Ponzi Vineyards

Biographies

The Family

Dick and Nancy Ponzi founded their family winery and vineyards in 1970. For nearly four decades, Ponzi Vineyards has practiced a philosophy of innovation, experimentation, respectful stewardship of the land and achieving consistent excellence in its wines.

Today, the winery and vineyards are operated under these same guiding principles by the second generation: winemaker Luisa Ponzi, director of sales and marketing Maria Ponzi Fogelstrom and director of operations Michel Ponzi.

The Ponzi family founded Oregon's first microbrewery, BridgePort Brewing Company, in 1984, now under new management.

Deeply committed to promoting the bounty of the Willamette Valley, the Ponzis founded a culinary center in Dundee, Oregon in 1998. The center is comprised of the Ponzi Wine Bar, representing more than 120 top vintners from throughout the state in addition to their own wines, and The Dundee Bistro, celebrating the region's fresh, seasonal products in its signature Willamette Valley Cuisine.

Luisa Alice Ponzi, Winemaker

Luisa Ponzi graduated from Portland State University, Portland, Oregon in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Following her undergraduate studies, Luisa moved to Beaune, France, where she continued her education in viticulture and enology. As part of the required curriculum, Luisa apprenticed with Burgundian producer, M. Christophe Roumier of Domaine Roumier of Chambolle Musigny, France as well as with Italian producer Luca Currado of Vietti in Piedmont, Italy. In 1993, Luisa was awarded the Certficate Brevet Professionelle D’Oenologie et Viticulture, at the time the only woman to earn such distinction.

In addition to her formal studies of enology and viticulture, Luisa has traveled extensively throughout other prominent wine regions including Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovenia and the United States. Since 1986, she has participated in all the International Pinot Noir Celebrations in McMinnville, Oregon and has attended all of the accompanying Steamboat Technical Pinot Noir Conferences.

Luisa combines her formal winemaking experience with her lifelong work with her father, Dick Ponzi, at their Willamette Valley vineyards and winery. Since 1993, Luisa has brought her knowledge of Burgundian practices combined with her personal experience to the family-owned winery.

Luisa continues to educate herself through contacts with winemakers around the world, frequent winery tastings and vineyard and winemaking conferences. She currently sits on the board of directors for the Oregon Chapter for LIVE (Low Input Viticulture and Enology), the world’s highest standard for sustainable viticulture and on the advisory board of the Northwest Enology and Viticulture Center in Salem, Oregon.

Luisa has been honored with awards and accolades, all contributing to Ponzi’s heightened stature in the national arena. She, her husband, fellow winemaker Eric Hamacher, and their four children reside atop Chehalem Mountain with commanding views of the glorious valley.

For more than 15 vintages, Luisa’s passion and winemaking talent have continued Ponzi Vineyards’ nearly 40-year acclaimed tradition of producing some of the world’s finest wines.

Anna Maria Ponzi, Director of Sales & Marketing

Maria graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon in 1987. Her studies included a year each at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and the Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy. Two weeks after receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree, Maria returned to Boston in search of her first “big” job. She was immediately hired as a sales representative for Goldhirsch Publishing Inc., promptly promoted to manager and, within two years, acknowledged as “Salesperson of the Year.” Along with the Rolex she was awarded, she received a tempting offer to manage the Southwest Regional sales office. Instead, she pocketed her savings, stuck the Rolex in her backpack and headed for a year of world travel and adventure, first stop: Borneo.

A year later, energetic and eager, Maria returned to the family winery and the position she left before college: working with her mother to market Ponzi wines. In 1991, she was hired as director of sales and marketing. She is officially responsible for the overall promotion of Ponzi wines. She develops sales and public relations strategies, manages the winery’s national broker, maintains communication with wine critics, and assists in the production of all winery graphics, including the coordination and concept of label designs. She is also responsible for the management and success of the winery’s tasting room, cellar club, private event space (The Vineyard Home), the Ponzi Wine Bar and the family’s regional restaurant, The Dundee Bistro.

During the family’s ownership of BridgePort Brewing Company, Oregon’s first microbrewery, Maria assumed the role of its marketing director, and was responsible for all package design concepts, company communications and oversaw brewpub operations.

Now entirely focused on the winery, she remains active in promoting Oregon’s wine industry. She was the promotions chair of the Oregon Wine Board for nearly six years and was a founding board member of the national Women for WineSense organization. She was president of the organization’s Oregon chapter for two years. She remains active with the Oregon Wine Board and holds board positions on Oregon’s Travel Information Council and the Portland Culinary Tourism Association. She is an active supporter of SOLV, a state organization committed to keeping its natural beauties clean and green, and also works with ORCA (Oregon Chardonnay Alliance), committed to educating and promoting Oregon’s Dijon-clone Chardonnay.

