Napa Winemakers Drink In Success

ST. HELENA, Calif. —  In the cool night breeze, in a secluded meadow, a rite of near-Dionysian proportion is taking place. Makers of wine and lovers of wine have gathered--1,800 strong--for another taste of California’s wine country.

There is Robert Mondavi, arguably the best known Napa Valley vintner, a dashing figure in a black gaucho hat, dancing with his wife. And--for the wine cognoscenti--there are the Duckhorns and the Trefethens. All night long, the wine flows.

Under a huge white tent, men in tuxedos and women in black crepe and heels dine on vichyssoise and filet mignon. Gleaming oversized bottles of wines--magnums and jeroboams--adorn each table, all hailing from Napa Valley’s best wineries. People table-hop for a chat and a taste of another vintage.

They revel until past midnight--but the night’s ball is just prelude to the next day’s 16th annual Napa Valley Wine Auction. By the end of the weekend, a record $2.3 million would be raised for local hospitals and clinics.

Not bad for a valley where, two decades ago, the wine was snubbed by connoisseurs and cattle were prized more than grapes.

Today, Napa Valley has about 260 wine businesses, worldwide acclaim for its wine, booming sales, and bidding wars over the preciously short supply of grapes.

Those vintners dancing the night away at the ball can testify to Napa Valley’s largess--but they also tell tales of how success has bred an intensity that was once what you escaped in the wine country.

“Things used to be much more relaxed, not as much competition,” says Michaela Rodeno, chief executive officer of the French-owned St. Supery winery. “All you had to do was make good wine and the world would find you. . . . It’s become much more like work.”

Vintners may dress in jeans, tour their vineyards in their sport-utility vehicles, and speak lovingly of the wines they pour at leisurely dinners, but these days they are promoters as much as wine experts. They have marketing directors and hire graphic designers to produce their labels. They are more likely to be entertaining wine distributors over those luxurious meals than friends. And they have a list of worries: grape shortages, pestilence, the throngs of tourists who drink too much, and the average Americans who don’t drink at all.

Good wine is made all over the state but Napa Valley is still the jewel in California’s viticultural crown, drawing a small, elite group who can afford $50,000-an-acre vineyards. In fact, the valley is such an insular place that when a rhythm-and-blues band took the stage at last month’s auction ball, one vintner eyed the musicians and ruefully noted, “This is probably the only time each year that we see black people in the valley.”

Twenty years ago, vintners were almost pioneers--rejuvenating a wine-growing valley that flourished at the turn of the century but was left crippled for years by the effects of Prohibition.

In 1976, two Napa Valley vintners packed their bags with chardonnay and cabernet and headed for Paris to enter their wines in a high-profile blind taste test against heavyweight French wines.

When Jim Barrett’s Chateau Montelena 1973 chardonnay and Warren Winiarksi’s 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars cabernet actually won, it became--in the words of one wine critic--”the tasting heard around the world.” The accolades catapulted California wines, in general, and Napa Valley wines, in particular, into the spotlight.

“Not bad for a kid from the sticks,” Barrett said at the time. Today, he’s more cocky. “We just kicked ass.”

Now, vintners cultivate consumers who range from clueless to so sophisticated that they buy out the stock of trendy $75-a-bottle Opus One--kind of the Julia Roberts of red wines.

“We work at keeping a high profile,” says Barrett, 69, whose Chateau Montelena winery puts out a newsletter and just released a special chardonnay that commemorates his Paris victory and comes in a bottle with the Eiffel Tower etched on it. “You can’t just assume they’re going to keep drinking your wine,” he says of his customers. “You have to keep them interested.”

And different vintners find different ways of carving places for themselves in the vineyards and on wine shelves.

The Chic Newcomer

Ann Colgin, 38, epitomizes the new Napa Valley tradition of the boutique winery owner. She bid her way in through the Napa Valley Wine Auction.

Colgin and her husband, Fred Schrader, art and antiques dealers from Florida, fell under the spell of Napa Valley in the ‘80s. Soon they were big bidders at the Napa Valley Wine Auction and making lots of friends.

One night, over a cozy dinner with Helen Turley--one of the valley’s most sought-after winemakers--the couple rhapsodized about making their own wine.

“We said if we ever made a wine we would want to make a cabernet,” recalls Colgin. “And another bottle of burgundy went by, and the next day, we were out looking for vineyards.”

The couple made Turley their winemaker--the person overseeing the process from grapes to bottle. They even made Turley and her husband their partners in the business. Like many fledgling winery owners, Colgin and Schrader actually have no building or vineyard. Under the direction of Turley, they bought grapes from one of the best vineyards and had them custom-crushed at another winery. They harvested their first grapes in 1992 and released their first wines in 1995.

“That’s a long time to just write checks and look at barrels,” Colgin says. They hired a Los Angeles designer to create their bottle label. “I told her I wanted it to be simple and timeless--like a great Armani dress,” Colgin says.

Though the couple’s wine business bears both their last names, Colgin decided only hers should go on the label. “I told Fred that ‘Schrader’ was too Germanic for a California cabernet,” she says with a chuckle.

This year, their second vintage, a 1993 cabernet, won raves from the Wine Spectator and a place on the up-and-coming list in the magazine’s issue on hot new wines. The 450 cases the couple sell easily don’t just go off to any old liquor store, either. They are selectively marketed to a mailing list of clamoring wine groupies and placed in a handful of ultra high-end restaurants in New York and California. Valentino, the Santa Monica restaurant run by Piero Salvaggio, is one of their clients.

