Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  As a result, farmers pulled out quality vines and planted hardier ones like Alicante Bouschet, the preferred shipping grape. A 1933 guide for home vintners described Alicante Bouschet as “a beautiful grape which yields a coarse wine.” A minor wine grape before 1915, it became a major one just before and during Prohibition, with its acreage going from 4,394 before 1915 to 29,321 in 1940. Wine made with the similar Alicante Ganzin grapes was supposedly so dark that it could be used to paint a barn.

  Many northern California farmers simply gave up on grapes, pulling out vines and planting plums for making prunes, walnuts, cherries, or other fruit that also grew well in the area’s rich soil and wonderful climate. By 1926, the acreage of plums under cultivation in the Napa Valley exceeded that of grapes.

  As Prohibition continued, more and more California wineries closed, with the number dropping from some 700 before Prohibition to only 130 shortly before Repeal. That did not stop Americans from drinking wine. Consumption more than doubled during Prohibition, going from 60 million gallons annually to 150 million gallons in the supposedly dry years.

  After fourteen years of the “noble experiment,” Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933. The parties to celebrate the end were even bigger than those thrown to start it. Martin Ray, a winemaker who had worked for Paul Masson, one of California’s biggest producers, had been forced into stock trading in the dry years. In expectation of Repeal he bought a huge bronze bell from an old schoolhouse that was being torn down and hauled it to the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco where Masson lived. On the morning of Repeal, Masson woke to the pealing of the giant bell. He struggled into his clothes and staggered outside, where he saw Ray enthusiastically ringing in the new era. Turning to one of his employees, Masson, a Frenchman from Beaune who never could understand why Americans had outlawed wine, said with emotion, “When I hear that big bell I really know it is true. Good old days return now, no? I always said Prohibition was so absurd that damned if I’d ever let it outlive me.”

  Immediately after Repeal quick-buck businessmen reopened old wineries or started new ones in an expectation that there would be an explosion of demand for wine. There wasn’t, and many of them just as quickly closed. In 1934, California had 804 operating wineries, 100 more than before Prohibition, but a decade later only 465.

  American winemaking came out of Prohibition in terrible shape. Many talented winemakers and their skills had died during the fourteen dry years. Most of the surviving wineries were run-down, and farmers were growing the wrong kind of grapes for quality wine.

  Worst of all, Prohibition had changed America’s taste in wine. Consumers now demanded basically two types of wine, and both of them were of extremely low quality. They did not command high prices and could not provide the profits winemakers needed to pay for new vineyards and equipment. The first type was dry table wine nicknamed dago red after Italian producers who made much of it. Sold in large jug bottles and drunk largely by immigrants, it was also called jug wine. The other kind was fortified, sweet wine sold as Port, Sherry, or Muscatel, although they bore little resemblance to European wines with the same names. These were popular with winos because of their low price and high 20 percent alcohol. Before Prohibition dry wines outsold sweet dessert wines three to one, but afterward the figures more than reversed. In 1935 sweet wines made up 81 percent of total California wine production. As a result of the shift in demand, wine’s center of gravity also moved from Napa and Sonoma counties south to the hotter and drier Central Valley, where both dago red and sweet wines flourished.

  The American wine business in the post-Repeal years was controlled not by California winemakers but by East Coast and Midwest bottlers. About 90 percent of wine was sold in bulk and shipped east, often in railroad tank cars, where it was bottled and marketed under a myriad of local names. As late as the early 1960s, even the renowned Beaulieu Vineyard was still shipping wine east in barrels to distributors in cities like Cleveland and New York.

  In the years after Prohibition, however, professors from the University of California led a relentless crusade to improve the quality of American wine. The 1887 Pure Wine Law had directed the University of California to undertake research on winemaking, although it was many years before money was appropriated to set up a separate agricultural research center in Davis, a town near Sacramento, the state capital.

