Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Jack’s business background led him to look for a niche market and he quickly zeroed in on a California version of Champagne. A few local sparkling wines were being produced, the best-seller being Almaden Blanc de Blancs, which was made in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Kornell in the Napa Valley and Korbel in Sonoma were also making sparkling wine. But none of those were using the French techniques developed by the monk Dom Pérignon and others. Davies said later, “We picked Champagne because we thought nobody was paying any attention to it in California.”

  The couple in 1965 bought a rundown Victorian manor in Calistoga. The price was about $500,000, and they had to put down just $10,000 in cash. In a quintessential example of the naïveté of so many of California’s new winemakers, they bought land in the wrong place for growing grapes needed for sparkling wine. According to the research done by Professors Amerine and Winkler, Calistoga, the hot area in the northern Napa Valley, is best suited for growing Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. Carneros, the cooler southern Napa region, is a better place for the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes they would need for sparkling wine.*Location didn’t matter, though. They both fell in love with the old house built by German immigrant Jacob Schram, and they decided to buy the property as soon as they saw the house. The Schramsberg winery, which Robert Louis Stevenson visited in 1880, was one of the most famous of the “ghost wineries,” as dormant facilities were called.

  Since the Davies couple knew virtually nothing about making wine, much less the more complicated Champagne, they asked Maynard Amerine to be their teacher and consultant. He declined, but recommended André Tchelistcheff’s son Dimitri, who had graduated from Davis and was then working as a winemaker in Mexico’s Baja California. Over a shrimp lunch on the beach in the fishing town of Ensenada, Dimitri agreed to be their consultant. His father, who happened to be visiting his son at the time, said that he would also help.

  Since no grapes of any kind were then growing at Schramsberg, Jack and Jamie set out to buy fruit on the open market. There weren’t any of the Chardonnay that they would need for Champagne, so they purchased five tons of Riesling grapes from a local grower and then exchanged them with the Charles Krug Winery for the same amount of Chardonnay to make their first vintage of sparkling wine. Aware that old-timers were laughing at the idea of making a French-style sparkling wine in the Napa Valley, the entrepreneurial couple made only 250 cases the first year. But veterans still had their doubts, and a rumor got started that Jack knew so little about agriculture that he put plants in upside down in his new Schramsberg vineyard.

  The reputation of Schramsberg grew quickly, however. When President Richard Nixon made his historic trip to China in 1972, he took along fourteen cases of Schramsberg sparkling wine, and at a formal dinner in Beijing he toasted his host Chou En-lai to a new era of relations between the two countries with Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs.

  In 1968, Eugene Trefethen, a recently retired president of Kaiser Industries, the company that built the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Grand Coulee Dam, bought Napa Valley’s old Eschol winery and ranch, which was started in 1886 and included 600 acres of prime vineyards. Trefethen’s son John, who had done his undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina and was working on an MBA at Stanford, became more interested in the possibilities of winemaking at the family’s new property than following his father into corporate America. While he was learning about the wine business, John met Janet Spooner, who had recently returned from nearly a year of living in Europe, mainly in Besançon, France. She came back to California determined to get a job in wine and eventually landed at the Winegrowers Foundation in St. Helena.

  John produced small batches of homemade wine in 1971 and 1972. It was pretty primitive stuff: he crushed Chardonnay grapes in plastic garbage cans. He had heard around the valley about the importance of cold fermentation of white wines, so he put the fermenting juice in an air-conditioned house on the ranch and turned the thermostat down as far as possible. Fermentation, which had been expected to take perhaps a week, lasted a month. His first tank of fermenting Pinot Noir erupted late one night like an exploding volcano because he had overfilled it. Trefethen, though, learned from his mistakes, and the quality of his wines soon improved.

