Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  The other California wineries in addition to Chateau Montelena Winery and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars:

  Chardonnay

  Chalone Vineyard, 1974

  Chalone is located about a hundred miles south of San Francisco and two thousand feet above the Salinas River on an unusual geological formation known as the Gavilan benchland. A million or so years ago, when the land mass that geologists call the Pacific plate started sliding under the North American plate, marine deposits were trapped between the plates and various hunks of geography were shuffled around. That monumental shift and the prehistoric eruptions of the Pinnacles Volcano left a large tract of soil rich in limestone and calcium carbonate.

  The Frenchman Charles L. Tamm in the 1890s thought the soil was very similar to that found in Burgundy and planted some grapes, although he didn’t stay around long enough to harvest them. During the next several decades, the land passed from owner to owner. The property’s history of fine wine began in 1923 when Will Silvear, a sickly rancher, came to the mountaintop because he had been told its dry clean air would be good for his health. His brother planted a vineyard that included high-quality French varietals—Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay, and Chenin Blanc. After Silvear died, however, Chalone went back to revolving ownership as new owners tried their hand at winemaking and failed. Severe, near-drought conditions made the harvests small, and the grapes were usually sold to other wineries.

  In 1965, Dick Graff, a young banker, bought into the winery, obtaining a 47.5 percent share. He had landed in California winemaking after being a music major at Harvard, a navy officer, and a banker. R. W. Apple Jr., aNew York Times reporter and friend of Graff, in a preface to the bookChalone: A Journey on the Wine Frontier, called Graff “an odd combination of a woolly-headed dreamer and a practical man who could build things with his hands.” Graff was also given to philosophical musings and published a treatise on decision making entitledThe Technique of Consensus .

  A chance encounter with wine had led Graff to leave his $450-a-month banking job to be the chief winemaker and boss at Chalone Vineyard, even though he then knew nothing about winemaking. As part of his signing agreement, though, Graff agreed to spend a year at UC Davis studying both viticulture and enology. True to his eclectic nature, while at Davis he also took courses in French and orchestra conducting.

  Not far away in San Francisco, the flower children at the time were preaching love and peace, and some of them found their way to Chalone, especially at harvest time. One was Captain John, whom Graff met in jail. Graff was there for speeding; Captain John was in for writing bad checks. After they got out, the Captain became a member of the extended Chalone family. He found people to lend money to the winery, purchased equipment on credit, and even bought 160 acres for $10,000 by guaranteeing payment of $1,000 a year.

  The 1969 vintage was Graff’s first, and conditions were primitive. Wine was made in a converted chicken coop and the capacity was only about two thousand cases a year. Everything from picking the grapes to labeling the bottles was done by hand. Despite the rustic environment, Graff produced very good wines. André Tchelistcheff knelt down in front of Graff after tasting his 1969 Pinot Noir, saying that he had reacted that way to a great Pinot Noir two or three times in Burgundy, and this was the first time it had happened in California.

  Graff took up cooking to go with his wines and in a bold move invited TV chef Julia Child to visit Chalone. He was shocked when she actually came, and was even more pleased when she proclaimed that Chalone made the first non-French wines she had ever liked.

  Before the 1974 vintage, Chalone built a new winery, with Graff doing much of the plumbing and electrical work. The new facility could handle twelve thousand cases, and the harvest that year was both large and of good quality. The company’s official history recounts: “They were heady years—1973, 1974, 1975. We were getting shareholders. We were getting money. We had three good vintages. We were right on track.”

  In October 1975,Robert Finigan’s Private Guide to Wines took notice of Chalone, writing, “The wines of Chalone, that aerie near Soledad, enjoy a certain cult appeal based at least in part on their unavailability. To be sure, what has trickled down from the mountain has indeed provided ample evidence that climate, soil and winemaking skill are admirably suited to production of California Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs matched in quality only by very great Burgundies.”

  The 1974 Chalone Chardonnay tasted in Paris sold for the rather high price, at the time, of $9 a bottle; most of the others in the competition were in the $6 to $7 range.

