Warren began to move beyond Chicago’s Poles when he went to high school, but he never totally left the neighborhood until college. As a young student, he was hard to categorize. He had to repeat the seventh grade, a rattling experience in a family that stressed education and achievement. But Warren wasn’t a slow student—quite the contrary. He was very bright, but had to get his arms around ideas or problems and shape them in ways that he could understand.
After high school he entered the University of Chicago, home of the Great Books program fostered by its president Robert M. Hutchins. The liberal-arts curriculum centered around the great writers and thinkers of Western civilization from Aristotle to Zeno. A truly educated person, Hutchins maintained, had to be at home with the fundamental thinkers of the Western tradition. Warren stayed there only a short time before going off to a school of agriculture and mining at Fort Collins, Colorado, thinking that he might be at home in forestry. Studies there, though, showed him he was really more interested in the world of ideas than in technical subjects.
While he was in Colorado someone gave Warren a book about St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. St. John’s, like the University of Chicago, centered its curriculum on the Great Books, and so he transferred there. The school was small, with less than three hundred students, and both teachers and students lived an intimate, intellectual life. In many ways, St. John’s offered Warren the kind of enlarged family atmosphere he had enjoyed growing up in the Polish section of Chicago. He also felt at home in a college where philosophic thoughtfulness was more important than rote memorization. A picture taken of Winiarski at St. John’s shows a young man with a serious demeanor, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses.
In his senior year, Winiarski met a freshman who shared many of his interests. Her name was Barbara Dvorak, and she had grown up in nearby Baltimore. Her family had been in farming, although there were also artists and musicians in her heritage. Barbara was well read and could keep up with Warren when his brown eyes grew distant and his ideas jumped from one thought to another like a ball bouncing around a squash court. Warren became Barbara’s guide through the Great Books, and the couple began sharing their dreams for the life that spread before them.
After graduating in 1952, Warren went back to the University of Chicago for graduate studies in political science. He soon drifted into political theory and the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus who advised members of the ruling Medici family in the Republic of Florence. In addition to power politics, Machiavelli advocated a civic spirit and solidarity among people, which laid the foundation for Italian nationalism. That sense of cohesion appealed to the Chicago grad student.
As part of his graduate work in political theory, Winiarski went to Italy in 1953 for a year of study at the Croce Institute in Naples. Winiarski did more than just read Machiavelli in the original Italian. He also discovered an attractive European way of life built around wine and food. While his family in Chicago had drunk wine for festive occasions, this was the first time he had been around people who enjoyed it as a daily experience. Winiarski loved the long luncheons and dinners, where a sense of intimacy was reinforced over a lingering glass of wine or cup of espresso. Winiarski admired the way people came together at mealtime in an aesthetic experience that seemed to give their lives a structure.
Warren returned to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1954 to take up a position as a lecturer in the basic program of the Great Books studies, where he taught for the next six years. He was on track to getting a Ph.D. and then a life as a college professor. Warren, though, couldn’t get the Italian experience out of his mind. Life abroad contrasted so starkly with what he and his new wife, Barbara, saw around them. At the time all the sinews holding American society together seemed to be breaking. U.S. cities were decaying, as millions of people took advantage of the new Interstate highways to begin fresh lives in the suburbs. There was little sense of community in the static housing developments being built on the edges of old cities. Ethnic enclaves in places like Warren’s Chicago and Barbara’s Baltimore were atrophying. The couple also had disdain for the power of television, which was becoming the center of family life. American family dining was becoming fast food, as Ray Kroc spread McDonald’s golden arches across the country from their beginnings in San Bernardino, California.
The Winiarskis, who were living in faculty housing, talked a lot about those changes. They soon had two children, Kasia and Stephen, and wondered about the atmosphere in which they were growing up. The couple dreamed of a simpler life, closer to nature, where children might come of age in a family surrounded by books, rather than in front of a television set.
