Miljenko’s spirits picked up when he boarded theItalia . It had been very depressing being a refugee in West Germany, even though people had been nice to him. But once headed for Canada he dared to have his first flirtation with hope. Seas were rough during the nine-day-long winter crossing, and most people on board got seasick. Miljenko, though, was so heady dreaming about his future that he had no problems.
As soon as theItalia docked, the passengers had to go through Canadian passport control. Miljenko received immigration papers, but since he had no relatives or job he was assigned to work cutting logs in the Yukon. The information was put on a tag on his jacket that resembled the one on the lost teddy bear in the childhood classicPaddington Bear . Before he left Nova Scotia, Miljenko sent a telegram to Anthony Domandich, his nephew who was a priest in the Seattle area, asking him if he knew anyone to contact once he arrived in Vancouver.
Then Miljenko boarded a train bound for Vancouver. He was told that a Canadian immigration official would meet him there and arrange for transportation to the Yukon.
The first night on the train Miljenko went to the dining car. A week before leaving West Germany, he had gone to a local shoemaker and had him remove the false sole under which he had hidden thirty-two dollars two years earlier in Croatia. Now that money had to last him until he got to Vancouver and could get a job. Looking at the menu, Miljenko pointed to the lowest price he saw—seventy-five cents—even though he had no idea what he would get for that money. A waiter brought him one piece of buttered toast on a plate. He never went back to the dining car again, buying food instead in stores at stops along the way.
Two days out of Halifax, a man boarded the train and sat down next to Miljenko. After a period of awkward silence, the man, who was dressed in a dark suit and looked like a businessman or civil servant, started up a conversation. The exchanges were slow because Miljenko’s English was halting. The stranger started by asking all the standard questions about where he was from and what he was going to do. Uncertain about who the man was, Miljenko told him he was going to the Yukon to cut trees.
As the train traveled across the flat and vast Canadian prairies, the man in a fatherly tone told him that he should start his own business. Miljenko had already started thinking about his secret dream of owning a winery in California, but he didn’t tell that to the Canadian. Instead he said, “Oh, no. I have none of the skills that would make me successful in business.”
The stranger insisted that he should save his money and run the operation on the cheap, with family members doing most of the jobs. Owning your own business was the way to really succeed, he said. Miljenko listened intently and then carefully put the idea in the back of his mind.
The train finally arrived in Vancouver on the evening of February 6. Fortunately no one from Canadian immigration was there to meet the train and send Miljenko to the Yukon to cut trees. By now, he had only about fifteen dollars in his pocket and no idea what he was going to do. It was ten o’clock and snow was falling. Miljenko found his way to the railroad station’s information office, where there was a telegram from his nephew telling him to go to Vancouver College, a high school run by the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic religious order, where he could get both a job and a place to stay.
One of the first things Miljenko Grgi had to do in Canada was change his name. His first boss at Vancouver College asked him if had a nickname because everyone had a hard time pronouncing Miljenko. The newcomer said his mother used to call him “Mee-lay” for short, but that would end up being spelled “Mile,” which seemed a strange first name, so he simply took the name Mike. No one could pronounce Grgi either, so he anglicized the spelling. By the end of his first month in Canada, Miljenko Grgi had become Mike Grgich.
Living in a country where he knew almost no one and spoke the local language poorly was a struggle, and for the next two and a half years Grgich did what he had to do to survive. He washed dishes and was a waiter at the school for a year. Then he was a clerk in a grocery stored owned by a fellow Croatian. He frequently wrote letters to the Franck family, telling them that his life in Canada was difficult. Once he sent the Franck’s daughter Anne Marie a birthday card and enclosed a Canadian dollar bill.
One day Grgich heard that MacMillan Bloedel, a paper company, was building a factory on Vancouver Island in Port Alberni, a fishing town surrounded by forests. He got work there as a waiter, while the factory was under construction. At the same time he applied for a job doing quality control of paper, which he got thanks to the technical training he had in Croatia.
