IDEA Week

Courtney Kingston is the founder of Kingston Family Vineyards in Casablanca Valley, Chile. She’s a graduate of Princeton University and she started her career as a consultant for Deloitte’s wine industry practice. There she began learning the ins and outs of the California wine business, and later as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she wrote the vineyard’s original business plan using the Chilean cattle ranch that her family had owned and operated since 1922.

After many discussions about the feasibility of converting the family farm into a vineyard, Courtney decided to take a leap of faith; in 1998, she became an entrepreneur and Kingston Family Vineyards became a reality. Today Courtney shares the story how it all began and what it’s really like to start and run your own vineyard.