handing the reins to another. Former president Harry Truman had just passed away in Kansas City, Missouri, in the week after Christmas, following a long illness. A few weeks later, former president Lyndon Johnson died unexpectedly of a heart attack. President Nixon had just won reelection and was sworn in for his second term on January 20; he was all smiles despite a news story that was just showing up in newspapers about the “bugging trial,” which was later dubbed “Watergate.”
As 1973 began, the United States had stepped up a bombing campaign in North Vietnam, but by January 20 a peace pact was signed, and it looked like the POWs would start coming home within weeks.
On the way to California we passed movie theaters showing The Godfather and The French Connection. When my mom flew to California she’d be one of the first airline passengers to pass through the newly mandated security systems designed to stop hijacking. (New Trier High alum Charlton Heston was starring in a now-forgotten but timely movie called Skyjacked.)
Looking back, I believe we were caught up in another element of that time: the “back to the land” movement. The hippie version of that was to join a commune, surround yourself with goats and naked toddlers, learn the dulcimer, and grow some pot. Others were starting the organic farm movement and creating food co-ops.
According to one study, in the 1970s more than one million people in Canada and the United States engaged in this reverse migration from the city to small rural farms.1
The Napa Valley version of that movement brought Jack and Jamie Davies from Los Angeles to Napa Valley to start Schramsberg. It brought the Brounsteins of Diamond Creek, the Trefethens, the Duckhorns, and Gary and Nancy Andrus of Pine Ridge. Jim Barrett came from Los Angeles to breathe life into Chateau Montelena, Joe Phelps was lured away from his construction business in Colorado, and Warren Winiarski left a professorship in Chicago to launch Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Men and women from diverse walks of life were drawn to this place in the late 1960s and early 1970s and committed everything they had to pull Napa Valley out of its long doldrums.
1. Jeffrey C. Jacob, “The North American Back-to-the-Land Movement,” Community Development Journal 31, no. 3 (July 1996): 241–49.
THREE
A Wine Country Emerges from a Wilderness
This wave of newcomers in the late 1960s and early 1970s—full of new ideas and enthusiasm—was simply the latest in a series of migrations to Napa Valley over the past 150 years, each one just as bursting with energy and ambition as the one before.
Napa Valley’s first vintage date was 1841 or 1842, when pioneer George Yount (namesake of Yountville) made the Valley’s inaugural wine from a small vineyard he’d planted not far from the river. Yount, whose original Scandinavian name was Jyunt, hailed from North Carolina by way of Missouri. He was a veteran of the War of 1812, a Freemason, and a frontiersman who knew how to trap and scout and live pretty well off not much in the wilderness. Native Americans, probably members of the Wappo tribe, stomped Yount’s grapes and fermented that first Napa Valley wine in ox-hide bags strung up between trees.1 Those who tried it said it was tasty, but then again they were probably pairing it with squirrel.
When Yount arrived, this area was a region of Mexico called Alta California. The first Mexican presence had come in 1823.2 The Valley was divided up into large swaths of land that historians call the Mexican land grants. Where our winery sits today was once part of Rancho Yajome. Other land grants at that time included Rancho Caymus (which belonged to Yount), Rancho Tulocay, Rancho La Jota, Rancho Las Putas, and the peculiarly named Rancho Carne Humana (translates as “human meat”). In 1846, after the Bear Flag Revolt (which gave us an animal for the state flag but had little political or military impact) and some more serious action by U.S. armed forces in the southern part of the state, Napa Valley became U.S. territory along with the rest of California.
In the decades that followed, pioneer vintners such as Charles Krug followed Yount’s lead and established one vineyard after another, and a wine country began to emerge from a wilderness.
The first person to actually construct a commercial winery was a British immigrant named John M. Patchett, whose winery was located approximately where today you’ll find the intersection of First and Monroe Streets in Napa,3 several blocks down from the West Coast offices of Wine Spectator.
Like the sites established by Yount, Krug, and Patchett, all the first vineyards were planted, sensibly, on the Valley floor. The land was flat and easy to work, plus the Napa River and its various tributaries offered reliable sources of water.
The first hillside vineyard was planted by a German immigrant named Jacob Schram in the 1860s. Though vines had been planted on hillsides in the Mediterranean world for centuries, it was a first here. And it took some doing. Schram had to clear dense forest on Diamond Mountain near Calistoga in order to establish his vines, which he dry-farmed—meaning that he didn’t attempt to irrigate them.
Over time, Schram’s vineyard earned a reputation for producing outstanding wines, and by 1880 Charles Krug, the Beringer brothers, and many others were following suit, situating vineyards on steep sites, including Howell Mountain (Krug) and Spring Mountain (the Beringers). In his book The Silverado Squatters, celebrated author Robert Louis Stevenson writes of visiting Schram and enjoying both the man’s company and his wines. While he referred to the wine of this region as “bottled poetry,” he also clearly saw it as a grand experiment, comparing it to prospecting for gold and silver in terms of its uncertain future.4
The wine boom started about the time of Stevenson’s visit here, as San Francisco’s new crop of gold and silver millionaires looked for promising places to invest their fortunes and perhaps to take on the trappings of aristocracy. Not for the last time Napa Valley found itself awash in wealthy investors, new landowners, and would-be winemakers. In 1880 there were forty-nine wineries. Within six years that number more than tripled to 175, according to historian William F. Heintz.5
The old Mexican land grants, which had been populated mostly by cattle, were cut into parcels and sold as quickly as buyers could snap them up.
Just to the south of present-day Shafer was the property of Horace B. Chase, a wealthy Chicago merchant who built a castle-like manor house, which he called Stag’s Leap. Terrill Grigsby and family bought vineyard land throughout the Valley and built a beautiful stone winery, just south of Chase’s property, called Occidental, still in use today at Regusci Winery.
Terrill Grigsby was a leading light in that viticultural heyday and something of American royalty. His father was a nephew of General William Henry Harrison and had fought with him in the War of 1812. Harrison later became the ninth U.S. president.
Along with his social standing, Grigsby was also known to have a temper. He once went ballistic on a man he suspected of shorting him on a load of grapes, thrashing him into near-lifelessness with a shovel. Grigsby beat a murder charge only because the man happened to live.6
While numerous colorful stories and key records survive from this period, no one today knows the origins of the name Stag’s Leap. According to a story that’s been handed down
