Judgment of Paris

by George M. Taber

  All during this procedure, Grgich protected the liquid to keep it away from oxygen, which is the enemy of good white wine. Contact with too much air can oxidize the juice, turning it dark and taking away its freshness.

  Once the pressing was finished, the juice was immediately pumped into stainless-steel tanks, while the skin and the seeds were removed and sent to the vineyard to be mulch. The clear juice was immediately cooled to a temperature of between 45 and 50 degrees, and it remained in the tanks at that temperature for four days, while pulp in the juice settled to the bottom. The tank was cooled by propylene glycol, a dense liquid often used to prevent freezing that circulated in pipes located between the inner tank and an outer skin. Grgich had first used the jacketed stainless-steel tanks at the Robert Mondavi Winery.

  Grgich kept a close eye on the grape juice during that period, and when it appeared that most of the sediment had fallen to the bottom, he racked it by pumping the juice out from the top of the tank, leaving the pulp fragments behind. Getting rid of the pulp sediment prior to fermentation gives the wine a fruitier taste. The decision on when to pump out the juice is based on experience. Nothing in a book can tell a winemaker when it’s time to rack the wine into another tank.

  Once the wine was in a new tank, Grgich tested it for acidity and sulfur dioxide. Ideally the juice should be between 0.7 percent and 0.75 percent acid. If it’s not, some tartaric acid may be added, but the 1973 vintage did not need any additional acid. At this point the Chardonnay grape juice was ready for fermentation. Grgich used a granular yeast developed by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which was named simply French White, to start the fermentation process. He had worked with six different strains of yeast while at Beaulieu Vineyard and liked French White the best. He dumped buckets of it into the tanks through openings in the top to begin the process.

  Following procedures advocated by the staff at UC Davis, which he had also used at Beaulieu, Grgich kept the temperature in the tanks during fermentation at between 40 and 50 degrees. So while Winiarski’s primary fermentation of the Cabernet Sauvignon took only six days and the temperature hit 90 degrees, Grgich’s fermentation of the Chardonnay took a month and a half at temperatures half as high. Fermenting Chardonnay at a higher temperature would have evaporated the wine’s aroma and destroyed its fruitiness.

  During fermentation, Grgich put a one-gallon jug filled with water at the top of each of the tanks. A tube went into the tank to carry carbon dioxide, a byproduct of transforming sugar into alcohol, out of the tank without letting in any oxygen. Again he was struggling to keep oxygen away from the wine. While fermentation was taking place, the spent yeast fell to the bottom of the tanks. Once the process was finished, the wine was again racked, and the yeast and sediment at the bottom were removed.

  Although Grgich used malolactic fermentation for red wines, he did not use this procedure for his white wines. A malolactic fermentation, he thought, would make the Chardonnay flabby and take away the crispness found in the very best French Chardonnays. “Don’t monkey with God in making wine,” Grgich said. “God is the best winemaker. Leave nature alone.”

  Next came heat and cold stabilization. Bentonite was first added to the wine to remove any proteins. The bentonite fining prevented protein haze if the wine were later heated up during shipment or storage. Then the temperature of the wine was lowered to 30 degrees and kept there for four weeks. Lab analysis finally showed Grgich that both heat stability and cold stability had been successfully achieved. The wine was then filtered and moved to another tank, and the sediment on the bottom of the first tank was discarded.

  By mid-November the Chardonnay was ready to go into barrels. All the stabilization was finished. Grgich’s testing in the lab showed that the alcohol level was 13.2 percent, while the residual sugar was 0.1 percent and the total acidity was 0.68 percent. It was an ideal balance for a crisp, aromatic Chardonnay.

