Hotel was taking place, which would prove a pivotal moment for Napa vintners. British wine merchant Steven Spurrier had set up a tasting of what he considered the best wines of France and of Napa Valley. From France came white Burgundies: Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles Domaine Leflaive, Domaine Leflaive, Batard-Montrachet Ramonet-Prudhon, Beaune Clos des Mouches Joseph Drouhin, and Meursault Charmes Roulot. The reds were legendary Bordeaux wines: Château Haut-Brion, Château Mouton Rothschild, Château Montrose, and Château Léoville-Las-Cases.3 The bottles were covered, the esteemed French judges tasted through the lineup, tallied the points, and discovered to their consternation that they had handed the top spots to two Napa Valley wines—a Cabernet Sauvignon from our neighbors at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and a Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena in Calistoga. Quelle horreur!
I’ve heard that once the bottles were unveiled, some of the judges in their arch-dismay tried to change their rankings. But it was too late. A month later the tasting was reported in Time magazine, which dubbed the event “The Judgment of Paris.” It was a story with superb appeal to Americans, who a) take delight in seeing a victory go to “the little guy” and b) enjoy French snobbery taking a poke in the eye.
The effect of the Paris tasting was palpable pretty quickly in Napa, although it didn’t take the form of any kind of public celebration. In part, the outcome of the tasting was simply a great psychological boost for all those who had believed in Napa and moved here in the prior five or ten years to grow grapes and make wine, believing fervently in this region’s potential to stand on the world stage, only to be largely ignored outside the West Coast. It was a way vintners could tell themselves they were not crazy for pouring their lives into Napa Valley. In a fairly short time wine critics and collectors from the East Coast and from the United Kingdom starting showing far more interest in what we were doing. In terms of gaining respect in the fine wine world, I think we would have rolled that boulder up the hill at some point, but Spurrier’s Paris tasting got us there perhaps as many as ten years sooner.
The buzz created by the Judgment of Paris had an effect on my dad. The idea of starting a winery was driven more forcefully to the front of his mind. How could it not? From our property a pro golfer with a strong drive could practically land a ball in Winiarski’s Cabernet vines. Just beyond that, Clos du Val’s 1972 Cabernet had also been selected by Spurrier for the tasting—an honor in its own right—and had come in eighth in the red category.
All around the Valley talk swirled of new wines and wineries. The Trefethen family and the Raymond family both released their first wines that year. Spottswoode got rezoning approval from the St. Helena City Council to reactivate wine production on their historic property. Newly constructed wineries opening their doors included Grgich-Hills, Cakebread, Robert Keenan, and Smith-Madrone, with more in the various stages of development, such as Pine Ridge Winery and Duckhorn. It was also the year that corporate America returned its attention to Napa Valley. Coca-Cola purchased Sterling Vineyards in Calistoga for $8 million, the largest corporate purchase since before the crash in ’74. The biggest purchases prior to that had been Heublein acquiring Inglenook in 1969 and Pillsbury buying Souverain in 1972.4 In addition, the prices for grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon finally edged higher. After hitting a low of $339 per ton in 1975,5 the $473 per ton of 19766 gave growers like Dad the sense that the momentum that had stalled in the early ’70s was picking back up.
Dad’s friend and fellow World War II B-24 pi lot Ernie Van Asperen7 was on the verge of starting Round Hill Winery and also provided encouragement. He knew Dad had been studying winemaking at Napa Valley College and talked him into producing some homemade wine out of grapes from our fifty-year-old Zinfandel vines. Dad did the whole thing by hand—picked the grapes, crushed and fermented them, and so on. He had a great time doing it, and this too nudged him to take a few steps in the direction of developing a winery. He teamed up with wine-making consultant Larry Wara and began to flesh out some ideas.
By the autumn of 1977, the Cabernet vines on John’s Folly were a couple of years old, and Dad finally harvested fruit that was truly his own. He sold most of that first crop to Mike Robbins at Spring Mountain Winery (whose 1972 Cabernet had also scored well at the Paris tasting). But he hung on to a small amount and made ten or twenty gallons of wine in his basement, funneling it into cleaned-out bottles that were still labeled “Mondavi Red Table Wine.” In one corner of the Mondavi label he penciled in the historic words “Shafer 1977 Cab.”
After Robbins had a chance to try the wine from Dad’s hillside fruit, he called and offered a ten-year grape contract. But at long last John Shafer’s dreams pulled rank on his practical side. Selling this fruit was out of the question. This was the Cabernet Sauvignon on which he wanted to build a winery.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1975 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1976, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
2. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1974 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1975, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
3. George M. Taber, Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (New York: Scribner, 2005), 186–95.
4. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 293.
5. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1975 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1976, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
6. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1976 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1977, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
7. It wasn’t until writing this book that I realized how many of Dad’s friends had been in the Army Air Corps during World War II: Louis Martini, Nathan Fay, and Ernie Van Asperen. They should have gotten together and released a wine called “Wing Commander.”
ELEVEN
Hillside Cabernet
In 1978 it felt as if a spell had been broken. The year started with near-normal winter and spring rains, which pulled us out of the long drought of the previous years. The year went on to become one of those growing seasons when everything goes right: a summer of warm, sun-flooded days with chilly evenings, offering no rain pressure as harvest approached. The sort of year grapes and winemakers thoroughly love.
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