Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  White wine finished fermentation in about forty-five days. Every day during the process, Grgich checked the temperature of the liquid as well as the sugar level with a hydrometer. The wine was cooled to maintain the temperature at around 50–60 degrees, and the sugar level fell as the alcohol level rose. Cooling the wine slowed fermentation and also protected the delicate aromas and flavors from being driven off.

  After fermentation, the white wine was pumped into another tank and fined with bentonite to eliminate proteins, so that no undesired change in the wine would take place if it got warm after leaving the winery during transportation or storage.

  After another three weeks, Grgich and Stewart racked the wine, a procedure that pumped the clear wine at the top of the tank into another wooden tank, while the sediment at the bottom was discarded. The wine was then aged in oak for an additional four to five weeks. After tasting and analysis, Stewart would decide when to bottle the wine. During the bottling, the wine was sterile filtered. The wine was then aged for an additional six to twelve months in bottles before being released.

  Grapes to make red wine were loaded into a crusher just like those for white wine. Then the winemakers transferred the mixture of grapes, seeds, and skins, which Stewart called the must, using its French name, into open redwood tanks for fermenting. Fermenting the juice for red wines while it is still in contact with skins and seeds gives the liquid color and character. The winemakers again added yeast to start fermentation, which took place at a temperature of about 80–85 degrees. Because of the higher temperature during fermentation, there was no need to heat stabilize the wine.

  Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fermentation, pushed the seeds, skins, and berries to the top of the tank, where they formed a hard crust called the cap. It was important, though, to keep the liquid in contact with the solid material since that gives it color, tannin, and taste. Twice a day during fermentation, Stewart or Grgich climbed a wooden ladder to the top of the tank and used a pole with a flat disk on the end to break up the cap and mix the liquid and solid material. In the morning and evening the men also pumped over the tanks of red wine to keep the cap moist and to further increase the contact between liquids and solids. They first attached one end of a hose to the bottom of the tank and put the other end at the top. Then they pumped the juice from the bottom of the tank to the top and sprayed it over the cap. Punching down the cap and pumping over are the very soul of red winemaking.

  Because of the higher temperature, the red-wine fermentation took much less time than that of the white—only about a week. When the process was finished, the wine was allowed to settle. Stewart kept the Zinfandel in wood for a year and the Cabernet Sauvignon there for two years. Just as with the whites, the oak added flavor and character to the reds. Stewart sold this better-quality Zinfandel or Cabernet Sauvignon for $2 a bottle.

  The remaining pulpy mixture in the tanks was moved to the basket press, which squeezed out the liquid, leaving behind a thick solid mixture of seeds and skin called the cake, which was discarded. The heavily pressed Zinfandel and Cabernet were blended with some Petite Sirah and Grenache, aged a few months in oak, and sold as Red Burgundy—although it contained no Burgundy-style grapes—in jugs for $2 a gallon. The quality reds got twelve months in the bottle before release.

  Grgich watched Stewart closely as he controlled the whole process. The newcomer was impressed with Stewart’s attention to detail and the way he faithfully followed a program set out for him a decade before by André Tchelistcheff. Stewart kept notes of everything he did, comparing them to records from previous years. He was almost obsessive about cleanliness, carefully and frequently sterilizing the pumps used to move juice or wine from one container to another.

  Stewart and Grgich worked sixteen hours a day during the crush, and everything had to be done precisely the way Stewart wanted. If a hydrometer test wasn’t done the first time as Stewart specified, Grgich had to do it again and again until the boss was satisfied. Work at the winery was deadly serious. One day Stewart was complaining about his ulcers but added, “At least I’ve never had any heart problems.” William Kirby, a retired army colonel who sold wines for Stewart, replied, “How could you have heart pains, Lee? You don’t have a heart.”

  Many things were new and puzzling to Grgich. On his first morning he went out into the vineyard before everyone else was awake. There he saw some vines that reminded him of home. The leaves and grapes looked just like those of a variety that he knew back in Croatia called Plavac Mali. When Grgich mentioned this to Stewart, the American corrected him saying that those were Zinfandel, probably the most widely planted grape in California. Grgich, however, remained unconvinced by Stewart’s explanation. In 2000, scientists from Croatia and California concluded with the help of DNA tests that the origin of Zinfandel was Crljenak Kastelanski, the father of Plavac Mali. Forty years later, Grgich was proven right.

