Mark Estrin, 57; Co-Founder of Winery Known for Prose, Pinots

Mark Estrin, co-founder and vice president of Red Car Wine Co., a five-year-old Santa Barbara County winery known for its varietal Syrah and Pinot Noir wines and its distinctive labels, has died. He was 57.

Estrin, a Santa Monica resident who underwent surgery for a brain tumor in 2003 and again in February, died Saturday at his parents’ home in Keizer, Ore., said his wife, Siobhan Ryan.

A former screenwriter turned wine-store salesman, Estrin went into partnership with film producer Carroll Kemp in 2000 to create Red Car Wine Co.

Each of Red Car’s wines has received outstanding reviews and has sold pre-release. But the company’s distinctive labels have drawn as much attention as its wines, the packaging on each wine suggesting a connection to a romantic, idealized past.

On the back label of each wine are lines of prose written by Estrin: one passage per vintage, each offering a new chapter in an ongoing 1940s-era melodrama.

Their first label, known as the trolley series, features a drawing of an old Pacific Electric Red Car and the words “Red Car” in a bull’s-eye. For the back label of their first wine, a 2000 Syrah called “The Window,” Estrin wrote:

“I walked to the window and pulled back a thin, tobacco-stained curtain. What passed for a breeze from the street below was hot and close and remorseless. Then a westbound Red Car trolley lumbered by, filled with people. For a fleeting moment, I imagined I was in the Red Car, heading to the beach, where the air was fresh and clean and cool. Riding the Red Car to the edge of the continent, to the edge of everything.”

Estrin and Kemp’s first Pinot Noir, “Amour Fou” (“Crazy Love”), offering a story line about a tragic love affair that takes place in 1940s L.A., came out last year.

The highly stylized approach was not only the result of Estrin’s background as a writer but his experience selling wine.

“I spent enough time working in wine shops and watching customers pick up a bottle and look at it and put it back to know that to succeed, we had to do something different to catch the buyer’s attention as soon as he picked up our bottle,” Estrin told The Times in 2004.

That same year, Red Car Wine Co. became a full-fledged winery. Estrin and Kemp bought 128 acres along the Sonoma coast, and they quit their day jobs.

Born in Chicago, Estrin earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Launching his screenwriting career in 1979, he co-wrote the TV movies “Warm Hearts, Cold Feet” (1987) and “Bare Essentials” (1991) with his brother Allen, with whom he wrote other film and television scripts.

In 1994, Estrin gave up screenwriting to pursue his longtime passion for wine, food and cigars.

He went to work at Wally’s Liquor in Westwood, turning the store’s closet-sized humidor into a separate cigar store location. From Wally’s, he went to the Wine House in West Los Angeles, where he took a small shelf of gourmet foods and turned it into a full department, including fine teas. It’s there that Estrin met Kemp, a customer.

“Anybody who met Mark Estrin walked away with the indelible feeling they had met someone who had great personal grace and dignity,” Kemp told The Times this week.

As noted in the 2004 Times story, Estrin’s experience with brain surgery in 2003 sped up his decision to stop selling wine for others and start selling his own wine full time.

“When it’s your own wine,” he told The Times, “you’re not just selling a bottle of wine. You’re selling your hard work, your time, your imagination, your hopes and dreams.”

In addition to his wife of 16 years, Estrin is survived by his adult children from a previous marriage, Nathaniel and Jennifer; four grandchildren; his mother and father, Mildred and Donald; his brothers, Joel and Allen; and his sister, Amy.

Estrin was buried in Albany, Ore., on Monday; a memorial service in Los Angeles is pending.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Mark Estrin Memorial Brain Cancer Research Fund at UCLA, c/o Dr. Timothy Cloughesy, 710 Westwood Plaza, Reed Building, Suite 1-230, Los Angeles, CA 90095.