Across Route 29 from Inglenook at Beaulieu Vineyard, the Napa Valley’s other showcase brand, André Tchelistcheff still reigned, but things were slowly going downhill. The parsimonious rule of Hélène de Pins was taking its toll; Beaulieu was not keeping up with the latest advances in equipment and technology. Tchelistcheff was very aware of research being done at the University of California, Davis, and in France, but Madame de Pins vetoed most of his requests to spend money to improve conditions at Beaulieu. While Tchelistcheff had helped install the very latest technology at Hanzell in the 1950s, he had not been able to make the same upgrades at Beaulieu. The winery was still using redwood tanks to ferment wine, and not aging it in French oak barrels as Tchelistcheff had told private consulting clients to do.
The new pacesetter for quality California wines was the Mondavi family. Founding father Cesare Mondavi had immigrated to the U.S. in 1906 from Sassoferrato, Italy, a village ninety miles northeast of Rome. He worked first in the mines on Minnesota’s Iron Range, but when Prohibition started, members of the local Italian Club designated Mondavi to go to California and buy grapes for them to use in their home winemaking. Two years later, Mondavi moved permanently to California and started a produce company in Lodi in the Central Valley.
The family business did well shipping grapes east to Italian communities, but after Prohibition ended, Cesare moved into the wine business. He initially produced bulk wine at the Acampo Winery in Lodi. Then in 1937, Mondavi bought the Sunny St. Helena Winery in the Napa Valley. Acampo and Sunny St. Helena produced so-called tank-car wines, which got their name from the railroad cars that carried them to the Midwest and East Coast, where the wine was bottled and distributed. In 1943, Mondavi also bought St. Helena’s Charles Krug Winery, which had been opened in 1861 and was the oldest operating winery in the Napa Valley. Soon Mondavi was selling several qualities of wine under three brand names: Charles Krug, Napa Vista, and CK Mondavi. While the bulk of the business was still jug wine, the family was moving into quality products that had higher profit margins. Starting in the late 1940s, Krug wines began winning medals at the California State Fair and in other wine competitions.
Cesare Mondavi’s two sons, Robert and the younger Peter, were both active in the family business. But as in the Bible’s story of Isaac’s twin sons Esau and Jacob, there was an intense rivalry between the boys. Robert was Mr. Outside, directing the marketing and traveling the country to promote Krug and Mondavi wines. Everybody loved Robert. Outgoing and affable, he was always ready to help newcomers to the wine business by buying up their surplus grapes or letting them use the family’s equipment. Anyone holding a party in the Napa Valley dreamed that Robert would come because he could make it a success. He had star power and was a visionary. Peter, on the other hand, was Mr. Inside. He stayed at home to make wine and develop new technology. Peter, the worker bee, was studious and practical. He was not as gregarious or as much fun as his older brother. No one in the valley thought Peter would be the life of a party. The two brothers were even opposites in stature. Robert, who played soccer at Stanford, was tall and athletic. Peter was built like his father—short and solid.
The Mondavis hired Tchelistcheff as a consultant before they relaunched the Charles Krug brand as a premium wine. With Tchelistcheff’s guidance and Peter’s research, the Mondavi family moved into the leadership of California wine technology. Krug was the first large California winery, for example, to age wine in French oak.
Sibling rivalry between Robert and Peter Mondavi was kept in check and out of the public eye as long as Cesare lived. Papa ruled the family, and no one dared challenge his decisions. After his death in late 1959, however, tensions slowly started to surface.
Robert made his first trip to Europe in 1962 and returned with a passion to make wines that could match the best of France. By 1965, the Mondavis were having trouble keeping up with the demand for quality Krug wines and took out full-page ads in newspapers under the headline “Not Enough Charles Krug Wines.” For a while at least, Peter and Robert Mondavi had a good division of labor, much like the successful partnership between Ernest and Julio Gallo.
