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“Retryment”:

Jacob Kappeler, From Wine to Sausage, 2nd Installment

By Bill Effinger

Photography by Dan Clement

For more of Dan’s photos visit his website www.clearfocusphotography.com

Meet Jacob Kappeler, retryment aficionado extraordinaire, who has continued to reinvent himself throughout his very successful life:

Jacob’s life began in Switzerland in 1939 with his wine-grape growing family on a hillside vineyard. There he spent his early youth helping with the chores of a prolific and prosperous business.

After graduating college with a degree in Horticulture and Meat Sciences in 1961, Jacob spent his mandatory 6-month military stint in the Swiss Cavalry and then decided to venture “across the pond” to America after receiving a sponsorship from the New York Fruit Growers & Nursery Association in Rochester. However, the process to get a visa took from 1961 to March of 1963 before one was obtained.

Upon arriving in Rochester, Jacob received an assignment to go to Florida and help with the orange picking season, which ended with monsoon rains, so with the purchase of a $50.00 Dodge Coronet, and a new set of tires (also $50.00) Jacob set out to see America.

Fascinated with the vastness of the country and what he was seeing as he traveled west he was beginning to appreciate the size of Texas when his car broke down in Rio Blanco. A used transmission was purchased from the local junk-yard, which was owned by a Mexican entrepreneur whose wife operated a local restaurant. There Jacob was treated to his first experience with hot chili peppers. To this day, Jacob thinks they played a joke on him as the tears streamed down his face, not letting his host know he was on fire.

Jacob’s arrival in California was abruptly and unceremoniously halted when he ran out of gas eight miles east of Holtville in January of 1964.

True adventurer spirit then took over when Jacob first labored as a piece-worker in the lettuce fields making $65 dollars a day (big money back then), on to driving a taxi in Brawley, ultimately finding a job with a Swiss farming family milking cows. That occupation ended abruptly when Jacob was kicked in the face by one of his bovine charges.

So what to do? See the rest of the United States, of course. And that Jacob did, traveling every state with the exception of Alaska for almost a year. Then, upon his brother being seriously injured in an accident back home he spent the next year in Switzerland and applied for a visa to Australia where he arrived in 1965 spending time exploring the country from Sydney to Queensland and back. He returned to the Imperial Valley, becoming a partner in the Five Field Farming Company, one of the largest turf-farming operations in the U.S. with over 3,000 acres under cultivation where he remained for the next 25 years until his partner died.

An advertisement caught Jacob’s eye in 1995 for a meat store in San Marcos, which rekindled his love for making sausage so he packed up and move to San Marcos after purchasing the meat store we know and love as T & H Prime Meats and Sausage.

Feeling cramped living in a modular home in a local mobile home park, Jacob and his wife Sue began looking for a place with more space. During 1997, they settled on five-acres just off Twin Oaks Valley Road on Mulberry where they live today.

Jacob, always the farmer, planted oats and other experimental crops to test the viability of the soil and eventually decided grapes could do well on the property. Once again and ever the adventurer, in 1999 Jacob planted the first vineyard to be grown in San Marcos, his new found home, returning to his roots as a vintner.

Shortly after the first grape planting, Jacob befriended neighbor and rose-grower Frank Bons, who was planning on changing his operation to growing something else. Discussions ensued, which resulted in the mutual planting of another four-and-a-half acres and their partnership, Twin Oaks Valley Winery, was born.

The partners’ dream is to have a wine tasting room on the Mulberry site where they would have the only vineyard that grows, produces and bottles its own grapes, unlike most all other vineyard/sellers who purchase grapes and/or outsource the production and bottling to other wineries.

Jacob Kappeler in his continual retryment has come full circle. Once again he is a vintner and sausage maker.

**If you or someone you know is actively involved in Retryment, please contact me at Hanson Commercial Real Estate, 760.233.5374 or bill@billeffinger.com so we can share the story with others in a future issue. SMM

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