Facebook
Twitter
MySpace
Digg

Single Page
Larger Font
Smaller Font

Everyone has a story to tell, and Charles Kimball’s has an interesting beginning. Kimball told me that he was born into the service and hospitality industry, quite literally. When his mother returned to New Hampshire after working as a nurse on a hospital ship off the coast of Italy during World War II, she opened a convalescent home in the family’s twenty-room Victorian house. With his father employed as the town plumber, baby Kimball came home from the hospital to a larger-than-average pride of awaiting grandparents. “Living with ten elderly residents in our huge Victorian home taught me a great appreciation for older people and molded me into an outgoing, people-oriented person,” notes Kimball.

Despite the eccentric yet loving environment of his youth, Kimball had wanderlust in his soul, even at a very young age. He says he owes part of this to his parents. “My parents valued travel as an education, and allowed me the freedom to explore, traveling the east coast while still in high school. I realized at a young age that the best education for me was to travel and learn from others. Starting at sixteen, I worked in the hospitality business as a waiter serving the masses food and working with groups of tourists. For my age, I was making a great income and was able to eat in fine restaurants and travel often to Boston to experience the great food and hotels in that fine city. During high school, I took college courses and graduated early, at seventeen, and quickly moved Ogunquit Maine. The restaurants and beauty of Maine solidified my career in the service industry. Ogunquit was a wonderful place to come out and experience my first relationship.”

Still in his teens, Kimball started exploring Europe in true teenage, backpacking style. “At eighteen, I found myself in Amsterdam and touring throughout Europe with two great friends. The adventures that followed showed me that every culture has a different way of looking at things, and that really helped educate me on myself. I picked olives in the hills of Crete for nine dollars a day, slept on olive sacks in the barn of the farmer, and ate goat cheese and salami for weeks. I also remember fondly a hippy bus I took, from Athens to Paris, for fifty dollars. It was an amazing trip through the old Yugoslavia, over Mont Blanc, and on to Paris. While I would never do that again, it was perfect for the time.”

For all his interesting tales, Kimball is also a good listener, and an avid participator in conversations. He learned respect for others at a young age, and the influences of his extensive travels not only opened his mind to other ways of life, but also taught him the art of meaningful conversation—a skill set he would take with him throughout his professional careers.

Before settling in Napa County, Kimball worked as an event manager and catering director at several fine hotels on both coasts. Planning corporate retreats, business meetings, and weddings further rounded out his hospitality experience and helped prepare him for what he would eventually call his dream job: working for himself. Learning about Kimball’s past, it struck me that nothing about his developing professional life seemed forced. Rather, there is a flow to his story, lessons and experiences that are built on one another, in an orderly and unique fashion. It’s almost as if he were destined to be living what he calls the “Champagne Lifestyle” in Northern California.

Kimball didn’t stroll into this tight-knit, egalitarian community of wine makers and hospitality professionals unwilling to earn his place; he had credentials to build and wine knowledge to expand. “My first job here in the wine country was working with a 20-year veteran of the wine world, Melissa Teaff Catering. We managed many intimate events at some of the biggest mansions that dot this valley. I met many of the movers and shakers of the wine world here, and now call them my friends. I also worked with Leslie Rudd of Dean and Deluca, selling wine and also as a captain at their high-end steak house, Press, in St. Helena.” Kimball also studied wine paring and wine service at The Culinary Institute of America to increase his knowledge. Finally, with the wine world in his blood and his hospitality connections ever increasing, Kimball was poised, with business plan in hand, to begin working for himself.

When setting up his wine country concierge business, Kimball didn’t originally consider catering to gay clientele. His original business model was more generalized, calling the business Undiscovered Napa Sonoma. “I had my business plan together and my web site running under UndiscoveredNapaValley.com,” he says. “But then one day, I was speaking with a well-placed businessman in Napa Valley about my business, and he made the assumption that as a gay man, I was marketing to the gay community. After many cups of coffee, he went on and on about how smart I was to do that, since in his view, no one had really pursued the gay travel market with any vigor. I went home and secured an additional domain name to attract gay visitors to my site, settling on www.GayNapaGetaways.com. The rest, as they say, is history.” His fortuitous conversation over coffee that day steered him in a direction he was bound to discover, sooner or later. “Looking back, the direction my business has gone has really been the direction it was meant to go. The gay travel community has a certain taste that I understand. Now that most of my clients are from the gay community, I take great pride in knowing that wherever they go, they’ll be welcomed with open arms and appreciated. That’s important to me.”

Kimball’s flexible business model took him in yet another direction, one he might have missed were he not willing to alter his original marketing focus. “A few months after expanding my website to directly reach the gay market, we achieved marriage equality in California, and I decided to become a legal officiant. Since then I have married and managed many gay, wine country weddings. My happiest moments in life are seeing a couple join in a life together. I plan on being here when equality comes back to California, and to position myself to be the premier same-sex wedding coordinator from San Francisco to Napa.”