hitney Fisher loves her job. As she told me during a recent bottle signing at Papa Joe's Gourmet Market in Birmingham, MI, "I drive to work every day with my dog, thinking 'I couldn't have a better life.'"

With no formal training, it was never her dream to become the winemaker at her family's Fisher Vineyards winery, which has been producing high quality wines from Napa and Sonoma for 30 years, and yet she ascended to that position in May of 2002.

"I grew up on the property and was involved in a lot of different aspects (of its operation). At the time, my father (Fred Fisher) was doing the winemaking, along with consultant Chuck Ortman. I would tag along with him, and I used to bug him, asking, 'What are you doing now? Why are you doing that? What are you going to do next?' And he'd say, 'Well, if you stick around, you'll see.' And that's actually what happened."

Still, the wine business was not in her plans early on, so she attended Princeton University, initially studying molecular biology, but finishing with a degree in American history, while doing "a lot of studio art in between."

"I'm one of those people with a lot of different interests," she says, "and it's ironic that all of those aspects that I find interesting in life have been fulfilled in the wine production side of things."

After college, Whitney wanted to get out and see things, so she took a job in the wine industry with a company that did joint ventures in such regions as South Africa, New Zealand and Western Australia. "I worked on the Sauvignon Blanc program for The Crossings in New Zealand, a project of FMG, the big insurance company," she explained. "We consulted with them as to what style they would produce, the vineyards they'd put in, the winemaking and then actually importing to the US."

She was mainly responsible for researching information for the client base; a typical assignment might involve investigating how much money it would take to buy a vineyard in South Africa, and start an operation, determining what the labor pool is like, and how, with the co-op being so strong in South Africa, to get in there and actually have quality wines made.

"It was great for me, because I loved working with the international community, and I had a lot of fun. But it got to a point where I came from a winery that was family - run, really hands - on and quality oriented, and some of the projects I was working with were more corporate, bottom line driven and so it's a very different side of the business to see, and that wasn't what I wanted to be doing. I ended up leaving that job, simply because they were demanding return on investments that were sometimes higher than 15%, and they would ask me, 'Whitney, we've got to cut winemaking costs, how do we do that?' And I'm saying, 'You want to sell your Sauvignon Blanc for $20 a bottle in the U.S. market, and you want to cut your winemaking budget? That's really not how you're going to do it.'"

So, Whitney went home to Fisher Vineyards in 1999, taking a position that was essentially that of a cellar rat, working long hours and performing such un - glamorous tasks as washing barrels and sanitizing equipment.

"I totally fell in love with it" she enthused, "it was something about the times when you're in the cellar doing work that's repetitive that's really a nice opportunity to think about things. I got a great perspective. My father's very anti - nepotism, so this was his way of introducing me to the business from the ground up, which he felt, if I were to enter the business, he would want to see. We're the kind of family where we all do everything. I'm the janitor; I clean the bathroom and take out the trash."