Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  Professors from Davis offered a steady stream of suggestions, and Hanzell became, in effect, their laboratory. Researchers, for example, had been trying to get winemakers to lower the temperature at which fermentation took place in order to protect a wine’s fruity characteristics. Since California is generally much warmer than Burgundy during the harvest, its wines often had a burnt taste because fermentation at a higher temperature was robbing the fruit of its natural flavors. As a result, the people at Hanzell had to introduce a way to cool the liquid. The objective was to ferment wine at roughly the same temperature in Sonoma as in the cooler Burgundy. To achieve that, Zellerbach commissioned the manufacture of twelve double-walled stainless-steel tanks, where chilled water, which was kept at a steady 55 to 58 degrees, circulated between the walls and cooled the wine. Each rectangular tank held exactly one ton of crushed grapes. A ten-ton refrigerator located in the winery’s basement chilled the water. Tchelistcheff and Harold Berg, a UC Davis professor, designed the tank.

  Davis professors were also warning winemakers about the oxidation of white wines, which occurs when there is excessive contact with air and causes the wine to lose its fruity flavors and turn brown. The researchers suggested engulfing the grapes and young wine in nitrogen in order to keep air away. Hanzell achieved that by blanketing the wine in tanks with a layer of nitrogen.

  The biggest breakthrough at Hanzell, though, was the introduction of controlled malolactic fermentation, the secondary fermentation that converts the harsher malic acid into lactic acid and carbon dioxide. This smooths out the wines and makes them mellower. Malolactic fermentation occurs naturally as the wine ages in barrels in all Burgundian Pinot Noir and most Chardonnay wines during the fall and winter after the alcoholic fermentation. In California wines in the 1950s, it was taking place haphazardly—if at all. Sometimes it occurred after bottling, giving wines an effervescence that could make the bottles explode. The first Hanzell vintages did not undergo malolactic fermentation, but Tchelistcheff and Berg told Webb that it was essential if Zellerbach was going to achieve Burgundy-style wines. Webb, though, developed a way to induce the process and make sure it took place even when nature didn’t cooperate.

  John L. Ingraham, a UC Davis professor, first isolated several lactic acid bacteria, the most promising of which came from the Louis M. Martini Winery and was named ML34. In January 1959, Webb conducted the first induced and commercial malolactic fermentation in California by adding the malolactic bacteria to wine fermenting in a glass-lined, stainless-steel tank. The procedure was repeated in the 1959 Hanzell Pinot Noir, which is believed to be the first wine in history with induced, rather than spontaneous, malolactic fermentation.*

  Zellerbach was not around the winery to follow the historic developments taking place at his property. In November 1956, President Eisenhower named him ambassador to Italy. Zellerbach, though, kept in close contact with hismaître de chai . After Webb successfully accomplished controlled malolactic fermentation, he quickly shot off a message to the ambassador.

  Webb also shipped bottles of Hanzell wines to Rome, which Zellerbach served at his embassy dinners and sent to European wine friends without telling them the origin. They told him the Chardonnay was obviously a white Burgundy from the Côte d’Or, but they couldn’t tell which vineyard!

  In an interview in the January 1960 issue of the California publicationWines and Vines, Zellerbach insisted that Hanzell was not “just a pastime” but a “serious business enterprise.” With its output of only about a hundred cases of 1956 Chardonnay, though, it was hard to consider Hanzell a commercial winery. Zellerbach priced his wines at exactly what it cost him to make them: the then lofty price of $6 a bottle.

  James Zellerbach never had the chance to see the impact of his experimental winery. After a very brief illness, he died on August 3, 1963, in San Francisco. His wife had never shown any interest in the winery and she did not even produce the 1963 vintage, selling off the grapes, wines still in barrels, and bottles to other wineries who marketed it under their own labels. Two years later, Mrs. Zellerbach sold Hanzell to a retired businessman.