  The wine was then moved into French Limousin oak barrels. Grgich had bought the 225-liter (59-gallon) barrels the year before and used them for the 1972 vintage. Wine had been in the barrels for only eight months, but the first use had mellowed the wood, taking off some of the rougher edges from the tannins and smoothing out the oak taste. The oak the year before had been something like a slap in the face to the Chardonnay, but now the year-old oak enveloped the wine like a gentle cloud. After they were filled, the barrels were stored along the inner wall of the winery, which was partially underground on three sides. The point where the cellar went underground was clearly visible because of water seepage that discolored the cement and rocks that formed the cellar walls. The cellar temperature was fairly constant during the eight months of barrel aging, ranging from only between 50 and 60 degrees.

  While the wine aged in oak, pulling in the hints of oak extractives and mild tannins from the wood and giving the clear wine a golden hue and rich aroma, Grgich topped off the barrels every two weeks, replacing wine lost to evaporation through the pores of the wood and the bung at the top of the barrel. Grgich tasted the wine as it aged, and by early spring he was very pleased: it was the best wine he had ever made. The bouquet, the buttery taste, the crispness seemed to be coming together in perfect balance.

  The Chardonnay was still in barrels on May 4, 1974, when the British wine writer Harry Waugh visited Chateau Montelena on one of his periodic trips to the California wine country. This was another big event for the still young winery. Waugh met both Paschich and Grgich, who were anxious to show him around. The Chinese junk that the former owner had put in the lake he built near the winery particularly amused Waugh. When they were in the cellar, Grgich removed the bung from a barrel of Chardonnay and used a wine thief to extract some wine.

  Waugh looked at the straw-colored wine, smelled it, and then took a sip. He smiled and said, “Mike, I haven’t tasted such a good wine even in France.”

  Grgich flashed a broad smile. He thought it was good, but what a compliment! He could hardly believe what he had heard.

  Waugh also tasted Grgich’s Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon wines and told him that all of his wines had a good acid level, adding, “That is not the case with many other wines from the Napa Valley.” Grgich liked wines with good acidity because they activated a person’s taste buds, making the wines food friendly.

  Following his visit, Waugh wrote in his diary, “Mike Grgich is a true perfectionist and we can expect exciting things from the Chateau Montelena.”

  By December 1974, the winemaker had decided that the aging in oak had given the wine the exact character he wanted. It was time for the master blend. Grgich wanted his wines to have a consistency from year to year, which he achieved by blending wine from the various barrels together in tanks. The same proportion of wine from each of the three growers was put in each tank to standardize the final taste. Then Grgich put the wine through Millipore filters to remove the last organisms and bottled it.

  While bottling was done mainly by hand at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, it was more mechanized at Chateau Montelena. Grgich was still passionate to keep oxygen away from the wine. After the bottles were filled and corked, a small machine glued on a label. Despite the new equipment, only 300 cases could be bottled a day, and so it took just over a week to complete the 2,200 cases.

  After bottling in December 1974, the cases were stacked in the cellar for aging. Bottle aging is the anaerobic process when the aromas of the grapes and the aromas and extractives of the oak are married into the bouquet. Grgich called this process, which takes one to two years, “the wine honey-moon.” The 1973 wine was scheduled to be released to wineshops in September 1975.

  According to Barrett, however, something unexpected happened before the Chardonnay reached store shelves. In early 1975, only weeks after bottling, Barrett arrived at Chateau Montelena for one of his periodic visits. He was feeling a little down because his wine business had not taken off as he had hoped. He and Grgich were coming to the conclusion that they would have to sell off 12,000 gallons of 1972 Caberne
t Sauvignon under the Silverado Cellars label because the quality was not good enough to sell it under the Chateau Montelena brand.

  As Barrett tells what happened next, when he arrived at the winery, he sampled a glass of the Chardonnay, only to discover that while its bouquet was appealing and its taste excellent, the wine had a distinct copper color. Barrett then went into the storage room and began pulling bottles of wine at random out of cases and opening them. He discovered that every bottle had the same copper color. He felt like someone who had just had a thousand cases of wine fall on him. He thought to himself, “First the Cabernet; now this. I’d better not quit my law practice anytime soon.”

