Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  The 1973 growing season in the valley had been nearly perfect, with lots of warm, dry days. There was a heat spell in late June and early July, and the temperature in nearby St. Helena hit 107 degrees and in Yountville was 105 degrees on June 26. There was another heat spike in late July with another 106-degree day in St. Helena. But for most of August temperatures were slightly below normal. Both July and August were also almost dry, and by mid-September less than an inch of rain had fallen during the growing season.

  Winiarski had been trying to lure Tchelistcheff, who was much in demand as a consultant, to help him at his new winery, and at a meeting of the American Society of Enologists in San Diego Winiarski had pressed him hard to agree. Only four months before, Tchelistcheff had finally cut all ties with Beaulieu Vineyard. He had stayed on after Heublein, a liquor company, bought the winery in 1969, but felt increasingly like a showpiece for the new owners and finally left in protest after he was reprimanded for giving an interview to a reporter without permission from his corporate bosses. The parting was bitter and whenever Tchelistcheff drove from the southern Napa Valley to the north he took the less traveled Silverado Trail to avoid Route 29 and having to drive past Beaulieu.

  Winiarski wanted Tchelistcheff’s experience to help him in particular with tasting his wines; the young winemaker recognized that he needed an independent expert to check on his impressions and restrain his enthusiasm. It was too easy for a winemaker to be blinded by his attachment to a certain style, and when it came to tasting wine, Tchelistcheff wasnonpareil . Drawing on his education in the classics, Winiarski compared the relationship the two winemakers might have to that of the two great philosophers of ancient Greece: Tchelistcheff could be the Plato, and he would be the Aristotle.

  Winiarski and Tchelistcheff were indeed a good match. Tchelistcheff had the ability to dramatize what to science was merely prosaic and taken for granted. He was the first person who talked with Winiarski about wine in terms of beauty and poetry. Some of the valley’s winemakers poked fun at Tchelistcheff’s grandiloquent language, saying with a sigh, “There goes André again.” Winiarski, though, admired his style and verve. In turn, Tchelistcheff had great respect for the younger man, calling him “one of the best winemakers in the Napa Valley, maybe even the best.” Tchelistcheff had noted that Winiarski minutely watched over each step of grape growing and winemaking, hovering over every row of vines and every barrel of wine.

  While he usually displayed a European formality, Tchelistcheff that September afternoon was relaxed and wore an open shirt. His wife, Dorothy, accompanied him, and the two Tchelistcheffs and Winiarski went out immediately into the vineyard to a section Winiarski had labeled Block Two, which was located midway between the foothills of the Stag’s Leap Palisades and the Silverado Trail. The soil is brownish gray close to the highway, but turns reddish gray near the eastern side of the valley. In this section of the vineyard the alluvial soil of the valley floor meets the volcanic soil of the hills, and it was the first area where three years earlier Winiarski had pulled out plum trees and planted grapevines.

  The Tchelistcheffs and Winiarski started at the block’s eastern end and walked toward the Silverado Trail. The vines were trained in what the Italians called a spaghetti-plate style, with the trunk sticking up and the arms of the plant spreading out to form an almost flat surface. The vine should be so flat that you can put a plate of spaghetti on it. The plants were still very young, and the grapes small, enabling loose clusters to get lots of sunlight—just as Winiarski had hoped when he grafted the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot onto the rootstock three years earlier.

  Picking grapes and tasting them as he walked, Tchelistcheff was very soon walking ahead of his wife and his host. Winiarski was nervous but proud of his vineyard, which had developed this year just as he had wished. For the last ten days he had been walking through the property alone, picking grapes at random and tasting them. He thought the crop was good, but he was anxious to hear the view of a respected outsider. Like a son hoping to win approval from his father, Winiarski waited for Tchelistcheff’s opinion.

