“We got George out to speak and he tasted some of our beers,” Vinnie recalls. “He was blown away that this beer could be made and it was that good in plastic fermenters. He wrote about it once, and it was a feather in our cap.”

In fact, it was through winery connections that she and Vinnie met years earlier. Natalie, a late teen at the time, was working for a winery called Piconi. One day, she and her employer had driven over to Cilurzo Winery—owned by Vinnie’s parents—to buy some produce when she saw Vinnie crushing grapes. The two were introduced that day, but it wasn’t until they found themselves at the same party the next summer that they started talking and Vinnie invited her to his 20th birthday.

At the time, he was a homebrewer messing around in his parents’ winery’s drain- and hose-equipped cellar. When they started dating, he found himself with company—Natalie would spend up to three or four nights a week there, talking while brewing and bottling. She brought the Scarcella’s Pizza and, because she was of legal drinking age and Vinnie wasn’t, the beer.

Opening a brewery was always the goal, and in 1994, they made it happen—for a while. It did not go very well, but it wasn’t entirely fruitless. “Our first beer at Blind Pig was the Inaugural Ale, which is now supposedly the first double IPA,” Vinnie says.