It was as if a dream had materialized with the steepest slope he had ever seen with gorgeously maintained Cabernet Sauvignon vines nestled into carved terraces, no less. Not much impressed this self-made telecom pioneer as he had traveled all over the world and seen every kind of natural beauty one could imagine. At a time, he wasn’t even thinking of making wine; the pure power of this estate’s resplendence was like a siren song he could not deny, and within an hour, he bought the property.
Fahri Diner is a man who has always been bold in taking on a challenge or dreaming big, even without the connections and wealth to make it happen. He was raised in Cyprus, the island country located east of Greece, and grew up in a farming family who loved making olive oil. An academic scholarship brought him to the U.S. to study electrical engineering at Florida Tech, and he went on to become a founder of the fiber-optic company, Qtera, which would eventually sell for $3.25 billion. Even though Fahri has taken on other business ventures since Qtera, he sought out another passion that had deep roots in his family and he wanted to reconnect to small-scale farming, creating high-quality produce such as the olive oil his family made. But would he stay in Florida? Go back to Cyprus? Or find a ranch in the gorgeous state of California?
Fahri did what he always did when having to make a big decision. He went to a lake and skipped a stone; if it skipped three times, he would go to California and look for a ranch to reconnect to his farming roots. It was three times, hence, his two-year journey seeking out a unique property throughout California, from as south as Santa Barbara to as north as Alexander Valley in Sonoma County, began. Most people told him Napa was the place to be but Fahri has always trusted his instincts and didn’t see any properties that felt right. One day, in 2001, someone told him about a property in the Alexander Valley area in Sonoma County. When he had that moment of coming over the crest of the road, taking in those terraced vineyards on an extremely steep slope, he knew that this was the place, especially since there were olive trees so that he could make olive oil.
At first, he sold the grapes from the vineyards to local wineries eager to get them. Still, it bothered him that these rare vineyards were not getting the acknowledgment they deserved. So, he hired a team of experts, such as winemaker Philippe Melka, a true living legend in the wine industry, to express the place’s unique terroir and aptly take on the name Skipstone as a wine producer. The journey of him reconnecting to his roots while combining it with his love for the U.S., his second home that has given him so much opportunity to succeed, has finally kicked off, full force, with the recent completion of the new Skipstone winery with the initial building of it colliding with taking on a fulltime head winemaker to lead the charge, rising winemaking star Laura Jones.
