Emilio Estevez Growing Grapes as Part of a Real-Life Script

ONE way to understand Emilio Estevez’s backyard vineyard might be to recall a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Remember Richard Dreyfuss, after a run-in with a U.F.O., obsessively fashioning mountains out of mashed potatoes and shaving cream? Except for the U.F.O., that’s kind of how Mr. Estevez is about growing grapes.

“One day I came home and he had dug up all the grass,” recalled Sonja Magdevski, Mr. Estevez’s fiancée. “He was like: ‘We’re going to plant! We need more space!’ ”

The year was 2005, and Mr. Estevez was working on “Bobby,” a film he wrote and directed, about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The couple lived, as they still do, in a Spanish-style home on a one-acre lot in Malibu — not exactly a prime locale for vintners.


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