The first time Randy Ullom laid eyes on California, he wasn’t impressed.

Born in Michigan and raised in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, he was accustomed to the lush, green landscapes of his youth. But California, which at the time had been enduring a five-year drought, was “dusty, brown and horrible.”

“I’d been offered a winemaking job at Buena Vista Winery and thought, ‘why would anybody want to live in California?’” he said. “The earth looked dead. I just couldn’t do it.”

But Ullom wasn’t the type to shy away from a challenge. On the contrary, he had spent his late teens and early twenties in Chile during the early 1970s, a time of intense political upheaval marked by a military coup and the rise of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Ullom, who’d braved the coup for a chance to s

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