Meet the Team
Tom Sinton grew up on a ranch in the Paso Robles area, where his family raised cattle, alfalfa, and sugar beets, inspiring his lifelong love of growing plants.
At 15, he spent a transformative summer with a family in Reims, France, where wine was served at every meal. The deep connections between food, wine, and family resonated with him.
Shell Creek Vineyards
This led him to establish Shell Creek Vineyards in 1972 on the family ranch. Realizing he needed to learn more about grapes and wine, he earned a Masters in Food Science at UC Davis while managing the vineyard. He decided the vineyard was too far away from Paso Robles to develop into a winery and tasting room, so he sold the vineyard in the early 1980s, and moved to the Bay Area.
ProBusiness
At the time, IBM had just launched the personal computer, and Tom founded a payroll and human resources service built entirely on PCs, ProBusiness, and took it public. He grew the company into one of the largest services in the US. After the Dot Com crash reduced interest rates to zero, he sold the company.
Returning to Wine
Realizing he still had a passion for wine, in 2011 he and his son, Rob, began making wine in Napa under the Starfield Vineyards brand, while knowing that — long term — Napa would be too crowded and expensive.
Years of Wine Tasting in France
To decide how to develop Starfield, they took multiple trips to France, where they tasted through Bordeaux (and made wine at Chateau Lynch Bages), Burgundy, and Beaujolais, and later embarked on a month-long trip to the Rhone, where they tasted at up to eight wineries daily, and ultimately fell in love with the aromatic varietals of Cote Rotie, Condrieu, Ermitage, Chareauneuf du Pape and Tavel, laying the foundation for their future selection of varietals, and helping establish their winemaking philosophy.
In 2012, they selected a 67-acre property in the Sierra Foothills, east of Placerville, in the El Dorado AVA.
Rob Sinton grew up as an urban kid in the Bay Area. He chose UC Davis for college, where he started in biochemistry. Taking an introductory wine course led him to start home winemaking — fermenting some El Dorado Mourvedre in a carboy in his Davis apartment. It turned out to be quite good, and as soon as he had a chance, Rob switched his major to Viticulture and Enology.
Making Wine in Napa and El Dorado
After graduation, Rob moved to Napa and interned at a winery for a year, while Tom got the vineyard started. In 2016, they began producing wine in Napa from the El Dorado vineyard and continued to do so until they could relocate production to El Dorado. Rob moved to a new house on the vineyard in late 2022, when he became Winemaker, and Tom focused on Winegrowing. Tom and Rob both love to grow landscape plants, and they manage the Gardens Together.
Winemaking
Rob aspires to make Starfield wines equal to those of George Vernay, Francois Villard, Yves Gangloff, Marcel Chapoutier, and Domaine Reynaud. He works by using new techniques and approaches in test lots and rolling out the successful tests to production-scale winemaking. He is the force behind Starfield’s increasingly successful cofermentations.
Passion for Gardens, Banjo, Astronomy, and Photography
Once he moved up, Rob started to add many new flowers to the gardens, including cannas at the Tasting Room, peonies along the trail to the Lake Pavilion, and quince and penstemon at the front entry. He often installs Ikebana displays in the Tasting Room. He can occasionally be seen on the property riding a motorized unicycle, and he’s often heard working on his banjo technique. He has a longstanding passion for astronomy and photography, which led him to design Starfield’s new labels, featuring Solargraphs taken with pinhole cameras he built. He lives on the property with his wife, Sarah, and one-year old son.