Louis had also been in the Army Air Corps in World War II and in part because he was just an engaging guy. His father, Louis M. Martini, had started in the wine business down in Livermore Valley, California, then moved to Kingsburg (south of Fresno), and had ultimately transitioned to Napa in the early 1930s.3 Martini did not need the Romans to tell him there was something special about a hillside vineyard. He was clear on the difference between what you got on a hillside and what you got on the Valley floor.
He believed that because of the drainage and the exposure, hillside fruit produced more elegant wine. Quick drainage meant that the vines never had a lot of moisture to draw from, and the exposure to sunlight on the side of a mountain gave the grapes something they just didn’t get anywhere else. Monte Rosso, with its south face, simply produced fruit with a difference you could see and taste.
After listening to Martini and talking with some other consultants, Dad got down to business. Early on, as we were terracing the hillside, it became clear we’d need to blast out several Buick-sized boulders. My sister Libby was living in San Francisco and working at Wells Fargo at the time, but helped out at the property as often as she could. At Dad’s request she drove to Marin County and loaded up the trunk of her car with dynamite, terrified on the forty-five-minute drive to our vineyard that she’d get rear-ended.
A couple of blasting experts, who’d learned their craft in the Vietnam War, came by and busily drilled holes in strategic spots, dropped in sticks of the explosive, ran blasting wire all over the place, and in short order—kaboom!—sent up plumes of smoke and debris. In the blink of an eye, the boulders were gone, but the hillside looked like it had just given birth to about twenty thousand baby rocks. And Brad and I were back on the job.
On the advice of a recent U.C. Davis viticulture graduate, we further prepped the hillside site by “ripping” the soil—as subtle a technique as it sounds. Dad hired a guy who came out with an attachment on the back of his tractor that looked like a giant dinosaur tooth. The tooth punched down three or four feet into the earth and the tractor drove the length and breadth of our vineyard-to-be, tearing up the soil.
The technique of ripping is a fine idea when you’re prepping a vineyard on a flat valley floor site, which at the time accounted for nearly every other vineyard in the area. However, we learned it is a disastrous idea on a hillside. Not long afterward, heavy November rains struck and we watched, sick at heart as soil and rock turned into rivers of mud, leaving clefts and small canyons behind. Fixing this took weeks of hauling soil back up the hill.
Unfortunately, we had quite a run of hard luck after acting on what we had hoped was good advice.
Mid-1970s: An early hillside planting on the Shafer estate.
Early on, knowing that we needed a well, Dad hired a geologist who surveyed the property and advised him to drill near the tiny stream-bed of Chase Creek, which meanders through our property. The well-drilling company came out and dutifully punched a hole in the earth and discovered a water source that produced a meager four gallons per minute. So Dad tried again—brought out another expert who told us to drill in a flat area of our vineyard just west of the house. The result was the same.
This time, though, the guy who was hired to drill the well said to Dad, “You really shouldn’t be drilling down here anyway, you should be up there,” pointing to the hillsides. “That’s where the water-bearing rock is.”
The idea of moving higher up to drill down seemed to defy logic, but having had his fill of geologists, Dad took the well-driller’s counsel. That third attempt on the hillside resulted in hitting a spectacular 250-gallon-a-minute water source.
The challenges ramped up the following spring when we planted our rootstock.4
In this case we used a rootstock called St. George, whose namesake was a celebrated slayer of dragons. Despite its heroic name, there’s one creature this rootstock had no power against—deer. Quite a number of stags (and does and fawns) leaped through a previously undetected hole in our fence, and they ate the rootstock down to raw nubs that barely peeked through the soil.
Dad attempted to bud (graft) the chewed up rootstock to Cabernet Sauvignon anyway, which resulted in a pitiful 20 percent “take.”
Undaunted, Dad pushed forward with the next step a lot of people were saying he needed to take, which was to create an overhead sprinkler irrigation system (for his yet non ex is tent vineyard).
At the time, most vineyards were located on the valley floor, where they could be dry-farmed, because the deep, rich soils stored a good deal of moisture from the winter rains.
Our hillsides, by contrast, came with a scant eighteen-to twenty-two-inch covering of porous volcanic soil and rock over a layer of weathered bedrock. So the soil, the underlying geologic material, and the steep slopes meant that any winter rain didn’t hang around very long. By mid-to late summer the hillsides were as dry as ash, making irrigation mandatory if you wanted your vines to survive.
The secondary reason for an overhead sprinkler was the discovery—first made in orange groves—that during frost season you could protect your vines from frost damage by coating them in water and letting a thin layer of ice form around them. It’s counterintuitive, but it works, like creating a tiny igloo around each grape; the ice actually helps the vines stay above the critical temperature of 31.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
What made this approach affordable was the fairly recent introduction of inexpensive PVC pipe. Grape growers were never exactly rolling in cash from Prohibition onward, so by necessity they were always on the lookout for new ways to squeeze a penny. Previously, frost protection was performed with the use of smudge pots, basically metal chimney-type structures in which you’d burn diesel oil that created a warm, heavy, dark smoke that filled your vineyard—and the air—keeping the vines above freezing. Some growers simply burned piles of old car tires. On a frosty morning back then the Valley could be pretty smoky and smelly.
Overhead irrigation systems like ours took weeks to build, and with his engineering background I think Dad was intrigued by the calculations involved in getting the water pressure and distribution right. But rather than try to conquer this one himself, Dad hired a consultant to design and build a complex array of pumps, pipes, valves, and sprinkler heads that all connected back to our pond.
After weeks of scrupulous assembly, it was finally time to test the completed sprinkler system. Dad cranked it on and we heard an exciting swoosh of water cascading through the web of PVC pipe. Water began to first dribble out and then to shoot in streams of spray here and there and across the way as planned. There was a real sense of occasion and achievement. We were for real. We were finally in the wine business. Our crops planted (getting there), our trellises erected (sort of). This was the real beginning of—
Pow—
The sprinkler head closest to us exploded into the sky, hurled on a blast of high-pressure pond water. We were still taking that in when the next sprinkler head down the line fired into the air. Then another. And another and another. All the way down the line. Pow, pow, pow—sprinkler heads across the vineyard soared into the air like fireworks.
The sprinkler consultant had used the wrong pressure valves, and the whole thing came apart before our eyes.
With these and other setbacks, my mom started to call the vineyard site “John’s Folly.”
The final kicker came
