The Wine Doctor : Andre Tchelistcheff is America’s greatest wine maker. He’s 90. He’s been working in the vineyards 53 years. And you’ve probably never heard of him.

RUTHERFORD —  Andre Tchelistcheff once got a call from tire fortune heir Brooks Firestone, who said he wanted to start a winery.

“Good,” said Tchelistcheff. “How much money have you got to lose?”

It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to dissuade a would-be winemaker. In the ‘40s, the late Fred McCrea, a retired advertising man, asked Tchelistcheff to help him plant a property. As the two walked the rugged and appropriately named Stony Hill, Tchelistcheff told him, “I seriously recommend that you remain in the advertising business.”

Decades later, as Jan Shrem prepared to start his Napa Valley winery, he got a vivid, detailed warning about the pitfalls of the winemaking business. Of course, Tchelistcheff went on to become a consultant for Shrem’s winery, Clos Pegase--and his mentor. “He helped me on every facet of wine,” Shrem says, “economics, public relations, education, even ethics.”

The diminutive Tchelistcheff, who many consider America’s greatest winemaker, has never been able to leave the business he helped create. He’s worked in California vineyards for 53 years and almost single-handedly revived the California wine industry. And although he will turn 90 on Dec. 7, he is not about to retire. Two decades after leaving the winery where he first gained fame, he has rejoined Beaulieu Vineyards. His goal is to improve the wines of the 21st Century.

Five years after Prohibition ended, Tchelistcheff, then a 37-year-old Russian-born enologist, arrived in the Napa Valley ready to make fine wine for Georges de Latour, owner of Beaulieu Vineyards. Tchelistcheff had been assistant to the director at the French National Institute of Agronomy when de Latour found him--and so, his standards were high.

He came to California envisioning a jewel of a winery, but instead found one in near ruins. After the 13 disastrous years of Prohibition, the staff was ill-prepared to make fine, even drinkable, wine.

“Beaulieu was just a little thing then,” he says. “What I saw was horrible technology. Look, I was coming from the European wine industry to the most technically progressive country. And I locate this. “ He winces as he recalls finding a rat floating in a vat of wine. “All the pipes were rusted. The wines were oxidized.”

Some of the wine, he says, also contained vinegar flies. “What the hell are you doing?” Tchelistcheff said to the cellar man. The cellar man replied, “Oh, young man, you don’t know what’s good. This wine is so excellent that all the flies go to it. It doesn’t do any damage.”

That was the beginning--and worse was to come. The following year, 1939, some of the worst rains in the history of the Napa Valley devastated the crop.

“It was raining and raining and raining and raining,” he says, “and when it came time to harvest,there was no way to pull the wagons with the boxes. Mud. We lost 100% of the white grapes and a lot of Cabernet.”

In frustration, Tchelistcheff drove to Davis to see Dr. Maynard Amerine, head of the University of California winemaking school. “You’ve got to be patient,” said Amerine. “We just started. We used to make wonderful wine, but we’ve been destroyed by Prohibition.

“He said, ‘You are lucky at Beaulieu. The vineyards are still there because of the sacramental wine (which was legal during Prohibition and kept the winery afloat). But you’ve got to go step by step, step by step.’ ”

Tchelistcheff’s first step was to reduce the use of sulfur dioxide. “Control of SO2 was unknown,” he says. “When I started to limit its use, the foreman in the fermenting room said, ‘Listen, Mister Doctor, what are you doing? Thirty tons of fruit and you give me a little tiny bit of SO2? We used to have a bucket.’ ”

Tchelistcheff took other technical steps that have left a lasting impact on the industry. He pioneered cold fermentation to retain freshness in white wines. He developed methods to control red wine fermentation--techniques that have since been adopted all around the world.

In those days most of the wine made by BV was sweet--Sherry, Port, Sauterne. Dry table wine made up only a tiny part of the U.S. market. Tchelistcheff, who was dedicated to fine wine, changed that. By 1950, he had established BV as the leading producer of Cabernet Sauvignon in the country, and the wine called George de Latour Private Reserve was famous among those who knew California wine.

By the early 1960s, Tchelistcheff and his assistant Joe Heitz had made BV known abroad for its Cabernets. And by the end of the decade, BVs from the great vintages of 1968, 1969 and 1970 were in high demand.

A small, wiry man--he stands 5 foot 4--Tchelistcheff has always been tireless, and he demanded the same of his co-workers.

“After harvest every year we would go tank top to tank top and check every wine,” says Heitz, who worked with Tchelistcheff for seven and a half years before opening his own Heitz Cellar. “And every tank to Andre was ‘A-1 priority.’ When we were done, I’d have a list of 50 ‘A-1 priority’ things to do. Everything required immediate attention. He knew it had to be done; knowing how to get it done just wasn’t his problem.”