  David Bruce Winery, 1973

  David Bruce grew up in a teetotalling family, but while he was a medical student at Stanford University in the early 1950s he became interested in good cooking and then in wine, because the two always seemed to go together. At the time, Bruce had a summer job on a ranch in the mountains, and one day ventured into the hills with his two-year-old son Karli to repair a broken water pipe. He had located the pipe and was working on it, when his son let out a scream that brought a couple hiking nearby rushing to see what had happened. The boy was fine, albeit a bit bored. It turned out the couple owned a small winery in the hills, and they invited father and son to come and see it. Bruce was amused by the winery’s slogan lifted from Oscar Wilde: “Work is the ruin of the drinking class.”

  Bruce began reading classic books like John Melville’sGuide to California Wines and Alexis Lichine’sWines of France. Lichine intrigued him with the description of Richebourg, one of the great Burgundy Pinot Noirs, as wearing a “noble robe.” Bruce simply had to get a bottle. He finally found one in San Francisco, but the price was a stunning $7.50—at a time when most premium wines cost about $2. Nonetheless, Bruce put his money down for the 1954 Richebourg and always remembered the way the wine’s aroma filled the room when he pulled out its extremely long cork.

  While a medical resident in Oregon in 1956, Bruce made some wine using Concord grapes and a unique way of crushing. He put the grapes on a large piece of plastic, folded it over the grapes, and finally put wooden planks over the whole thing. He then drove a car over the boards. Bruce ended his grape crush by pouring the juice into gallon jugs and starting fermentation with Fleischmann’s yeast, a product normally used for making bread.

  After his residency, Bruce returned to California and began looking to combine his love of winemaking with his work as a dermatologist. In 1961, he bought a forty-acre plot above the town of Los Gatos, which seemed ideal for growing the grapes used in Burgundy’s great wines—Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The land was sandstone and had good drainage. It was located at 2,200 feet on the ocean side of the mountains, which Bruce called the Pinot Noir side, as distinct from the inland side, where Cabernet Sauvignon seemed to do better. The property was above the fogline and only a short distance from the San Andreas Fault, the fracture in the earth’s crust where earthquakes regularly occur. Bruce gave his winery the slogan “Wines of elegance and distinction from the dangerously beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains.” Annual rainfall was heavy, averaging sixty to eighty inches.

  In addition, the property was just a mile from Martin Ray’s vineyard. As others had reasoned before him, great wine could probably be made on land near where great wine was already being made. Martin Ray was then making the best Pinot Noir in California, and Bruce’s goal was to make a world-class Pinot Noir just like that Richebourg with the “noble robe.” Although the two men never became personally close, Bruce followed Ray’s strictures of sticking as closely as possible to nature’s way of doing things, going against conventional thinking at the time and using no insecticides or preservatives.

  Bruce replanted the old vineyard on the property with Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling, and Pinot Noir grapes, which were not readily available from local farmers. His own grapes, though, provided only about 10 percent of the total amount he needed. He got most of his grapes from farmers in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Santa Clara Valley.

  Bruce’s medic
al training came in handy for wine chemistry, and he was constantly trying new methods as he learned winemaking by the books. He produced seventy different wines in 1971, including twenty-two types of Zinfandel. Bruce got wide attention with a White Zinfandel that he called Blanc de Noir and also with a sweet, late-harvest Zinfandel that tasted like Port. He left the 1969 Chardonnay in French barrels for five years to see what would happen to the color and was surprised when longer aging made the wine lighter.

  The dermatologist by day and winemaker by night and weekend was best known in the 1970s for his Chardonnay, which had a big oaky taste that came from the French wood Bruce used for aging. Following Martin Ray’s dictum, Bruce did not use sulfur dioxide to protect his wines. The absence of that made them more susceptible to spoilage, but he thought it also made them more robust, helped them develop faster, and gave them a distinctive amber color.

  Wine critic Robert Finigan in 1976 rated the 1973 David Bruce Chardonnay as “outstanding,” writing, “The flavors of this exotically rich wine are sufficiently intense to suggest Pinot Noir rather than Chardonnay, and the finish is dramatically long.” Finigan called it the “essence of Chardonnay.”