  As part of his studies at Stanford, John produced a business plan for the winery. One of the biggest problems he addressed was distribution. Like Rodney Strong before him, Trefethen had run into problems getting distributors to sell his wine. They wanted to deal with big-brand companies such as Gallo that moved millions of cases, rather than the little-known new ones that sold perhaps a few thousand. Trefethen’s solution was the same as Strong’s: go around distributors by selling direct. He proposed setting up a sales office in the tourist town of Carmel, California, and selling to residents and visitors. An added advantage of direct sales was that profit margins would be higher since he didn’t have to go through a distributor.

  Things moved fast for Trefethen in 1973. He married Janet in August before the harvest of his first commercial wine crop. Later that year, he reached an agreement with Moët & Chandon, the French Champagne company, to make its first California sparkling wine at the old Eschol winery, now Trefethen Vineyards. Moët had spent two years roaming the world looking for a place outside France to make sparkling wine and had decided that the best location was the Napa Valley. The company had quietly bought up land for vineyards in the central and southern Napa Valley, but while their own vines were maturing it wanted to jumpstart its operation by buying grapes from Trefethen and using its facilities to make its wine. For a while the historic Eschol building contained two separate, bonded wineries: Trefethen Vineyards on the ground floor, and Domaine Chandon, the French firm’s American subsidiary, on the second floor. Working in such close proximity with the French, the Trefethens learned a lot about winemaking—and also showed the French a few new things such as mechanical harvesting, which was anathema at home.

  Basking in the glory of having worked with the French, Trefethen went on to develop one of the most extensive wine lists in the Napa Valley that included Gewürtztraminer, a spicy wine produced mainly in Alsace. Trefethen was also one of the California pioneers in growing Merlot, which he did at the suggestion of his mother, who was very familiar with French wines and knew that Merlot was blended with Cabernet Sauvignon in many of Bordeaux’s most famous brands.

  By the early 1970s, many of the ghost wineries had been reopened. The influx of the ambitious amateur winemakers continued, but the new arrivals had to buy land from farmers who were grazing cattle or growing plums and other fruit. The newcomers shared the same eclectic background as the first arrivals. Two engineers from the Silicon Valley, Thomas Cottrell and Thomas Parkhill, started the Cuvaison Winery in 1970 on the Silverado Trail near Calistoga. In 1972, seven new wineries changed hands or were opened. Tom Burgess, a retired Air Force pilot, bought Lee Stewart’s old Souverain Cellars. Albert Brounstein, a pharmaceuticals wholesaler in Los Angeles, purchased property on Diamond Mountain in the northern part of the Napa Valley and in 1972 released his first Cabernet Sauvignon. Francis Mahoney, who had planned to be a history teacher, launched Carneros Creek Winery.

  Jack Cakebread and his wife, Dolores, in the early 1970s owned Cakebread’s Garage, an auto-repair shop in Oakland. In his free time Jack was also a professional photographer. In 1973, he got an assignment to shoot pictures forThe Treasury of American Wines book and traveled to the Napa Valley to see Jack and Helen Sturdivant, family friends who were raising cattle and growing a few grapes. As he was leaving, Cakebread told them that if they ever wanted to sell their property, he’d like to buy it. No sooner had he gotten home to Oakland than he got a call from the Sturdivants saying that they wanted to sell.

  The Cakebreads drove up to the valley, all the while thinking that it was a wasted trip because they didn’t have money to buy anything. When they arrived, Jack candidly told the Sturdivants that all he had was the $2,500 advance he was getting for taking pictures for the
book. The Sturdivants said they’d take the money as a down payment. While continuing to run their Oakland garage, the Cakebreads became winemakers. They took classes at UC Davis and sought the advice of local savants like Robert Mondavi and Louis M. Martini. Slowly the Cakebreads began selling their wine—almost bottle by bottle. The Cakebreads led their double life at the garage and the winery for nineteen years until they finally sold the garage.