Always a voracious reader, Winiarski began poring over books about people living the kind of life to which he aspired. One of them was written by Philip Wagner, an editor at the BaltimoreSun and a winemaker. The son of a University of Michigan professor of romance languages, Wagner had grown up drinking wine with meals. Prohibition forced him into making his own wine, and he wrote a how-to book telling Americans the way to make wine at home. For Wagner, wine was part of a way of life, just as it was for the people Winiarski had met in Italy.
In 1945, Wagner opened Boordy Vineyard, a winery in Riderwood, Maryland, where he set out to produce quality American wine. Although others had tried and failed to make French-style wines not far from there, Wagner used new French hybrid vines, which adapted better to the mid-Atlantic soil and climate. Wine historian Leon Adams described a Boordy white wine as “fresh and delicate” and a rosé as “soft and fruity.” Each year Wagner easily sold out of the four wines he produced. Winiarski had first heard about Wagner while a student at St. John’s. The more he learned about Wagner, the more Winiarski liked, so in 1962 he wrote him a letter and then visited Boordy Vineyard.
One of Winiarski’s main concerns at the time was whether he could get started in winemaking by working at a winery and picking up the needed skills as he went along. As a father with a new family and limited financial means, he couldn’t simply drop everything and go back to school for a couple of years. Winiarski had run cross-country when he was in high school, and he considered winemaking to be like running long distances. You didn’t need a degree in anatomy to run two miles. And in order to make wine, he felt, you didn’t need to become a chemist.
When he visited Wagner in Riderwood, Winiarski was entranced by the way of life he found there. It was a small operation and had the elements of food, wine, and family he was seeking. Wagner was intrigued by the question of whether someone could still get into winemaking as Winiarski suggested, and so he wrote his UC Davis friend Maynard Amerine. Not surprisingly, the academic dismissed Winiarski’s idea, saying it was impossible for someone to learn everything on the job; a person needed the foundation of university study. Wagner relayed the letter to Winiarski in Chicago, but it had scant influence on the college lecturer, who was becoming more and more determined to grow grapes and make wine.
Winiarski started making wine in his Chicago apartment, just as his father had before him. Once when he was visiting his wife’s family in Baltimore, he drove to rural Westminster County and bought some Baco Noir grapes from a farmer who sold the same grapes to Wagner. Winiarski continued on to an antique store, where he bought an old crock. He crushed the grapes in Baltimore and carried them in his station wagon back to Chicago, where fermentation took place. At first, the station-wagon wine was okay—in fact, it was almost pleasant. Soon, though, a problem developed. Crocks like the one he had bought were used in rural Maryland to pickle or ferment all sorts of things. The one Winiarski purchased had probably been used for making sauerkraut or pickles. The crock’s tiny cracks contained remnants of life from its earlier uses, and soon he was drinking pickled wine. It was an inauspicious introduction for Winiarski to the mysteries of microbiology.
Winiarski explored agricultural options other than wine. In the spring of 1963, he set out alone for New Mexico to look at the cultivation o
f both grapes and apples there. Living out of the family station wagon, he drove around the Rio Grande Valley examining the agriculture and looking at the way people lived. What he found was raw and rough. Outside of irrigated areas, the land was arid and unavailing. Lecturers in Chicago were not affluent, but the apple farmers he saw in New Mexico were dirt poor.
One day during the trip he pulled the station wagon to a stop along the highway and looked at a nearby abandoned adobe house. Picket fences still stood around the fields. Cornhusks left from the last harvest lay on the ground. The tumbleweeds carried depression in their wake as they rolled across the countryside. Winiarski looked around and wondered why he was even considering moving there, saying to himself, “Your ancestors would curse you for having left what you left to come back to something like this, and your descendants will curse you for having opportunities and then bringing them to this.”
