Rich Aurilia, Dave Roberts Look to Become Big-League Winemakers

SAN FRANCISCO -- Rich Aurilia and Dave Roberts turned their first passion (baseball) into a career, and now they're trying to do it again with their newest passion.

Aurilia, a veteran Giants infielder, and Roberts, a recently-retired outfielder, are soon going to be bottling the first vintage of their own wine.

No, Aurilia and Roberts aren't stepping on the grapes themselves, but neither are they simply slapping their name on someone else's company.

In fact, several of the proposed labels for the Red Stitch Winery have only a subtle hint of baseball, with no mention whatsoever of its big league owners.

"We don't want to be the baseball guys that make wine," Aurilia told FanHouse. "We want to be two guys that make a really good bottle of wine that anybody can enjoy."

Aurilia and Roberts are planning to be in Napa next month when the first barrels of their wine, a 2007 Cabernet, are bottled. They'll be producing 1,800 bottles, which will go on sale later this year. The price will be about $60 to $75 per bottle, Aurilia said.

"We're starting small," Aurilia said. "But a lot of these places start small and the next thing you know, they explode and buy a vineyard. We'll concentrate on the first three years and see how it goes and hopefully it takes off from there."

Aurilia said he first got interested in wine toward the end of his first go-around with the Giants, around 2003.

"I started to enjoy it more and learn about it more, how to distinguish between the finer wines and the regular wines," Aurilia said. "I just started reading up. Why not get into it? Look where I am, an hour away from one of the wine meccas of the world."

Aurilia then left the Giants for a few years to play with the Mariners, Padres and Reds. When he returned to the club in 2007, he found some eager wine buddies in Randy Winn and Roberts. The three formed a wine club of sorts. They'd get together with another wine industry friend, John Micek, and do blind tastings.

This spring, after the Giants released Roberts, he came up with the idea of starting up a winery. Micek, who knew the ins and outs of the industry, joined them.

Red Stitch Winery is not an actual winery. The grapes are "outsourced," grown at the Mi Sueno winery in Napa. Roberts, Aurilia and Micek tasted wine from different barrels at Mi Sueno and came up with their custom blend in mid-June. When it's bottled in July, Aurilia and Roberts will go up to Napa to participate.

"It's like your baby," Aurilia said. "You want to be part of the process."

The wine will be available, via the Red Stitch website, five or six months after that, Aurilia said.

"This isn't something we're going to make money on right away," Aurilia said. "We're going to break even the first couple years. The ideal goal is maybe next year to do the same type of cab and then maybe do another varietal like a pinot, increase production by a little."

Ideally, Aurilia said he and Roberts can parlay this into a full-time wine-making business, with an actual vineyard.

"Who wouldn't want to travel around the world tasting wine and pouring wine?" Aurilia said. "Sounds like a pretty cool thing to do to me.

"It's an interesting business. There is a lot more involved than 'Hey we're going to make wine and sell it.'"