A Vineyard in Napa. Doug Shafer
eventually saw that my dad was sincere. For the next five or six weeks the city boy from Chicago built up some calluses tossing bales of hay onto the back of a truck.
(I think a lot of people at some time in their lives must develop a craving to get outside and get dirt under their fingernails. Many summers later a successful attorney from San Francisco asked Dad if he could do the very same thing at the winery.)
In spite of Dad occasionally disappearing into farmland, things were going well on the home front. My parent’s first baby was my sister Libby. Two years later my brother Bill came into the picture. I was born in 1955, and finally our youngest brother, Brad, joined us in 1960. By this time we lived on Oak Street in Hinsdale, Illinois, in a three-story Victorian with a big screened-in porch and a sloping green lawn.
We enjoyed a noisy, rambunctious life with snowball fights in winter and coasting our bikes down the lawn in spring and summer. My memories are filled with water fights, sleepovers, ping-pong on the front porch, catching fireflies, and watching Dad and his friends practice chip shots and knock back gin and tonics on the lawn. There were always one or two black labs in the mix.
Shafer family home on Oak Street in Hinsdale, Illinois.
During the school year, we benefited from Dad’s career, which bridged education and salesmanship. In the bedroom I shared with my brothers, Dad created a system of sliding blackboards. In the evenings, we would “play school” with him. With chalk in hand he would make up fast-action math and word games that were such fun we had no idea he was teaching us key concepts and ideas.
By the early 1970s, after two decades of applying himself full-bore at Scott Foresman, Dad had worked his way to the office of Vice President of Long-Range Planning. He took the “long range” part of the title seriously and advocated that the company invest in experimental educational tools, such as video and other technology that were barely out of the starting gate. His proposals were apparently viewed as a bit radical and became mired in subcommittees, meetings with consultants, endless cost-benefit analyses, and countless other tools the corporate world uses to kill ideas. Working in that top-floor office, which sounded impressive, had turned as gray and uninspiring as the old machine tool job in Cleveland.
Around this time Dad read a newspaper story that struck a chord. It said that if you were going to embark on a second career you needed to start by the age of fifty. The wheels started turning.
Soon afterward he read an intriguing investors’ report from Bank of America called “Outlook for the California Wine Industry.” The document laid out a compelling case for the future of wine in the Golden State in just twelve pages, beginning with its opening paragraph, “The strongest growth in wine markets ever recorded will occur during the next ten years. Annual U.S. consumption will approach 400 million gallons by 1980 …”2 (The actual consumption in 1980 was, in fact, even higher than predicted at 480 million gallons.)3
The report cited a number of factors that would contribute to this unprecedented rise. One was the anticipated growth in disposable income and the fact that 40 million new young adults, who favored wine, would reach drinking age during the 1970s. They weren’t calling us the baby boomers yet, but our numbers were already reverberating throughout the business world.
A change of fortune was already being felt in Napa Valley, where in the five years from 1964 to 1969 the value of the annual grape harvest had soared from $2.9 million to $8 million.4 Other areas of the state were doing well too, as my dad would learn.
Several dots connected for him, including that itch to work outside. Mind you, his agricultural background until then had only included tossing hay bales and growing flowers in our backyard. The other element that ate at him was the idea of being his own boss. No matter how hard he worked or cut his own path at Scott Foresman, he was still there as the result of family connections, and it seemed that every long-range proposal he put on the table was getting torpedoed. A move into the wine business would be a venture purely of his own creation. It would sink or swim based on his ideas, drive, and resourcefulness.
At some point in 1970 Dad started reading everything he could find on winemaking and grape growing. In early 1972 he flew to California and scouted vineyard property in Edna Valley, Monterey, and Santa Maria. At one point he was chatting with an old-timer who owned a roadside winery outside of Gilroy. When the man learned that Dad was interested in the wine business, he said, “Well if you’re interested in wine, what’re you doing here? There’s nothing happening here. You need to be up in Napa.”
Dad eventually did make his way north to Napa Valley, where he worked with real estate agent Jim Warren (whose stepfather, it turned out, was the Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren). They toured quite a number of sites Dad found unpromising. Most were located in the center of the Valley with deep fertile soils, drawing lots of moisture from the nearby Napa River. Dad’s goal was to find a dry, rugged hillside, having read that grapes from terraced hillsides were favored for centuries throughout the Mediterranean world. A saying that dates back to the Roman Empire, “Bacchus amat colles,” which translates as “Bacchus loves the hills,” illustrates the idea that the Romans believed their god of wine had a special affinity for wine sourced from hillside vines.
Finally, Jim mentioned a remote site in an area known locally as Stags Leap. He warned Dad that it had been on the market for three years and a number of knowledgeable winery owners had already seen it and turned it down.
It seemed foolish not to at least lay eyes on the site, so they drove out, and Dad has often recounted being awed by the beauty of the hillsides and the huge rock outcropping beyond called the Stags Leap Palisades, which soars some two thousand feet. Even so, he understood Jim’s warning. Once you got past the scenic magnificence, this was not an obvious gem to the eye of a Napa vintner of that era. Besides a rundown house and outbuildings, it was a rambling 209-acre site, with steep, boulder- and rock-choked hillsides on the eastern and northern flanks. A full three-quarters of the property was unplantable, thanks to the steepness of much of the terrain. The 30-acre vineyard established on the flatter, western portion sported a hodgepodge of red and white grape varieties, interspersed with walnut trees, and last planted in 1922.
But rather than view those steep, wild hillsides as a detriment, Dad was thrilled. The site was almost a photograph of what he had been searching for, chiefly, those south- and west-facing hillsides composed of thin layers of volcanic soil, ensuring that grapevines would struggle for survival, holding out the promise for producing rich, opulent, concentrated fruit.5
Dad returned to Chicago having completed his research and a year’s worth of property hikes—he had all the data he needed—but ultimately it took something gut-based to push him to the very edge of the decision. He put together a business plan, in which he projected his costs and profit, and drove it over to his accountant’s office.
The accountant sat at his desk and reviewed Dad’s figures. Then he took off his glasses, shrugged, and said that frankly it was impossible to gauge if Dad could make a success of running a winery. “Anyone can put together numbers that make a great-looking projection,” he said.
It wasn’t what Dad had hoped to hear, but he appreciated the frankness. As Dad headed for the door, however, the accountant stepped out of his role as financial analyst, and he said rather wistfully, “You know, John, you only go around once.”
Years later Dad told me that’s what did it: the featherweight of those words finally tipped the scales. Dad knew he wanted—needed—to make the leap into this new life in Napa Valley. He didn’t want to live in Chicago for the rest of his life, drinking gin and tonics and playing golf while wondering what if—what if he’d purchased that hillside? What if our family had pursued the dream of making wine?
Not