A little about us and how we got here. John and I met, coincidentally, at a wine tasting. At that time, neither of us were in the wine field and in fact, we didn’t even live in the same city! As romantic stories go, we fell in love and knew we would need to make some location and vocational changes to be together. After a beautiful candlelit proposal in a courtyard on New Years Eve, we made plans for John to move from Longview, Texas to Dallas where I lived. John began a search for a new occupation and in doing so discovered a local winery for sale. We discussed it and decided to look into it. We had traveled to Napa and Tuscany and I had grown up in Southern Italy so the idea of a winery wasn’t completely foreign although neither of us comes from such a background. Shortly after that, we found ourselves the owners of a small Texas winery. After a few months, John quickly learned we would need to relocate to drive the traffic needed to keep the place alive. Almost two years later and with a stroke of luck, we leased space in historic downtown Grapevine under the newly rebranded name of Umbra Winery. The ‘ umbra’ is the shadow created when the moon and other celestial bodies pass. John likes to say it represents our coming together: he the dark and I the light.