  The small berries Tchelistcheff picked were a deep purple, with a light gray, waxy coating that rubbed off easily. The seeds of a wine grape make up a larger part of the fruit than those in a table grape and have a strong, woody taste. Tchelistcheff, though, did not bite down on the seeds. He tasted the pulp, chewed the skin, and then spit out the remnants. The quality of a wine grape is determined in large part by the taste of the skin, in particular the fuzzy inside, which breaks down during winemaking, more than by the fruit’s tough, leathery outside. The skins give tannin, the grainy substance that provides the platform for the sweet taste of the pulp. Picking grapes first from one side of the row and then the other, Tchelistcheff began to comment about what he tasted, although speaking to no one in particular. “Honey. This tastes like honey,” he said. “Divine honey.”

  Winiarski was so elated that he grabbed Dorothy and hugged her. As the three kept walking, Tchelistcheff continued making similar comments. When they finished surveying the field, the three chatted for a while and then Tchelistcheff and his wife departed. As Winiarski watched them drive away, he had a great sense of pride and satisfaction. The master had just passed judgment on his product. Moreover he didn’t just say it was good; this year’s crop had the potential to make a great wine.

  Shortly after that visit, Tchelistcheff agreed to be a consultant, and the two men were soon kindred spirits. Part of the bond was a shared Slavic background. The Russian-born Tchelistcheff felt a kinship with the winemaker of Polish heritage, whose wife’s family was of Czech background. For several years after, the two families spent Christmas Eve—one of the most important holidays of the year in a Polish household—together.

  Once he had the blessing of Tchelistcheff, Winiarski knew the harvest was not far away. He kept a close eye on the weather, always concerned about the possibility of heavy rains, which could cause mold and damage the crop. Another danger was excessive heat, which can dehydrate the grapes, and in extreme cases turn them into shriveled raisins on the vine. If the damaged grapes are not removed, the resulting wine will have a burnt-fruit taste. As he watched the weather and the vineyard, Winiarski felt as if he were on the edge of a knife, trying to eke out the most he could from the fruit. Winiarski used a hand-held refractometer to measure the percent of sugar in a drop of juice, giving its reading in Brix. In normal weather, the Brix goes up about a degree and a half a week. If the weather turns hot, however, the Brix will shoot up. Winiarski knew he was near harvest when the Brix went over 23 degrees.

  No instrument, though, is better than a winemaker’s sense of taste, and as the grapes continued to mature, Winiarski sampled more individual berries and sometimes clusters of grapes. Fields do not mature uniformly and berries at the top of a cluster taste different from those at the bottom. So he crisscrossed the blocks picking and tasting along the way. By the end of September, the berries seemed to be reaching their flavor peak. Winiarski also noted that the juice was developing both the structure and the softness he sought.

  Like a general deciding whether to launch an invasion the next morning at dawn, Winiarski alone had to take the decision on when to harvest. No one was there to help him. On the afternoon of September 22, everything seemed to indicate that it was time: the flavors were good, promising the wine would have layers of tastes; the skins had a wonderful grainy texture from the tannin, foretelling structure and a long life for the wine; and finally the weather was warm, so waiting any longer would produce more sugar and thus more alcohol later, which would make the wine too powerful and alcoholic. From a logistical point of view, the pickers Winiarski needed were available for the next few days, but perhaps not after. If he didn’t act now, he might miss this window of opportunity. So Winiarski decided that the harvest would start the following day.

  Winiarski’s idea of when to pick, indeed his whole philosophy of winemaking, by now differed greatly from that of his fellow vall
ey winemakers. The so-called big wines they produced repelled him. He thought the alcohol was too heavy and the tastes overpowering. If some Cabernet varietal character was good, other winemakers were saying, more had to be better. Winiarski, by contrast, stressed harmony and balance in his wine.

  No other vintner has probably ever used the ancient Greek concept of the Golden Rectangle to describe his winemaking. To the Greeks, beauty comes from a harmony that results from the dynamism of opposites. To them a square is perfection because all sides are equal, but it is not particularly interesting because it lacks dynamic tension. The Greek mathematicians Pythagoras and Euclid identified the Golden Rectangle as more intellectually attractive. In a Golden Rectangle the ratio of the short side to the long side is the same as the ratio of the long side to the sum of the short and long sides together. The Parthenon in Athens is an example of the Golden Rectangle in architecture. Classicists also see this golden mean relationship of opposites in music and even in such natural forms as sunflowers and seashells.