In 2004, Maria founded the first ever Wine Walk of Fame, recognizing the state’s visionary wine pioneers who put Oregon on the map as a world-class wine-growing region. Each honorarium’s name has been etched in stainless steel and now lines the courtyard in front of the Ponzi Wine Bar in Dundee. A record of each individual and their corresponding contributions has been placed in a binder held at the wine bar for guest perusal.

At current, Maria is involved in writing a book on the evolution of Oregon’s wine culture from her perspective as a child growing up in the industry. She and her Portland-based architect husband Brett Fogelstrom, reside minutes from the winery on 15 acres with their daughter Lauren, son Max and alpacas. Once an abandoned farm, the house and property now feature contemporary design and a large lake inhabited by wild geese, great blue heron and white swans.

Michel Carlo Ponzi, Chief Executive Officer

Michel was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Oregon in 1986. He majored in Italian with a minor in music. Other academic degrees include a Certificate of Keyboard Proficiency from the Dick Grove School of Music in Beverly Hills in 1982, and a Diploma de Profitto in Italian language and literature from the Universita Degli Studi de Firenze, 1985.

Since his first piano lesson at age three, music has been an integral part of Michel’s life. He read music before he could read words. His first major purchase, when he was 10 with money earned working in the family winery and vineyard, was an antique foot-powered organ. Through elementary and secondary school he performed at school functions, theatrical productions and winery festivals. The high school “garage” band rehearsed evenings in the winery’s barrel room. He studied jazz theory and improvisational jazz with a local veteran artist, while appearing in straight ahead jazz ensembles and vocalists in Portland clubs ... before he was of legal drinking age.

During his one-year study in Florence, Italy, Michel frequently spent weekends at the winery of family friends in Piedmont. While studying in Eugene, life was much the same with weekends spent working at the family winery. At graduation, he was faced with a career decision: music and an artist’s unpredictable life or the growing family business. A few years earlier, the family had founded BridgePort Brewing Company, Oregon’s first microbrewery. By 1986, BridgePort was experiencing phenomenal growth and success. At the same time, Ponzi Vineyards was gaining national recognition with high demands for its wines. Michel assessed the situation, took some intensive business classes and stepped aboard.

At BridgePort, Michel assumed the role of day-to-day family liaison with supervision of the general manager. At the winery, he took on administrative responsibilities from legal, accounting and tax matters to regulatory compliance and personnel. He brought Ponzi Vineyards into the computer age and remains its technology guru. In 1995, he successfully negotiated the sale of BridgePort. In addition to his winery responsibilities as director of operations, he also oversees The Dundee Bistro.

Michel now composes in his home studio, accompanies his singer/songwriter wife Becky, and teaches his two sons the magic of music. The family resides at the immaculate La Luce Vineyard. The music and wine duo seem to stay in harmony.

Richard Lee Ponzi

Born in 1934 as the third son of an Italian immigrant couple, Dick Ponzi was raised in Michigan. Typical to most Italian families, meals were considered sacred. Wine was always served and made at home. The flavors, sensations and values of Dick’s family traditions followed him throughout his life and professional ambitions.

Following high school graduation, Dick worked a variety of jobs, including employment with the Ford Motor Company, to support himself through college. He graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with a mechanical engineering degree in 1959. He immediately moved to California where he worked in the aerospace industry as a structural design engineer. Later, he founded Seroc Corporation in Los Gatos, California, and designed and developed equipment to process light-weight, high strength building materials. Dick also held the position of project engineer for a firm that designed and fabricated theme park rides for DisneyLand and DisneyWorld.

In 1969, he moved to Portland, Oregon and founded Ponzi Vineyards one year later, one of the premier wineries in the state. From the first vintage in 1974, Dick has set the standards for enological and viticultural innovation. His mechanical engineering background has proven a great asset through his many years of winemaking. He fabricated machinery and winemaking techniques in his cellar now commonplace in many wineries across the globe. He planted some of the first Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley in the late ‘60s, and some of the first commercial plantings of Pinot Gris in 1978. He has guided plantings of cool-climate varietals throughout the valley since the early 70s, encouraging others to plant and build a quality wine industry in Oregon.

Dick was a founding member and first president of the Oregon Winegrowers Association. In 1987, he served as a founding director of the Oregon Wine Advisory Board (now Oregon Wine Board). In the early years in Oregon, he worked as a professor of engineering at Portland Community College to support the growing winery business and family.

In 1984, he and his wife Nancy founded Oregon’s first craftbrewery, BridgePort Brewing Company. Ponzi designed and fabricated the first craftbrewing system in the state, a system which has since been duplicated several times over by craftbreweries across the country. In 1998, Dick and Nancy founded a culinary center in Dundee — encompassing the Ponzi Wine Bar, a regional wine tasting room, and The Dundee Bistro, a local restaurant that features fresh Willamette Valley cuisine.

