Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Then the wine was stabilized. Stewart explained that they didn’t want any surprises in the bottle after it left the winery: the wines would have to be able to withstand cold and heat fluctuations during travel and on store shelves. First the wines went into barrels or tanks where any remaining carbon dioxide, which could make the wine fizzy, escaped. Then the temperature of the white wines was lowered to about 40 degrees so that tartar crystals, which occur naturally in wine at low temperatures and could be unwelcome remnants at the bottom of a bottle, formed and then fell down in the tanks. After the cold stabilization, the clear liquid was siphoned off and the tartar crystals left behind.

  Red wines did not need to be cold stabilized because this process of having the crystals settle to the bottom would take place naturally while the wines were aging for two winters in tanks or barrels. Bentonite, a clay compound, was added to the whites and acted as a coagulant, attracting protein and other substances before falling to the floor of the tanks. Finally the wines were filtered to remove yeast and any other microorganisms that might later harm the wine.

  Soon after the beginning of the new year, Stewart and Winiarski were out in the vineyard pruning the vines. The two men cut back the plants while leaving only a few stubs, called spurs, that would bear fruit in the coming year. Stewart showed Warren examples of his own pruning and how to choose the correct number and orientation of the buds left for new growth. When the pruning was finished, only the skeleton of a plant remained.

  As the weather warmed up in the spring, the two men were back in the fields tending to the vines again. Now the plants, acting as if they had minds of their own, were sending out stray shoots called suckers. These could take vitality away from the shoots that Stewart and Winiarski had meticulously selected. In addition, the suckers would produce unwelcome additional leaf cover that would later block the sun from getting at the clusters of grapes. Two or three weeks after the first buds appeared, the two men walked down the rows of vines pinching off the stray suckers. They returned one more time to remove new ones that had appeared.

  With spring progressing, Stewart and Winiarski began applying sulfur on the new growth on the vines to prevent mildew. Whenever there was another six inches of growth on the plants, the two men walked the rows of vines applying a fine sulfur dust. They repeated the procedure three or four times during the rapid growing season.

  The vines had developed nicely by early summer, and it generally took about 180 days from the first bud burst to the fruit’s full maturation. In midsummer, though, Stewart told Winiarski that they needed to thin out the crop. The two men then went through the vineyard picking off poor clusters or removing parts of damaged ones to eliminate any imperfect grapes that would lower the quality of the final product. All during the growing season winemakers fight an endless series of battles that nature throws up against them: extreme weather, poor fruit set, insects, mildew, wandering animals, and more. If the grape growers are successful, they will reap bigger harvests. Each ton of grapes will produce about sixty cases of wine.

  By August the grapes at Souverain were ripening rapidly, and it was time to begin preparing for another harvest and winemaking. Most wine that still remained in barrels or tanks from the previous year was bottled, so that the containers would be empty and ready to receive the new vintage.

  Winiarski had an insatiable appetite for information about what they were doing both in the vineyard and the winery, constantly asking Stewart about why this or that procedure was being done. At one point Stewart seemed to get suspicious that Winiarski’s plethora of questions was a sign that he would soon be leaving, perhaps to start his own winery. Stewart said there were about a dozen wineries in Napa Valley and that there might be room for another two. Even the quality wines Stewart was producing were selling for only about $3 a bottle, and there just wasn’t the demand to support more wineries.

  Stewart drilled into Winiarski the same attention to cleanliness and detail that he had taught Grgich. The boss was extremely fastidious, watching closely over every last detail. For example, when Stewart put a bung, a wooden plug, into the top of a small barrel, he carefully aligned the grain of the bung with that of the barrel to assure a tight fit. He demanded that Winiarski do it exactly the same way.

  The veteran showed the younger man how to stack cases of full bottles fourteen high, pointing out the way to interlock the containers so that they were perfectly straight, with the stack not leaning in the slightest. When the cases were in place, Stewart would step back and quietly admire his work just as Michelangelo must have gazed at hisDavid .

  As he watched him work, Winiarski realized that Stewart was not as big physically as he seemed at first, but was powerfully built. Stewart sometimes climbed out the top of an open tank by lifting himself up by his arms much like a gymnast raising himself on parallel bars, a feat that required tremendous arm and shoulder strength. When equipment or tools were exchanged on the job, Stewart simply tossed them to Winiarski, who quickly learned how to catch things on the fly. Winiarski got along with Stewart better than Grgich had. In the intense atmosphere of a two-man winery, the two Americans had more in common and no language barrier to complicate communication.

  While Winiarski was learning a lot from Stewart, he wasn’t accepting everything as dogma and began developing his own views of winemaking independent of his boss. Warren didn’t think much of Lee’s Green Hungarian wine, which he thought was made with inferior grapes. Winiarski also didn’t approve of his leaving a small amount of sugar in white wines, which made them slightly sweet. Winiarski was surprised that all Souverain reds, whether Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, or Petite Sirah, were treated the same way during the fermentation. He also thought fermentation of reds was done at too high a temperature, which diminished their natural flavors.

