There are some wines you make because the vineyard tells you to. Some because the vintage demands it. And then there are the ones you make because a story has been waiting for you.

MAESTRI was always meant to be one of those wines.

Maestri is the Italian word for teachers, and from the beginning this bottle was meant to honor the two who shaped my life more than anyone else—my parents, Rich and Cindy Puppione. Between them they spent nearly seven decades in education in the Bay Area. That’s a lot of classrooms. A lot of lesson plans. A lot of early mornings and late nights spent thinking about how to help someone else learn something that might change their life.

But if you knew my parents, you know they would tell you the real work of teaching rarely happens in the lecture.

It happens in the way you show up.

My father believed deeply in a philosophy that shaped how he taught and coached and lived. It’s the idea of being the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage. The sage stands in front of the room and tells everyone what he knows. The guide walks beside you and helps you discover what you are capable of knowing.

Dad didn’t need the spotlight. He never chased it. He just kept showing up. For his students. For his players. For his colleagues and friends. For his family. If you asked people what they remember about him, the answer comes back again and again in different forms but with the same meaning:

He was someone you could count on.

My mother is the same way. Cindy taught for more than thirty years and understood something that every great teacher eventually learns—that sometimes the most important thing you can be in someone’s life is simply the most consistent and kind presence in the room.

That was our home growing up. It still is.

Those lessons stayed with me, even when I wandered off the expected path. Because if you look at Puppione Family Wines, what you really see is someone taking a chance.

I never went to school for winemaking. I never apprenticed under some legendary cellar master. There was no master plan. There was just curiosity…and a little courage that I probably inherited from my parents.

Mom and Dad always encouraged us not only to learn and not only to teach, but to educate ourselves—to chase ideas that stirred something in us, even if there was no guarantee they would work out. Especially if there was no guarantee.

That philosophy is this winery.

Every bottle we make carries my family name on the label. When I started down this path, there were no promises anyone would like the wines. No assurances the whole thing wouldn’t collapse under the weight of my own optimism.

But I knew why I wanted to do it.

First for my wife, Dee, and our daughter Ariya.
Then for our son, Soren.
And yes, for my mom and dad, and our extended family, too.

Because if you grow up with a name like Puppione, you learn pretty quickly that names carry responsibility. They carry history. They carry the quiet expectation that whatever you do, you try to do it in a way that would make the people who gave you that name proud.

MAESTRI also reaches back even further.

In the early days of the Puppione family in California, my great-grandfather Pietro would buy grapes that came down from Livermore on the back of a cart. He would haul them home and make wine in the family basement. No branding strategy. No tasting notes. Just grapes, family, and a belief that wine belonged on the table.

Many of those early wines were field blends—what the Italians call uvaggio di campo. Different grapes grown together, harvested together, fermented together. The vineyard deciding the blend instead of the winemaker.

That spirit lives in this bottle.

The 2024 MAESTRI is a field blend of Zinfandel and Primitivo from Livermore Valley, made the old way—hand harvested, foot tread whole cluster, fermented with native yeast, aged quietly in neutral barrels, and bottled unfined and unfiltered. Nothing fancy. Just patience and trust. The kind of wine that behaves the way a good teacher does. It doesn’t dictate. It guides.

This wine was originally meant to celebrate my parents and their life in education.

Then life changed.

My father passed away the day after Christmas, and like anyone who has lost someone they love, we are all still figuring out how to carry that absence. But there is one moment I will always hold close.

Just before he passed, we opened this wine at my parents’ Christmas dinner table. Everyone was there—my mom, my siblings, their families, our kids running around the house the way kids do when a holiday is in full swing.

Dad tasted the wine. And he kept going back for more.

Now, if you knew my father, you know that was the highest level of review he was ever going to give. He wasn’t a tasting note guy. He didn’t swirl the glass and talk about forest floor and crushed violets. His system was simple:

If the glass kept getting empty, the wine must be pretty good.

By that standard, MAESTRI passed with flying colors.

And in that moment—sitting at the head of the table with his wife, his children, and his grandchildren—I think he knew what the wine was meant to say.

This bottle is not meant to be a showpiece wine.

It’s meant to be a table wine in the most honorable sense of the phrase. The kind that belongs beside a meal, beside laughter, beside stories that wander late into the evening. The kind that doesn’t compete with the moment but helps create it.

Which is exactly what great teachers do.

They don’t demand attention. They earn it, quietly, through consistency and presence.

There is one more detail about this wine that matters to me.

The retail price is $37. One dollar for every year my father spent as an educator.

Truthfully, the wine could probably justify more than that. But this felt right. Teachers, after all, often give more than they receive. Their worth isn’t measured by a salary or a single lesson plan. It’s measured in the quiet accumulation of lives shaped, paths redirected, and courage instilled.

Their value is counted not across lessons, but across lifetimes. And thirty-seven felt like the right way to say thank you.

So MAESTRI remains what it was always meant to be. A celebration of teachers. Of family. Of heritage and culture. Of the courage to try something even when you don’t know how it will turn out.

And most of all, of the kind of people who walk beside you in life, pointing gently toward what you might become.

My father was one of those people. My mother is one of those people.

If this wine does even a small part of that work at your table—if it brings people together, slows down the evening, and reminds someone they are loved—then it will have done its job.

And somewhere, I imagine Dad smiling at that.

Probably while reaching for another glass.