On Santa Catalina Island, a Winemaking Couple's Costly Pursuit Brian P. Hall for The New York Times THE CROP The Rusack Winery vineyard, high above the Pacific on Santa Catalina Island. Geoff Rusack, a Santa Monica, Calif., aviation lawyer turned Santa Ynez Valley vintner. IT may be among the world's most challenging vineyards, with salty soil and over-the-top costs for transporting the grapes to the winery. Then there are the predators: crickets and yellow jackets and deer and bison. And disease, like the powdery mildew that once forced each cluster of chardonnay grapes to be washed by hand. But the worst is the wind: sea breezes that forced the vines to be covered in plastic sheets so potential grapes didn't blow off. This is the dream vineyard of Geoff Rusack, a Santa Monica, Calif., aviation lawyer turned Santa Ynez Valley vintner, who imported the zinfandel vines of a dreamer before him to grow grapes on Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off Los Angeles's coast. The family of Mr. Rusack's wife, Alison - the Wrigleys of chewing gum and Chicago Cubs fame - has owned land on Catalina for nearly a century. The dream of an island vineyard took hold while the couple were riding horses there during their second date, in 1982. Twenty-five years later, Mr. Rusack realized the dream by transplanting the remaining zinfandel vines of Justinian Caire, a San Francisco businessman who brought the grapes to Santa Cruz Island in 1884. Mr. Caire built a red brick winery that stands today and turned Santa Cruz, a remote and rugged isle off the coast of Santa Barbara, into one of the West Coast's more celebrated vineyards before it was knocked out in 1932 by the one-two punch of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Mr. Rusack, who founded the Rusack Winery in Santa Barbara County in 1995, took Mr. Caire's zinfandel, as well as pinot noir and chardonnay vines, and planted them on four acres of the family's El Rancho Escondido, which sits beneath Santa Catalina Island's mountaintop airport and overlooks the western coastline. "We just said, "We're not getting any younger," " he said. It's like the Nike ads: Just do it. Mrs. Wrigley Rusack added: "We'd be kicking ourselves if we didn't try this. We'd always wonder if it would have worked. It does, barely, despite geography and climate. Yellow jackets wiped out half the first zinfandel crop. The wasps did not return over the summer, but quail and foxes ate about half the pinot noir crop, which was harvested the first week of September. "It was a great thing to get to know the vineyard business in Santa Ynez before we attacked Catalina," Mr. Rusack said. We call it extreme farming. Being in this environment, you have to be vigilant. You have to be on top of it. All of the different things we have to do to dial this in are unique to Catalina. The owners of Santa Cruz Island - the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy - were happy to let the old vines go. They have spent the last three decades trying to return the 97-square-mile island to its native environment, removing feral pigs and sheep, and returning bald eagles and island foxes. But while preserving cultural history is a small part of the conservancy's mission, replanting a long-lost vineyard of nonnative fruit was never in the cards, despite pleas from donors. "It just wasn't appropriate for us to do it on Santa Cruz Island," said Lotus Vermeer, who was director of the Nature Conservancy's Channel Islands Program from 2002 until last April. The group didn't have the funds, resources or expertise, she said. Geoff and Alison really took the pressure off of us to plant a vineyard there, and they did it right. That process started in earnest about a decade ago, when Mr. Rusack began researching Catalina's climate and found it was much like the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, where chardonnay and pinot prosper. After hearing about the remnants of the old Santa Cruz vineyard, he said he thought: "You know what would be novel and fun and historical? Why don't we try to resurrect some of these wild vines on Catalina Island? Soon after, he was led to one of the last surviving vines on Santa Cruz by David Dewey, the ranch manager, who said he "fished around" until finding grapes growing in a willow on a hillside choked by scrub oak, poison oak and lemonade berry. With his two sons" help, Mr. Rusack collected samples and had them identified as zinfandel by experts at the University of California, Davis. Then he took 200 cuttings and propagated them into vines. That turned out to be the easiest step in resurrecting Santa Cruz Island's vineyard on Catalina.