  Barrett figured they’d have to sell off the wine to someone just to get rid of it and salvage at least a little of his investment in that year’s vintage. Barrett says Darrell Corti, a wine merchant in Sacramento and also one of the most respected wine tasters in California, was contacted to see if he would buy it. Barrett recalls being told that Corti could probably put together a group that would buy the 2,200 cases of wine at $2 a bottle, but that he couldn’t buy it until he got his group together.

  In early spring, Barrett returned to the winery for another routine visit. As he often did, he brought a piece of chicken with him that he planned to cook at the winery. On the way to the kitchen, he stopped and picked up a bottle of the 1973 Chardonnay. Walking back to the living area, Barrett mused, “I’m going to carve out a hundred cases of this for me and my buddies. We’ll put blindfolds on and drink it. It tastes terrific; it just looks terrible.”

  After he cooked the chicken, Barrett opened the wine and poured a glass. Something was different. The copper color seemed to be gone. The wine now appeared to have a beautiful straw color—just like a good Chardonnay.

  “Maybe it’s just the lighting,” Barrett thought. The room was dimly lit since it had only one small window. Nonetheless, Barrett went down to the storage area and began opening random bottles. The copper color seemed to be gone from all of them.

  Barrett hoped against hope that this was not just sometrompe l’oeil, but he still feared the poor lighting was playing tricks on him. He couldn’t be sure until morning, when the sun came up and he could see the bottles in natural light, which would be late because it was early spring. Barrett slept fitfully that night, but finally woke shortly after 6:00 a.m. and looked at the wine.

  There was no doubt. The copper color had disappeared. Barrett was ecstatic. Something had happened to the wine; he didn’t know what. But his first thought was that he didn’t want to sell that wine to Darrell Corti for $2 a bottle. So Barrett says he sent Corti a telegram that was written in the telegram style of the day, which used the word “stop” in lieu of punctuation and was all in all capital letters. It read:

  DEAR DARRELL STOP WE AGREED TO SELL YOU TWO THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED CASES OF CHARDONNAY AT TWO DOLLARS A BOTTLE STOP WE HAVE NOT HEARD FROM YOU STOP YOU HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO SEND US THE MONEY OR WE ARE WITHDRAWING OUR OFFER STOP JIM BARRETT

  The next twenty-four hours was the longest day Barrett ever lived. By the deadline, though, he hadn’t heard back from Corti. Corti recalls being offered the wine at a low price before it had been bottled, but doesn’t recall the telegram or any discoloration of the wine.

  Mike Grgich, for his part, says that the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay was “perfect from the very beginning” and that the events Barrett recounts never occurred. He recalls that there was some temporary discoloring of the 1972 Chardonnay when an old bottling machine let in some extra air into the bottles, but not of the 1973 one.

  So-called bottle shock, when unexpected developments in the wine took place after bottling, was fairly common even at some of the most famous and technically advanced wineries. Experts describe a phenomenon like the one that Barrett says happened as “pinking in the bottle,” and in the still early days of the California wine revolution the process was not widely understood. Napa Valley wineries in the early 1970s had not yet completely mastered their technology, and were sometimes so anxious to protect Chardonnay from air that they overprotected it. Wine has a natural browning enzyme that disappears when it comes in contact with oxygen, but wineries at that time wanted to make sure no oxygen ever touched their white wines in an attempt to protect their freshness and clarity. If the browning enzyme has no contact with air prior to bottling, a temporary discoloration sometimes turns up in the bottle but then soon naturally disappears.

  In his July 1975 newsletter Jim Barrett announced that the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay would be released in September 1975 and sell for a suggested retail price of $6.50 a bottle. Because of the limited supply, customers could buy only one case.

  Part Three

  The Judgment of Paris

  No matter how fine an average American wine might be, the American snob does not praise it highly, for fear of being thought naïve, or even chauvinistic…. There are two ways to cope with wine snobbery. One is to compare wines with their labels hidden…. The other way is to send American wines to Europe and challenge the imports on their home grounds.

  —LEON D. ADAMS,

  THE WINES OF AMERICA,1973

  Chapter Sixteen

  Voyages of Discovery

  A glass of wine is great refreshment after a hard day’s work.