  One evening during his first week, Grgich was sitting on the porch looking at a newspaper, when he noticed a snake curling up a yard away from him. Just at that moment Stewart walked out of the house and saw the snake as well. Without saying anything, Stewart went back into the house, got a gun, and shot the snake. Then Stewart told Grgich about rattlesnakes, which the foreigner had never seen before.

  Despite Grgich’s respect for Stewart, personal relations between the two men were never very good. From the ad that had appeared in theWine Institute Bulletin, Stewart had expected to get a European who had plenty of experience in current European wine techniques. Someone perhaps like Tchelistcheff—only younger and cheaper. Stewart considered Grgich more of a wine chemist than a winemaker. In addition, Grgich hadn’t made wine in the four years since he left Croatia, which was not exactly on the cutting edge of world wine trends as it was.

  After about four months at Souverain and after the basic winemaking was completed, Grgich began feeling uncomfortable. There wasn’t as much to do now. Things were also not going well personally with Stewart, and Grgich felt isolated living halfway up the mountain surrounded by nothing but trees and vines. He didn’t own a car and public transportation was infrequent. As a result, he had to depend on Stewart to take him to St. Helena once a week to shop. Grgich felt he had learned a lot from Stewart, but it was time to move along. Stewart was not unhappy to see him leave.

  Since the Christian Brothers had opened the door to the Napa Valley for Grgich, he called Brother Timothy, their well-known cellar master, and asked if he might have a job for him. The Christian Brothers were a Roman Catholic religious order founded in the seventeenth century in France with the mission of educating poor children. The Brothers started making sacramental wine in California in 1882, and in 1931 bought a winery and vineyards on the western side of the Napa Valley. After Prohibition the Christian Brothers made both premium and bulk wines, but their real success came from selling brandy and a sparkling wine marketed as Champagne.

  The religious order, in 1950, bought one of the most famous buildings of the Napa Valley—Greystone, located two miles north of St. Helena. The magnificent building was built in 1889 and for a while laid claim to being the world’s largest stone winery. It was also a wonderful showpiece for the wines and brandies Brother Timothy promoted in national advertising.

  The Christian Brothers didn’t have a winemaking job for Grgich, but they offered him one in Champagne production paying two dollars an hour. Nearly half his pay went for a room he rented in a hotel in St. Helena. He walked one mile to work every day and lived frugally, cooking his meals on a hot plate in his room. He owned just one knife, which he had bought for thirty-five cents shortly after his arrival. He used the knife for both preparing food and to cut bread and meat.

  Grgich had been living in the hotel for about five months when his brother-in-law, Vide Domandich, who was a fisherman in Aberdeen, Washington, came to visit. Mike’s sister had died, and the widower wanted to take a break from fishing. Domandich was shocked to see his relative’s austere living conditions and immediately bo
ught Grgich a second knife for five dollars. The brother-in-law also tried to buy him a garbage can, but Grgich explained that there was no garbage. Just as back in Croatia, nothing was thrown away. He used up everything in one way or another; all the food was consumed; there were no such things as scraps. Domandich did manage to convince Grgich to move out of the hotel, however. The two found a duplex in St. Helena for sale for $8,500. Domandich loaned Grgich $2,500 for the down payment and later bought him a refrigerator and a table. After staying for six months, Domandich left, convinced that his relative had achieved at least a minimum standard of living.

  Despite his poverty, Grgich found money to continue his winemaking education at UC Davis. While working for the Christian Brothers, he took a week off at no pay to take a course on the latest developments in wine production. The night before the program started, Grgich checked into a hotel near the campus and learned that the price would be $2.50 for a night. Back in Croatia the price of everything was fixed. Since a hotel room cost $2.00 a night in St. Helena, he assumed it would also be $2.00 a night in Davis. That fifty cents extra a night meant a lot to Grgich, but the clerk told him he could go back to St. Helena if he wanted a $2.00 hotel room. Grgich reluctantly paid the higher amount.

