With more than 30 years' experience running high-tech companies, Tom Roebuck never expected be up against a wall trying to find a new job, after being laid off from his position as CEO of a software startup company. Yet that's exactly where he found himself 2 1/2 years ago. Today, Roebuck, 63, still hasn't found a job—instead, he decided to create his own by taking a longtime hobby and developing it into his own successful company.

Roebuck lives on a one-acre piece of land in a beautiful French-style home with his wife, Louise, in Saratoga. In the back of his house, he grows grapes for winemaking on more than 350 vines. Adjacent to one of his patches of vines is a small micro-winery house that is partially underground, keeping it between 60 and 64 degrees, which houses his barrels of wine as they age. Once a year, Louise helps him harvest the grapes.

For several years, Roebuck enjoyed this hobby in his spare time after work and on weekends.

However, he always came across a problem when it came time to transfer the wine from the huge barrels to bottles.

"I needed a system that would allow me to bottle wine efficiently," he says. He began searching the market for a small-scale bottling system for at-home winemakers. He was disappointed when he found that there was no such thing available at a reasonable price. So, he decided he needed to invent his own.

Roebuck remembers it took him around five or six months to design his bottling system and get it working smoothly, but he kept the product to himself for about two years.

Then suddenly, Roebuck was laid off. He immediately started looking for another job; however, the response he got was less than enthusiastic. When after a long while Roebuck was still unemployed with no prospects, he began to rethink his longtime hobby. He decided to take the plunge and try introducing his bottling invention to the wine world. After re-examining the market, he discovered that there still was a lack of any type of similar, small-scale bottling system. Roebuck realized that his device could fill an important niche in the wine industry.

"I got more serious about trying to launch a commercial version of the product," he says. So, in October 2003, Roebuck set out to "product-ize" his invention, as he called it. Over the next two months, he built a working prototype that he could demonstrate.

Roebuck's invention

Roebuck designed an automatic, multiple-bottle-filling device. It consists of a volume-based, time-based computer, which is combined with a multichanneled metering and electronic flow-management subsystem. The machine is packaged in stainless steel.

Roebuck's device comes into play when a winemaker is ready to transfer wine from barrels or carboys—glass jugs that hold about six or seven gallons—into wine bottles. The device has a small platform in front, with a loading tray on which to place empty bottles. Long, skinny spouts extend down from the top of the device toward the loading tray. The winemaker places the bottles so they are under the spouts, which are designed to create a smooth, laminar flow of any liquid into the receiving bottles or containers. The spouts are interchangeable, coming in many different lengths to accommodate whatever size bottle the winemaker uses. Then, one end of a plastic tube is placed into the barrel or carboy that is holding the wine, and the other end is connected to the device.

One of the unique aspects of Roebuck's device is that it has different settings. A knob on the control panel allows adjustment for the size of bottle the winemaker is filling. Roebuck says a standard, commercial wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine. However, there are also what are known as "splits," or half-size bottles, that hold 375 milliliters and double-size bottles, which hold 1.5 liters. With Roebuck's device, the winemaker adjusts the knob to the size of bottle he wants to fill. Then, all that has to be done is push the AutoFill button, and within 15 to 18 seconds, four or six bottles are filled.

Using a special calibrating device that Roebuck also invented, he individually fine-tunes each machine himself to make sure they are perfectly accurate, so that when the winemaker presses the AutoFill button, each wine bottle is filled to the exact same level.

"The end result is a self-contained, automatic system which is easy to use and allows the user to quickly fill either four or six bottles at a time to an accurate, user-determined level at the push of a button," says Roebuck as he picks up one of his devices, demonstrating how compact and light they are, at only 30 pounds each.

"The performance of these machines is around 400 to 700 bottles per hour," Roebuck says.

Roebuck says self-containment, ease of use and affordability were important features he wanted his device to have, being that the existing market only offered huge, bulky and expensive machines. The sizes of those machines also means they can only be transported by truck, which can take weeks and is extremely expensive. The compact size and light weight of Roebuck's machine allows it to be shipped for $30, arriving in only a few days.

A company is born

Roebuck decided to name his company Vigneron Specialty Products, after the French word for winemaker. Once he had his prototype ready, he set out for trade shows to begin introducing it to the industry, attending his first this January. He also filed applications for a provisional patent to protect his invention.

Between February and April, he continued to attend more trade shows all over North America and demonstrate his invention. Roebuck discovered that merely describing his product over the phone to representatives of wine companies left them skeptical—he needed to show his product in person.

Once industry representatives saw the device with their own eyes, it was well received. Vigneron Specialty Products became the Vigneron Corporation and began filling its first orders in April. He has also signed on two dealers, one in Concord and one in Canada. Between Roebuck and the dealers, 30 systems have been shipped since April, bringing in between $1,000 and $1,500 each, at introductory pricing.

After a while, Roebuck realized that his invention could possibly be used for more than just bottling wine. After all, he reasoned, many things come in bottles, and other companies might benefit from his system.

"Since I began shipping my product, I realized there are other markets outside the wine industry where the same design and application has a good fit," he says.

He has begun talking to boutique companies that bottle products such as olive oil, salad oils, flavored syrups and cosmetics like creams. Vigneron Corporation is now planning to expand into these other markets. In fact, Roebuck already has a customer in the flavored-syrups business—a plant with more than 1,000 customers that ships about 200,000 bottles a year.

"I accidentally put my foot in a small niche and wound up stumbling upon this greater market," he said. "So now I am addressing them."

"I realized my product has the needed capability and flexibility, and that these other markets have greater business potential than small, commercial wineries," he says. However, Roebuck says he will still continue to service the wine industry.

Currently, Roebuck's company offers two models of his machine: the Vigneron 4, which can fill four bottles at a time, and the Vigneron 6, which fills six. Both models can fill between 400 and 700 bottles per hour. He is experimenting with a possible Vigneron V12, which will be more powerful and hopefully be able to fill up to 2,000 bottles per hour. Future plans include a Vigneron 2, which will be for beginning at-home winemakers, filling only two bottles at a time and selling at a lower cost.

Older job-seekers

As Vigneron Corporation grew, Roebuck needed help assembling machines to fill orders and developing the business in areas such as manufacturing. He placed an ad online, seeking employees.

Roebuck was less than surprised when all of the people who answered his ad were older Bay Area residents like himself who had also been laid off and were unable to find a new job. One of his part-time assistants had been unemployed for two years before Roebuck offered him some work.

"A lot of people lost their jobs between 2001 and 2003, and many of them still remain unemployed," he said. Although officials continue to say the economy is bouncing back, Roebuck says he thinks the high-tech industries in the Bay Area are not recovering as quickly as others and estimates the local unemployment rate to still be at around 6.2 percent. He says he personally knows many people over the age of 50 who have been laid off and who are still having trouble finding jobs in their industries because companies all want younger blood.

"People my age are being discriminated against. We're supposed to be a protected age group, and we're not. I think this is happening more and more," he says. "So, you're forced into doing something else, like me."

Roebuck says when he was looking for a new job after being laid off, he was constantly asked to fill out "profiles." The profiles asked questions such as how long ago he graduated from college and how long he had worked in each of his past disciplines. Basically, he says, it was their way of determining how old he was without directly asking him. If he declined to answer any of the questions, he would not be granted an interview.

As a result, Roebuck says he was forced to take his future into his own hands. Luckily for him, it paid off, proving the age-old saying true: the harder one works, the luckier one gets.

"It was a big risk putting up all the money to start this business," Roebuck admitted. "But I knew the bigger risk was to do nothing."

For more information, visit Vigneron Corporation online at www.vigneron-sp.com.