that eluded them by leaping from one crag on the palisades to the next.
It’s plausible that both the myth and the name were dreamed up by Chase and/or his wife, Minnie. The area was, and still is, home to a lot of deer (as we would later discover), and the term “leap” shows up in various place-names often associated with steep, rocky cliffs, such as Huntsman’s Leap and Byard’s Leap in England, the Priest’s Leap in Ireland, Ivy’s Leap in southern Australia, and so on.
Another possibility is that it was tied to a neighbor a mile or so down the Silverado Trail from the Chase manor named William K. Staggs. In at least once instance, the local newspaper in the 1890s referred to this area as “Staggs Leap.”7 As late as 1973, the Napa Register referred to the property next door to us as “Staggs Leap Ranch.”8
(About one-third of the original 75 acres owned by Staggs is now our Borderline Vineyard, a source of Cabernet Sauvignon for us, located along Silverado Trail.)
What this means is that the name could be the result of clever word-play, working in both the stag’s myth and the Staggs’ neighbor. Pioneers had a sense of humor, after all, when they weren’t whacking each other with shovels.
By the early 1890s, a national economic downturn was hurting the wine industry in a big way, but the darker player was a near-microscopic, root-attacking insect called phylloxera. This menace had already devastated the vineyards of France, an apocalypse so complete that in Stevenson’s Silverado Squatters he movingly laments what he sees as the end of centuries of French winemaking altogether. Now hordes of these tiny bugs did their worst here. Within a few years of phylloxera’s arrival, Horace Chase had lost 50 of his 57 acres of wine grapes. Winery owners throughout the Valley were turning to new crops, including watermelons, olives, almonds, and peaches (walnuts and prunes became widespread in the century that followed).
On the property we own today, the owner Jacob Ohl had taken to growing corn alongside his dwindling Zinfandel and Malvoisie grapes. Near where you’ll find Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, a large population of hogs was newly in residence, helping to off set the owner’s loss of grape income.9
Things got so bad that the Bank of Napa is listed in 1895 as the owner of a great deal of acreage throughout the Valley as the result of repossession.
In short order the dreams of many of those first wine pioneers were extinguished. After phylloxera, even with successful replanting between 1898 and World War I, the doom of the Napa Valley wine business was sealed with the era of Prohibition in 1919.
The landscape became dotted with ghost wineries. The mountain vineyards of Jacob Schram and the Beringers were reclaimed by the forest. Much of what had been a massive, thriving industry lay dormant, waiting for another cycle and another generation.
1. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 19.
2. Lin Weber, Old Napa Valley: The History to 1900 (St. Helena, CA: Wine Ventures Publishing, 1998), 17.
3. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 25.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (London: Chattus and Windus, 1893), accessed June 20, 2011, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Stevenson/SilveradoSquatters.
5. William F. Heintz, California’s Napa Valley: One Hundred Sixty Years of Wine Making (San Francisco, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1999), 121.
6. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, pp. 27 and 28.
7. Stags Leap District Appellation Committee (John Shafer, Chairman), Petition to Establish the Viticultural Area of “Stags Leap,” August 22, 1985, private archive, Stags Leap District.
8. “Napan Hurt When Horse Strikes Car,” Napa Register, January 2, 1973, 2A.
9. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, p. 39.
FOUR
The Pendulum Swings
Home winemakers were allowed to produce as much as two hundred gallons a year for their own consumption during Prohibition. Selling wine grapes to these winemaking operations in basements across the country helped create a decent living for some growers in the Valley. There was a pretty lively illegal alcohol trade as well. According to our neighbor, Frank Perata, who lived on our property as a boy in the 1940s, there is an old moonshine that is still buried somewhere along the creek behind the winery. In addition, when Frank’s father was tearing down a decrepit outbuilding, he found a secret storage area for wine barrels under the floorboards.
Slowly the stars began to align for Napa Valley with the end of Prohibition in 1933. Wine was still almost solely of interest to German and Italian immigrants. This continued to be a beer and whiskey country, so no one here was getting rich but at least making wine couldn’t get you thrown in the slammer anymore.
Toward the end of World War II, the government built a prisoner of war camp along Silverado Trail (near where Conn Dam is located today) complete with barbed-wire fences and a guard tower. Perata remembers that the German POWs were rented out to local growers to tend walnut orchards and vineyards here in Stags Leap.
The war had a bigger effect here than providing cheap labor from the Third Reich; it sparked several things that helped create favorable conditions for a Napa resurgence. The postwar period saw big national economic expansion—the importance of this can’t be underestimated. The gunpowder of every boom is money.
This creation of wealth coincided with an upswing in American interest in wine. Many military men and women who had been stationed in Europe returned home bringing new Mediterranean-inspired food and drink cravings with them.
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, residents of San Francisco, movie stars, Bay Area connoisseurs, and others started visiting in the Valley in greater numbers to try wines at Robert Mondavi’s new winery and at other places, such as Sutter Home and Louis M. Martini Winery.
By the early 1970s, Napa Valley wine was on the cusp of a very different era. The 1972 harvest garnered the highest prices anyone had ever seen for grapes. The overall crop value was $19.4 million, nearly $2.5 million more than the previous year.1 According to an ebullient Time cover story on California’s soaring wine industry, Napa Valley had “run out of vineyard land.”