A split between the Mondavi brothers, however, was unavoidable; it seemed only a question of time. Each brother was struggling to get control of the company and put members of his own family into key management positions. Peter thought Robert was spending too much money on travel and promotion, while Robert thought Peter was working with his mother to block the rise in the company of Robert’s oldest son, Michael. Valley residents began to chuckle at how the two brothers were no longer even pronouncing their family name the same. Peter pronounced it in the Americanized way: Mon-day-vi, while Robert used the original and more chic Italian pronunciation: Mon-dah-vi.
Tension culminated at a family gathering in November 1965, when a fist-fight broke out between the two brothers. According to the story that made its way around the valley, trouble got started with a disagreement over a mink coat that Robert’s wife had bought to wear to a dinner at the White House. Robert won the fight but lost the battle, since their mother, Rosa, thereafter sided with Peter on questions of who should lead the company. Robert was banished from the business where he had worked all his life, but soon found backers who would support him financially to start his own winery.
The explosion in the Mondavi clan was an opportunity for Warren Winiarski. Shortly after he had left Souverain, Winiarski had visited André Tchelistcheff to ask him if he knew of any openings in the wine business. Winiarski knew him only casually but thought he would be aware of opportunities in the valley. Tchelistcheff said there might be an opening at Robert Mondavi’s new winery in Oakville, a Mexican hacienda–style structure set far back from Route 29, Napa Valley’s Main Street and just south of both Inglenook and Beaulieu Vineyard. This was clearly going to be a showpiece property. Before he knew it, Winiarski had a job paying five hundred dollars per month. He would be adeus ex machina for Mondavi, whose grand plan was for his son Michael to be the winemaker. The Vietnam War was under way, though, and Michael had gone into the National Reserve. While Michael was on military duty, Winiarski would be the winemaker.
For Winiarski, Souverain Cellars and the new Robert Mondavi Winery were studies in contrast. While Souverain was small and orderly, Mondavi was big and chaotic. Winiarski quickly realized, however, that his two years’ experience made him the only veteran winemaker around. Robert had spent most of his life marketing wine, not making it. Most of the others on staff were new hires with limited training.
Building the Robert Mondavi Winery was a lot like setting up a traveling circus. Things were going on everywhere. New equipment was constantly rolling in, though often no one knew how to operate it. Sometimes one new machine wouldn’t work with another. Huge tanks were bought, but no one remembered to order the fittings to make them useable. Equipment would arrive before the place where it was to be used had been built, so it ended up sitting outside exposed to the weather. Electricians and plumbers worked above, below, and around people making wine. When Winiarski didn’t have things to do as a winemaker, he picked up a hammer and became a carpenter. People from Peter’s Charles Krug Winery helped the Robert Mondavi crew, and Krug grapes even found their way into Robert’s wines. Peter put differences with his brother aside long enough to crush Robert’s first batch of Chardonnay.
Top managers and owners from Louis M. Martini, Beaulieu, and other wineries were also ready to help Mondavi get off the ground. The whole valley was elated about the founding of a new large winery after the dejection caused by the sale of Inglenook. Other winemakers admired the ambition of Robert’s goals. He had the vision to be a category builder. Some business people start companies, and that can be a great achievement. Others create a whole category of enterprise that is bigger than just their single company. Henry Ford did that with the automobile, and Steve Jobs of Apple Computer created the personal computer category. Says Vic Motto, a modern-day wine business consultant: “Robert Mondavi didn’t just mak
e great wine; he created the category of Napa Valley wine starting in the mid-1960s.”
Robert Mondavi himself had many jobs at his new business—raising money, hiring new staff, ordering barrels and presses, as well as overseeing construction and buying grapes from other producers. He had a strong intuition born from a lifetime spent around wineries, which often helped solve problems. In his new company Mondavi was combining his vast experience with the best new technology available anywhere in the world. He bought all new equipment and only the best tanks, crushers, and barrels. Winiarski was particularly impressed by the new jacketed stainless-steel fermenting tanks that allowed winemakers to determine more easily the exact temperature during fermentation. France’s Haut-Brion had introduced the tanks in 1961, and these were the first in the Napa Valley. He was also intrigued by the new Coq pumps from France, which moved the must from the crusher to tanks much more gently than the older types did.
