If he was going to get serious about taking over his vineyards, one of the first things Dad realized he needed was manpower. His thought was to hire a foreman to live on-site to help with the increasing workload. When he asked around for recommendations, John Piña pointed him toward a young man on his own crew named Alfonso Zamora-Ortiz.
Alfonso had little or no vineyard experience, but he had worked in a nursery and possessed valuable insights regarding plant life—how to size up the health of a vine, when to prune, how much to irrigate, and so forth. None of his guidance came from reference works or a formal education; all of it came through observation, gut feeling, and experience. If he had Big John’s respect, Dad thought, Alfonso was certainly worth trying out.
Alfonso had fairly recently come to the Valley from his home in the Mexican state of Jalisco and didn’t speak much English. Dad wasn’t terribly fluent in Spanish, although he’d been studying it in night classes at Napa Valley College. Yet they managed to communicate through gestures and half-sentences and a sense of humor.
Working together, Dad and Alfonso picked up on the basics of things like running and maintaining a tractor, discing between vine rows, and using sprayers and dusters. They took on the tasks of laying out and terracing the new vineyard blocks, repairing fences, and digging post-holes for the new trellis systems.
Early on they tried to tackle the weed problem with the use of a French plow. Dad drove the tractor pulling the plow, while Alfonso walked behind and steered the plow’s blade around the base of the vines to clear the unwanted weeds and wild grasses. It was not a perfect system, and they had their share of gouged vine trunks.
Worse was when Dad drove the tractor pulling the discer between the rows. The spacing was unforgiving, allowing only a few inches between each side of the discer and the head-pruned vines, whose fifty-year-old trunks were as thick as posts. More than once in less-watchful moments Dad took out an entire vine. Among growers this is called “tractor blight.”
Meanwhile, it came time to make a second run at grafting grapevines onto the budwood now sprouting optimistically again on the vineyard block, which was stuck with the name John’s Folly. The fence had successfully been mended, keeping out all the hungry deer. When it came time to “bud over,” as it’s called, rather than go to a nursery and purchase Cabernet budwood—as is standard practice today—unbeknownst to Dad, Big John did the far more practical thing, and something that had happened in the Valley for decades—he got some for free. Besides helping to manage our vines, Piña also worked for a lot of other people, including Milt Eisele, taking care of his vineyards in Calistoga. This had become a well-known site, thanks to the fact that Phelps produced a rock-star wine called Joseph Phelps Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. It was one of the early Cabs, like Heitz’s Martha’s Vineyard, which were head-turners and showed the rest of us what Napa Valley was capable of producing.
When it was time to make a second attempt to bud John’s Folly to Cabernet, John Piña simply cut the requisite number of canes, or vine branches, from Milt’s vineyards (without mentioning it to Milt) and brought them over to our property.1
Dad did not discover this act of cane-sharing until some weeks later when he bumped into Milt at a cocktail party and Milt let Dad know he was not terribly pleased.
This time, without any interference from leaping stags, the grafts took beautifully to the budwood, and we were at long last in the hillside vineyard business.
1. Years later Bart Araujo purchased Eisele Vineyard, and the vines were unfortunately struck by our old microscopic nemesis, phylloxera. Needing to replant, Araujo contacted me to see if they could have some of our Eisele budwood. Of course I said yes, and Araujo Estate Wines recovered from phylloxera with new budwood from their original vine cuttings. Four or five years later, we needed to replant a small block of our hillside vineyard, and I called Bart and asked if we could have some canes, and he graciously agreed. Back and forth it goes.
TEN
1976
By 1976 Dad and Alfonso were hard at work replacing the property’s old vines one block at a time, while simultaneously prepping and terracing new blocks of vines on the hillsides. On our property the vineyard blocks run from about 1 to 9 acres in size. We divide them up based on their geo graphical structure, whether they face south, southwest, or west.
Fortunately I was at U.C. Davis during most of this period so now the rock hauling duty fell squarely on Brad and whomever Dad hired to assist.
My dad had to move at a careful pace. If he tore out too many of those old vines too quickly, he’d have no income as he waited for the new ones to produce their first sellable crop. This was when he planted some Chardonnay on the lower, flatter portion of the property we call Bench, believing rightly that the popularity of this white would continue to grow and that for a grape grower it’d be a good source of income. With the economy still in the doldrums and grape prices languishing, it was imperative to pay attention to the bottom line.
Uppermost in his mind, though, was Cabernet Sauvignon. He still nursed the dream of one day building a winery and making a world-class Cabernet wine from the vines he’d fought to get established in the hillside soil. Some of this was fueled by his friendship with our neighbor, Nathan Fay.
As mentioned earlier, in 1961 Nate Fay had been the first grower to plant Cabernet in the cooler Stags Leap area. Besides selling grapes to local wineries, he kept a little fruit each year for himself and made some Cabernet for friends and guests to enjoy. One evening Mom and Dad, along with Joe and Alice Heitz, were invited to dinner with Nate and his wife, Nellie. With the meal, Nate poured his homemade 1968 Cabernet, which Dad remembers to this day as a stunning wine—rich and delicious with lush dark fruit. It was this same vintage, also tasted at Nate’s house, that had prompted Warren Winiarski to purchase land next door and make his first Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet in 1972. For Dad, though, the timing for such a move still wasn’t right. Unlike a number of our neighbors, such as Winiarski or Mondavi, he did not want to jump-start a winery with borrowed money and then find himself beholden to a group of investors. That could turn into a corporate stranglehold as bad as the one he’d extricated himself from back at Scott Foresman. Building a winery didn’t have to happen tomorrow. If the timing was right, he thought he might be able do it on his own. So he chose to wait for the game to change.
On May 24, 1976, the biggest thing on everyone’s mind in Napa was the heat and the ongoing drought. The previous winter had been the third driest on record. Early May saw a 100-degree heat wave that led the California Department of Forestry to declare “fire season” a month earlier than normal. There were early jitters about wildfires and for good reason—fire crews were busy as one blaze after another burst to life in the dry grasses and underbrush. The city of Calistoga was desperate for ways to cut water consumption by one-third or it risked running dry. All of this looked like a continuation of 1975, which had started with very little moisture during the winter and spring and had culminated in a summer of prolonged extreme heat, which had depressed the entire agricultural economy of the Valley—not just grapes but everything else from tree fruit to cattle. Prices for Cabernet Sauvignon in 1975 dropped more than $100 per ton1 below 1974’s abysmal per ton price of $454.2 As the drought continued into 1976, grape growers were deeply worried that the decline in grape prices would continue as well. Nothing here on May 24 indicated that Napa would declare its emancipation from France in this bicentennial year.
On
