Sirah in the Valley and double that of Pinot Noir.
Zinfandel was a tempting choice because, first, even though the vines weren’t in top condition, the variety already existed here on the property. Second, as a grape grower, Dad’s income was tied to how much he’d get paid per ton of fruit. Besides being popular with consumers then, Zinfandel clusters tended to be big and heavy, which translated into a few extra dollars when you weighed and then sold your load at harvest.
Cabernet Sauvignon, meanwhile, seemed risky. Conventional wisdom at the time held that the Stags Leap area was too cool for Cabernet. We got excellent midday heat in summer, but with the northernmost tip of San Francisco Bay just eighteen miles away, afternoon and evening breezes delivered a consistent chill in the late-day air, even in July and August. It was widely believed that you needed to plant Cab in the warmer areas of Rutherford and Oakville.
The first person to go against the grain in that regard was our neighbor to the south, Nathan Fay, a grower who occasionally produced a little homemade wine for himself. He’d planted 15 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon in 1961, and he was followed about ten years later by Warren Winiarski at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, after he bought the Heid Ranch adjacent to Nate’s land. Dick Steltzner, of neighboring Steltzner Vineyards, had also planted some Cabernet by about this time.
Dad consulted with two local growers, Manuel Barboza and Laurie Wood, to get their take on this. Barboza had been the vineyard manager at neighboring Stags’ Leap Winery since the 1920s and knew this part of the Valley like his own family. Wood, who owned a vineyard management company, came out to our property and dug test holes and studied the soil to confirm his initial assessment of the vineyard’s potential.
Both men were convinced, despite popular belief, that the property held good potential for red grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon in particular.
Before Dad got into the Cabernet Sauvignon business though, Ivan Shoch approached him with a more direct route to some income in the grape business, which was the idea of planting the knoll at the western foot of our property to the white variety Chenin Blanc. While Cabernet Sauvignon appealed to the tastes of the new vintners in this region, the American public had yet to be won over. White wine, specifically Chardonnay, was overwhelmingly the top choice out in the marketplace, and a number of wineries were betting on Chenin Blanc as being the next big thing. Shoch had a contact at a local winery who was looking for more sources of this white grape, and Dad decided to sign on. The reason was purely financial. While he prepared to plant Cabernet on his previously unplanted hillsides, he had a guaranteed sale with Chenin Blanc. He hoped that by thinking first with his wallet, he would later have the freedom to follow his heart.
Being a newbie to this business, when it came time to set up an agreement for his future harvest price Dad did the unthinkable—he asked for a written contract. What he wasn’t fully clued into was that grape contracts then were done on a handshake. Perhaps to indulge this citified newbie, the buyer agreed, and they drew up a contract for a price that was based on 1973 prices. Again, not a problem. Prices for grapes had been growing at an astounding rate for more than ten years. And in 1973 they had climbed higher still—the total value of the Napa Valley grape crop that year was $33.9 million, a staggering $14.4 million more than in the previous year. Cabernet Sauvignon sold for an average of $874 per ton. Chenin Blanc sold for $482 per ton.1 It was like the gold rush all over again, and no one wanted to miss out.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1973 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1974, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
SEVEN
Cabernet
Dad’s approach to his vineyard life evolved rapidly. Unknown to me until much later, he’d come to Napa Valley hoping to start a winery fairly quickly. (For years I thought he’d wanted to come out here and live the life of a gentleman farmer, but he swears now he always intended to get into winemaking.) However, once he got into the middle of the business, he realized how much he had to learn. Ever the realist, he decided to gradually take over the vineyard work on his own—to avoid paying fees to a management company—and focus solely on growing and selling grapes. At least for now.
In addition to cultivating vines, he thought he should get a job that would give him some flexibility and steady income. After all those years hanging around educators and teaching math and spelling to us kids at home, he decided to become a teacher. To that end he started commuting to University of San Francisco to get his teaching credential.
His concerns about money were prompted in part by the fact that the U.S. economy took a nosedive in 1974, due to factors such as the OPEC oil embargo and related financial turmoil. We had a new genre of inflation called “stagflation,” rising unemployment, and long lines at gas stations.
One thing you learn when the economy tanks is this: no one has to buy wine. It’s one of life’s glorious add-ons, which means that the financial vitality of the wine business is strapped pretty firmly to the nation’s fiscal health. When the economy bottomed out, the grape bubble popped. Cabernet Sauvignon prices plummeted into the $400-per-ton range1 and Napa growers wouldn’t see 1973 prices again until 1985.2 Chenin Blanc was now averaging $243 per ton. When the buyer came to purchase Dad’s white grapes on our knoll, he very reluctantly paid those much higher 1973 prices thanks to that unwelcome written contract. The buyer informed Dad that everyone else was “taking it in the shorts,” in other words, some (or perhaps quite a few) of those handshake contracts weren’t being honored, which probably did much to curtail the practice.
Meanwhile Dad was beginning to take over the vineyard operations himself. He let go of Ivan Shoch’s company and began to contract with Big John Piña, who worked with him more on an as-needed basis, which in the beginning was still quite a lot.
With Big John’s help, Dad took his first running start at planting Cabernet Sauvignon in 1974. He had his eye on a south-facing 7-acre shoulder of the hillside located high up behind our house. A big part of preparing a site for planting, at least on Shafer property, is clearing rocks. My brother Brad and I spent every weekend that school year lugging rocks out off that hill. By hand. By the thousands.
The only thing worse than doing a job like this—for hours on end in the merciless sun—is doing it with your thirteen-year-old brother. He had a special love for chucking rocks at me and once even scored a bull’s-eye on the back of my head. Dad referred to this kind of work as “contouring the land.” Brad and I called it a lot of things much less poetic.
Planting a hillside is always a tough endeavor, but in Dad’s case it was made more challenging because it was a rarity in that era. You couldn’t buy a how-to manual for this sort of project or even type “how to plant a hillside vineyard” into Google. As such, it was a good bit of timing that Dad met Louis P. Martini at one of realtor Jim Warren’s welcome-to-the-neighborhood cocktail parties. Louis invited Dad to ride out to their Monte Rosso Vineyard in the wilds of Sonoma County and showed him how they’d terraced their mountainous site, which Louis’s father had expanded in the late 1930s. It was a wild ride in Louis’s pickup through dense woods on a roller-coaster road, which Dad remembers as “someplace straight out of the movie Deliverance.”
Louis P. Martini was a big guy with a broad forehead and a big smile, a quintessential product of the Golden State in its prime, all confidence, who’d grown up around crush pads and grapevines.
