(SFChronicle) - When successful business owners talk about what they did before entering the wine industry, a few origin stories start to sound familiar. Real estate development. Private equity. Even, increasingly, professional sports (see: Yao Ming, Tom Seaver, Arnold Palmer).

What you don’t often hear is this: “Border control caught me 33 times before I made it into the U.S.”

That’s the story of Jesus Ordaz. Better known as Chuy (CHEW-ey), he is one of California wine’s most unlikely success stories.

His Palo Alto Vineyard Management company, named for his hometown in Michoacán, farms 500 acres of wine grapes across Sonoma County. In the 1970s, he planted several of Sonoma Valley’s benchmark vineyards, such as Montecillo and Vendimia. He was a pioneer here in organic farming, compelled by a concern to protect farm workers from unsafe chemicals. His formidable client list includes DuMol, Failla, Neyers, Turley, Arnot-Roberts, Bedrock and Scholium Project.

So inextricable is Ordaz from his farming sites that many wine producers have taken to naming their wines after him — an unprecedented nod to a vineyard manager.

“Around here, Chuy is known as a genius,” says Kaarin Lee, who owns the Montecillo Vineyard. “There’s no one in our area who commands more respect.”

But while Ordaz controls some of Sonoma’s most valuable commodities, the grapes are not his own: All of the vineyards are either leased or contract-farmed. Now 63, he is working with his sons Chuy Jr. and Epifanio (“Eppie”) to establish a winery of their own, Ordaz Family Wines. The final frontier, he hopes, will be land ownership.

But the road has been long — and it began with running across a bridge in Tijuana.

Ordaz is a grape grower — a farmer. A compact, sturdy man, he seems to swim in his own clothing, with a baseball cap that obscures his eyes and pants hanging so low they look like they might slip. The first thing you notice upon meeting him is his smile, so relentless as to border on mischievous, and yet he’s reserved, quick to answer questions but content to be quiet otherwise. “I’ve never known a man so comfortable in his own skin,” says Tadeo Borchardt, winemaker at Neyers Vineyards, which buys fruit from Ordaz.

Farming is the foundation of wine production, but the grinding work is worlds away from the plush settings of wine sale and consumption. An essential component of many vineyards is undocumented immigrant labor, the often invisible underpinning of the industry.

Ordaz was once one of them.