Vineyard Vets

At his Livermore winery, Josh Laine provides opportunities for veterans.

Photos by Kevin Gordon

No one will ever say Josh Laine isn’t tough. Laine, 26, enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003, leaving for boot camp shortly after graduating from Livermore High. He served two tours in Iraq’s dangerous Anbar Province, where he fought at Fallujah and was wounded three times. He survived being shot and stabbed, and having his vehicle hit by an improvised explosive device, before he was honorably discharged in 2007.

Toughness, however, hasn’t always been enough for veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. By any measure, the situation is grim: Hundreds of thousands of veterans have come back to the worst economy since the Great Depression. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan vets suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, and the suicide rate has risen to the point where some reports have called it an epidemic.

Laine (pictured on bottom, at right) saw what the situation was doing to some of his Marine friends and knew he had to find a way to get through the culture shock of returning.

“I was actually the last one to get out,” he says of his Marine friends. “And these guys were still looking for jobs, and a lot of their lives were kind of in a pickle—financial issues or DUI issues or whatever—and I basically said, I can’t go down that road.”

He found work as a journeyman plumber and tried to learn how to distill whiskey, without much success. His then girlfriend, who worked at Wente Vineyards in Livermore, suggested he give winemaking a shot—even though he knew next to nothing about wine.

“I didn’t know there were different varieties of grapes,” Laine says. “I thought it was just, you know, a grape.”

After some initial speed bumps, Laine and his friend Paul Harper, another former Marine, began producing wine, and people who tried it told them they should take it public. In need of additional labor to plant vines and get the winery up and running, Laine asked a few of his veteran buddies to help out.

“We basically asked them, our other vets that we served with—and these were still our friends—to help us plant,” Laine says. “And we eventually started paying them, and it evolved.”

The Lavish Laines Winery now has 30 acres of planted vines, with nine different varietals, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Gewürztraminer. It produces 3,000 cases a year, and has a tasting room that Laine and his veteran friends built just off Tesla Road, around the corner from Concannon Vineyard. As the winery grew, Laine continued to offer jobs to fellow veterans, many of whom were struggling to find work. Today, 42 vets work at the winery—about three-quarters of the staff—learning about viticulture and doing everything from trimming vines to washing bottles to pouring in the tasting room.

“I know that he tries his hardest to accommodate any vet he can,” says Kodie Misiura, a 26-year-old Marine Corps vet who served in Iraq before working at Lavish Laines for six months in 2011. “What I appreciate, after having worked there, was being around other vets and the camaraderie, and knowing that we all shared common ground.”

“We all have our memories, and I have people near me that I can talk to, and we go out and have a good time,” Laine says. “Being in the vineyard is great therapy as well because it’s hands-on, it’s outdoors, and you’re doing labor.”

The story of Lavish Laines has begun to make news outside the veteran community. In 2010, Kevin Gordon, then a graduate student in Stanford’s documentary film department, found out about the winery and decided to make a short film about it.

“Josh and the guys he worked with were really frustrated with depictions of vets in the media,” Gordon says. “I think news crews would tend to show up at the local community college—where a lot of vets were taking classes—and shove cameras in people’s faces and [ask] about post-traumatic stress disorder, and all this kind of dark stuff. They were sick of that story, but luckily, it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell the story of vets helping vets.”

Gordon’s 15-minute documentary, No Wine Left Behind, received an enthusiastic reception when it debuted at the Napa Valley Film Festival in November. It’s now making its way around the festival circuit.

“Josh is kind of interesting because he’s had the most combat experience of all the guys there, but he’s also the rock for that community. So many of the guys he served with would talk about how they’ll call him in the middle of the night to talk things through,” Gordon says. “I never really got a good answer as to why Josh was able to weather that more than any other guy, except that he’s just one tough, tenacious dude.”

It isn’t always easy. Laine says that the initial transition to civilian life wasn’t too much of a struggle, but despite the success of the winery, he began to feel uneasy—so much so that he tried, unsuccessfully, to reenlist in 2009.

“I got used to the civilian life, and that affected me,” he says. “From ’07 to ’10-ish, I was still in that military active mode, so I was still gung ho, motivated, and then it just kind of hit me like a wave. And I was just like, whoa, this is hard now.”

Still, he’s kept the winery moving forward, and the veterans who have found work there are grateful.

“I think it puts us in a good spot: It gives veterans much-needed work, and God knows, it’s already a hassle in this economy,” says Bernard Solano, 28, a Marine Corps vet who served in Iraq and was also a Livermore High classmate of Laine’s. “I’ve known Josh a decade now. He’s a good friend. He’s a man of his word. I think he looks out for other people.”

For information on Lavish Laines Winery, go to lavishlaineswinery.com. And follow No Wine Left Behind at facebook.com/nowineleftbehind.