A Vineyard in Napa. Doug Shafer
fierce. I’m still friends with fellow teammates Cyril Chappellet and Jeff Jaeger. We beat our “archrivals,” Cloverdale, in the first game, which was an auspicious start. Also, I was the new kid on campus, which had a little coolness attached to it, so life was good.
Not all the adjustments to country living were stress-free though. On my first night after basketball practice, I drove home from St. Helena and discovered that with no streetlights and very few cars out and about, Silverado Trail was pitch-black. I couldn’t find any signs or landmarks in my headlights to help direct me home, and I drove almost to Napa searching for the entrance to our driveway. Finally I had to turn around and head north again, slowing down at every break in the trees, every cattle guard, and every possible turn. In an era before cell phones, the only thing I could do was drive up and down the Trail in this way, with a growing sense of panic, until I finally stumbled on our driveway.
By contrast, sunny school mornings started with a bang. My brother Brad and I would pile into a beat-up 1955 Jeep pickup that had come with the property. I’d throw its antiquated “three-on-the-tree” shift system into gear and gun the engine, taking Brad to Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) Middle School in St. Helena before I’d head over to St. Helena High. Every morning he’d egg me on to “beat the bus”—a way of saying drive like hell down Silverado Trail to beat the school bus to RLS. Fortunately there were fewer cars on the road back then, which is probably the only reason we’re both still alive.
While I was off shooting hoops and risking my neck in various ways, Dad was coming to grips with the reality of life as a grape grower. With the purchase of our property, he had inherited a contract with the St. Helena Cooperative Winery (which everyone simply called “the Co-op”). By next fall our grapes would need to be harvested and hauled up to St. Helena to be crushed and fermented. Most of the juice from our property, and throughout the Valley, was sold to Gallo and became a jug wine called Hearty Burgundy (which Dad remembers as being pretty good back then. And no wonder, with so much prime Napa Valley fruit in the blend).
The work started right away. At that time of year, in winter, the vines were ready to be pruned. When spring warmed the soil, we’d get the first wave of weeds and predatory insects.
For the short term, he hired a vineyard management company run by Ivan Shoch, one of the original investors in Robert Mondavi Winery, and learned a lot by observing how this hired crew cared for the soil and the vines—when they tilled between the vines, when and how they pruned, and so forth. He also took viticulture classes at University of California–Davis and Napa Valley College.
Long term, Dad realized that all those vines planted back in 1922 needed to go. They were a mix of red grapes, Carignane and Zinfandel, and white grapes, Sauvignon Vert and Golden Chasselas (which today is typically identified as Palomino), that had been planted by an Italian immigrant named Batisti Scansi. Not only were they past their prime, but the world of American wine was changing fast. The future looked to be less in mass-market wines in fat-bellied jugs and more in fine wines that had a specific place and grape variety associated with them.
This meant that over the next few years we’d need to replace the 30 acres of aging vineyards, while at the same time expanding our vines up onto the surrounding hillsides, where Dad believed we’d get the best quality.
This forced him into the dicey task of deciding which new grape varieties we would stake our future on. First he needed to get a fix on where the wind was blowing in terms of the marketplace. What wines were consumers buying today? What wines were they likely to gravitate toward several years down the road when our new vines were reaching maturity? Those factors had to be balanced against an educated guess as to which types of grapes would grow best on our site.
In 1973 this was a world in which a grape called Napa Valley Gamay occupied nearly 1,000 acres of the 12,000 acres planted to red grapes. (Today that variety claims fewer than 20 acres here.) There were 1,200 acres of Petite Sirah in the Valley and double that of Pinot Noir.
Zinfandel was a tempting choice because, first, even though the vines weren’t in top condition, the variety already existed here on the property. Second, as a grape grower, Dad’s income was tied to how much he’d get paid per ton of fruit. Besides being popular with consumers then, Zinfandel clusters tended to be big and heavy, which translated into a few extra dollars when you weighed and then sold your load at harvest.
Cabernet Sauvignon, meanwhile, seemed risky. Conventional wisdom at the time held that the Stags Leap area was too cool for Cabernet. We got excellent midday heat in summer, but with the northernmost tip of San Francisco Bay just eighteen miles away, afternoon and evening breezes delivered a consistent chill in the late-day air, even in July and August. It was widely believed that you needed to plant Cab in the warmer areas of Rutherford and Oakville.
The first person to go against the grain in that regard was our neighbor to the south, Nathan Fay, a grower who occasionally produced a little homemade wine for himself. He’d planted 15 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon in 1961, and he was followed about ten years later by Warren Winiarski at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, after he bought the Heid Ranch adjacent to Nate’s land. Dick Steltzner, of neighboring Steltzner Vineyards, had also planted some Cabernet by about this time.
Dad consulted with two local growers, Manuel Barboza and Laurie Wood, to get their take on this. Barboza had been the vineyard manager at neighboring Stags’ Leap Winery since the 1920s and knew this part of the Valley like his own family. Wood, who owned a vineyard management company, came out to our property and dug test holes and studied the soil to confirm his initial assessment of the vineyard’s potential.
Both men were convinced, despite popular belief, that the property held good potential for red grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon in particular.
Before Dad got into the Cabernet Sauvignon business though, Ivan Shoch approached him with a more direct route to some income in the grape business, which was the idea of planting the knoll at the western foot of our property to the white variety Chenin Blanc. While Cabernet Sauvignon appealed to the tastes of the new vintners in this region, the American public had yet to be won over. White wine, specifically Chardonnay, was overwhelmingly the top choice out in the marketplace, and a number of wineries were betting on Chenin Blanc as being the next big thing. Shoch had a contact at a local winery who was looking for more sources of this white grape, and Dad decided to sign on. The reason was purely financial. While he prepared to plant Cabernet on his previously unplanted hillsides, he had a guaranteed sale with Chenin Blanc. He hoped that by thinking first with his wallet, he would later have the freedom to follow his heart.
Being a newbie to this business, when it came time to set up an agreement for his future harvest price Dad did the unthinkable—he asked for a written contract. What he wasn’t fully clued into was that grape contracts then were done on a handshake. Perhaps to indulge this citified newbie, the buyer agreed, and they drew up a contract for a price that was based on 1973 prices. Again, not a problem. Prices for grapes had been growing at an astounding rate for more than ten years. And in 1973 they had climbed higher still—the total value of the Napa Valley grape crop that year was $33.9 million, a staggering $14.4 million more than in the previous year. Cabernet Sauvignon sold for an average of $874 per ton. Chenin Blanc sold for $482 per ton.1 It was like the gold rush all over again, and no one wanted to miss out.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1973 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1974, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
SEVEN
Cabernet
Dad’s approach to his vineyard life evolved rapidly. Unknown to me until much later, he’d come to Napa Valley hoping to start a winery fairly quickly. (For years I thought he’d wanted to come out here and live the life of a gentleman farmer, but he swears now he always intended to get into winemaking.) However, once he got into the middle of