as pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies.

No one took them seriously until Harvard University — which sits on the largest endowment in the world, valued at $52 billion last year — agreed to a meeting. But it would be on Christmas Eve, during a polar vortex.

“We were being tested,” said Ontiveros. “These institutional investors are not just robots placing money bets. They’re actively vetting everything all the way through. They’re betting on people more than they’re betting on the rest of it.”

It was a successful meeting, and soon Grapevine was planting a large vineyard in Shandon east of Paso Robles. The hot, dry region didn’t have the best reputation for quality grapes, but Ontiveros knew better.

“As a farmer, you’re just looking for the right natural resources,” he said. “It had great soils. It had phenomenal water. But it had been hamstrung by a reputation that it was all bulk wine. We were the first people to do high-quality, modern viticulture out there, to try to make fine wines. It worked.”

Then came more. “We found some really attractive deals, and we found some investment partners,” said Turrentine. “Then we kept doing more of it. We’ve just found things that we thought made sense, that were creative and exciting. We’ve always tried to be guided by demand.” They’ve developed a steady customer base of more than 100 wineries, mostly bigger brands but a few tiny ones as well. Most of their grapes, and the resulting wines that they also make for some accounts, go to about 20 clients.

To some, especially those who value the intimate nature of boutique winemaking, institutional investors sound like the boogeymen. “Some people think that’s bad, but there are a lot of really capable and responsible institutions that uphold the highest standards — those are the only kind of people we want to work with,” said Turrentine, who seeks partners that are committed to sustainable and ethical practices. “There are institutions and investment groups that we’ve chosen not to work with because we don’t think that their expectations are realistic or achievable. That’s no recipe for success. There’s no deal we have to do.”

It hasn’t all been entirely smooth sailing. If grapes, water, and Harvard ring a bell, that’s because Grapevine was behind the North Fork Vineyard in Cuyama, which was attacked by neighbors for trying to collect more water than they deemed appropriate for the high desert community. The County of Santa Barbara ultimately denied the building of additional reservoirs in 2023, but the nearly 900-acre vineyard remains a significant holding for Grapevine.

That’s one of the only public conflicts that Ontiveros has endured, despite being involved in so many deals in so many different regions. Credit that down-home cowboy charm.

“James really stays in the lane of building these one-on-one relationships with people in person,” said Katie Luttge, a friend from high school who worked at Sea Smoke Vineyards for 23 years before becoming the general manager of Native 9 last fall. “It’s such a lost art in our world. It’s not on his computer and it’s not on his cell phone and it’s not by text message. Given his incredible history, it’s all just tied into something really old-fashioned to me about how he protects his relationships and fosters them. People don’t do that anymore. It’s very refreshing.”

Industry Insights

It’s unprecedentedly dark times for wine.

Last year’s harvest was the smallest in 20 years, in part due to Mother Nature, but also because so many unpurchased grapes were just left on the vine. The cost of everything, from labor to PVC piping to the vines themselves, is through the roof, and many grapes, especially those from larger vineyards that are the backbone of the business, are selling for less than they did decades ago. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley Bank’s “State of the Wine Industry 2025” report — considered the bible of wine economics — reported last month, “The wine industry is undergoing a significant reset, marking the first demand-based correction in three decades.”

With so much skin in the game, James Ontiveros spends a lot of time thinking about what the industry can do to emerge out of the current doldrums. Part of him wonders how much of the downturn is hype over hard realities, but he doesn’t dispute that there is a reckoning underway.

“What’s really happening is no one’s buying these cheap wines anymore,” said Ontiveros. “The bottom of our pyramid is eroding away.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as that means more people are increasingly interested in buying wines in the $20 range. And that’s exactly what Grapevine is designed to do. 

“People are drinking less but consuming better,” said Charles “AJ” Fairbanks, another multigenerational Californian who’s worked in both Napa and the Central Coast, currently serving as estate director for Crown Point in Happy Canyon. “That premiumization is what James is preparing for.”

For Ontiveros, the two lingering problems are that there is a lot of monotonous wine in the marketplace and far too many wine brands. “Our industry has a little bit of a problem that it’s too easy to get into this,” he said. “It’s kind of the nice thing, but it’s also causing a problem. This huge ballooning of brands has confused a lot of people about what to buy.”

And a lot of that, especially for widely available brands, just isn’t very good. Ontiveros has been to parties where otherwise worldly and sophisticated people break out overripe, nearly sweet bottles of pinot noir or sour, funky, self-proclaimed “natural” wines that just aren’t very good by classical standards.

“When we have people thinking that the tail is the head, then we’re not helping ourselves,” said Ontiveros, whose own Native 9 wines — which have always used native yeasts and undergo the most minimal manipulations possible in the vineyard and cellar — are the epitome of “natural.”

The root of the problem is an age-old disconnect between the people who grow the grapes and those who make the wine, which is why Grapevine Capital does a bit of both. “We make wine from almost every vineyard in our system,” he said, as that’s the best way to know what they’re selling. “I have a good enough palate and understanding of the processes of farming and winemaking to tie those things together. That’s not a deep, unique skill, but it’s one that most people don’t have. They’re either steeped in one or the other.”

The solution, aside from revolutionizing the federal government’s three-tiered sales system that constantly gums up the works? “We need to make good wines,” said Ontiveros. “And we need them to be priced attractively enough that people keep drinking them.”

There’s one known in this sea of unknowns: If anyone is qualified to lead the way, it’s someone like James Ontiveros.

“We’ve had Jim Clendenen and we have Richard Sanford, and I don’t know how we look to anyone else other than James Ontiveros as our elder statesman now,” said Fairbanks, referring to two of Santa Barbara County’s wine pioneers. “Who’s our leader? Who’s our compass right now? It’s James Ontiveros. If James is optimistic, then I’m optimistic.” 

Native 9 @ World of Pinot Noir

James Ontiveros will be at the World of Pinot Noir this weekend at the
Ritz-Carlton Bacara, pouring his Native 9 wines.
See wopn.com for tickets and native9.com for information on how to visit Rancho Ontiveros and taste his wines.