Jerry Brassfield grew up in the San Joaquin Valley farming town of Porterville, got into the nutrition business at nineteen, and built what became NeoLife, the supplement company he still chairs. In 1973 he bought a 1,600-acre Lake County cattle ranch called High Serenity Ranch, in the western reach of High Valley beneath the 4,285-foot volcano Mount Konocti, and expected to sell it on. He kept it instead. After watching neighbors plant grapes, he spent 1996 onward studying weather patterns and pulling hundreds of soil samples; the first vines went in and the first phase of the winery was built in 2001, using materials salvaged from a demolished Bay Area shopping center. Brassfield was a lead petitioner for the High Valley AVA, approved in 2005. The estate now runs to several thousand acres with over 500 planted between 1,800 and nearly 3,000 feet, an elevation band shared by roughly one percent of the world's vineyards, and all seventeen varietals are grown, made and bottled on site.