  Freemark Abbey Winery, 1972

  Freemark Abbey had a long history in the Napa Valley and was staffed primarily by people who had deep roots there, rather than by newcomers to the wine business. In 1967, St. Helena grape growers Charles Carpy and Laurie Wood purchased the old stone winery just north of St. Helena. Although its name would suggest otherwise, it has never had any religious affiliation. Josephine Marlin Tychson founded the winery in 1886. She had brought her sickly husband, John, who suffered from tuberculosis, to the Napa Valley in the hope that the drier air there would help him recover. She paid $8,500 for 147 acres where a few grapevines had already been planted but no wine had been produced. After her husband died, Josephine built a thirty-thousand-gallon facility, naming it Tychson Winery. She made Zinfandel and Riesling for eight years before selling the property to her ranch foreman.

  The winery had several owners and a variety of names until 1939, when three southern California real estate developers—Charles Freeman, Markquand Foster, and Albert (Abbey) Ahern—bought it. Using a bit of each of their names, they called it Freemark Abbey. The three were better at coming up with a good name than they were at making wine, however, and the winery soon fell into decline.

  When Carpy and Wood bought it, Freemark Abbey was dormant, and the main business of the owners was selling wine jelly and candles to passing tourists. Carpy and Wood had been following developments in the Napa Valley wine business and the shift to quality grapes, and in 1964 they planted a vineyard with Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir; the following year they put in one with Chardonnay and Riesling. They also closely studied the work being done at UC Davis that had turned Chardonnay from a grape plagued with disease and a poor producer into a healthy and major product.

  The two growers eventually recruited five more partners. The most important was Brad Webb, and it took Carpy a year of wooing and the promise of a partnership to get him. After the Hanzell winery was sold, Webb couldn’t find a winemaking job that interested him and ended up as a biochemist at the Sonoma State Hospital working on brain research, doing only a little wine consulting on the side. Building on the expertise of the grape growers in the partnership and his own experience making wine at Hanzell, Webb quickly moved Freemark Abbey into the premier ranks of California wineries. In 1969 Webb hired Jerry Luper, a recent graduate of the wine program at Fresno State College, to be the winemaker.

  Freemark Abbey produced its first wines under the new management in 1967. The grapes came mainly from Carpy’s vineyards, although Wood contributed some Cabernet Sauvignon. In the cooperative style of Napa Valley, the sixty tons of grapes were crushed at the new Robert Mondavi Winery seven miles south on Route 29. By the next year’s harvest, however, Freemark Abbey had its own new equipment.

  Freemark Abbey quickly earned kudos for its Chardonnay.Robert Finigan’s Private Guide to Wines gave an “outstanding” rating to the 1969 vintage. Wrote Finigan: “A nearly faultless wine in a fairly big style. Among generally distributed Chardonnays, my strong first choice.”

  That same 1969 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay came on the radar screen of the small group of American wine connoisseurs in March 1973, when it won a major taste-off of twenty-three California, New York, and French Chardonnays in New York City. The tasting was organized by Robert Lawrence Balzer, the wine writer who the year before had staged the Cabernet Sauvignon tasting Mondavi won and now publishedRobert Lawrence Balzer’s Private Guide to Food & Wine . He brought together fourteen wine experts, including Sam Aaron, a New York City wine merchant; Paul Kovi, a manager of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York; and France’s Alexis Lichine. The event took place before 250 members of the New York Food and Wine Society, who were shocked when California Chardonnays received the top four scores. In fifth place was the 1969 Beaune Clos des Mouches Joseph Drouhin. Other French wines at that tasting: 1970 Corton-Charlemagne Louis Latour; 1971 Pouilly-Fuissé Louis Jadot; and 1970 Chassagne-Montrachet Marquis de Laguiche Joseph Drouhin. California wines were starting to get attention, but news of the Balzer tasting didn’t travel much beyond a small circle of wine aficionados.

  The 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay was a classic Webb-Luper product and followed in the tradition of the award-winning 1969 wine. The grapes came from the Carpy Ranch and the Red Barn Ranch in the Napa Valley. The wine had an oakiness that came from nearly seven months of aging in small French barrels.