  At Greystone, Grgich did a bit of everything in the Champagne production department on the third floor, working in both bottling and shipping. But after less than a year, Grgich didn’t feel that he was progressing toward his goal of making wine or someday owning his own winery. Members of the Christian Brothers order held most of the top jobs, and they had made a commitment to the order for life. Grgich didn’t think he’d ever have a chance there to be either a wine chemist or a winemaker. He had a job, but his career wasn’t going anywhere.

  So on one of his days off in mid-1959, Grgich went to Beaulieu Vineyard to see André Tchelistcheff. He didn’t know Napa Valley’s most famous winemaker, although he was very familiar with the basics of his biography. Grgich felt Tchelistcheff might help him because they had so much in common. Both had been blown about by the winds of history before finally landing in California. Grgich hoped that Tchelistcheff might offer him a job or at least give him some advice about what to do or where to go next. One day Grgich simply picked up the phone and got an appointment to see the man who had become his idol. As the Greyhound bus took him from St. Helena to the Beaulieu winery in Rutherford, Grgich kept saying to himself, “He was a refugee—like me. He knows what it means just to survive—like me. We’re both Slavs. He’s even lived in Croatia—like me. Maybe he will understand me.”

  When they met, however, Tchelistcheff immediately told Grgich that he didn’t have any openings. Nonetheless, Tchelistcheff suggested that he fill out an application anyway. Grgich left after asking Tchelistcheff to keep him in mind if he ever had an opening.

  Two months later, Grgich unexpectedly got a phone call from Tchelistcheff, who told him that his wine chemist had been diagnosed with leukemia and might never come back to work. Tchelistcheff asked Grgich to come in for another interview. At the end of the second talk, Tchelistcheff explained that the job of wine chemist paid three dollars an hour, but Grgich would first have to pass a two-month probation. Tchelistcheff gave him a textbook on wine chemistry to take home for the night. The next day the cellar foreman gave Grgich twenty-five samples of red wine and asked him to analyze them to determine the levels of sugar, alcohol, and acid. Tchelistcheff wanted to make sure Grgich knew the fundamentals of being a wine chemist and could do the lab work needed during winemaking. The new hire asked for some help, but Tchelistcheff replied, “Mike, I am very busy. I gave you the book. Read it and do it yourself.”

  Working alone in the Beaulieu wine lab, Grgich set to the task. Every day he got the six o’clock bus from St. Helena that dropped him off in front of the winery, rather than the eight o’clock one, so that he had two hours to work on the twenty-five samples before everyone else arrived. It took Grgich a week to analyze all the wines, and Tchelistcheff approved the results.

  Grgich counted down the days and hours to the end of his probation period. When the end of two months arrived, he went to Tchelistcheff and asked, “Can I stay?”

  “Yes, congratulations,” replied Tchelistcheff. “You’ve done a good job. I’ll even give you a raise to $3.25 an hour.” Grgich would later say that the twenty-five-cent raise was the most important one he ever got because it gave him a job with a future in wine.

  Grgich usually worked in a white lab coat while doing his wine analyses and even took off his trademark beret. With a camaraderie born of their similar backgrounds, Tchelistcheff and Grgich worked well together. Tchelistcheff spoke some Croatian from his days living there, and the two men sometimes talked to each other in that language.

  Only three months into the new job, Grgich showed Tchelistcheff that larvae of fruit flies were living around the barrels’ bung holes in the tops through which they are filled or emptied. Not all that much seemed to have changed at Beaulieu Vineyard since 1938, when Tchelistcheff had discovered the rat in the Sauvignon Blanc. Tchelistcheff immediately named Grgich sanitary inspector in addition to wine chemist.

  Grgich quickly felt at home at Beaulieu. On November 17, 1962, he married Tatjana izm , also a native of Croatia, in a ceremony at Madame de Pins’s residence in Rutherford. The couple soon had a daughter, Violet.

  Tchelistcheff gave his new assistant ever-increasing authority, and he was soon in charge of quality control for the whole winemaking operation from grapes in the field to bottled wine in the warehouse. That gave him the opportunity to learn the whole winemaking process in a way that few winemakers ever get. Tchelistcheff told him, “Mike, you have to be my eyes. I cannot be everywhere. Look at everything and report back to me.”