  Winiarski looked for the classical harmony of opposite elements in his Cabernet Sauvignon. The fruit, he felt, should be soft, while the tannins are hard. Sweetness and acidity were another point of balancing opposites. The soil of the Stag’s Leap vineyard, he thought, had the gentle qualities from the alluvial soil and the tougher ones from the volcanic soil. The blending of Cabernet Sauvignon with Merlot, which Winiarski always favored, unlike most California winemakers, produces that same point and counterpoint. The Cabernet Sauvignon provides strength and structure, while Merlot is fleshy and soft. Winiarski believed that all these factors come together in a tense harmony that would give his Cabernet Sauvignon an exciting taste.

  Determining the peak moment for the harvest was an early case of achieving harmony. The crop must have the appropriate ripeness—but not the most he could get. The ripeness and richness of the Cabernet had to be combined with restraint in what Winiarski called directed understatement.

  Picking began early in the morning of September 23, and by mid-afternoon 8.3 tons of grapes had been harvested—4.5 tons of Cabernet Sauvignon and 3.8 tons of Merlot. The picking continued for five more days, following the ripeness of each of the different blocks of grapes and even sections within a block. The final 1.8 tons were picked on October 3. The 1973 harvest totaled 32 tons.

  The main work was done by Mexican laborers who walked the rows using sharp, crescent-shaped knives to snip off clusters of grapes with a quick turn of the wrist. The harvested fruit was then gently dropped, so as not to bruise it, into wooden lug boxes that held forty-five pounds. After all the clusters were cut from one vine, the picker moved his box to another vine and snipped off more fruit until his box was full enough to transfer the contents into a gondola, a large open-topped container that sat on wheels. A tractor dragged the container through the fields.

  When the gondola was full, it was towed to the winery, located 200 yards away near the Silverado Trail. During the months before the harvest, Winiarski had bought a collection of some new, but more often used, equipment. The hoist that lifted the gondola filled with clusters of grapes and dumped them into the crusher had been bought used from another winery. The crusher, though, was new and had been designed by someone who had previously been in the prune business but was now making equipment for the new wineries.

  When the grapes arrived from the field, they were dumped into a hopper that had a giant screw at the bottom. The screw took the grapes into the crusher and destemmer, which separated the grapes from the stems. The mass of berries, skins, seeds, and a few stems that had slipped past the destemmer were pumped into twelve-foot-high stainless-steel fermenting tanks. Each tank held up to ten tons of crushed fruit, but a maximum of only eight tons was put in to leave room for the material to expand during fermentation and for pumping over to keep the juice in contact with the skins and add color to the wine.

  Winiarski had designed the tanks himself, basing the height-to-width proportion on pictures he saw in a magazine that showed new steel fermenting tanks being used at France’s Château Latour. These were creating quite a stir in international wine circles. The Latour tanks pictured in the magazine seemed to Winiarski to have the right relationship between width and height. If the tank were narrow and tall, the cap of skins would be too thick and the pump-over process would not extract the required substances from the skins. As a result, the wines would be poorly endowed with color, tannin, and flavor. If the tank were too wide and flat, there would be too much contact and extraction, resulting in an overly powerful and harsh wine. The Château Latour design seemed just right.

  The vast majority of French winemakers at that time used almost exclusively wooden fermenting tanks, so California winemakers like Winiarski who were installing new temperature-controlled stainless-steel equipment were leapfrogging most French wineries in adopting next-generation technology.

  At about 10:00 on the evening of the first day of picking, Winiarski heaved a bucketful of yeast through the opening in the top of the tank to start fermentation in the first tank. He had propagated the yeast himself, using material given him in the valley’s cooperative spirit by Beaulieu Vineyard. The starter made the wine a living organism, and Winiarski carefully followed sterilization procedures to make sure that no contamination developed, techniques he had first learned from Lee Stewart at Souverain. The must pumps, hoses, and other equipment were repeatedly sterilized to stop any microflora from being introduced into the fermentation process and spoiling the wine.