Colgin, as trendy as her wine--she showed up at this year’s auction ball in sequined black jeans and a blue satin shirt--found a chic way to make a contribution to the auction. She not only provided a six-liter bottle of Colgin cabernet, she got a craftsman to make a box for it. And not just any craftsman. She and her husband flew to London and convinced Viscount Linley, the son of Britain’s Princess Margaret and a gentleman cabinet-maker, to make the box.

“This is the only wine box he’s ever done,” Colgin says proudly. Of the 201 lots auctioned this year, the Colgin cabernet in its royal box went for the 10th-highest bid--$28,000.

The Eminence Grise

If there is one thing that everyone in the valley seems to agree on, it’s that Robert Mondavi has done more to promote Napa Valley than any other winemaker. He is among the oldest vintners of the valley. And with his sons in place today running his winery, he seems to have ensured a long line of Mondavis into the future.

With a yearly production of 450,000 cases of wine ranging in price from $6 to $56 per bottle the Mondavi name is all over the market. He is also half-owner with Baroness Philippine de Rothschild of the high-end Opus One venture. The starkly modern edifice of the Opus One winery sits across California 29 from the Mondavi winery. There, figuratively and literally, Robert Mondavi stands at the center of the valley.

At 82, he remains the consummate salesman. As he wanders out toward the vineyards that surround his winery, gaggles of tourists gawk as if he were a movie star. A couple from New York run up with a camera and ask to have their picture taken with him. “We only drink your wine,” one of them gushes.

“I think Napa Valley is like Yosemite,” he muses. “It’s one of the biggest tourist attractions. You have to control it. . . . But we want to be gracious.”

Three decades ago, Mondavi fought so bitterly with his brother that he broke away from the family wine business (the Charles Krug Winery) and started his own eponymous business. Today, he says he gets along fine with his brother. In fact, he so extols the virtues of family and compromise, he sounds like he’s been in therapy.

Tell him this and he sweeps his arms out over his sun-drenched vineyards and exclaims, “I’m living therapy!”

The Scrappy Vintner

While Colgin makes a religion out of devotion only to cabernet, the Cosentino winery tries to be all wines to all drinkers--red, white, and blends the average consumer didn’t even know existed.

The night before the Napa Valley auction ball, Mitch Cosentino is hosting one of the numerous small winery dinners. His is not the hottest ticket in town. That honor might go to the anniversary event at Chateau Montelena or dinner with Francis Ford Coppola at his historic chateau.

But the atmosphere is festive nonetheless, even giddy. Cosentino barely eats as he table-hops, chatting up friends and investors.

Cosentino, 44, is nothing if not a clever salesman. But in Napa, wine sellers are witty. To avoid customers stumbling over his name, Cosentino chose to label his wines with quirky titles. The Novelist. The Poet. The Sculptor.

By Cosentino’s extravagant logic, he calls his chardonnay the Sculptor, because a sculptor hones one piece of rock the way a winemaker ferments just one grape variety to make the chardonnay. The Poet, by contrast, is a blend of reds. “The poet is bound by no restrictions on variety,” Cosentino tells his dinner guests. (You should hear him try to explain the Novelist.)

Cosentino was a wine distributor in Modesto who scrapped his way up to Napa Valley as a winemaker and vintner. Now he can talk about malolactic fermentation with the best of them.

This year, he’ll sell 18,000 cases, 70% of that to restaurants. He ranks among neither the biggest nor the most prestigious of the vintners, earning respectable but not rave reviews. But as befits this boom period, he has been selling out his stock, he says. Not that that stops him from going off to do charity events or chatting up new customers. “You never stop selling even when you’re sold out,” he says.

The Veteran

If Colgin is a newcomer, Justin Meyer is a veteran of the valley. He is surrounded by the trappings of his success: a winery at the end of a long tree-flanked driveway, vineyards in Napa Valley and Alexander Valley, a reputation as a maker of such prestigious cabernet he can sell out at more than $40 a bottle. This year, his Silver Oak winery will release 50,000 cases of cabernet.

At age 57, Meyer owns a small plane, spends $60,000 each year putting two of his three children through college, and mulls over plans to spend more time fishing.

But this former monk who learned his winemaking skills as a member of the Christian Brothers (which once made respected wine) wrestles with the problems that could undermine the success that he and his business partner have built.

With vineyards just now replanting due to the recent phylloxera scourge, wineries are scrambling to get grapes. “You’ve got this real dogfight for grapes. You’ve got these guys with these big bankrolls who come in looking for grapes,” he says. To stave off competitors, Meyer voluntarily raised the price that he pays his grower.

He sees tourism as a double-edged sword, grateful for customers, weary of people using his tasting room as a happy hour. “We cringe when we see a limo come in, because we know they’ve been hitting wineries all day.” Meyer instituted a 30-person limit in his tasting room. Most of the hard-core revelers, he finds, will leave rather than wait for their turn in the tasting room.

But nothing annoys Meyer more than the “neo-Prohibitionist” trend he sees. He can’t forget the time his youngest child came home from elementary school and asked, “Dad, why do you make drugs?”

“A teacher told them wine was bad,” recalls Meyer. “I said, ‘You ask the teacher what he thinks of prescription drugs.’ I say, let’s make a distinction between use and abuse.”

Like other vintners, he believes the federal government does not make that distinction. “We’re not the guys who cause alcoholism,” he says. “For every alcoholic, there are 100 who enjoy a glass of wine. And how many of those poor people in the gutter are down there drinking Silver Oak wine?”

Meyer may be competitive but he now sits out the Napa Valley Wine Auction. “I don’t believe in all the hype that goes on there,” says Meyer, who withdrew from the Napa Valley Vintners Assn. in a dispute over the auction. “We probably saved $15,000 dropping out.”