A Vineyard in Napa. Doug Shafer
on the bottling line at Kornell.) You learned never to be idle. The lowest form of humanity, as far as Hanns Kornell was concerned, was an employee with his hands in his pockets. If there was a minute in which you weren’t occupied, you’d better grab a broom or you’d get a rain of fire from the boss.
Hanns Kornell terrified me. I’d never met anyone so tough. As a teenager in Germany he’d survived the Nazi’s Dachau concentration camp and had come to the United States with only $2 in his pocket.
He’d beaten brutal poverty, he’d stared down Hitler; he wasn’t about to take anything from a lazy college kid.
I had several surprises the following summer when he rehired me. Well, I guess the first surprise was that he rehired me. Beyond that, though, I realized that he actually seemed to like me (by now he’d nicknamed me “Professor”) and that under his rhino hide was a sweet, decent guy. One afternoon I was inside a fermentation tank, cleaning it out, and for some reason the small, round door swung shut. I panicked. It was dark, hot, and small, with a limited supply of oxygen; then from outside I heard a chuckle—“heh, heh, heh.” It was Hanns’s idea of an affectionate prank. Later I knew I was in his good graces, because he’d started saying in his thick German accent, “Hey Professor you should marry Paula (his high-school-age daughter)—stay and work with me!”
Years later I took my young children, Katie, Kevin, and Stephen, up to Kornell just to say hi. We walked in and the hospitality guy at the bar said he’d watch my kids while I walked around looking for Hanns. I poked my head in the cellar and got that familiar scent of wooden riddling racks and sparkling wine. I walked around outside and couldn’t find him. As I was approaching the hospitality room again I heard the sound of giggling. I walked in and there was Hanns Kornell on the floor playing with my children. Then he looked up and said to his hospitality guy in that great accent, “Get these kids some chocolates!”
It was the last time I saw him. But to this day I still hear that voice in my head telling me to get my hands out of my pockets.
Throughout this period Dad was juggling two careers—education and grape growing. His first classroom stint was at a new continuation school in Napa called Temescal, created for students who, for a variety of reasons, weren’t succeeding at the local high school. Most had gotten into trouble and had spent time in juvenile hall. Dad believed the work there was important and could have a positive impact, but it was not an easy year. For his efforts there, Dad got his tires slashed and his brake lines cut.
The following year he transferred to St. Helena High, where things went so well he was offered a full-time position. But by this time, Dad felt he was doing two jobs poorly and had to make a choice. Fortunately, the vineyard won.
NINE
Alfonso
If he was going to get serious about taking over his vineyards, one of the first things Dad realized he needed was manpower. His thought was to hire a foreman to live on-site to help with the increasing workload. When he asked around for recommendations, John Piña pointed him toward a young man on his own crew named Alfonso Zamora-Ortiz.
Alfonso had little or no vineyard experience, but he had worked in a nursery and possessed valuable insights regarding plant life—how to size up the health of a vine, when to prune, how much to irrigate, and so forth. None of his guidance came from reference works or a formal education; all of it came through observation, gut feeling, and experience. If he had Big John’s respect, Dad thought, Alfonso was certainly worth trying out.
Alfonso had fairly recently come to the Valley from his home in the Mexican state of Jalisco and didn’t speak much English. Dad wasn’t terribly fluent in Spanish, although he’d been studying it in night classes at Napa Valley College. Yet they managed to communicate through gestures and half-sentences and a sense of humor.
Working together, Dad and Alfonso picked up on the basics of things like running and maintaining a tractor, discing between vine rows, and using sprayers and dusters. They took on the tasks of laying out and terracing the new vineyard blocks, repairing fences, and digging post-holes for the new trellis systems.
Early on they tried to tackle the weed problem with the use of a French plow. Dad drove the tractor pulling the plow, while Alfonso walked behind and steered the plow’s blade around the base of the vines to clear the unwanted weeds and wild grasses. It was not a perfect system, and they had their share of gouged vine trunks.
Worse was when Dad drove the tractor pulling the discer between the rows. The spacing was unforgiving, allowing only a few inches between each side of the discer and the head-pruned vines, whose fifty-year-old trunks were as thick as posts. More than once in less-watchful moments Dad took out an entire vine. Among growers this is called “tractor blight.”
Meanwhile, it came time to make a second run at grafting grapevines onto the budwood now sprouting optimistically again on the vineyard block, which was stuck with the name John’s Folly. The fence had successfully been mended, keeping out all the hungry deer. When it came time to “bud over,” as it’s called, rather than go to a nursery and purchase Cabernet budwood—as is standard practice today—unbeknownst to Dad, Big John did the far more practical thing, and something that had happened in the Valley for decades—he got some for free. Besides helping to manage our vines, Piña also worked for a lot of other people, including Milt Eisele, taking care of his vineyards in Calistoga. This had become a well-known site, thanks to the fact that Phelps produced a rock-star wine called Joseph Phelps Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. It was one of the early Cabs, like Heitz’s Martha’s Vineyard, which were head-turners and showed the rest of us what Napa Valley was capable of producing.
When it was time to make a second attempt to bud John’s Folly to Cabernet, John Piña simply cut the requisite number of canes, or vine branches, from Milt’s vineyards (without mentioning it to Milt) and brought them over to our property.1
Dad did not discover this act of cane-sharing until some weeks later when he bumped into Milt at a cocktail party and Milt let Dad know he was not terribly pleased.
This time, without any interference from leaping stags, the grafts took beautifully to the budwood, and we were at long last in the hillside vineyard business.
1. Years later Bart Araujo purchased Eisele Vineyard, and the vines were unfortunately struck by our old microscopic nemesis, phylloxera. Needing to replant, Araujo contacted me to see if they could have some of our Eisele budwood. Of course I said yes, and Araujo Estate Wines recovered from phylloxera with new budwood from their original vine cuttings. Four or five years later, we needed to replant a small block of our hillside vineyard, and I called Bart and asked if we could have some canes, and he graciously agreed. Back and forth it goes.
TEN
1976
By 1976 Dad and Alfonso were hard at work replacing the property’s old vines one block at a time, while simultaneously prepping and terracing new blocks of vines on the hillsides. On our property the vineyard blocks run from about 1 to 9 acres in size. We divide them up based on their geo graphical structure, whether they face south, southwest, or west.
Fortunately I was at U.C. Davis during most of this period so now the rock hauling duty fell squarely on Brad and whomever Dad hired to assist.
My dad had to move at a careful pace. If he tore out too many of those old vines too quickly, he’d have no income as he waited for the new ones to produce their first sellable crop. This was when he planted some Chardonnay on the lower, flatter portion of the property we call Bench, believing rightly that the popularity of this white would continue to grow and that for a grape grower it’d be a good source of income. With the economy still in the doldrums and grape prices languishing, it was imperative to pay attention to the bottom line.
Uppermost in his mind, though, was Cabernet Sauvignon. He still nursed the dream of one day building a winery and making