At 19 Cary Esser flew alone from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Kansas City, a place she’d never been. “When I got off the plane,” Esser recalled in a recent interview, “I just walked up to somebody and asked, ‘Can you tell me how to get to the Kansas City Art Institute?’ ”

As a student in the early 1970s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Jerry Eisterhold found himself pondering wine in addition to graphic design. It was a brief phase, yet one that foretold the future. “I thought it would be a cool thing to be a wine aficionado,” Eisterhold remembers.