After 18 years in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Loma Prieta Winery has changed hands.

The winery and vineyard, known as the nation’s largest producer of pinotage, was purchased by Chris Arriaga, a real estate developer and former U.S. Marshal. He and his daughter, Samantha, both residents of Saratoga, will continue to operate the winery under its existing name, retaining all staff.

Arriaga, a Bay Area native, had been keeping an eye on the Loma Prieta Winery property for the last year and a half, and when the price dropped to a really attractive point, he made his move.

“I’ve had an interest in owning a winery for quite some time,” he said. “This was a turnkey operation; it was all set and ready to go, so I’m not reinventing the wheel.”

Arriaga, who worked on the development of the Apple “spaceship” campus in Cupertino, along with several Facebook buildings, didn’t start out with dreams of owning a winery. He had his heart set on being an oceanographer. His mother encouraged him to attend UC Santa Cruz, where he moved in with an uncle who lived nearby.

“The whole Santa Cruz vibe was way too free-spirited for me,” Arriaga admits. “I had led a very sheltered life; ‘anything goes’ was not for me.”

He ended up enrolling at Cabrillo College, where he encountered a science professor he’d met while at UC Santa Cruz.

“He basically told me about the limited possibilities of a career path as an oceanographer—that I’d have to go to an Ivy League school and there were very few positions in the field,” Arriaga recalls. “When he told me I would most likely end up teaching, that was it.”

Soon, he and a buddy discovered they could make some money in law enforcement, and both enrolled in the sheriff’s academy in Fresno. He loved the community and felt very much at home in the Central Valley.

“I became really good at narc and vice,” he says, once busting a huge meth ring in the Geysers in the 1980s.

Arriaga became a U.S. Marshal and served on a task force that hunted fugitives and major criminals, often busting gangs in Salinas and San Jose. After retiring from law enforcement, he began working in real estate development

His daughter, Samantha, a CPA, grew up in San Jose and attended Westmont High School in Campbell before getting her bachelor’s degree in accountancy and master’s in taxation at the University of San Diego. She’s managing the day-to-day operations of the winery.

Father and daughter are already enjoying the new venture, meeting the club members and getting to know a thing or two about the wine business. They consider themselves lucky they didn’t have to build the place from scratch.

Loma Prieta Winery was founded by the late Paul Kemp, a personal injury lawyer, and his wife, attorney Amy Wiler Kemp, who purchased the property in 2000.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d build a winery, home and tasting room on top of a remote hilltop at 2,600 feet in the Santa Cruz Mountains,” says Amy Kemp. “But my late husband, Paul, fantasized about mountain living, complete with a vineyard and a winery.  Fortunately, I had the design, building and business experience to turn that fantasy into a reality.”

She persevered through power outages, snow, delivery drivers getting lost, and multiple trips up and down the mountain daily with two young children, becoming, in her words, “a true mountain woman.”

Her husband wasn’t content to make just your average grape varietals. When he fell in love with pinotage—a rare cross between pinot noir and cinsault originally created to grow in South Africa—he went all in, grafting the estate pinot noir to pinotage, making it the highest-altitude pinotage in North America. He sought out every other vineyard in California that grew the grape, finding three of them, turning Loma Prieta Winery into the largest producer of the varietal in the country.

The Kemps consistently made award-winning pinot noir from the Saveria Vineyard in Corralitos, plus cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, petite sirah and merlot.

The iconic label was created by New Orleans artist Martin La Borde, who rendered the view of Loma Prieta as seen from winery. The yellow, red and orange lines running beneath the green mountains depict the San Andreas fault, as the mountain was the epicenter of the earthquake of 1989. Flying over the mountain is a magician named Bodo, with a glass of pinot noir in hand, a peace offering to the gods that rumble deep within.

After Paul Kemp passed away in 2018, Amy became a “wine widow,” and ran the show single-handedly until November of this year. With both her sons in college, it was time to move down from the mountain and closer to family. She feels confident that the winery she labored to create and sustain is in good hands with the Arriaga family.

Loma Prieta Winery is at 26985 Loma Prieta Way, Los Gatos. Hours are Saturday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m. No reservations needed. All tastings are conducted outdoors. 408-353-2950