Thomas J. Fogarty's House

Thomas J. Fogarty is an American surgeon and inventor of the embolectomy catheter. Before his invention the success rate for removing an embolus, or blood clot, was forty to fifty percent. Fogarty’s inventions and the many others that resulted from his original embolectomy catheter heavily influenced the way surgery was performed.

In 1969, when he began teaching surgery at the Stanford University Medical Center, Fogarty was first introduced to the wine industry. He helped out a Stanford colleague’s small winery with vineyard and cellar practices. Later on, he purchased land in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He established a cellar there and began making wine with grapes bought from nearby growers. He planted his first vines in 1978 and set up a commercial winery, Thomas Fogarty Winery and Vineyards, in 1981. The estate now consists of three hundred twenty-five acres. Fifteen thousand cases of wine are produced annually.

Fogarty’s basis for winemaking also stems from his explanation that certain elements in the extracts from grape skin relax the blood vessels and lower the affinity for blood to clot.