  Developments at Hanzell, though, were not lost. Given the free flow of information in northern California wine circles, and because Zellerbach had hired so many consultants as well as professors from UC Davis, word of Hanzell soon spread to leading Napa Valley wineries.

  Hanzell was not the only winery breaking new ground. Another leader in new technology was the Charles Krug Winery, where Peter Mondavi was the winemaker. A UC Davis graduate, he did extensive experiments under the tutelage of William Cruess, a Davis professor, on cold fermentation of white and rosé wines. He also did trailblazing work on new methods for pressing grapes and filtering wines.

  André Tchelistcheff adopted lessons from both Hanzell and Krug, where he was also a consultant. In 1962, Beaulieu became the first large-scale winery to introduce malolactic fermentation for all its red wines. At a UC Davis seminar that year Mike Grgich gave a presentation demonstrating how winemakers, with the help of a specially treated paper—chromatography paper—could see the progress of the procedure as it was taking place.

  In addition, Tchelistcheff and Grgich were introducing a way to protect vineyards from frost, which could wipe out a year’s crop on a single chilly night. Tchelistcheff had a hard time convincing Madame de Pins to spend money to install a frost-prevention system, but finally succeeded when he showed her that the winery would be more profitable if he could eliminate frost damage. Tchelistcheff and Grgich initially tried burning hay and then old tires to fight off frost. They had the most success with return stack heaters, which burned diesel fuel and were widely used in southern California to protect citrus trees from cold weather. In addition, Tchelistcheff installed wind machines that looked like propellers on a tower to mix relatively warm air with the colder air near the surface of the soil to supplement the heaters.

  Grgich played a major role in introducing a very fine filter that trapped small amounts of yeasts and bacteria that slipped through the filters then being used just before the wine was bottled. These particles sometimes contaminated wine. Grgich and Tchelistcheff were spurred on to find a solution to the problem after Beaulieu had to dispose of ten thousand bottles of spoiled rosé. A company named Millipore Corp. made a filter for the pharmaceutical industry to assure sterile manufacturing of medicines. It proposed using the same technology to eliminate even the smallest yeast particles and bacteria in wine just before bottling. Gallo had first tried the new process, but had discontinued the experiment. Tchelistcheff learned about that from his son Dimitri, who was then working for Gallo, and asked the Millipore Corp. people to do another test at Beaulieu. They spent several weeks in 1962 at the winery working with Grgich to develop, install, and test a double filtering procedure that first put the wine through a traditional filter and then through a microscopic one. The filters worked and were soon adopted by many wineries.

  All the technical advances being made in California wine production resulted in much better wine, although even those doing the work didn’t always realize how much they were accomplishing. In 1964, UC Davis professor Maynard Amerine visited Beaulieu to talk with Tchelistcheff before going to a wine symposium in Bordeaux. It was quite an honor for him to be asked to address the group, and he asked what he should talk about to this major international wine gathering. Amerine knew that Tchelistcheff read French technical wine publications and so was very familiar with developments there.

  “What can I tell the French about winemaking?” asked Amerine.

  “Don’t be so humble,” Tchelistcheff replied. “We are now doing many things in California that they don’t know about. Tell them about controlled malolactic fermentation and tell them about microfiltering wine to stabilize it biologically. Those are two things we are doing here that even the French do not fully appreciate.”

  *France’s Émile Peynaud was also doing research on controlled malolactic fermentation at about the same time and may have achie
ved it earlier. Wine technology did not travel very fast between France and California at the time, however, and the men were unaware of each other’s work.

  Chapter Seven

  The Swashbuckling Wine Years

  Making good wine is a skill, fine wine an art.

  —ROBERT MONDAVI

  Rodney Strong came to California winemaking via Broadway. He grew up on a farm near Vancouver, Washington, discovering at an early age that he loved the theater and dancing. For a while he worked as a between-acts comedian at a Portland burlesque show, keeping audiences laughing while the girls prepared for their next performance. After a year at the University of Washington, Strong went to New York City in 1946 and studied with dance legends George Balanchine and Martha Graham. He was also in the chorus of long forgotten Broadway shows likeToplitsky of Notre Dame . Successful as both a dancer and choreographer, he earned a then lordly $100,000 a year.