In 1972 Tchelistcheff, then 71 years old, was restless. Three years earlier Beaulieu had been bought out by the corporate giant Heublein, and Tchelistcheff often clashed with executives from Hartford, Connecticut. “The tragedy of corporations in general,” says Tchelistcheff, “is that they are willing to invest their money, but they don’t know the business. . . . And they expect to have a rapid remuneration for their investment.”

Insiders say Tchelistcheff and Heublein battled because the corporation felt he should be more visible marketing wine. Tchelistcheff just wanted to be in the fields with his vines. “The winemaker should be living much closer to the wine grower,” he says. “This is the partial contribution I made to the wine industry. Before, enology and viticulture had been separated.”

At heart, the man who introduced cold fermentation to California--and the world--is an old-fashioned grape farmer. Brooks Firestone recalls that Tchelistcheff once knelt down in his vineyard in Santa Barbara County, put a handful of soil in his mouth and said, “Pinot Noir. The soil is perfect for Pinot Noir.”

That was just after Tchelistcheff decided to retire in 1972 . . . and went into the consulting business instead.

It was not a new thing--Tchelistcheff had actually been a consultant for decades. In 1941 he had joined with Frank Bartholomew to found Buena Vista, in which he was a minority partner and consultant. In the late ‘60s he assisted winemakers in Washington State, which included huge Chateau Saint Michelle--a consulting arrangement that lasted for more than 20 years.

He aided the new Firestone Winery in Santa Barbara. Then in 1975 Jordan hired Tchelistcheff to set the style for the wines of his fancy new winery in Sonoma County. He also assisted Clos Pegase, Domaine Michel, Conn Creek, HMR, Valfleur, Villa Mount Eden, Konocti, Field Stone, Niebaum-Coppola and others.

While at BV, he worked with a Who’s Who of American winemakers that includes, in addition to Heitz, Theo Rosenbrand (later at Sterling Vineyards), Dr. Richard Peterson (later at the Monterey Vineyard and Atlas Peak), Mike Grgich (now with Grgich Hills), and Tom Selfridge (now at Kendall-Jackson). Later Tchelistcheff also influenced literally dozens of California and Washington winemakers at the many wineries that consulted him.

Tchelistcheff also kept things in the family: He encouraged his nephew Alex Golitzin to make Cabernet. Today, Golitzin’s Quilceda Creek Winery, just outside of Seattle, is one of the top producers of Cabernet Sauvignon in the nation. And Tchelistcheff’s son, Dmitri, consults for wineries from Hawaii to New York.

But despite Tchelistcheff’s expertise, he is not one who thinks he knows it all. Says one young winemaker, “He is learning all the time. He’s so progressive, even at his age, that if he tells you something one year, a year later he could tell you something else. It’s really amazing.”

The most amazing thing, says Shrem of Clos Pegase, is Tchelistcheff’s attitude. “The stability and sense of balance he brought to the wine scene is refreshing. Through it all, he has remained humble. He was the lowest priced consultant. He never raised his fees, and they were lower than so many of the younger people, which always astonished me.”

But age has been catching up with Andre Tchelistcheff. For years he made his rounds in a racy yellow 240Z sports car, dashing madly around the back roads of the Valley. A year ago, Tchelistcheff misjudged a truck making a turn on the Silverado Trail. He swerved and his 240Z rolled. His arm was in a sling for weeks, and that convinced him that he should give up driving.

About the same time, Tchelistcheff--an inveterate smoker--gave up cigarettes. He had quit cold turkey ten years ago, but almost immediately went back to smoking. He said his palate memory had been formed as a smoker and once he quit, wines didn’t taste or smell the same. Not smoking created problems evaluating wine.

But when he developed a lung infection a year ago, doctors said they couldn’t cure it unless he quit for good. He quit again. “It took him a few months to get his palate re-calibrated,” says his nephew.

Now there’s a new change in Tchelistcheff’s life. He has gone back to Beaulieu. “I’d like them to be as well-known now as in the past,” he says. “I’ve got to light them, start the fire.”

It is a homecoming, he admits, that has made him quite emotional. “Sometimes when I talk about the wines, I permit myself to suffer a little bit,” he said. “When I come home, Dorothy says, ‘Andre, why at your age do you suffer so much?’ But that’s one of the reasons I came here.”

Tchelistcheff is, in fact, a man incapable of doing anything by half measures. “A few years ago,” says Allen Shoup of Chateau Ste. Michelle, “after we had acquired the Conn Creek and Villa Mt. Eden wineries, I asked Andre if he would consult with our winemakers, and he said, ‘But I have another master.’ Well, it seemed like a religious thing, so I didn’t probe.

“I said I was convinced we had the right people, and that all we needed was a mentor. But Andre mentioned ‘his master’ again, so I asked him about it, and he said, ‘The master is age, and I fight him every day. I cannot ignore him and eventually he will win.’

“He said that to do that job right, he had to climb up on the catwalks and taste the wines, every day. I told him you don’t have to do that, we have people who will go get the wine samples and bring it down to you. But he said, ‘No, you must do it yourself.’ And then he accepted the jobs.”