  Near the house where the Winiarskis were staying was a ghost winery, where Warren began doing his own winemaking. After working with Lee Stewart during the day, he would have a quick dinner with the family and then go out to check on his various wine experiments. There was no electricity in the barnlike structure, so the only light came from flashlights or candles. Bats emulating dive-bombers added to both the fun and the fright. In his second season with Stewart, Winiarski made a half-barrel of Zinfandel. When the main harvest was in, he handpicked small, second-crop clusters that grew on lateral shoots that had been passed over in the regular picking. Winiarski then crushed and fermented the grapes at Souverain with help from Stewart. Winiarski brought the half-barrel of Zinfandel down to the ghost winery, where he and his daughter Kasia carefully racked and clarified it. Few wines have been made with more loving attention and study.

  When Warren Winiarski had headed west in 1964, owning a winery had not been part of the plan. But the idea began to take root in the California soil. In August 1965, Winiarski paid $15,000 for fifteen acres of uncleared land higher up Howell Mountain at about 1,900 feet. The plan was to plant three acres of grapes on the nearly flat part of the property. He had been able to get money together for a down payment from his savings and by borrowing money from Barbara’s parents. He took out a bank loan for the rest.

  In the spirit of the young winemakers, Winiarski was experimenting and taking risks. Most people in the valley didn’t think quality grapes would prosper at so high an altitude, but Winiarski was determined to give it a try. At the time, the highest Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard on Howell Mountain was on Stewart’s property at about nine hundred feet. The sparse quality of the soil on Howell Mountain, Winiarski thought, would restrain the normally vigorous grape from growing too fast in the spring and accelerate the ripening of the fruit in the fall. If only spring frost did not turn out to be too much of a problem, he thought he could make it work. Winiarski felt like a pioneer. At the same time, he recognized that it might be a long time before he would know whether he was right. He recalled an old adage he had first heard in Italy:Vedremo in Cent’Anni (We’ll see in a hundred years).

  The land where the vine
yard would go was covered with poison oak and scrub brush, and Warren and Barbara immediately set out to clear it. Then Warren installed a fence around the area where the vineyard would go to keep out wandering deer.

  In the fall of 1965, Warren hired a man from the valley who owned a Caterpillar tractor to come in and prepare the land that had never been tilled. The earth was densely compacted and parched. In a procedure called ripping, the farmer pulled a sharp, wedge-shaped steel blade three feet through the earth at five-foot intervals. Then he went across the land in the opposite direction and made a final pass diagonally across the area where the vineyard was to go. The action reminded Warren of a pick being thrust into a block of ice. When the ripping was finished, the land was littered with large clumps of earth and rock. Hired hands removed the rocks, while Warren and Barbara broke up the remaining soil. The goal was to have the ground to a consistency where plants could grow easily, but not to the texture of a fine soil. Old-timers in the valley said that the ground should be worked until you could push a stake into the ground to the depth of one foot. The ripped ground was then left in that open condition so that fall and winter rains would penetrate deeply into the fractured earth.

  At the end of the year, the Winiarski family left its first house below Souverain Cellars and rented a place near the top of the mountain in order to be closer to their new property. Their new house had the romance of the Old West, having previously been a resting place for Wells Fargo wagons on their way between the Napa Valley and Pope Valley to the east. Olive trees grew all around, and there was an olive press in the basement. The house was built into the hillside, so its cellar was cool even on the hottest days. Behind the structure was a forest of Douglas fir trees, and in front was a meadow, walnut trees, and a lake. The family had a large garden, where they grew their own vegetables and fruit. They also had sheep, a young bull, and a pony. The house faced Pope Valley, so in the morning the rising sun smiled in on them. The evenings were cool.

  By the spring of 1966, Warren was ready to lay out his vineyard. Following the strictures of UC Davis, it was to be eight feet by twelve feet—vines eight feet apart in rows that were twelve feet apart. Professor Winkler from UC Davis had determined that those dimensions provided the most efficient use of land, allowing a tractor to travel easily between rows and giving each vine plenty of space to gather nutrients from the soil. This density is much less than that found in France, where vines generally grow only three feet apart.

  In a bigger vineyard the viticulturist would have laid out blocks of vines with clear demarcation lines to divide the property into smaller units by soil type or climatic conditions. In that way he could monitor how different blocks were producing and perhaps pick one block earlier or later. But there was no need for blocks in that three-acre vineyard since there was little soil variation.

  From an agricultural supply store in the valley, Winiarski bought lines of steel wire on which nuts had been welded at eight-foot intervals. He then laid the wire on the ground for the entire 325-foot length for a row, pulled the wire tight, and fastened it at both ends. Then day laborers Winiarski had hired to help him drove a redwood stake into the ground at each point where there was a nut. That was the spot where they would plant a vine. There would be exactly 413 plants per acre in the vineyard. The peg was later replaced by a rot-resistant, six-foot post to which the plant would be staked while it was growing to the desired height. Wires would be attached along the row of stakes to form the trellis. As the plant grew, the arms of the vine would be tied to the lowest wire of the trellis.