The Robert Mondavi Winery offered Winiarski a tremendous opportunity. While he had learned the meticulous, small-scale artisanal way of winemaking from Lee Stewart, Mondavi gave him the big picture and a glimpse into the future of both viticulture and enology. Mondavi was open to new ideas and swung quickly from one project to the next. Not everything he tried worked, but he was innovative and gave Winiarski a chance to be on the cutting edge of international wine production.
When the first harvest in 1966 began, walls on the main Mondavi building had been built, but there was no roof, so it was like making wine in the outdoors. Fortunately for the Mondavi crew, the harvest was late. In the early fall, the morning fog often hung around until 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon. As a result, the grapes ripened later than normal. The last Cabernet vines were not picked until November 11. Mondavi didn’t have a lab technician on staff, so Winiarski did many of the tests during fermentation and directed the blending of wines. Mondavi and his partners anxiously followed the progress of the wines and held frequent tastings either at the winery or at Mondavi’s home in St. Helena. The late harvest had, fortunately, let them spread out the winemaking process.
The harvest and crush the following year were a little less hectic than they had been in 1966. Systems and equipment were now in place, and everything went much smoother. The staff was larger, and Winiarski was able to turn some of his duties over to lab technicians and others. Michael Mondavi had now returned from military service and was acting as winemaker and head of production.
As dynamic and exciting an environment as the Mondavi winery had been, Winiarski knew he wouldn’t stay there long. The thrill of the new had faded, and routine had set in. He had learned a lot from Robert Mondavi, but wanted to do his own thing. Just as at Souverain, in two years he had learned most of what there was to learn at Mondavi. It was time to move again. Shortly before the beginning of the 1968 harvest, Winiarski left Mondavi to strike out on his own. For some time he had been fielding offers to do consulting work, and he decided to become a freelance winemaker and consultant. Other wineries desired the skills and experience Warren had acquired as well as the knowledge of new technology his time at Mondavi had given him.
Chapter Eleven
Launching a New Winery
Wine is like the incarnation—it is both divine and human.
—PAUL TILLICH
In the late summer of 1968, Warren Winiarski’s mother, Lottie, made her first visit to the Napa Valley. She was anxious to see her three grandchildren, especially her new granddaughter, Julia, who had been born in California. Near the end of her weeklong stay, Warren and his mother were sitting on the large veranda on the front of the family’s rented house on Howell Mountain, enjoying the panoramic views. As they talked, she told him that she had accumulated some money and that if he ever wanted to buy more land or start a winery, she would be willing to help. Warren was surprised, grateful, and above all enthusiastic. His mother’s offer opened new vistas.
A disappointing episode the year before had showed him that he couldn’t do much without money. In his spare time Warren liked to wander all over the valley, seeing where grapes were grown—or had been grown—and where he might someday plant his own larger vineyard. One day he was on Spring Mountain, on the western side of the valley. He was attracted to one particular area that he could tell had been a vineyard before Prohibition, perhaps as far back as the 1880s. Walking through the young forest he had even found some still standing redwood stakes left over from the vineyard days. As he entered a clearing, Winiarski spotted a spring in the distance. In a flash he thought it would be a great place for both a vineyard and a winery. The area was stunningly beautiful, and it had all-important water. Since a vineyard had already once been planted here, a new one would certainly succeed.
Winiarski rushed home and brought Barbara back to see the property, and she too thought it was beautiful and had great potential. Research turned up that it belonged to the widow of one of the owners of the Freemark Abbey, an old winery that had recently been restarted. Warren tried to interest her in selling, but she died before any action was taken. He also asked an old Chicago friend to invest with him, but that too failed. The land eventually went into an estate sale, where another buyer got it before Warren could get his financing together. The whole experience was disappointing, but now with his mother’s support, another opportunity like that might turn out differently.
