Alumnus Rich Hill Enjoys Success as an Ohio Vintner
Armed with a BS and MS in ceramics engineering, in 1975, Rich Hill embarked on an 18-year career with Union Carbide in new business development and technology, followed by positions with Advanced Ceramics Corp., Thermagon, and Laird Technologies, where he served as vice president of technology until his 2016 retirement.
For Hill, retirement has been an ideal opportunity to focus full-time on Laleure Vineyards, which he and Betsy, his first wife and Rutgers alumna, launched on a shoestring budget in 1997. Today, the boutique winery vineyard produces roughly 9,000 bottles a year of award-winning red and white wines.
After driving by a small dairy farm in Parkman, Ohio, Hill recalls how the couple bought the farm and decided to grow grapes, planting the first vines in 1997. When the vines thrived, they decided to move ahead with a winery. Laleure Vineyards – named for Hill’s grandmother, who was a World War I bride from France’s Loire Valley – was officially established in 2002. “Eventually, we started making really good wines,” he says.
“In 2016,” Hill says, “two things happened. Betsy passed and I retired. I’d been doing the winery part-time, but until then I’d never considered doing it full-time.”
A Growing Reputation
Laleure makes wines from its own grapes, and is perhaps best-known for its Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, and Pinot Noir varietal wines, which have won awards at international competitions. Its blended Nine Bridges Red and Nine Bridges White wines, and Paradox, a blended red of three varietals originating from the Bourgogne and Bordeaux regions of France, are all well-received.
With Laleure’s small output, sales are limited to its tasting room customers, local merchants, and area restaurants in Northeast Ohio. This past year was, in Hill’s words, “the most wonderful grape-growing year. It was the first year we made appassimento wine with Cabernet Franc grapes dried on racks.”
Drawing on Engineering Expertise
For Hill, whose engineering career was dedicated to developing new materials to “make things better,” and whose professional portfolio includes more than 30 patents, engineering and winemaking go hand and hand. “Being a vintner takes all your skills as an engineer,” he reports.
While he credits his SoE education and 2002 PhD in materials science from Austria’s University of Leoben with providing him with valuable research and technical skills, he also says working at a gas station fixing things while at Rutgers and a physical chemistry course he took for fun at Pace University while working for Union Carbide have stood him in equally good stead. “Grape growing is chemistry – that’s all it is” he insists. “All things – my education and experience earlier have let me do this. You can do it – that was my philosophy.”
Maintaining Academic Ties
“Throughout my whole career I have loved being associated with universities,” Hill says, which is clearly reflected in his recent appointment to the SoE Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s External Advisory Board. He has sponsored materials research at the Rutgers Center for Ceramic Research, research on polymers, co-taught a fermentation course at Case Western Reserve, and taught at The University of New Mexico labs after he brought a polymer ceramic technology he was developing to them. And, as a member of the Ohio Grape Research Committee, he regularly applies his technical know-how to focus on technologies for the state’s growing community of vintners.
Hill’s secret of success in everything from ceramics and materials sciences to winemaking he claims, is due, in large part, to his French grandmother, who told him, “No matter what you have to do, keep it up, Richard. No matter what.”