  A Paris nightclub owner in 1948 saw one of Strong’s shows and offered him the choreographer’s job at the Lido, a new nightspot he was opening in Paris. Strong jumped at the opportunity and lived in Europe for the next four years, where he grew to appreciate good wine and good food. It was an idyllic life. He was well paid, and his theater connections gave him an entrée into French society.

  A dancer, though, has to think about life when the music stops. Like a football running back, a dancer’s legs begin to go at a certain age. So while he was enjoying fine French wine, Strong began thinking about making wine his second career. Before returning to New York City in 1952, he picked up odd jobs at harvest time in family wineries in Bordeaux and Burgundy. The work was hard and he was usually not paid, but he learned Old World winemaking techniques from the vineyard up.

  In 1959, Strong married and decided it was time to put away his dancing shoes. While performing with traveling shows in California, he had looked at breaking into the wine business there as well as buying property for a vineyard. He first worked at a small winery in Santa Clara, south of San Francisco, and then opened Tiburon Vintners, a wine shop in a town of that name north of San Francisco. It operated out of a rundown Victorian house, where Strong and his wife received free rent in exchange for repairing the place. He bought wine in barrels from vintners in Sonoma and Napa counties and bottled it in the cellar, while his wife handled sales upstairs. First-year sales totaled ten thousand dollars. In order to survive, Strong taught dance at San Francisco State College three days a week and choreographed shows likeWest Side Story for the tony Bohemian Club.

  Sales at Tiburon Vintners eventually took off, and Strong set out to buy land for a vineyard. From his European experience, he was convinced that the location and quality of land was the key to great wine. The French had taught him that the vintner played only a secondary role; the vineyard had the starring role. Strong looked for a cool area, fearing that Europe’s leading grapes like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir would not do well in the hot California sun in places like the Napa Valley. He also worked with professors at Davis on soil and temperature studies, looking for the best location for a new vineyard.

  Finally Strong found his ideal in Sonoma County, where the chalk-colored soil reminded him of the vineyards he had seen in the Champagne region of France around Épernay and Reims. In 1962, Strong bought a sixty-acre vineyard, complete with a winery dating back to 1898, and renamed it Windsor Vineyards.

  Strong pulled out the poor-quality, Prohibition-era grapes and replaced them with quality ones. Soon he was producing wines that had a cult following. He also brought new ways of doing business to the local wine trade. He called his first property Chalk Hill after the vineyard’s location. Since distributors were reluctant to handle his little-known wines, Strong sold them by mail, often to the same clients he had in Tiburon and to members of the Bohemian Club.

  Strong’s business exploded, with annual sales going quickly from $300,000 to $3 million. Financial institutions like Bank of America and Prudential Insurance were anxious to lend money to a promising winery because it had good collateral—its land—and promising sales thanks to growing wine consumption. Strong was soon buying up plum orchards and turning them into vineyards. By 1970, his company owned five thousand acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties. Strong later called this period “the adventurous, swashbuckling wine years in California.”

  Rodney Strong was just one of a new breed of winemaker who started arriving in northern California’s wine country in the 1960s. Sometimes a person came alone; more often they were a couple. Some were millionaires; others were a pittance away from poverty. They came from all parts of the country and from all walks of life. There was a dermatologist, a securities analyst, engineers, bankers, and professors. Some were young people seeking adventure; others were going into retirement. Many were escaping the riot-filled and declining American cities of the 1960s and were seeking a simpler life close to nature. Just as the first settlers who came to California nearly two centuries before, the newcomers hoped to get some land and carve out a great future for themselves.