It was also becoming clear to Winiarski at this time that there were severe limitations for him to develop the land and the vineyard he was working on Howell Mountain. Without adequate water on the property, no winery could be built there. It was also becoming clear that the vineyard needed something like drip irrigation because the soil on the property drained very rapidly. Finally, access was over a road that needed to be paved. All those improvements would take a lot of money—more than even his mother could offer.
Warren had to ask himself the tough question. Would the Howell Mountain property ever make it for him? Experience and romance were beginning to run into reality. A new approach had to be taken, and so Warren and Barbara decided to cut their losses, sell the property, and look at other alternatives.
Things worked out well, however. The owner of a San Francisco furniture store bought the property in October 1968, made the investment to drill a well that produced fine crystal-clear water, and hired Warren to manage the vineyard he had planted. That helped bring in some money for the family to supplement what he was making as a consultant winemaker. His first such job was with Dr. Gerald Ivancie, a Denver periodontal surgeon. Ivancie loved wine and had come up with the idea of buying Napa Valley grapes and fermenting them in Denver. Winiarski bought Gamay and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in the valley and shipped them to Denver, where they were made into wines that were sold as Ivancie Beaujolais or Ivancie Cabernet Sauvignon.
Winiarski also did work for Parducci Wine Cellars in Ukiah, about eighty miles north of Napa in Mendocino County. Parducci had been making bulk wine since just after the end of Prohibition. Every other week or so, depending on the time of year, Winiarski drove to Ukiah to help John Parducci with everything that needed to be done to transform the winery from a bulk operation to one that produced bottled wine.
While working for Ivancie and Parducci, Winiarski also farmed the three-acre vineyard on Howell Mountain. The Cabernet Sauvignon vines were beginning to produce small crops of grapes, but it would still be a year or two away before they would be large enough to make significant amounts of wine.
Winiarski in late 1968 and 1969 was something of a professor in residence in the Napa Valley, carefully studying the whole wine district, looking for where he could buy land for another vineyard. From one side of the valley to the other, Winiarski looked carefully at soil types and microclimatic weather conditions. One objective was to determine the areas susceptible to spring frost, which damaged grapes. So, for example, every time there was a frost he rushed out to discover the pattern of how tiny ice crystals covered the land, examining it on mountains, midrange slopes, and flat ground. He ha
d to observe all this before the sun’s warmth melted the frost, which meant getting up at 4:00 a.m. in order to get to spots on the mountaintops facing east, where the sun hit earliest. Winiarski was like a scientist in his lab, only the lab was the entire Napa Valley.
Winiarski’s winemaking philosophy continued to evolve during his consulting years, and he was striking out on his own. At the time, the conventional wisdom among valley winemakers was that 100 percent varietal grapes made the best wine. As Robert Finigan wrote in the widely read newsletter bearing his name in October 1973, “Most California winemakers consider a 100 percent varietal the highest form of their art.” At the same time, however, the Californians freely mixed Cabernet from different vineyards often miles apart to make the final product, and few wines carried a vineyard specific name. One exception was the very popular Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon.
This emphasis on 100 percent varietal and mixing wines from several vineyards is very different from the practices of the best French producers, especially those in Bordeaux. All the First Growths of Bordeaux are blends of wines from several grapes, at least Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and often others as well. Given the French concept ofterroir, the leading French wineries would not dream of freely mixing wine from a wide variety of geographical sources in their leading brands.
As his winemaking concepts took shape, Winiarski found himself coming down more on the side of the French rather than with his fellow Californians on both blending andterroir . He believed that the 100 percent varietal purists were unnecessarily limiting their abilities to make the best wines possible. He was open to blending some Merlot with the Cabernet in the Bordeaux style, if that was needed to soften the Cabernet. Winiarski also became convinced that specific sites in the Napa Valley produced different expressions of Cabernet Sauvignon, and he was attracted to the concept of a vineyard-specific wine.
Judgment of Paris Page 14
