Vintner Squeezes the Good Life from Only a Few Acres

Readers of last week’s column on Bill Schweitzer of Paccielo Vineyard will recall that he founded the Ramona Valley Vineyard Association (RVVA) in February 2001 along with Bill Jenkin, the late Frank Karlsson, Don Kohorst and John Schwaesdall.

This week I had a chance to talk to Kohorst. He and his wife, Joyce, co-own Pyramid Vineyards and Winery, pyramidvineyard.com on Magnolia Road, just off Highway 78 on the east end of Ramona.

Pyramid opened a tasting patio on the weekend of April 2.

“We had a very soft opening,” Kohorst said, with a chuckle, which I learned was characteristic of him. He also has a low-key, plain-spoken manner of description. “Just a few friends,” he said.

He said he hadn’t been absolutely sure he was going to open at that point, with the uncertainty of the lawsuit against the still hanging over everyone’s head.

With the Superior Court upholding the ordinance April 15, that uncertainty has been dispelled.

Kohorst called the passage of the ordinance “a win-win for everybody.” The county will get more sales tax revenue, agricultural land will be preserved and water will be saved because viticulture requires far less irrigation than other crops, he said.

Kohorst is a retired engineer who worked in the space program, and he spoke with an engineer’s detail when he described his Ramona acreage, tracing its history as part of a subdivision in the late 1800s. His 9 acres (now down to 8) had been used for dairy farming and then egg ranching before he bought it in 1979. At that time, Kohorst was working at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He and his family lived in Glendora.

There was a farm house on the Ramona property. “We brought the kids down on weekends,” he said.

Seeking to build up something for his retirement in a time of high inflation, Kohorst first started raising Christmas trees, which he continued to do for 15 years.

In 1988, he and Joyce opened . As that got busier, Kohorst got out of tree farming. A Sizzler employee who had started growing grapes with some cuttings from John Schwaesdall “raved about vineyards,” he said.

Kohorst got to know Frank Karlsson, who referred him to an online manual by an amateur winemaker named . The rest is history.

Kohorst started growing grapes on his property in 2000. He took courses taught by Eisenman at MiraCosta College and went to seminars by the San Diego County Vintners Association.

Pyramid has been a bonded winery since 2007. Today, it offer two reds, Merlot and Syrah, and three whites, Muscat Canelli, Orange Muscat and White Syrah. Kohorst's grapes have also gone into other Ramona Valley wines. A 2008 Merlot made by Pamo Valley Winery with Pyramid grapes won a bronze medal at the 2010 Lum Eisenman Ramona Valley Wine Competition.

In my conversation with Kohorst, his sense of humor sometimes took over from the engineer’s precision, and he made winemaking sound more simple than it undoubtedly is.

“First of all you have to realize that only a third of it is making wine, another third is being a chemist, and the last third is being a cellar rat, cleaning everything before, during and after the winemaking.”

The more precise, serious side was evident in remarks he made before the San Diego County Board of Supervisors during hearings leading up to the vote on the Tiered Winery Ordinance, drawing on the history of his Ramona acreage.

“This particular piece of property that we’re on supported a family for 30 or 40 years, and with the ordinance it will again,” Kohorst said. “Now you can have somebody make a living off of agriculture in San Diego County on a small piece of property, without having a million acres of land.”