Warren bought some grapes in New Mexico and carried them home to Chicago, where he made a second batch of wine. Increasingly Machiavelli was taking a backseat to wine in Winiarski’s studies and life. He began devouring all the books and articles on the subject he could find. He studied classics likeAmerican Wines by Frank Schoonmaker and Tom Marvel, which had been published in 1941, as well as Wagner’sAmerican Wines and WineMaking . A book by John Storm entitledAn Invitation to Wines introduced Winiarski to new small wineries in northern California that carried names like Hallcrest Vineyard, Mayacamas Vineyards, and Souverain Cellars. According to Storm they were producing good, European-style wines. The Martin Ray winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco appealed particularly to Winiarski because it seemed to incorporate the simple life close to nature that he was seeking.
Winiarski wrote Ray, asking him for an apprenticeship. In his response Ray held out the possibility of a job, but asked Warren first to go to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a preliminary screening by Peter Martin Ray, a stepson who taught at the University of Michigan. While there, Winiarski tasted his first Martin Ray wine, a Chardonnay that was better than anything he had ever experienced.
Winiarski passed the interview and was invited to the winery for a week to see the operation. The week with Martin Ray was like living in a dream. Here was everything: the bucolic location amid pines; communal dining; intelligent conversations. Food was prepared as simply as possible, with only a few seasonings added to enhance the natural flavors. Ray and his wife spent hours preparing rustic and robust meals, and fowl was cooked over an open spit. For a special occasion, the large school bell—the same one Ray had used to celebrate the end of Prohibition—rang out to call everyone to table. There was almost a sacramental character to life at the Martin Ray winery.
Winiarski joined in with gusto. He put on boots and tramped behind a tractor breaking ground for a new Chardonnay vineyard. Since Ray produced only about a thousand cases a year, everything was done on a small scale. Wine, for example, was bottled with a siphon hose. Winiarski put one end of a small hose into a barrel of wine and the other end into an empty bottle. Then he sucked the air out of the tube in order to start the flow of wine. When the bottle was full, he pinched the hose to stop the wine and then moved the hose to another bottle and filled it. Winiarski looked at a place where Ray said the family might live and chalked out on the floor where each child would sleep. At the end of the week, Winiarski left with high spirits and dreams of a new life.
On his return to Chicago, he wrote Ray an enthusiastic letter, thanking him for his hospitality and expressing his interest in moving to California. But for a long time he didn’t hear back. When a response finally arrived, Ray explained to Winiarski that he seemed too independent to be part of the Martin Ray world.
Winiarski was crushed. Only later did he realize that life on Ray’s mountaintop might not have been the paradise he had originally envisaged. It would have been difficult for Winiarski and his young family to live in Ray’s forced togetherness, and he probablywas too independent to adjust to the winemaker’s strict, almost militaristic, way of doing things. Ray, he later recognized, had the traits of a benign despot. It had been magic for that week, but what would have happened when the magic faded?
The rejection slip from Ray, however, did little to diminish Winiarski’s obsession with winemaking. Someway, somehow he had to get back to California. Martin Ray’s approach was not the only way. The positive aspects of Ray’s lifestyle could be preserved without replicating the less attractive side.
Soon Winiarski was doing what he had done before: writing letters and reading more books. He wrote to other small wineries mentioned in the Storm book. Several did not bother to reply. But finally he got a bite. Lee Stewart at Souverain Cellars offered him work as the number two man in a two-man winery. It was basically the same job that Mike Grgich had held six years earlier. Stewart told Winiarski that he and his family should arrive in the middle of the summer so that he could help with the grape harvest and crush.
On August 1, 1964, the Winiarskis packed up the station wagon and headed off to a new life on the West Coast. It was an exciting, if stressful, journey. Problems with the car put them far behind schedule, and Warren was concerned about getting to Souverain Cellars in time for harvest. He drove each day for as long as he could, but eventually fatigue would set in and the family would have to stop for safety’s sake. Some nights they camped by the side of the road, with Warren and Barbara sleeping outside under the stars while the children slept in the car. One day they drove long after dark to a mountain mesa campground in Arizona and were not sure exactly where they were when they parked for the night. The next morning they awoke at dawn’s first light and realized that if they had taken another twenty steps in the dark, they would have stumbled off the edge of the mesa. From that flat tabletop they looked across miles of red-rock desert toward other mesas as far as the eye could see.
