The 11th annual Wine, Chocolate & Art event benefitting the Manteca-Ripon-Escalon Council of the United Way of San Joaquin County takes place Thursday, Sept. 16, at the Great Wolf Resort.
You can text WINE to 40403 to purchase tickets for $30 each or go through the United Way of San Joaquin website.
Jose Hernandez, the first migrant farmworker to become a NASA astronaut, will be at the event serving his wine that he is now making through Lodi-based Tierra Luna Cellars.
Hernandez was born into a migrant farm working family from Mexico.
Hernandez – who didn’t learn English until he was 12 years old – spent much of his childhood on what he calls the California circuit, traveling with his family from Mexico to California’s southern San Joaquin Valley each March. They then worked their way northward to the Stockton area by summer, picking strawberries, cucumbers, cherries, tomatoes and grapes along the way. In late November, they would return to Mexico spending Christmas and waiting for March to start the cycle all over again.
While in California, his weekends were filled with laboring in the fields with his family. While the end of the school year meant summer fun for his peers, it meant working 7 days a week in the hot summer fields for Hernandez and his family. The neighborhoods he lived in were not the best and often plagued with drugs, alcohol, and gang violence.
Through all of this, his parents stayed strong and focused on their children’s education which allowed Hernandez to dream of one day reaching the stars. Determined to fulfill his dream, he obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering. After a successful career as an engineer and scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked on the development of an X-ray laser, helped developed the first full-field digital mammography system for the early detection of breast cancer and travelled to Russia to work in the nuclear non-proliferation arena, Hernadez joined NASA in 2000 and was selected as part of the 19th class of U.S. Astronauts in 2004.
On August 28, 2009 Hernandez, assigned to the STS-128 Space Shuttle Discovery mission as the flight engineer, realized his main dream of reaching for the stars blasting off into space on a 14 day mission to the International Space Station.
Hernandez left NASA after 12 years of service and decided to come home and raise his family near his parents who live in Lodi.
In doing so, he was able to focus on and realize his next big dream, which was to one day own his own vineyard and produce his own wine. This is how Tierra Luna Cellars was born. Today, Hernandez along with the help of his father, Salvador, own and farm a small vineyard north of Lodi and produce their own line of wines.
Hernandez’s view of the constellations from space inspired the naming scheme for his wines.
