An artist and a winemaker, Thomas Rodrigues created a career in which he could join his two passions. Rodrigues says that from an early age, he knew he would be an artist – by fourteen years old he was an apprentice in a stained glass studio and by seventeen he was teaching the medium in adult education classes. In the early 1980s Rodrigues was the Designer and Production Manager at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch Studio. Rodrigues began studying wine in 1978 and was soon designing wine labels; he describes the wine and vineyards at Maple Creek, where he and his wife started Maple Creek Winery his canvas.