The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with Brian Ruffentine  has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Brian Ruffentine grew up in Tempe and was once deemed the world's second toughest firefighter, He served the town of Gilbert's Fire and Rescue Department for more than 21 years, retiring as battalion chief in 2015. He and his wife opened Garage-East Winery in Gilbert and are raising three children in town. 

Who was the first (toughest firefighter)? It was a guy out of Las Vegas, and he was just a rock. He was a stud and, mind you, this was in 2010. This was a hot minute ago. ... It was a great experience. 

It was kind of like a tough man competition for firefighters. And there was four obstacles or four timed individual timed events, and I was leading after the first three by 221 seconds and I lost by 223 seconds. He smoked me. It was a 22 story stair climb fully turned out and shocker, you know, we don't have high story buildings in Gilbert. So I really didn't train. I thought I could just coast through itm and he smoked me. So he's from Vegas. I'm sure he's got a successful, he's probably president of something. 

You grew up in Tempe? My family moved from New Jersey. One of four kids had asthma and so back then, the thought was you got to move to a dry climate, and I don't know if that's still true or not for asthmatics, but anyway, they moved from New Jersey to Tempe. 

I grew up in kind of the Price and mcclintock southern area and loved it. I had a great childhood, went to McClintock High School,did all the things that high school kids did. I wrestled. Our wrestling coach made us go out for two sports. So I wrestled, didn't have success in untill my senior year and my senior year he made me go out for a second sport. So I did pole vaulting because that was the least amount of running that you could do in track. I think the highest I ever went was like, 10-5 or something. And that's not high.  

So Phoenix College, they offered me a wrestling scholarship. I had a couple of opportunities to go out of state, but I didn't want to. I had my eyes focused on becoming a firefighter somewhere through high school, and I was kind of fixated on that. And Phoenix College, at that time, had the best fire science program. And so I gravitated toward that, wrestled, got my fire science degree and then got hired. And so I graduated from the program at Phoenix College and then transferred over to ASU, and as I was getting hired with Gilbert, I stopped going to classes, and I thought I could just mail it in and show up to the finals. So, you know, I'm still working on that four-year degree.  

Where did the spark come for becoming a firefighter? So, the fun story with that is I was a Boy Scout, Eagle Scout. But I would go spend my summers at Geronimo up in Payson and one summer they had a fire that was close to camp. And so they rallied up a few of our counselors and said, ‘Hey, we need you guys to go cut line.’ And so for about a week we kind of protected the camp from this fire that was close. And I think that's what did it because I didn't have any family, nothing that really would have thought I should go in that direction. So that's the only thing I could draw attention to.  

 So you join Gilbert's Fire and Rescue department in the very early days. So back when Rural Metro was contracted to serve the Gilbert community, I got hired as a reserve with them, and it was about a year and a half worth of kind of working part time and, you know, crazy stations out in the middle of nowhere. 

And then Gilbert had their one station at that time. Um, and then when Gilbert transitioned to have their own municipal fire department. I got hired on that on that first go around and worked my way up and got hired into a full time for part time to a full-time spot to a captain and to a battalion chief and did a lot of fun things.  

Did you ever second guess it? Is there something else you thought maybe I should be doing something different? I did not, but my wife did my beautiful wife Megan. She grew up in central Phoenix, went to American University for a couple of years and then realized she didn't like DC or politics that she thought she would and then transferred to U of A. She went from living at home to living in college with roommates to meeting me, getting married in a very short period of time and then marrying a fireman to where now she's living by herself. And at that time we owned a house in Tempe by the campus and it was the Hardy and Broadway area. So not a brilliant part of Tempe. And, yeah, so fun story is we live next door to the drummer of the Meat Puppets. The Meat Puppets is an old time local Tempe band. Well, they enjoyed to do the things that rock bands would put into their bodies, and we had three homicides in our house next to us at their house during parties all while I was at work in different times. And she's like, ‘I hate your job.’ She'd call down and we'd be playing Risk or watching a movie or Monopoly and guys are laughing in the background, and she's crying because the cops are all out front or someone's walking through the backyard. 

And so she encouraged me and she questioned the job of a fireman. But she quickly got over it and has never looked back. So great career, very nice retirement. It’s afforded me to do the chapter B, so the next page. OK.  

So the fire department, it's a brotherhood. And so there's a lot of things you gotta learn through that process. Talk about some of the mentors that took you through that. This is another thing that may have led me into it is that through my Boy Scouts and the Eagle project, Chief Gaines out of Tempe was my Eagle sponsor. And so he was a mentor for me of getting me into the stations and meeting guys and riding on the trucks and at, at a young age, at 17 years old. And so that was the first one. The next one was Dick Rambo. He was an assistant chief for Tempe and then Gilbert. He since passed away this last couple of years, but just a solid guy solid in his faith, solid in his family, really cared about the community and service and probably where I got the most out of what it means to be a servant. 

So how did that come to be this whole Garage-East thing? We've been open seven years. Probably about 11 years ago, so four years before we opened, we reconnected with high school buddies of Megan's. They all went to Sunnyslope High school and kind of as life takes people in different directions, we lost contact of them. And it was actually her sister ran into them when they went down to experience wine country in southern Arizona. And they're like, ‘Hey, you remember Todd and Kelly Bostock, they, they opened a winery and so we reconnected with them and reestablished that friendship that they had from high school, and we'd go down there and we'd help them with harvest and we'd go down there and help them um clean bins and stomp on grapes and do all the things, but really just went down there to have fun and be as much help as we could. 

Joe Johnston, pillar in the community, was having his vision and dreams for his next project within Agritopia. a grat topia. It's now called Barnone. So Joe was pursuing Todd and Kelly to do something in that project. Joe fell in love with Arizona wines by drinking what Todd and Kelly made and really was pushing hard, and we live in the neighborhood and we know Joe and Cindy really well and we're like, ‘Joe, you got to get them.’ It would be so cool to have them up here, not thinking that ‘Well, Todd and Kelly, they're, they were running a winery in Southern Arizona. They're raising their kids down there. They're living their lives down there.’ Fast forward a good amount of time, and we're down there, and we're working and drinking and relaxing and drinking, and Todd was like, ‘You're ready to retire. Why don't you just do it?’ And I'm like, ‘That's a great idea.’ 

And so that was the first domino to fall, and between Todd and Kelly making great wine and loving Southern Arizona and being able to make something out of Arizona and promote Arizona and promote Arizona wine in an industry that not a lot of people had known about then being involved with a project that Joe seemingly Midas just touch guy. Um having it being in our neighborhood and in our community that we love so much. All those came together to go, ‘Yeah, it makes sense. I'm going stop being a firefighter. I'm going to retire as a battalion chief. Great pension. I'll be able to do that. Megan was in a position of her time with her career that she was able to pivot, and we just went for it.