  Grgich became obsessive about checking every barrel of wine at Beaulieu once a week. He told himself that a good winemaker had to learn to communicate with his wine in the same way that a mother interacts with her children. A winemaker can know all the techniques, he believed, but if he doesn’t develop a way to converse with his wine, he’ll never make really fine wine. Grgich would go into the vineyard during the growing season and squeeze the berries to see how they were progressing. Winemaking, Grgich believed, is a feeling, and you have to use all your senses—seeing the wine, smelling it, listening to it, touching it. To Grgich winemaking was not just chemistry; it was an emotional and spiritual experience. Grgich spoke little with other employees at Beaulieu. He preferred to walk the fields and the winery, visiting with his vines and wines.

  Chapter Six

  A Revolution Begins

  When there is plenty of wine,

  sorrow and worry take wing.

  —OVID

  Louis M. Martini, founder of the Louis M. Martini Winery, in 1945 organized the Napa Valley Vintners group with just seven members. They met once a month for lunch at the Miramonte Hotel in St. Helena. The meals lasted three or four hours, and in addition to the food there was lots of wine tasting and singing in French and Italian. With a cooperation rarely seen in other fields of business, the leading winemakers in the Napa Valley readily exchanged information, helping each other turn out better wine. They might compete with each other on the shelves of shops around the country, but they were allies at home. They traded winemaking experiences, both good and bad, and were always ready to lend a hand, whether it was to crush grapes or provide a place to store wine. During harvests in the late 1950s, Peter Mondavi, the winemaker at the Charles Krug Winery, routinely stopped by rival Beaulieu Vineyard late at night for a snack of French bread, salami, and Cabernet with winemaker Joe Heitz. The two discussed any problems they were having with the harvest as well as their new experiments. Robert Mondavi wrote in his autobiographyHarvests of Joy, “We all understood that the more the whole valley succeeded, the better it would be for each of us in it.”

  By the early 1960s, the pace of change in California winemaking was picking up, abetted by research coming out of UC Davis and the free flow of inform
ation among grape growers and winemakers. A revolution in winemaking was starting. Its birthplace was in Sonoma County at Hanzell, a small hobby winery started by James D. Zellerbach, the chairman of Crown Zellerbach, the second-largest forest-products company in the world. A knight of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, an organization that celebrates Burgundian wine, Zellerbach had particular affection for that region’s two most prized products, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. He particularly liked Romanée-Conti Pinot Noir and Meursault Chardonnay, a taste he developed while working for the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.

  Zellerbach and his wife, Hanna, owned a weekend retreat in the town of Sonoma named Hanzell, which combined parts of her first name and his family name. After returning from Europe, Zellerbach came up with the idea of trying to see if he could produce his two favorite wines in California. He told people his goal was to “make California wine as good as the best of Europe.” As a symbol of the French inspiration, Zellerbach had his architect model the winery after the wooden, slate-roofed building in Burgundy’s Clos de Vougeot where the Tastevin group held banquets.

  Zellerbach enlisted top people in California wine. Ivan Schoch, a leading grape grower in the Napa Valley who owned the famed To Kalon vineyard and whose grapes went into Beaulieu Vineyard wines, helped plant the Hanzell vineyards starting in 1953 and later sold grapes to Hanzell. R. Bradford Webb, a Berkeley-trained biochemist and former winemaker at Gallo, directed the winery with the French titlemaître de chai (cellar master). André Tchelistcheff became a consultant on winemaking, and Davis professors were all over the place.

  Hanzell wanted to combine the best of French techniques with the best of Davis research and adapt both to the California soil and climate. The clone for Hanzell Pinot Noir, the specific subtype of that grape, came from the Napa Valley, but had been originally imported from France by Martin Ray. Webb also started fermentation with Burgundy yeasts. Zellerbach followed the advice of Burgundy’s Louis Latour and insisted on aging his wines in small French Limousin oak barrels, rather than the larger redwood or American oak ones then commonly used in California.