Constantly innovating, designing, constructing and crafting, Dick’s latest pursuit satisfies a nearly 40-year-old dream of creating a state-of-the-art, sustainable winemaking facility. The new winery, Collina del Sogno, was completed in time for the 2008 harvest. Outside the family business, Dick devotes a large part of his time to a multitude of other interests — one he most treasures is time spent with his eight grandchildren.

Nancy Ann Berry Ponzi

Nancy was born in Southern California, but grew up all over the world. Her father worked in the oil business, which took her to exotic areas of the globe like the jungles of Venezuela, the San Angel District of Mexico and the Ozarks of Arkansas. She studied at The University of Mexico, Mexico City; El Camino College and West Valley College in California. In Palo Alto, she completed the Association Montessori Internationale Primary Education Course. Her emphasis was in Spanish, English and primary education.

She married Dick Ponzi in 1961. Their mutual love of food, wine and family made their union “storybook” and naturally lead them down a path overwhelmed with the culinary arts. An overly ambitious woman, she has a steady record of taking on “never before attempted” projects and gracefully turning each of them into great successes.

Before moving to Oregon, she held offices in the Pan (Latin) American Round Table and was a teacher’s assistant at the Villa Montessori School in Cupertino, California. In Oregon, she continued teaching at West Hills Montessori School. At Portland Community College, she taught yoga, wine appreciation, and ethnic and basic cooking. Her culinary classes extended to local cooking schools, television shows and a weekly wine show on the radio. Teaching was only one of many activities Nancy pursued after replanting the family in the Willamette Valley. She co-founded The Consumers’ Food Council, which promotes environmental concerns of food and agriculture and the then novel concepts of recycling, ingredient labeling and a legal definition of organic. This led to becoming a registered environmental lobbyist at the Oregon legislature. She wrote a weekly column for the Hillsboro Argus, was president of the Washington County Women’s Federation, held various offices in the Oregon Winegrowers Association and was a founding director on the Board of Washington County Visitors Association.

An exceptional and committed mother of three, Nancy not only raised her children, but concurrently managed a small farm complete with chickens, goats, horses, ducks, geese and cows (Scottish Highlanders, no less) — all this while building the family’s wine business and helping to create a foundation for the state’s wine industry.

In addition to being one of the first marketers of Oregon wine in the country, she was a founding director of the Washington County Wineries Association and was instrumental in establishing the Oregon Wine Advisory Board. Nancy has contributed to the conception and establishment of Oregon’s most successful wine events and has played a vital role in promoting the Willamette Valley as a viable wine region. One of the most widely recognized events is the International Pinot Noir Celebration. This is Oregon’s premiere wine event which brings together winemakers and aficionados from around the world to discuss, taste and explore Pinot Noir. Nancy also co-founded ¡Salud! The Oregon Pinot Noir Auction, a hugely profitable fundraising event of unique cuvées from Oregon’s most prized vintners. All proceeds provide low cost healthcare for vineyard workers and their families. Most recently Nancy helped found Oregon Pinot Camp, an exclusive event that privately invites the wine trade to the valley for three days to learn first hand about Pinot Noir.

In 1998, Nancy helped found the Ponzi Wine Bar in Dundee, showcasing some of the region’s very finest wines alongside Ponzi wines. In 1999, The Dundee Bistro, one of the area’s most successful regional restaurants, was born under her direction. Both the wine bar and bistro have become the center of wine country, inviting travelers from around the world and neighboring winegrowers to enjoy the marriage of regional food, wine and good spirit.

Nancy remains active in most Oregon wine industry promotions and is integral to marketing Ponzi and the region. Her current focus, in addition to caring for and nurturing her eight grandchildren, is in creating an innovative cookbook. Her vision is to share her love for the culinary arts, blending her expert cooking techniques that range from Latin American fare to Italian cuisine, while exploring a range of complementary wines. Nancy currently contributes her private recipes to the Cellar Club newsletter each quarter.

In 1984, the Ponzi family established BridgePort Brewing Company, the first microbrewery in Oregon. Nancy directed legislation to allow for microbreweries and adjoining brew pubs in the state. She quickly went on to found the largest and most successful beer event in the United States, the Oregon Brewers Festival. In 1997, the Culinary Center in Dundee — comprised of the Ponzi Wine Bar and The Dundee Bistro — was founded by Dick and Nancy Ponzi. In 2004, Dick and Nancy Ponzi were acknowledged for their lifetime achievement in the Oregon wine industry with the ORVI (Oregon Vintner Award).

Today, still full of vision, enthusiasm, determination and energy, she continues to work with her daughter in all marketing and promotion aspects involving Ponzi ventures and the Oregon wine industry. Her current focus, in addition to caring for and nurturing her six grandchildren, is in creating an innovative cookbook. Her vision is to share her love for the culinary arts, blending her expert cooking techniques that range from Latin American fare to Italian cuisine, while exploring a range of complementary wines