Casey Di Cesare | Source | Winemaker at Scheid Family Wines

Arriving at Scheid Family Wines in 2017, Winemaker Casey Di Cesare has been an innovative spirit since day one. Focused on distinctive brands like Metz Road and Sunny with a Chance of Flowers, he has explored approaches to making great tasting wines in unique ways. For Metz Road, he uses in-vineyard native yeast fermentation as a way to best express terroir utilizing the microbes of the vineyard in a bonded shipping container winery set in the middle of the vineyard. For Sunny with a Chance of Flowers, his ingenuity to create a low alcohol, zero sugar, low calorie wine with fully ripened grapes and a proprietary process catapulted the brand to the top of the ‘Better for You’ category and earned recognition for the Chardonnay as one of Wine Business Monthly’s 2020 Hot Brands.

Casey was raised in Irvington, New York, a small Hudson River town, before jetting off to the West Coast to attend college. While studying political science at the University of California Los Angeles, Casey was a competitive Division 1 track and field athlete, specializing in the pole vault. Though a different field than the soils of Monterey, it was this unconventional path that led Casey to his first job in the wine world. Through a fellow teammate, he landed a part-time position at Cinquain Cellars in Paso Robles and what began as a fun side gig in the cellar quickly developed into an irrefutable passion for wine.

Casey enrolled in Cornell University and received his Masters in Enology, while studying in the Finger Lakes AVA. Upon graduating in 2017, he made his way back to California, to Scheid Family Wines, his new home where he could flourish with the endless creative opportunities that the broad portfolio offers. Casey was promoted to Winemaker in March 2021. He was named a 2021 Wine Industry Leader by Wine Business Monthly and was selected to represent Monterey County as a Founding Board Member of the Vintners Institute in 2022.