(Eater) - It all started with a tattoo of grape clusters, on Brianne Day’s left arm—inked there to cover up a previous lotus leaf drawing she'd committed to after many glasses of Champagne on the day of her divorce. It was spring 2013, and Day had just bottled her first vintage of Pinot Noir. To support her "winemaking habit," she not only was waiting tables at Gabriel Rucker’s Portland restaurant, Little Bird—but also working at a wine shop, managing the wine list at another restaurant called Riffle, and helping out at local winery Grochau Cellars.

Day was overworked, but she was also motivated by the prospect of continuing to make wine. And it was likely this positive attitude that captured the attention of two customers, Richard and Diana, who were dining at Little Bird while in town from Michigan, where they had grown wealthy thanks to Richard’s shares in a residential hot water tanks company. But it was also Day’s tattoo which caught their attention, and they asked what it meant.

Day, who is petite and fiery, with short blonde hair and an audacious smile, explained that she had fallen in love with winemaking in recent years, had worked harvests around the world to learn the craft, and had just started making her own juice out of a rented facility in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

"We’ll back you," they told her. And, boom: by 2014, Day had gone from making 450 cases of wine, to 2,500. This fall, Day will unveil a freshly renovated, state-of-the-art 14,000-square-foot winery in Oregon's Dundee Hills—all thanks to her generous investors. And Day plans to pay it forward: her new winery will be, she hopes, a "destination tasting room" where small-scale producers working naturally can rent facilities for their own wine labels. It will be the realization of Day’s life-long dream: to be a part of a "commune."

Day’s story might paint her as merely lucky—does a tattoo earn one a business these days?—or as someone who wants to make winemaking glamorous, were it not for her very robust, adventurous, and self-made winemaking CV, which started off right in her home state of Oregon. Day was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and has not remained close to her parents, but in a sense her "fairy godparents" Richard and Diana have helped her realize who she was meant to be. Day first became interested in wine while visiting Italy at age 19. But, it wasn’t until ten year later that she worked her first harvest at Murdoch James Estate in New Zealand.

"The first harvest was the most difficult," she recalled recently. "I didn’t know how to pace myself, what the workload would be like." But she was infatuated, and Day went back to Oregon and landed a job managing the tasting room and directing sales at one of the oldest and most respected Willamette Valley wineries, The Eyrie Vineyards. That propelled her through a series of harvest experiences, at three Oregon wineries; at Domaine Huber Verdereau in Volnay, Burgundy; in Mendoza, Argentina at Cepas Elegidas; she also traveled solo through the Loire Valley, specifically searching out natural winemakers, a philosophy that had become important to her as she learned more about the craft.