  Social changes that had been taking place at a rapid pace in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s created a new market for the young California wineries. Americans were becoming wealthier, better traveled, and more sophisticated about food and wine. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1958 bookThe Affluent Society pointed out that the country was enjoying “quite unprecedented affluence.” The number of American families in the then top category of federal income statistics (earning $15,000 or more per year) jumped from 1.2 percent in 1951 to 22.3 percent in 1970. One of the first things the newly affluent Americans did was travel. The number of passengers departing from the U.S. jumped from 1 million in 1951 to 9.4 million in 1970, and about 40 percent were Europe bound.

  Flying on the new Boeing 707 jet, which made its first transatlantic passage on October 26, 1958, on a trip from New York to Paris, Americans arrived carrying Arthur Frommer’sEurope on $5 a Day, first published in 1957. While there, they were exposed to a lifestyle that many saw as less harried and more enjoyable. And wine was an integral part of that lifestyle from Paris to Madrid, Rome to Lisbon. The footloose Americans often tried to reproduce some of the things they had enjoyed in Paris, France, when they returned to Paris, Texas. The first and easiest way to do that was to drink wine with special meals.

  Another consequence of European travel was a new interest in food. Americans who had previously considered well-done roast beef to be the epitome of haute cuisine were now makingcarbonnade de boeuf on Saturday night. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961 hired a French chef for the White House. That same year, Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck publishedMastering the Art of French Cooking, a book dedicated to making fine cuisine accessible to American home cooks, and two years later Child started her popular public television seriesThe French Chef . On November 25, 1966, she was on the cover ofTime magazine with the headline “Everyone’s in the Kitchen.”

  Wine was also the drink of preference for members of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. Hippies and their followers were rebelling against everything that reminded them of the lifestyle of their parents, including the hard liquor they generally preferred. So instead of drinking a martini or scotch on the rocks, young people were reaching for a glass of wine.

  All these trends came together to create a significant increase in American wine sales in the 1960s and also a change in the type of wine people were drinking. The breakthrough year was 1967, when sales of dry table wines surpassed those of high-alcohol sweet wines for the first time since Prohibition, and annual per capita consumption went over 1 gallon, a 16 percent increase in the previous decade.

  Few of the new wine connoisseurs, however, were paying much attention to what was taking place in California wines. The state’s reputation for producing only low-quality jug wine was tough to kick. When it came to wine, the new American sophisticates ordered French. While living in New York City in the late 1960s, I wanted to drink California wine to support my home state. But the merchant on Madison Avenue where I shopped always steered me toward French or Italian wines, saying that California only produced “cooking wine.”

  One of the very few people who recognized that something important was happening in northern California was Harry Waugh, a British wine writer and one of the major players in the global wine business. Waugh started in wine in 1934 and introduced Bordeaux’s then little-known Pomerols, in particular Château Pétrus, to the English market. He worked for Harveys of Bristol, a liquor importer, and was its representative on the board of directors of Château Latour, a Bordeaux First Growth.

  Waugh first learned of the new small California wineries in June 1964 at a tasting in New York City. The next spring he made an extensive trip through the California wine country and shipped back to England cases of Souverain Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon and Heitz Cellars Chardonnay. At the end of his trip he wrote in his diary that he was “sticking my neck out rather dangerously” but thought that the best California Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon were equal to “good estate bottled” French wines.

  For the next few years, Waugh traveled to California nearly every spring and his enthusiasm for California wines grew exponentially, sentiments he recorded in his diaries. During his 1969 visit he wrote, “To my mind, at this particular period of time, these vineyards of California must be among the most exciting of all.” In April 1971, he wrote that the Napa Valley had become “the most fascinating, the most exhilarating grape-growing district of the world.” He credited that to “the vitality, the enthusiasm, the expertise, and the thirst for knowledge of the winemakers, [and their] willingness to experiment and try out new ideas increases from year to year.” Three years later, Waugh wrote, “This is what is so fascinating about California, the growers have such open minds and are adventurous enough to try almost anything.”