  Many of the new breed had spent time in Europe, often an extended stay, where they had discovered a more interesting and exciting lifestyle than they had experienced in America. Wine played a central role in that culture, and they returned to the U.S. looking for a way to make wine part of their lives. The wannabe winemakers were usually just gifted amateurs who knew little more about wine than that they enjoyed drinking it. But they also didn’t want to make just any wine; they shared a determination to make world-quality wine.

  Unlike the French, the new California winemakers had no tradition or handed-down wisdom. They couldn’t pass along a wine heritage because they didn’t have one. As a result, they became experimenters, borrowing ideas where they found them and trying different ways of turning grape juice into wine. The lessons from Hanzell—fermenting in temperature-controlled stainless-steel tanks, induced malolactic fermentation, using inert gases to eliminate oxidation, and aging in small French oak barrels—became gospel. In addition, though, they did their own thing. At one point, for example, winemakers at Trefethen Vineyards in the town of Napa decided they were getting too much color from the Pinot Noir grapes going into its sparkling wine, so they and other growers tried harvesting at night when it was cooler to see if they’d get less pigment. The experiment worked and produced a wine with more freshness and vibrancy. The new winemakers also tried different ways of marketing, selling direct to consumers at their wineries and through mail order.

  Not all their trials were successes, and some experiments were more popular with novice wine consumers than with connoisseurs. When a batch of Zinfandel got stuck during fermentation and all of the sugar did not convert successfully into alcohol, the vintners at Sutter Home in St. Helena decided to market the slightly sweet, pink wine as White Zinfandel. Soon Sutter Home was selling millions of cases annually.

  The newcomers had a model for the wines they wanted to achieve: the great French wines. They studied French techniques closely, trying to ascertain exactly what made the great French wines great in hopes that they could then reproduce that taste. They drank them regularly alongside their own wines to see how theirs stacked up against what they considered to be the world’s best. The staff at Hanzell regularly tasted the great Burgundy Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. After drinking them they placed the empty bottles on a shelf in their bottling room almost like sacred offerings to Bacchus. Among the remembrances of wines past: a 1952 Bâtard-Montrachet, a 1959 Grands Echézeaux, a 1935 Clos de Vougeot, and a 1959 Romanée-Conti. Only the best.

  That search for quality led the new generation to plant different grapes than those that locals called “the standards”—Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Carignane, and Alicante Bouschet, which had been grown in California since the nineteenth century and were popular largely because they grew easily and crops were large. In their place the new winemakers followed the direction of UC Davis research and concentrated on what became known as the “four noble grapes”—Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot
Noir, Chardonnay, and Riesling. In the Napa Valley in 1961 there were only an estimated 387 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, but by 1973 that number had increased to 2,432 acres. Pinot Noir grapes in the same period went from 166 to 1,013 acres, Chardonnay increased from 60 to 785 acres. On the other hand, acreage in Alicante Bouschet, the old reliable red from Prohibition days whose main attribute was its thick skin, dropped from 228 to 58 acres.

  The new winemakers respected the old and strong California tradition of sharing the knowledge they acquired and helping each other. Most of them closely followed the new techniques and technology that had been developed at Davis and Fresno State College, which set up its own wine program in 1958. There were few trade secrets as all of them struggled to find their own style of winemaking and advance their technical skills.

  Jack and Jamie Davies were living in San Francisco in the early 1960s, when they became interested in the California wine country. Jack had attended Stanford, received an MBA from Harvard Business School, and then worked for a variety of companies, including Kaiser Aluminum, McKinsey, and Fibreboard. After being the president of two companies, Davies decided he wanted to have his own business.

  The couple first learned something about wine through the San Francisco Wine and Food Society, and then from Martin Ray, who had previously worked for Paul Masson in the Santa Cruz Mountains but now had his own winery there. One memorable session of good food and good wine with Ray started at noon and ended thirteen hours—and many bottles of wine—later. Jack and Jamie invested in Martin Ray’s wine ventures and also listened to his suggestion that they buy a winery.