For Tien, the family-owned restaurant Tsunami was a lifeline, his first introduction to cooking—and more importantly, a glimpse into the way a restaurant can feel like home.

He was hired at Clos du Val, and she landed work at Beaulieu Vineyards in the lab.. A goat at Jumping Goat Vineyard..Jumping Goat Vineyard.

1995 was a watershed moment in their timeline.It's the year when Philippe and Cherie formed Melka Consulting and began offering their winemaking services.Their first clients were Lail Vineyards, Seavey Vineyard, and Constant Diamond Mountain.

A year later, in 1996, the couple decided to make their own wines and introduced the Melka Wines label.. Fast-forward to the here and now, and any mention of the Melka name is often preceded by some iteration of "100-point winemaker," but the details of Philippe Melka's meteoric rise in winemaking fame should not be relegated to the pages of a handful of critics' notebooks.His 100-point scores do seem to trail him like a Grateful Dead fan club, and at this stage, he couldn't tell you how many perfect scores he's achieved..

The first 100-pointer came in 2009 for a 2007 Dana Estates Lotus Vineyard Cabernet.

But points aside, next to Napa's other historical French figures like André Tchelistcheff of Beaulieu Vineyards fame, and the flying French winemaker Michel Rolland, or the Virginia-born Thomas Rivers Brown, much of the Cabernet Sauvignon style inhabiting bottles today is the result of other Napa winemakers aiming to craft their own Melka lookalikes..We made custom gear for restaurants order by order.

As the business continued to evolve, we'd make designs that people really loved.Then we would start leaning into that, and adding the designs to our website, and then people would buy it organically.

What I realized somewhere along the line was that people who were watching.and the Food Network, et cetera, also wanted to look and feel proper and legitimate, like the chefs that they admired so much.