  Fermentation took place over a six-day period. During that time Winiarski got little sleep. He wanted nothing to go wrong and monitored the process like an obstetrician delivering his first baby. He carefully controlled the temperature in each of the seven tanks, cooling the liquid if it got over 90 degrees. He also regularly read all of the wine’s vital signs, such as the sugar level, tasting each tank in the morning and then again in the afternoon.

  Fermentation finished at different times for different tanks depending on when it was started. When the sugar level fell to approximately 6 degrees Brix, Winiarski drained the first juice, or free run, out of the tanks and put it into a separate container. Then he removed the skins and pressed them to get the so-called press wine, which went into another tank.

  Dying yeast cells and other suspended solid material in the juice fell to the bottom of the tanks and formed the gross lees. Then he racked the wine, removing the liquid and leaving the sediment behind.

  Winiarski’s only help during the winemaking process came from Wes Schramm, who had first started making wine with him when the Winiarski family was living on Howell Mountain. Schramm, a Seventh-Day Adventist who abstained from drinking alcohol for religious reasons, monitored the grape juice and must along the way with Winiarski until the point when it became alcohol. Then he stopped tasting.

  In the fall of 1973, the wine underwent malolactic fermentation, which gave it a smoother taste by converting malic acid into lactic acid. Winiarski was very familiar with the still relatively new process, having used it at both the Souverain and Robert Mondavi wineries. He also got the fermentation starter from the lab at Beaulieu and propagated it into the amount he needed. He began the malolactic fermentation in generally the same way as the primary fermentation, although it required much less starter material to begin the process.

  The malolactic fermentation, though, takes longer than the primary one, and only occurs at a reasonably warm temperature of 45 degrees or so. By now, though, the nights in the Napa Valley were cool, and the Stag’s Leap winery building was not heated. Winiarski did not have a way of heating the tanks by circulating warm liquid through the cooling jackets, as he had circulated cold liquid to lower the temperature during primary fermentation. So he bought some electric blankets at a department store in nearby St. Helena and wrapped them around the tanks to keep the wine at a temperature where malolactic fermentation would continue. Since he was worried that the process would stop if air reached the wine, the tanks were fi
lled to the top and large cotton swabs were plugged into the opening there. The cotton allowed carbon dioxide, which was created by the malolactic fermentation, to escape but stopped air from entering the tank.

  From mid-October to late November, Winiarski periodically tasted the wine and checked the cotton swabs. As the rate of malolactic fermentation slowed, he began taking samples of wine and putting a drop on a special paper that measured the amount and type of acid remaining. When the paper tests showed that the malolactic fermentation appeared to be finished, Winiarski took a wine sample to a lab in St. Helena, which confirmed his conclusion.

  Shortly after Thanksgiving, it was time to give the wine some air. During malolactic fermentation, it had not been exposed to oxygen, which was now needed to start the wine’s evolution and aging. The liquid was pumped through a splash tank that had a screen over it to break up the stream. A fan over the tank also increased the volume of air exposed to the wine. Then Winiarski did a first fining, a procedure that introduces a product, in this case a small amount of gelatin, into the wine and absorbs minute particles before falling to the bottom of the tank. In February 1974, the wine went through a second fining before being pumped into another tank, leaving the settled materials behind.

  The next month, the Cabernet Sauvignon wine was moved out of the stainless-steel tanks and into 225-liter (59-gallon) barrels made of French Nevers oak. The barrels came from Dick Graff, the winemaker at Chalone, a winery located south of San Francisco, who had a sideline business importing French barrels. All the barrels were new and had been very slightly smoked inside in a procedure called light toasting. Winiarski had treated the barrels with water to make them watertight and also with a citric acid solution to stop any organisms from growing in them.

  The Merlot, which had gone through the primary fermentation and then malolactic fermentation on its own separate from the Cabernet Sauvignon, went into puncheons, 500-liter (132-gallon) barrels also made of Nevers oak. The softer, milder Merlot did not need as much direct contact with oak, which is why Winiarski put it in the larger barrels.