Weaver expected a rigorous legal education. "I got it," he says, "but after going through the College, the Law School wasn't as bad as I feared. When you are used to reading hundreds of pages of original texts every night, being assigned just a few cases seemed like a good deal."

Following law school and two years clerking on the Seventh Circuit, Weaver joined a Chicago firm and focused on land use, planning, and zoning law. He consulted with landowners and governments all over the country. Weaver's widely varied practice ranged from trying (and winning) the first case to protect Sanibel Island from over-development and, at the other extreme, writing the zoning ordinance authorizing casino development in Atlantic City. "My practice was about as 'real world' as any I can imagine," Weaver says.

To cut down on traveling, Weaver gradually shifted his practice to the general representation of state and local governments in Illinois. When, at age fifty two, he retired as senior partner from Burke, Weaver & Prell, he was representing such diverse agencies as the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety, Lake County, the Lake County Forest Preserve, the DuPage and Northwest Water Commissions and about a dozen suburban communities.

In 1996, he and his wife Donna purchased Azienda Agricola Le Miccine, a small, 300-year-old Tuscan wine estate located near the geographic center of Tuscany's Chianti Classico wine region (www.LeMiccine.com). The Weavers now produce premium wines that have been extremely well-received by connoisseurs and consumers. Gambero Rosso, the definitive reviewer of Italian wines, praised Le Miccine's "97 Chianti Classico as "excellent...with elegance and finesse .... [A] beautiful, complex and mouth-filling wine ... strong and fully satisfying."

"I had thoroughly enjoyed my career in the law," says Weaver, "but I knew it was time to quit when my  weariness of all of the necessary accouterments began to outweigh the fun and the challenge. His fun and challenge now comes from "growing grapes and, with my own hands, turning them into a fine wine that people can truly enjoy. In the law, the end product of my labors was usually only a pile of paper, whose subtlety and refinement was, most often, truly appreciated only by me. Now, my end product is a bottle of wine that I have lived with since it first sprouted as a bunch tiny grape flowers. Ultimately, my client is the person who sips that wine. Happily, my clients now often find pleasure in nuances and complexities that even I hadn't recognized."

As different as his two careers may seem, Weaver says that a common approach informs them both. "It is trite, but true: the University of Chicago teaches you how to think. But, more importantly, the University taught me not to be afraid to think, not to be ashamed to think, and not to underestimate the power of thought to change the outcome of any situation. There is no aspect of my life that has not been influenced by six years of that discipline."—C.A.