  It was not enough, however, for the new breed of winemakers just to make good wine. The world’s wine connoisseurs had to recognize the quality coming out of the new California wineries. In the early 1970s, Waugh was the exception.

  *It took more than three decades to correct that mistake. In the 1990s, Schramsberg replanted forty-two acres of vineyard and experimented to see which grapes did best there. It turned out to be Cabernet Sauvignon, and in 2001 the winery produced its first vintage of J. Davies Cabernet Sauvignon, which immediately won high marks with critics.

  Chapter Eight

  In Search of a Simpler Life

  Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by the gods to man.

  —PLATO

  Warren Winiarski in 1952.

  The white Chevrolet station wagon pulling a U-Haul trailer filled with books, clothes, furniture, household goods—and more books—was barely able to get up the hill on Route 66 in western Arizona just before the highway goes into California at the town of Needles. The temperature under the stifling desert sun of August 1964 was over 110 degrees. Driving the car was Warren Winiarski, a University of Chicago lecturer in the liberal arts program and a graduate student in political science. Accompanying him in the car were his wife, Barbara, and their two children, aged four years and eighteen months.

  The car chugged and coughed its way up the dry and barren Arizona hills, while the passengers sweltered inside. The station wagon was on its second set of valves, having blown its first on the initial day after the family left Chicago. Warren pushed the gas pedal to the floor, but the car sputtered its way up the steepest grades at no more than five miles an hour.

  With the Chevrolet dying in slow motion, Warren and Barbara agreed that she and the children should get out in order to lessen the load over the last two major crests. As they approached the top of the first one and the car inched forward, Barbara jumped out and walked alongside the car for a while before it got ahead. When Warren was over the crest, he stopped, and Barbara got the children out of the car. Warren also off-loaded some of their luggage to further lighten the load. They then waited until he flagged a trucker carrying a load of oranges, who stopped and told them that after the next crest they were near a major downhill slope. He offered to take Barbara, the children, and the luggage to meet Warren further along the road. Barbara never asked the trucker where he was coming from, but thought it was lovely to ride into California accompanied by oranges.

  The family was reunited after the last crest. Warren stopped at the next small town, where he found a garage that rented him space to unhook the trailer and store it until he got back later with a stronger vehicle to pull it. The family, now unburdened by the weight of the trailer, was able to continue on its way tow
ard the Napa Valley.

  Born in 1928, Warren had grown up in the large Polish section on the northwest side of Chicago during the Depression, when a quarter of American workers were unemployed. His father ran a livery business that had been started by Warren’s grandfather in the late nineteenth century. He delivered coal to homes in the winter and ice in the summer. The transportation of goods eventually evolved into the transportation of people, and by the time Warren was grown, his father was providing cars for weddings, funeral services, and other rites of passage for Chicago’s Poles.

  Winiarski means “son of a winemaker” in Polish and, sure enough, his father made honey, dandelion, and fruit wines in the family basement. One of Warren’s earliest memories was of putting his ear to the side of a wine barrel stored in the family’s basement and listening intently to the blub-blub-blub sound of fermentation taking place. To the young boy, the barrel seemed magically alive.

  The Poles were a small, tightly knit society inside the big city. The Winiarskis lived across the street from the Polish National Catholic Cathedral, a centerpiece of Polish life and source of local pride. Services at the cathedral were conducted in the native language. Religious and social events bonded the people together.

  The Polish neighborhood was a place where everyone knew your name—and probably your father’s and mother’s as well. Whether you were born in the old country or only spoke a smattering of Polish, you were never a stranger in your section of town. Whenever something happened, whether it was a happy event like a wedding or a sad one like an automobile accident, people would immediately ask, “Was it someone from the community?” The sense of people, place, and purpose meant that no matter what happened, it would be a lot easier to accept if you had the support of your people. Warren would later devote his life to trying to re-create the sense of solidarity and family that he had first experienced in Chicago.