For the first time since he had left Croatia, Grgich felt that he had a real future. He was doing chemical analysis of rolls of paper and finally putting to work his education. He stayed at MacMillan Bloedel for more than a year and enjoyed the work, but the lure of making wine in the California paradise still kept pulling at him. Grgich looked into the possibility of making wine in western Canada, but at the time there were only two wineries—one in Victoria and another near Lake Okanagan—and neither produced the quality wine that he hoped one day to make in the Napa Valley.
As the months drifted by, Mike talked frequently with his nephew, Anthony Domandich, telling him that he still hoped to move to California. The nephew contacted the Christian Brothers, who ran a winery in St. Helena, and asked them how his uncle might get a job in the Napa Valley. One of the Christian Brothers suggested that Grgich put a position-wanted ad in theWine Institute Bulletin, offering his services as a winemaker and outlining his education in winemaking and his experience. Lee Stewart of Souverain Cellars saw the ad and gave Grgich the job guarantee he needed to get an American visa. He quit his quality-control job at the paper mill, and a few days later boarded the Greyhound bus headed for the Napa Valley, carrying with him that precious and all important job guarantee.
As Mike Grgich sat on his bed at the Hotel St. Helena that night in August 1958, Desne and his former life seemed far away. He was all nerves, worried about whether he would be able to make it in California. Grgich was now thirty-five, which was old for someone making such a life-changing move. His age and travails, though, had given him great determination. Grgich was convinced he could succeed if he got a chance. Years before in the evenings sitting at theognji te his father had told his children, “Every day do something just a little better.” His son would put that maxim to practice in California just as he had in Croatia, Germany, and Canada.
Grgich was excited, but as he tried to go to sleep that first night in the Napa Valley, he allowed himself to dream a little. Wouldn’t it be great if he could find a winery that nobody wanted? One that was rundown and that he could buy at a good price. He couldn’t afford anything now. But he’d save his money, and maybe within a year he would be able to have his own winery. It was a dream good enough to sleep on.
Chapter Five
Starting Over in America
Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.
—HOMER
As Lee Stewart drove Mike Grgich across the Napa Valley and then up the winding mountain road to Souverain Cellars, the newcomer looked around at everything with amazement. He was surprised by how rural the valley was and enjoyed listening to birds singing and watching deer run. He was also shocked that most of the farmers weren’t growing grapes. They were cultivating plums for making prunes or even walnuts in what was supposed to be America’s wine country.
When they arrived at the winery, Stewart showed his new employee around. From Stewart’s house Grgich looked across the valley at tree-covered mountains and down at a lake made by the Bell Canyon Reservoir. Directly in front of the house were grapevines.
Stewart then showed Grgich the small cottage where he would be living. It had just a bed, a table, and a hot plate, as Grgich would be having most of his meals with Stewart and his wife during the harvest. Grgich would earn a hundred dollars a month, half of that going back to Stewart for food and lodging.
At the end of
the first day on the job, Stewart treated Grgich to two of his most prized wines: a 1951 Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1954 Zinfandel. Aged wines were something new to Grgich, and he had never before enjoyed a seven-year-old wine. Back in Croatia people drank all the wine they made one year before the next year’s harvest. He thought both of Stewart’s wines were outstanding.
As the two savored the wines, Stewart began telling Grgich about himself and about the winery. Stewart was born in 1905 and grew up in Fresno and San Francisco. His mother was a member of the wealthy and influential Leland Stanford family, which was the origin of his first name, but he hated the pretension and insisted that people call him Lee.
Stewart played professional baseball for a year, then worked for Armour, a large meatpacking company where he handled exports to the Far East from San Francisco. He found, though, that he was temperamentally ill-suited for working in a large corporation and was soon looking for something else. He toyed with the idea of being a freelance writer, but soon discovered that the work was difficult and his talent limited.
