Outside, Honea Vineyards rambles away across some flat land and rolling hillsides. About 20 acres are under grapes while some steeper terrain and old creek beds, not suitable for vines, are dotted with ancient oaks and sown wild flowers.
The Honeas have also planted around 100 olive trees and plan to put in quite a few more on some of the sharper slopes that do not lend themselves easily to vine trellises.
"When you retire you've got to find something," said Mr. Honea. "Something you're passionate about. Something that intrigues you. Something that enthuses you. Retirement does not mean doing nothing. You need activity. Something different."
Mr. Honea, who at one time headed the third largest natural gas company in the U.S., was searching for all those things when he first settled in Santa Barbara. He knew that after working flat-out all his life, he couldn't suddenly go from 100 miles per hour to zero. "It was like falling off a cliff," he recalls.
To soften his landing, the engineering graduate hooked up with the Engineering Department at UCSB, invested in and worked for a high-tech company in town, and joined the board of the Santa Barbara Technology Group, an incubator for start-up companies.
None of these ventures really worked out: "I realized I'm not a high-tech guy," smiles Mr. Honea. However, he knew he had always liked the idea of owning some land and spending his days on a tractor or doing some sort of manual work outdoors.
In 2002, having concluded that a vineyard might satisfy this desire to connect with the land, Mr. Honea bought 40 acres of farmland that had been used to graze horses and grow vegetables and which came with a couple of modest houses and a little patch of merlot grapes.
As he explored the idea of growing grapes he fell in love with "the Italian niche," connected with winemaker Steve Clifton -- a specialist in Italian wines and rated by Mr. Honea as the best such winemaker in the United States -- and engaged vineyard manager Jeff Newton.
Since then the Honeas have planted nine different Italian varieties: the whites, pinot grigio, arneis and tocai; and reds, barbera, sangiovese, dolcetto, nebbiolo, lagrein and muscat canelli.
Honea Vineyards produces about 60 tons of these grapes, enough for around 3,600 cases of wine. The fruit is all sold to Mr. Clifton for his Palmina Italian varietals label which sources grapes from a number of growers and is made in Lompoc.
Mr. Honea buys back some of the Palmina for his family, friends and visitors while continuing to harvest the acre of merlot that came with the property and which yields about 100 cases per year for his own personal use.
While he has the best of professionals taking care of the planting, pruning, harvesting and winemaking, Mr. Honea and his wife still play an active part in operations while their eldest grandson, Matt, who lives next to them on the property, is the vineyard foreman.
"It's a full-time job just taking care of all the landscaping," said Mr. Honea, referring to the planting of olive trees and wildflowers, care of the many oak trees, and mowing the cover crops between rows of vines.
Then there's pest control. In the first year, gophers killed about 600 young vines; in response, over the first 18 months, Mr. Honea and his team accounted for around 1,000 of the pesky little critters.
The Honeas have also set up half a dozen nesting boxes to encourage gopher-loving owls to make the vineyard their home. However, other birds remain a major nuisance and, as the grapes begin to ripen, all the vines have to be covered in protective netting.
Harvesting grapes, trapping gophers and driving a tractor around the Santa Barbara County countryside is all a far cry from the world where Mr. Honea spent most of his life carving out a successful corporate career.
Born in Arkansas, Mr. Honea moved to California with his family during World War 2 , was educated in Concord -- where he and his future wife first dated in high school -- and went on to complete a degree in engineering at Berkeley.
He spent two years at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1958 to begin a stellar career in management than spanned 10 different industries and where his specialty was start-up companies and turning around others that had fallen on hard times.
Mr. Honea was appointed a general manager at the age of just 29 and later moved on to become president, chairman, chief executive officer and chief financial officer with different companies.
He was with FMC, formerly Food Machinery and Chemical Corp., in San Jose, for 22 years. During that time he took charge of the company's machinery division, dealing in agricultural, automotive and other machinery, at a time when FMC was in an acquisitive mode.
While with FMC he oversaw construction of a plant in Arkansas and moved there; after leaving the company he took over another struggling business, turned it around in four years and sold it to International Harvester.
During a career in which he rubbed shoulders with Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas, and later George Bush in Texas -- at the time both men were the respective state governors -- Mr. Honea became heavily involved in the energy industry.
He was chairman and chief executive of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co., which later became Arkla, Inc. and then NorAm Energy Corp. As the business grew into a multibillion enterprise employing thousands of people, he moved the headquarters to Houston.
Mr. Honea was involved in a series of gas and electric mergers, takeovers and corporate bundlings that eventually led to NorAm being sold to Houston Industries in a deal valued at $3.8 billion. Two years after Mr. Honea retired, Houston Industries changed its name to Reliant Energy Inc.
The hustle of Houston is a long way, literally and figuratively, from the leisurely, laid-back lifestyle of a Los Olivos vineyard. Mr. Honea is the first to agree that his new venture is all about lifestyle and that he'll be lucky to ever break even financially growing grapes.
But for the Honeas, lifestyle also includes interaction with their three married children and 10 grandchildren, ages 8 to 24, who love visiting the couple in Santa Barbara and out in the vineyard.
It also includes regular trips to Italy since getting to know that country --and learning to speak Italian -- is all part of their love affair with Italian wines.
And earlier this year the couple managed to combine their passions for family and Italy when they rented a castle in Tuscany and took their children, their partners and all the grandchildren on a very special 50th wedding anniversary celebration.
e-mail: fnelson@newspress.com
MIKE ELIASON / NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS
