Mary Rocca practiced dentistry in Minnesota for years before convincing her husband, pain specialist Dr. Eric Grigsby, to move back to her native Northern California in 1989, four young kids in tow.

She soon opened a new practice in Napa and set about looking for vineyard land, as you do when you've grown up in Sonoma and western Marin counties, the daughter of avid gardeners.

"Eric and I have long valued agriculture and land," Rocca said. "We like the idea of growing and producing from the land, so it was inevitable that we would want to have a vineyard."

Still, it took 10 years for Rocca and Grigsby to save money, find and buy the right red-grape vineyard, a 21-acre dream spot on the valley floor in Yountville, now named for Grigsby, at the northwest corner of Silverado Trail and Yountville Crossroad. A few more years passed, and they bought another plantable patch of land in the cooler Coombsville area of Napa, a 12-acre parcel they planted themselves to cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and petit verdot. They named it the Collinetta Vineyard.

Originally, they sold the Grigsby grapes to thirsty Napa Valley wineries looking for great cabernet sauvignon and syrah, including Stags' Leap Winery, which had been buying the fruit for years.

But as these things so often go, Rocca eventually could not resist the nagging temptation to noodle around with making a little Rocca Family Vineyards wine as well.

"It all started because we had these beautiful vineyards we'd been so meticulous in finding and cultivating, we had the soils of Yountville and we had an absolute love of the land," said Grigsby.

A serious woman when it comes to her passions " people, gardening and food and wine " for her first vintages Rocca hired consulting winemaker Celia Welch Masyczek, considered among the finest cabernet consultants (Staglin, Hartwell, Scarecrow) working in Napa.

With the right vineyards, the right winemaker and Rocca's vision, from the onset the wines have been seriously good " particularly the dark plum and mocha cabernet sauvignon, a blend of fruit from the family's two vineyards, and a smoky, cherry-tinged syrah, also now sourced from the two estates. They produce around 2,000 cases in all.

But Rocca Family Vineyards surprised everyone when in 2007 it won first place at a blind tasting of 2002 California cabernets organized by the American Vintners Club at Chateau Brane-Cantenac in Bordeaux, an event attended and judged by dozens of Bordeaux's upper echelon. Among its competitors were some of Napa's finest, including Caymus Special Selection, Ramey Wine Cellars Jericho Canyon, Ridge Monte Bello and Flora Springs Rutherford Hillside.

That same year at a Vintners Club of San Francisco blind tasting of a dozen California cabs from the 2004 vintage, Rocca's wine again placed first, ahead of Shafer Hillside Select, Ridge Monte Bello, Dominus and others.

Buoyed by such early and unexpected success, Rocca last year decided she needed a full-time winemaker of her own, so with Masyczek's blessing and personal recommendation she hired young up-and-comer Paul Colantuoni. Raised partly in Europe, Colantuoni was introduced to the great wines of France and Italy in his early teens.

"Those wines were a revelation," he recalled. "Being introduced to such beautiful wines at such a young age had a profound impact on me. Those wines continue to influence my winemaking."

Originally planning to be a doctor, at Princeton Colantuoni switched majors in his senior year from chemical engineering and molecular biology to romance languages, with the goal of becoming a winemaker.

"I started looking for a wine job in Napa," he continued. "I had never been to California but I knew Napa was America's wine mecca and I wrote a blind letter to Tim Mondavi and explained that I had no experience but that I was motivated."

Colantuoni soon found himself working as a wine educator and lab tech at Robert Mondavi Winery. Living and working in the Napa Valley, he eventually met a young winemaker named Ehren Jordan, who had trained in Cornas, France, in the northern Rhone. Jordan hired Colantuoni as his assistant winemaker at Neyers Vineyard in Pritchard Hill.

Colantuoni's sensibilities have served him well. After Neyers, he trained at some of the world's most vaunted, old-world wineries, most notably Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, where he further honed a noninterventionist winemaking approach.

"My job is to stand out of the fruit's way," he said. "(Rocca's) sites have wonderful rocky soils with excellent drainage, great climate conditions and sun exposure. All of the pieces are already in place to make world-class wine."

Cabernet is Rocca's focus, but Colantuoni's hire and past training in the Rhone invites questions on whether syrah might take on more weight. Rocca also makes an approachable, Bordeaux-style blend called Bad Boy Red " the elusive, cowboy-hatted fellow on its label rumored to be Grigsby " for $32.

With that name, Bad Boy might be more noticeable on a store shelf, but the true story of Grigsby and Rocca is one of good deeds.

Having worked so much in the field of patient care, in 1997 the couple founded the Grigsby-Rocca Foundation, an international nonprofit that originally provided health education and care in underserved areas of the Unites States, including helping patients with transportation and healthcare at Grigsby's pain management clinic in Napa.

Most recently, their efforts have been focused on providing end-of-life care to AIDS patients in Malawi, Africa, in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic. Grigsby trained in anesthesiology and pain management at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., then later joined the staff, teaching at the Mayo Medical School before moving to California.

"Mary and I moved to Napa with the dream of owning vineyard land, but we never lost sight of the larger international community," Grigsby said. "We consider ourselves fortunate to have some medical expertise and we've made it our mission to establish the necessary medical infrastructure around the world to offer palliative, end-of-life care."

Infused with good people making good wine, Rocca Family remains one to watch, a story still unfolding, one with a very good beginning.