Long interested in wines, Stewart during Prohibition brought wines illegally into San Francisco. Then in 1943, he bought thirty acres of land plus a house at an altitude of about nine hundred feet on Howell Mountain. The property included a stone-and-redwood winery that had not been used since Prohibition. Built in 1875 by immigrants from Northern Italy, it was originally named the Rossini Winery. Stewart at first grew chickens on the property. But he soon tired of lugging around hundred-pound sacks of chicken feed and decided to switch to wine.
Stewart thought the winery ought to have a French-sounding moniker, so he named his new property Souverain. The name was one of several suggested by his printer’s daughter, who was studying French at a local high school. With the new name in place, Stewart set out to run a business. In 1944 he made his first wine even though he knew next to nothing about how to do it. He crushed the grapes and put the juice into barrels so porous that it leaked out through the staves. Unaware of what really should be happening with the developing wine, he only hoped it wouldn’t turn into vinegar. Eventually Stewart sold the 1944 wine in bulk to the Mondavi family winery, which mixed it with its own production.
That and other haphazard experiences led him to hire as a consultant André Tchelistcheff, who in addition to his work at Beaulieu Vineyard had an independent research company. Robert Mondavi, whose family the year before had bought the Charles Krug winery and who was always willing to help other winemakers, also taught Stewart the basics of making wine.
The early years at Souverain were tough, and many times the only things Stewart and his wife had on the table for dinner were bread and beans. Even in January 1947, nearly three years after the first vintage, Souverain’s sales for the month totaled $1.25, the price of one gallon of the wine he called Red Burgundy.
Stewart ran a very small operation and was slow to spend money on either staff or equipment. He often said, “Being of Scottish descent, I am tight with the dollar.” Dozens of stories were told around the Napa Valley about Stewart’s frugality, which he seemed to enjoy playing up. Once in the early 1960s he was particularly appreciative of a part-time worker who had put in lots of extra hours, so he gave him a Christmas bonus of exactly one dollar. In order to save money Stewart had generic labels printed in large quantities for his Cabernet Sauvignon and then wrote the year on each bottle by hand.
With the help of Tchelistcheff and Mondavi, Stewart developed into a highly regarded winemaker, and his wines regularly won medals at agricultural fairs. Between 1947 and 1957, Stewart won thirty-four prizes just at the California State Fair. He produced the Napa Valley’s first Green Hungarian wine, which was made from a grape that grew easily in California but had a bland taste and never gained much popularity. He also had a small vineyard of Petite Sirah, a lackluster French grape know as Durif. Petite Sirah had once been extremely popular in California but hadn’t been grown much in the Napa Valley after Prohibition. Stewart was well known for his Zinfandels, and many people said he made the best Johannisberg Riesling in the Napa Valley. Although Tchelistcheff was considered the dean of California wine, some thought Stewart the better winemaker.
When Grgich arrived at Souverain, the winery was about to begin its peak of activity. The crush, when grapes are harvested and then made into wine, is an exhausting time for everyone involved. Although the fundamentals of winemaking were the same as what Grgich had first learned from his father in Croatia, the Stewart operation was both bigger than what he had seen at home and more technically advanced than what he had learned at the University of Zagreb.
Like most California winery owners, Stewart grew many different kinds of grapes on his thirty acres of vineyards. When he bought the property in 1943, Zinfandel, Grenache, and Petite Sirah were growing there. Later he added Carignane, Cabernet Sauvignon, and some more Petite Sirah. French winemakers over generations learned which grapes did best in which particular location and specific type of soil. In California viticulturists knew far less. Professors Winkler and Amerine in their classic study of California’s wine-growing regions had set out broad planting suggestions, but thousands of acres of old vines, such as those at Souverain, had been planted without the benefit of their research. Stewart and many other growers didn’t see any reason to tear out producing vines just to plant the ones the professors recommended. Souverain grew only a small proportion of the grapes that went into its wines and bought others from farmers as far away as Sonoma County. Stewart had a Zinfandel vineyard next to his winery that was used for that wine, but he bought additional grapes for his Cabernet Sauvignon and for all three of his whites: Johannisberg Riesling, Chardonnay, and Green Hungarian. The winery produced only about four thousand cases a year.