  The most important research at Davis was done by professors Albert J. Winkler and Maynard Amerine, who in the late 1930s started trying to determine which grape varietals did best in California. The professors based their conclusions on studies of some 3,000 different wine samples. In 1944, they published their conclusions inHilgardia, an agricultural research magazine, under the title “Composition and Quality of Musts and Wines of California Grapes.” The study divided California into five climate regions and recommended the best grapes for each zone. They determined, for example, that the Yountville area in the Napa Valley was similar in temperature to the Bordeaux region of France and would be a good area for growing Cabernet Sauvignon, while the cooler Russian River Valley region of Sonoma County was more like the Côte d’Or section of Burgundy and would be well suited for cultivating Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

  The professors reached clear judgments and stated them boldly: the popular Alicante Bouschet grape received a “very poor quality” rating in all five regions. Cabernet Sauvignon, on the other hand, was the “variety of choice” for northern California, where it produced “very good quality” wine. Chardonnay grapes from the same region, wrote the professors, would produce “excellent quality” wine. Amerine and Winkler were not just theorists. They routinely tasted twenty or so wines each day before lunch and then another twenty after lunch. Amerine, though, once quipped, “Quality in wines is much easier to recognize than to define.”

  California grape growers and winemakers in the late 1940s recognized that their wines were inferior to the European ones they drank as points of comparison, but they didn’t understand enough about their craft to know exactly why. As a result, they closely studied the “Composition and Quality” monograph and other studies from UC Davis with such titles as “Sulfur Dioxide and Metabisulfite in Wine Making” and “Clarification and Filtration of Wine.” They also acted upon the professors’ recommendations. Farmers who up to that point had planted grape types haphazardly began pulling out old vines and following the advice of Winkler and Amerine in their choice of new plantings. Winemakers also attended seminars and short courses at Davis, and a few full-time students made their way into the business after graduation. Gradually quality grapes began replacing the Prohibition ones in vineyards all across northern California.

  World War II cut off the supply of European wines to America, which provided an unexpected opening for California wines in the large and important East Coast market, where most wealthy and sophisticated consumers lived. Respected producers like Inglenook and Beaulieu Vineyard, though, could not move fast enough to make inroads because it takes at least a decade for new vineyards to develop and for their wines to age.

  In the nineteenth century German and French immigrants like Jacob Beringer and Charles Carpy dominated the California wine business. But after Prohibition and the new wave of immigrants from Southern Europe in the early twentieth century, Italian wine families took over leadership. Among them were the Martinis, the Mondavis, and the Petris.

  The most powerful of the newcomers was the Gallo family in Modesto, about 120 miles south of the Napa Valley. The two Gallo brothers, Ernest, the marketer, and Julio, the production director, were a perfect match. According to legend, Ernest once told his brother, “I’ll sell all the wine you can make.” To which Julio replied, “I’ll make all the wine you can sell.” In the 1950s and 1960s upwards of 75 percent of the wine produced in California’s Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties was sold to Gallo and bottled under that brand. In the 1950s, Gallo’s Thunderbird, a sickly sweet blend of lemonade and Port whose main attraction was that it produced a quick and ch
eap high, was the best selling wine in the country. While the brothers were best known for their jug wine, Gallo was also a leader in technological and production developments. The Gallo research laboratory was the best outside UC Davis. Gallo also invested heavily in equipment and built its own bottle manufacturing plant in 1958.

  For the three decades after Prohibition, a small band of quality producers—Almaden, Beaulieu, Beringer, Christian Brothers, Inglenook, Krug, Martini, Paul Masson, and Wente—struggled to survive. The largest was Christian Brothers, which sold about a hundred thousand cases annually. They all depended on jug wines and sweet wines for most of their revenues. Sweet wine, for example, made up 80 percent of Beringer’s production. All but Inglenook produced a line of jug wine. At the same time, though, these producers bravely continued to make small amounts of excellent table wine. But there was almost no market for it. Few American consumers were looking for good wines, and those who did drank European, mainly French. In the 1950s those top-of-the-line products made up only about 1 percent of California wine sales.