  Spring Mountain Vineyard, 1973

  When Mike Robbins grew up during the 1930s in Iowa, no one he knew drank wine. He left Des Moines to go into the military and then went to the Naval Academy in the last months of World War II. While an Annapolis cadet, he dated a stunning blond named Grace Kelly, who lived in nearby Philadelphia and later went on to capture the heart of Hollywood as well as that of the prince in Monaco. Robbins was still on active duty in the navy when the Korean War broke out and he eventually served three tours in the Pacific.

  In 1954, Robbins retired from the navy and settled in San Francisco. He went to work for the real estate broker Coldwell Banker and earned a law degree and an MBA from the evening division of the University of San Francisco. His first introduction to wine came through the friend of a friend in San Francisco, and a leisurely tour of Western Europe in 1959 confirmed his interest. Robbins got started in the wine business the following year, when he invested in Mayacamas Vineyards, where he also did some marketing work while continuing his real estate career. But after three years he sold his stock, telling owners Jack and Mary Taylor that they were producing a weak-tasting “Cabernet Rosé that was a waste of outstanding Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.”

  Combining his interest in wine and his knowledge of real estate, Robbins in the early 1960s began buying land in the Napa Valley. There was plenty of property for sale, and the prices were low since land was mainly used for cattle grazing or plum orchards. Good property cost only $2,500 to $3,000 an acre, and Robbins bought some of the best available. In 1962, he purchased a Victorian home with a small winery and vineyard north of St. Helena. Founded in 1884, it was named the Johannaburg Vineyards. Robbins renamed it Spring Mountain after the hill on the western side of the valley where the property was located.

  Robbins took a year off from real estate in 1968 to get the winery started, while learning about his new field from members of the local wine brotherhood: Robert Mondavi, Joseph Heitz, and André Tchelistcheff. For the next seven years he experienced the life known to many entrepreneurs—holding down two jobs. Weekends he was a winemaker, while during the week he was a real estate broker, working on projects like the Golden Gateway Center in San Francisco and Century City in Los Angeles.

  The early years at Spring Mountain were haphazard. Robbins blended Cabernet Sauvignon from his first two years and marketed the wine as the 1968–69 vintage. Originally he bought all the grapes he used for winema
king and did his crushing at other wineries. But as money became available, he restored the Victorian mansion, replanted the vineyard, and bought his own equipment.

  Robbins hired Charles Ortman to be his winemaker. Once a commercial artist, Ortman learned much of his winemaking while doing pick-up work for two years at Heitz Cellars on the other side of the valley. He used both his old and new talents at Spring Mountain, designing its wine label and also becoming a master maker of Chardonnay. Ortman and Robbins had an iconoclastic approach to winemaking. They weren’t out of the UC Davis school and thought the work of the professors was more applicable to the large Central Valley wineries than it was to the Napa Valley’s smaller ones that were producing more refined wines. Robbins adopted the French view that growing grapes under stress improved their quality. One of his maxims was never to irrigate his vineyard after May 20, even in the driest of years. Stressed vines, he thought, produced a more intensely flavored harvest.

  In the early 1970s, Robbins was used to coming home from wine tastings with the gold prize. His 1969 vintage won at a tasting of thirteen Chardonnays put on by the Los Angeles/Beverly Hills chapter of Les Amis du Vin. The competition included not only Freemark Abbey and Heitz Cellars from the Napa Valley but also Corton-Charlemagne Remoissenet and Puligny-Montrachet Leflaive from Burgundy.Robert Finigan’s Private Guide toWines gave “outstanding” rankings to Spring Mountain’s Chardonnay for its 1970, 1972, and 1973 vintages.

  Finigan put the 1973 Spring Mountain Chardonnay into a special class with the Freemark Abbey and Heitz Chardonnays. Finigan wrote that all three reached “a special level of quality,” adding that he couldn’t pick out one as the best. Then after pointing out some shortcomings in both the Freemark Abbey and Heitz wines, he wrote: “I suppose that leaves the Spring Mountain as my narrow favorite, but choosing among these classic California Chardonnays really involves senseless hairsplitting.”