Once the harvest started, day laborers, mostly Mexicans, went through the Souverain vineyard picking bunches of grapes and putting them in wooden crates that held about forty-five pounds. They were paid by the box. The older, more experienced laborers knew how to quickly spot the biggest clumps of grapes amid the plethora of leaves. They usually earned more than the young workers who might be stronger but were not as adept and didn’t work as fast. Each laborer had his own rows, and the ones who picked fastest earned the most money. Grgich and Stewart collected the boxes of grapes, loaded them on a flatbed truck, and then brought them from the vineyard to the winery, where they would be crushed, pressed, and fermented. Farmers also delivered the purchased grapes to the winery in wooden boxes on flatbeds.
When they were inside the winery, the grapes for white and for red wines went through different processes. The white grapes were crushed, pressed, and then fermented. Red grapes, on the other hand, were crushed, fermented, and only after that was finished, were pressed.
Stewart and Grgich dumped the grapes—one box at a time—into a crusher. Inside the crusher were fingerlike projections, and when a motor was turned on, the inside of the crusher began rotating the fingers and slightly crushed the grapes. One of the men caught the grapes in a bucket at the end of the crusher and dumped them into a basket press located about five feet away. Some golden juice drained immediately down into a receiving container and was then pumped into the settling tank. Crushing continued until the basket press was full. While the press was being filled, juice was draining out through the slits in between the staves because of the weight of the grapes added on top. Stewart explained to Grgich that this juice was called free run and was the best quality juice.
The basket press was made of a series of wooden staves held together by galvanized hoops. In the middle of the press was a metal screw. On top of that screw was a heavy metal block with a handle. When the press was filled, a heavy wooden top was added that covered the fruit inside the press. At this point, all the juice that had been collected was free run.
Stewart or Grgich began the pressing by taking the handle and screwing the heavy metal box downward. Juice then seeped out of the press between the slots of the staves and drained down into a metal dish at t
he bottom of the press. There were two levels of pressing, depending on the degree of pressure on the grapes. At the beginning of the pressing process, the first 10 to 15 percent was called light press and was added to the free run juice. This mixture would be kept together and sold as a varietal wine such as Johannisberg Riesling, Chardonnay, or Green Hungarian at a premium price of between $1.25 and $2 a bottle. The wine that resulted from the heavier pressing was kept and processed separately and sold as Dry Sauterne for $2 a gallon. Stewart’s Dry Sauterne contained no Sémillion, the dominant grape in the sweet Bordeaux wine called Sauternes, which is spelled with ans at the end.
When the pressing was finished, the hard residue in the press containing the seeds, skins, and stems was collected and spread in the vineyards as mulch and fertilizer.
Pressing a ton of white grapes yielded about 150 gallons of juice, and Stewart crushed white grapes on one day and red grapes the next. The white juice produced in a day would go into one tank. That juice was then analyzed in the laboratory, usually by Grgich, for the amount of sugar and acid. If the acid level was low for that type of wine, some tartaric acid would be added. At the same time, sulfur dioxide was added to prevent oxidation or browning of the juice. The next step was to cool the juice with the help of a pump that lowered the temperature to 50–55 degrees. Everything was then mixed and the juice was left to settle overnight.
The next morning the clear juice from the top of the tank was moved to another tank or puncheon. The sediment was then moved to a smaller container for further settling. Selected yeast obtained from the University of California at Davis was then added to the juice to start fermentation. In two or three days, the fermentation started bubbling and releasing carbon dioxide. The yeast was splitting molecules of sugar into wine alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The gas escaped from the fermentation tank through a wet bung, a device that lets carbon dioxide gas escape from the tank but does not permit oxygen into it. Wine fermentation is an anaerobic process.
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