“We’re farmers,” Pedro Ceja tells visitors to the Ceja Vineyards tasting room in the family home in the Napa Valley. He sweeps his arm to embrace the vineyards growing just outside the door. “We love working in the vineyards. You can taste our love of the land in our wine.” Pedro’s father, who came to California as a brasero in the 1960s, passes by the window and turns down a vineyard row, still a farmer after all these years. Ariel Ceja, the third generation to work in the winery, stops by to help pour.
Wine first came to what is now the United States from Mexico in the 16th century, only a few decades after Mexico was conquered by Cortez. The wine was made by Casa Madero, in Northeastern Mexico, the first winery to be established in the Americas. Casa Madero still makes wine and ships it worldwide.
350 years later, Pablo Ceja followed the wine trail to California, leaving Mexico to work in the vineyards of the Napa Valley. He picked grapes, worked in wine cellars, and saved his money. After a few years, in 1967, he had saved enough to bring his wife, Juanita, and his six children north. Juanita joined him in working for Napa Valley wineries. A few years later they had saved enough to buy a house in the Carneros district. Then in 1983, after years of working for others, Pablo and Juanita bought a 15-acre plot of land and planted their own grape vines.
By now the Ceja’s children, too, were working for others in the Napa vineyards, but their parents encouraged them go to college as well. Pedro, the eldest, became an engineer and his brother Armando, with a degree in viticulture, became a vineyard manager. Pablo continued to work in the family’s small vineyard while Amelia worked passionately in her large kitchen cooking for her large family, neighbors, and friends. The family continued to acquire more land and plant it. When the 90s rolled around, the Cejas owned 113 acres of some of the best vineyard land in the Napa and Sonoma valleys.
Then, in 1999, Pedro, Armando, and their wives, Amelia and Martha, also the children of Mexican immigrants, founded Ceja Vineyards, Inc., to produce and bottle wine under their own label, with Amelia as CEO and Armando as winemaker. They took a mission bell as their logo, and “Vinum, Cantas, Amor” as their motto: Latin for wine, song, love.
Three years later, Ceja Vineyards was named best new winery by 90 wine writers, and in 2004, Inc. Magazine named Amelia “Entrepreneur of the Year.” In 2008, Amelia opened a Ceja wine tasting room in downtown Napa, with live salsa music and dancing lessons on Saturday night. Visitors to that downtown tasting room, or the tasting room at the Carneros winery, are sure to meet one or more charming Cejas.
A year ago, a couple visiting Napa from Knoxville, Tennessee, stopped to taste wine at the Ceja tasting room in Carneros. It was noontime. The visitors were startled to see Juanita, Pablo, Amelia, Pedro, Martha, Armando, and six other Ceja’s seated around a huge dining room table having lunch. The Tennesseans apologized, and said they would come back later. Juanita jumped up, “No, no, join us,” she said. “I have just made empanadas. We have plenty.”
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