Winemaker
Rob Murray
- Discipline
- Winemaker
- Based in
- Paso Robles, California, United States
i. Biography
Rob Murray founded Tooth & Nail Wine Company in Paso Robles and Tooth & Nail Winery, carrying into wine a sensibility formed long before the first label or cellar door on a family farm in California’s Central Valley. That background gives the work a soil-first logic: farming as the starting point, not an afterthought, and a career built with attention to what happens before a bottle is ever opened. Across the years, Murray’s path has read as accumulation rather than shortcut, with each step widening his view of the land, the vines, and the work that links them.
The Path
The sequence is instructive. He moved through the trade with practical patience, taking in one region before bringing that experience back to another, where the contours of Central Coast wine country shaped the next stage of the work. By 2001, he was founder at veteran vineyard management company in Central Coast, California, building on that foundation as co-owner / vineyard owner and grower at Rob Murray Vineyards in Central Coast, California (2004–2025). Over those years, the work moved from early hands-on experience into ownership, stewardship, and the long view required to tend vineyards over time. He later expanded into wine production in Paso Robles, California, becoming co-founder at Tooth & Nail Wine Company (2011–2025) and owner at Tooth & Nail Winery (2014–2025), shifting from vineyard work into winery leadership. In that move, Murray carried the same discipline forward without losing the original center of the career. The vineyard logic remained visible in the broader winery enterprise, giving the Paso Robles project continuity: not simply making wine, but building a place around it.
The Work Today
The work most closely associated with Murray is the Paso Robles wine company he founded, along with Tooth & Nail Winery. Together, they mark the clearest expression of a career built from the ground up—rooted in farming, tested in vineyard management, and carried into the wider demands of winery leadership. The emphasis remains on creation and continuity: a company, a winery, and a body of work still tied to the land and the regions that formed it.
Signature
Rob's signature wines include Force of Nature, Tooth & Nail, Amor Fati, Stasis, and The Stand. The list shows the range attached to his name, each wine part of the larger identity he built through Tooth & Nail Wine Company and Tooth & Nail Winery.
Acclaim
The recognition here is durable and concrete: a founder whose roots trace back to a family farm in the Central Valley and whose work is tied to Tooth & Nail Wine Company in Paso Robles and Tooth & Nail Winery. It is a profile marked less by flash than by substance, by the sort of sustained effort that accumulates over years and shows up in the vineyards, in the cellar, and in the shape of the businesses he helped create.
Profile updated August 2026
FAQ
Asked of Rob
Where did Rob Murray train or study?
Rob Murray trained at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
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