  The most prestigious premium-wine producer in the Napa Valley at mid-century was Beaulieu Vineyard. Owner George de Latour liked California’s land and climate, but everything else at his winery had a French accent. His daughter Hélène studied in France and married a French nobleman, Marquis Henri Galçerand de Pins, whose family also had a wine heritage. De Latour’s staff was French or French-trained, and he regularly traveled to the Continent.

  In 1938, Beaulieu’s French winemaker retired, and so de Latour and his son-in-law headed to Paris to hire another French one. Among the people they contacted was Professor Paul Marsais at the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris. Marsais told de Latour that he had several good French winemakers but doubted that they would adapt well to a foreign environment like California. But he also had a Russian student who had lived in many countries and had been trained in France. Marsais thought he would work out better than any of the French.

  The man was André Tchelistcheff, and he was indeed a quintessential cosmopolitan. Born on November 24, 1901, in Moscow, he traced his roots to German ancestors in the thirteenth century. During the Russian Revolution his family sided with the Whites who fought a civil war against Lenin’s Communist Reds for control of the country. After the Reds won, the Whites became displaced people wandering Europe looking for a new home. Tchelistcheff first studied winemaking in the Tokay region of Hungary and then worked in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was later renamed Yugoslavia.

  In 1931, Tchelistcheff moved to France to further his wine studies. Growing up on the Russian family estate, he had drunk both French and Crimean wines. In fact, he got drunk at the age of eleven at a New Year’s celebration, when he and his sister drank the remains of Mumm Red Monopole Champagne that revelers had left in their glasses. Tchelistcheff studied viticulture at the French Institute of National Agronomy and enology at the Pasteur Institute, where he impressed Professor Marsais. Tchelistcheff’s first job in France was at the Moët & Chandon Champagne works in Épernay.

  Tchelistcheff had his initial taste of California wine at an international exhibition in Paris in 1937, and he long remembered a Wente Brothers Sauterne from either 1932 or 1934. “All the Frenchmen, colleagues of mine, were just astounded that such a wonderful type of wine could be produced in California,” he said later.

  In view of the strong recommendation from Professor Marsais, de Latour interviewed and hired the diminutive Tchelistcheff, who was only four foot eleven inches. De Latour liked the fact that Tchelistcheff was a biochemist and thought he could help solve the problems Beaulieu Vineyard had been having with spoiled wines since the end of Prohibition. De Latour told Tchelistcheff about the shortcomings of California wine and even those of Beaulieu, allegedly one of California’s finest wineries, but nothing prepared the Russian refugee for what he found when he arrived there in September 1938. The winery’s equipment for pressing grapes and aging wines was badly out of date, and the vineyards were run-down. At the Pasteur Institute, Tchelistcheff had learned the importance of cleanliness around a living product like wine, and it was a shock for him to find a rat floating in a tank of Sauvignon Blanc at Beaulieu.

  Georges de Latour died less than two years later, and after that Tchelistcheff worked mainly with Madame De Pins. While recognizing the need to improve the equipment at Beaulieu, she kept a tight hand on the purse strings, considering the winery a venture whose main purpose was to provide enough money for her and the marquis to maintain the lifestyle they enjoyed.

  Nonetheless, Tchelistcheff was able to improve the quality of Beaulieu wines. In 1941, the year after Georges de Latour died, Tchelistcheff marketed the company’s premium 1936 Cabernet Sauvignon as the Georges de Latour Private Reserve. The price was a then-high $1.50 a bottle. While it sold only modestly, for the next three decades that wine was considered the highest achievement of California winemaking.

  Despite the best efforts by Beaulieu, Inglenook, and other premium producers, the American wine business in the 1950s was literally dying on the vine. The number of California wineries fell by more than one-third between 1950 and 1967. A national survey in 1956 showed that 85 percent of wine was being drunk by 15 percent of the population—and they were largely aging immigrants drinking jug wine and winos consuming sweet wine. Only a very small part of the population drank wine with meals, and when they wanted good wine, they looked to France.