  —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

  In the summer of 1975, Patricia Gallagher was making plans to visit her sister in Palos Verdes Estates, the wealthy coastal community south of Los Angeles. Gallagher and Steven Spurrier had been talking for months about staging the tasting of California wines in Paris to show the French that interesting things were happening in the new, small California wineries—and of course to publicize their wine shop and school. But they faced two problems getting the project off the ground. First, they did not know that much about what was really happening there. American wine journalists Frank Prial and Robert Finigan had told them about the new California wines, but Spurrier and Gallagher had little firsthand experience with them, having tried only an occasional bottle. Second, none of the really good California wines were readily available in France. Fauchon, a fashionable shop in Paris that carried some American products for expatriates anxious for things from home, sold a few Paul Masson wines mainly out of curiosity, but they were of low quality and came in screw-top bottles. Clearly either Spurrier or Gallagher had to make a trip to California’s wine country and see what was really happening there and also to come up with a way for getting the wines back to Paris.

  As Gallagher made plans to visit her sister, she got the idea of extending her trip by a few days to make a scouting trip up north. When she suggested the side trip, Spurrier immediately agreed and phoned Robert Finigan to ask if he could make some introductions on her behalf. It was decided that Gallagher would stop in San Francisco to meet with Finigan before proceeding into the wine-producing area.

  In early August, Gallagher arrived on Finigan’s doorstep a few blocks from San Francisco Bay. The weather was cold. Finigan gave her a rundown of the wineries he thought most merited a visit. He recommended about a dozen places both north and south of San Francisco, paying little attention to well-known ones such as Beaulieu Vineyard, Inglenook, or even the new Robert Mondavi Winery and concentrating only on lesser-known places, where newer and more exciting things were taking place. Finigan called ahead to several wineries to introduce Gallagher, and that night they dined at Chez Panisse, a notable San Francisco–area restaurant. Her Paris friend Glenda Cudaback had suggested she stay with her family while visiting the Napa Valley and also put her in touch with Joanne Dickenson, the wife of a leading lawyer, who had started a company called Wine Tours International that ran wine trips to exotic ports of call.

  Dickenson took Gallagher to several wineries on Finigan’s recommended list, where Gallagher tasted wines and talked about winemaking styles. None of the California winemakers had ever heard of the Caves de la Madeleine—much less the Académie du Vin—but they all readily opened their doors and their bott
les. Gallagher was impressed by the intensity the mostly young winemakers had for their craft, noting that many wineries were family owned and operated. Joe Heitz had one of his three children working with him in the field the day Gallagher visited Heitz Vineyards.

  The morning she visited Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Gallagher and Warren Winiarski hit it off quickly, and she ended up staying for lunch. Since he had taught political science, which was Gallagher’s major in college, the two had many interests in common.

  Gallagher also visited Chateau Montelena and talked with winemaker Mike Grgich. She was struck by the beauty of the setting at the base of Mount St. Helena and Jade Lake, located only a few hundred feet from the winery.

  Gallagher returned to Paris convinced that the new generation of winemakers in California was indeed doing exciting things. The plan to hold a tasting of their wines in Paris as part of the American bicentennial was eminently feasible from the quality point of view. Gallagher carried back to Paris three bottles as samples: a 1973 Chateau Montelena Zinfandel, a 1968 Mayacamas Zinfandel Late Harvest, and a 1973 Chalone Chardonnay.

  In September, Joanne Dickenson went to Paris to make arrangements for a wine tour of France she was organizing that would be led by André Tchelistcheff. It was being billed as “André Tchelistcheff’s Tour of France,” and he had already contacted many old friends from his days in France, lining up a nonstop tour of wineries from Champagne to Bordeaux. The tour was scheduled to last from May 6 to May 28, 1976. Tchelistcheff’s presence and a program that took the group to some of France’s best châteaux attracted many Napa Valley winery owners, including Louis M. Martini and Jim Barrett.