Warren kept pushing forward through small towns toward the Napa Valley. When the family reached the recently completed Interstate 80 highway east of San Francisco, Barbara grew worried. The hills around San Francisco Bay were desolate and parched. Only a few trees could be seen in the small arroyos; everywhere else there was only dry grass and scrub bush. Warren tried to reassure her, telling his wife that the Napa Valley, which was now only about fifty miles away, would be beautiful.
A week after leaving Chicago, the Winiarskis finally made their way into the Napa Valley and up Howell Mountain to the Souverain Cellars winery, where Warren had a job waiting for him. Lee Stewart had arranged for the family to rent a small house below the winery on Crystal Springs Road. The cabin dated back to California pioneer days and had a wood-burning stove and a screened porch all around it. Just across the road were trees, where the family could pick its own fruit. A stream went through the property, and the sound of the wind blowing through the pine trees resounded like a symphony. It was a long way from Chicago.
Chapter Nine
An Apprentice Winemaker
Give me wine to wash me clean
of the weather-stains of cares.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(Above left)Warren Winiarski in the summer of 1970, irrigating the vines that, once budded, would produce the 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon. (Above right)The Winiarski children (from left to right),Julia, Stephen, and Kasia, in the vineyard in the spring of 1973, with the wild mustard cover crop, which will be tilled and returned to the soil as fertilizer.
When the Winiarski family arrived at Souverain Cellars, the grape crush had already started and Warren went to work immediately, slipping easily into the rhythm of the place. In the two-man winery, he did a bit of everything, but spent most of his time at first stacking onto a truck the fruit boxes filled with grapes that day laborers had picked. Warren and Lee Stewart drove the truck out to the vineyard to pick up the containers and then carried them to the winery for crushing. It was hard work, and every night Warren returned home exhausted.
Souverain Cellars was a much bigger and better-equipped operation t
han Martin Ray Vineyards, Warren’s only other close experience with a winery in operation. At Souverain, for example, they were no longer filling bottles using a siphon hose. A machine allowed several bottles to be filled simultaneously, although an operator still had to manually run it. There were also 1,500-gallon oak tanks for aging wines.
Souverain had developed a lot in the six years since Mike Grgich had worked there, thanks in large part to André Tchelistcheff, who was still a consultant to Stewart. The Beaulieu winemaker was passing on what he had learned in the Hanzell experiment as well as innovative things winemakers like Peter Mondavi were doing. Stewart learned from Tchelistcheff about controlled malolactic fermentation, which greatly improved the complexity and finesse of his red wines. Stewart was also at the cutting edge of new technology that used selected yeasts to achieve low-temperature fermentation of white wines.
While Grgich left Stewart after only the basic winemaking was completed at the end of four months, Winiarski stayed there for two years and was able to watch the development of the entire annual wine cycle twice. After the initial fermentation was completed in late September, the clarification of the wine began. The process of turning sugar into alcohol had left behind in the liquid lots of small particles. As the wine sat in its holding tanks, those gradually fell to the bottom. Stewart showed Winiarski how they pumped the clear wine from one tank to another, leaving the sediment, called the lees, behind to be discarded. The procedure was called racking, and they did it several times in the early fall for both the red and white wines.
In October, the secondary or malolactic fermentation of the red wines began. Stewart had kept some of the lees material and introduced that along with malolactic bacteria into the wine to start the later fermentation. This process took much longer than the first fermentation, and the goal was to have it finished by Thanksgiving, before it became so cold that the process would simply stop. The malolactic fermentation again stirred up the wine and left residue behind, and so again it had to be clarified by racking.
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