  Frank Prial, the long-time wine columnist of theNew York Times, owns a 1945 wine list from the “21” club, the prestigious Manhattan restaurant then known as “Jack & Charlie’s 21.” It gives a vivid picture of the way Europe dominated American wine consumption at mid-century. The list contains hundreds of great wines from Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, but especially France. There was even a 1904 Château Margaux selling for $17.50. Only four California wineries—Beaulieu Vineyard, Inglenook, Louis M. Martini, and Wente Brothers—made the list. Even they were given descriptions that compared them to better-known French wines. A Wente Brothers Chardonnay, for example, was described as a “Burgundy type.”

  California wines had a long way to go.

  Part Two

  The Awakening

  In California, where the wine industry is of comparatively recent growth (a mere 200 years), really thrilling changes are taking place.

  —HARRY WAUGH,1969

  Chapter Four

  California Dreamer

  Beer is made by men, wine by God.

  —MARTIN LUTHER

  The Greyhound bus pulled to a stop at the corner of Railroad and Adams streets in St. Helena, the heart of California’s Napa Valley, one night in the middle of August 1958. It was just past 10:00 p.m. The only person to get off the bus was a thin man, about five foot, six inches tall and weighing some 130 pounds. He wore a black beret. His name was Mike Grgich, and he had been traveling by bus for more than a day, down the Pacific Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, stopping in one small town after another. From the luggage compartment under the passenger area Grgich picked up two cardboard suitcases that contained everything in the world he owned—some clothes, books, and important papers like his birth certificate and university records, which were in Croatian and probably wouldn’t be much help here. Grgich, though, kept in his coat pocket his most important document—his long-sought American visa.

  After picking up his bags, Grgich spotted a pay phone and pulled out a piece of paper on which he had written the phone number of J. Leland (Lee) Stewart, the owner of Souverain Cellars, a small winery located on nearby Howell Mountain, on the eastern side of the Napa Valley. Grgich had put a position-wanted ad in theWine Institute Bulletin, a newsletter, looking for a job as a winemaker. Stewart had answered the ad, offering him a job and agreeing to sponsor him for a permanent-resident visa.

  When Grgich heard Souverain’s phone ring, he held his breath. In his letter offering Grgich the job, Stewart had said to contact him as soon as he arrived in St. Helena so tha
t he could come down and pick him up. But what if there had been some mistake? Perhaps he was supposed to be there next week—or last week! Perhaps Stewart was traveling. Perhaps he had changed his mind. Perhaps there wasn’t a job! Grgich had suffered many setbacks in the four years since he left his native Croatia, then a part of Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, on a student visa. If something didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be the first time in this long trek to California.

  After a couple of rings, Grgich heard a gruff “Hello.”

  “This is Mike Grgich,” said the new arrival in heavily accented English. “I’m supposed to start working at the Souverain Cellars. Are you Mr. Stewart?”

  “Yes, I’ve been expecting you. But it’s too late now for me to drive down to St. Helena and get you. Why don’t you just go to a hotel, and I’ll come and pick you up in the morning. You can find a hotel right near where you are.”

  Grgich said he understood, and Stewart repeated before hanging up that he’d pick him up in the morning.

  Grgich looked out on the street. He had been dreaming of St. Helena for weeks, but now the real thing looked like all the other small towns he had passed through on the way from Vancouver. The few small shops were all closed.

  Grgich saw a sign for the Gable Hotel and went over to it. The building was dark, so he knocked first on the door and then on the window next to it. No one answered.

  “Maybe there is a night bell, and you have to ring it to get people to come down,” Grgich thought to himself. “I should have arrived earlier. Then this wouldn’t be happening, and Mr. Stewart would have picked me up.”

  Grgich walked around the hotel and looked in other windows. Everything appeared to be closed up tight. He knocked a few more times, and then waited and waited.

  After a half-hour looking around the Gable Hotel, Grgich walked up to Main Street, where he saw a sign for the Hotel St. Helena. This building was also dark, except for a light shining downstairs. When he got to the light, Grgich saw it came from a bar, where a few people in groups of two or three were quietly talking.