  After the vineyard was laid out, Warren and Barbara plus two other couples, who were their best friends from the valley, held a ceremony to mark the beginning of the new vineyard. They planted the first three vines—one for each couple—and Warren asked heavenly powers to watch over and care for the plants.

  The first living thing to go into the ground was the rootstock. This was a phylloxera-resistant plant that would provide the foundation for the vine. Winiarski selected St. George rootstock, which was then widely used and reportedly resisted drought. The rootstock came in dormant, dry bundles of fifty from a valley nursery. After the rootstock was severely trimmed so there were only one or two spurs sticking out the top and short stubby roots at the end, the rootstock was planted with five inches above the ground and ten inches below. Six weeks later, in front of each planted rootstock, the workers dug basins into which water was placed to provide irrigation. Warren drove a truck carrying water through the vineyard. His day laborers took a bucket of water to each plant to irrigate it, a process they repeated every few weeks during the next five months. This vineyard, like nearly all those in the Napa Valley at the time, would be dry farmed, which meant that this would be the only time the plants would be irrigated. After that, the vines were on their own and had to survive on the area’s modest rainfall—perhaps only a couple of inches during the spring part of the growing season.

  After two years with Lee Stewart—the harvests of 1964 and 1965—Winiarski felt he had learned most of what he could at the place that brought him to California. He increasingly felt that he was not working toward his goal and felt it was time to move on. He was not content to remain the number-two man at a two-man winery. That was not the reason he had come to California. Stewart must have sensed this also, and he told Winiarski he was going to make a change. In mid-summer 1966, when Winiarski left Souverain, he did not have a new job but felt he could live on savings for a while until he found work. He also supplemented the family income by starting a small business serving farmers, spraying fields by hand that were overrun with poison oak and wild blackberries.

  In the fall of 1966, Winiarski was ready to bud his Howell Mountain vineyard. In this process the desired grape variety, in this case Cabernet Sauvignon, would be grafted onto the rootstock that had now taken hold. The grafted vines then produce the grapes that go into wine. Winiarski had obtained the Cabernet Sauvignon cuttings from the Larkmead vineyard north of St. Helena.

  Then the serious work began. Warren had hired budders, day laborers who did the budding for the whole vineyard, to do the main work. The window of opportunity for budding was short because it all had to be accomplished before fall weather set in. First the workers made a V notch on the rootstock, sliced a bud away from a piece of Cabernet Sauvignon wood, and joined the two so that the bud piece fit into the notch on the rootstock. Then they wrapped the two parts with a strip of rubber to bind them tightly together. Finally, the plant was covered with soil to prevent it from drying out in the heat and sun and so that the two pieces could grow together in the semimoist, cool earth.

  The moment of truth came in the spring of 1967, when Winiarski went from plant to plant removing the bands of rubber to see whether the bud had grown into the root. In a major disappointment for the fledgling viticulturist, some 90 percent of the buds had not taken. Because of the soil’s dryness and the difficulty of providing enough hand-carried buckets of water, the rootstock had not gotten enough moisture to grow actively and fuse with the buds. Winiarski, though, was not easily discouraged. He considered it just a learning experience, and the next fall he budded the vineyard again, this time being careful to have the rootstock well irrigated in advance, and achieved much better results. The roots were also now a year older, which meant they were stronger and easier to bud.

  All this time, Winiarski continued learning about winemaking from a variety of sources. He took a course on wine taught by Professor Amerine at the St. Helena Wine Library and also read voraciously. Warren called the Amerine and Winkler pamphlet on California wine regions his “bible” and each night studied a short section. But despite the idyllic setting high on Howell Mountain, life there was tough. The Winiarskis were isolated, and money was short. The family bought second-hand clothes for vineyard work and lived off their land. In addition to harvesting vegetables from the garden, Warren shot deer during the hunting season—and occasionally out of season when they got over or under the fence and
into the vineyard. Barbara froze the meat and served it throughout the year. The family entertained itself with games and plays, and on Saturdays listened to opera on the radio. They might have been poor, but they were very happy.

  Chapter Ten

  The Rise of Robert Mondavi

  Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after.

  —BYRON

  In the mid-1960s, the California wine business was going through a shift in generational leadership. The people who had led the drive for quality wine for the three decades since the end of Prohibition were retiring, and a new group was taking their place.

  Inglenook, the grand old winery founded by Gustave Niebaum in 1879 that had been the most prestigious, high-quality California wine producer both before and after Prohibition, was sold in 1964 to United Vintners, a huge cooperative that vied with the Gallo brothers for leadership of the low-end, jug-wine trade. John Daniel Jr. had inherited Inglenook in 1939 and had resolutely protected its heritage of outstanding wines through the 1940s and 1950s, when there was almost no market for such products. He was broken by that Sisyphean effort, however, and resigned himself to selling the winery. Only four years later, Inglenook was sold again, this time to Heublein, the giant East Coast liquor company, and the transformation of the proud Inglenook brand from quality wine to jug wine soon took place at an accelerating pace. To the valley’s winemakers it was like a death in the family. Everyone felt somehow diminished, even violated.