T. Gantner Collection

Tiburcio Parrot Biography
Draper Interview Part 1
Draper Interview Part 2

John O. Gantner bought 160 acres of property on Spring Mountain in 1941 to plant a clone of Pinot noir that he received from his friend John Daniels of Inglenook fame. He, his wife and three sons, used the property as a summer retreat from San Francisco and his highly successful sportswear business. His sons still own the original property. John started making Schoolhouse wines in the 60s, named after a Spring Mountain schoolhouse located on the property, which burned down in 19??. His son, John, continues the Schoolhouse wine tradition of making fine Pinots.

Interview of John O. Gantner
Background and Some History of the Napa Valley
By Gunter R. Detert
February 8, 1984

GRD John, I understand that you have family background and background yourself that goes back many, many years into Napa. Could you tell us about that?

JG Hello Gunter. I must want to say that it is an honor to be interviewed by you because we’ve known each other since childhood and you yourself have a very honorable and marvelous California background and you have espoused the Napa Valley after your boyhood as I have to return to some of the points where my ancestors were pioneers. I’ll try not to do too much of this in the first person, but it’s hard not to. In the first place, my name Gantner is a Swiss name which comes from an old family out of Zurich that landed here — my grandfather, John Gantner, landed in San Francisco in 1850, just after gold was discovered, and eventually became a gold miner himself. He arrived here as a poor boy with a meistership as a machinist; and with this training, naturally he got into the mining business. His son, that is my father, John. O. Gantner, after whom I am named, married into an old California Spanish family who were real old-timers — my mother being – her maiden name was Frisby, which is a Yankee name — Frisby married one of the Vallejo girls, the daughter of Salvador Vallejo. Salvador settled in the Napa Valley area at a place he called: Las Trancas,” which sight is still there, although the old, beautiful adobe burned down, destroying many of the historical artifacts of the family. It burned down when I was a little boy. Incidentally, if you’d look at me, you’d see I was a man born in 1909, March 8: so my own personal observation goes back for about 74 years. Gunter, how’s that for a start? I’ve qualified myself a little bit.

GRD What did you say about your grandfather, he was a meister machinist? That would be, can we say a master machinist?

JG That’s right.

GRD Next, I wanted to ask you about the Vallejo family. Salvador was the brother of . . .

JG Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the general

GRD Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the general.

JG Yes.

GRD He was his brother, and your mother’s maiden name was Frisby?

JG F-R-I-S-B-Y.

GRD F-R-I-S-B-Y. John, what does the word “Trancas” mean?

JG “Las Trancas” in Spanish means the barriers, and in this case it meant the tidal barrier. The tide of the bay came right up the Napa River to the turning of the river at “Las Trancas,” which is, maybe about a mile and a half up along the river, north from where the town of Napa is today. Incidentally, near “Las Trances” there [are]some beautiful old caves in the side of the Napa River bank; and this is one of the reasons they used this for their home site because it was a marvelous place to stable their best riding horses, which were mostly Barb horses with a percentage of Arabian breed in them. These were some of the finest horses in the state — they were kept in the caves at “Las Trancas.” Although sequestered, I was told how those caves were raided by horse thieves on occasion, including when raiding expeditions came after the bear flag episode in Sonoma. Some of the horses could be hidden so well in the caves by friendly Indians that they were never stolen.

GRD Who was stealing them from Sonoma?

JG Oh! A little earlier, in Sonoma this was Fremont’s outfit and William B. Idle’s gang, who had decided that they were going o set up a republic of California for which I must say — this is all in the histories — Fremont was called back to Washington and finally court martialed, and typical of the way our history goes, later was gently kicked upstairs and made a general, then ran for president of the United States which he never made. He married Senator Benton’s daughter from Pennsylvania, and this gave him quite a bit of clout, but this is the history how one civilization rolled over the next; and my Spanish ancestors, of course, were not very happy the way they were treated. As part of raising of the bear-flag in Sonoma, they took the general and his secretary, Leese, and put him in jail at what late became Stockton. A Swiss adventurer (with a settlement called Sutter Fort) was persuaded to act as Vallejo’s jailer. Stockton, a young U.S. naval officer, strategically placed and at the right time stepped in and released the general. The American government apologized, but a lot of the damage was done. After all, Fremont was sent out to California supposedly to “survey” the region. Certainly, he was not supposed to try to set himself up with other schemes like William B. Idle to usurp the hospitable government of the Californians.

GRD Keep on going John, I have a few more questions. You referred to the horses, I think the word was Barr horses, did you say?

JG Barb, B-A-R-B.

GRD What does it mean?

JG Those are the original horses that were brought over here from Spain. It was a closely-coupled, short-bodied horse with good endurance and very good to work the cattle on the range. And then for their own personal riding enjoyment, many of their horses were interbred with Arabians. Those were the days of the horse, just like today is the day of the automobile. The early Californians really lived a great horse existence; they loved horses; they understood horses and bred horses they could depend upon. Their very existence depended upon good horses and fine ones for their pleasure. Likewise, many horses of mixed character and breeds roamed wild over vast areas; and if one were good at it, many of the latter were there for a free bronco ride.

GRD What was the spelling of the name of Mr. Leese, the secretary who was arrested along with the general?

JG L-E-E-S-E, Jacob Leese.

GRD That’s pretty simple. I have heard by rumor that the grand mansion of Silverado Club was a home of Salvador Vallejo. Is it true, or what’s the background on that one?

JG Perfectly beautiful spot back there, but no way. The family did not build that mansion. There may be — the property originally may have been in part of the land that was granted to them, but that mansion was built, as I understood, by an American army officer later; his name must easily be found in the records. The beautiful building that’s there is relatively more modern and was not constructed by any of my ancestors. Never thought of it but the American officer may have taken a Spanish bride. As I recall, there’s not much adobe in it.

GRD Have you any notion how many acres Salvador Vallejo had in Las Trancas?

JG Salvador’s “Las Trancas Jalopa” a Mexican land grant via Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado in 1838 to his brother-in-law. Talk about keeping it in the family! I wish they’d been able to have kept a little part for me. Yet, this grant was but a small part of the family’s holdings. Well, just to give you an idea the way things were in those days, it was said that the two brothers, Salvador and Mariano, when this became the United States, owned more land in the United States than any other family. It was often measured in square leagues in those days. Four thousand four hundred thirty-eight acres in a square league, as you may recall. How many actual acres and what specific delineation was of Las Trancas I don’t know. Las Trancas was simply the name that they gave to their home, which was right at the barrier point where the tidal flow and ebb stopped on the Napa River.

GRD Now Colonel Yount, isn’t he related by marriage into the Vallejo family too?

JG No, he was not in any way related.

GRD And did he get some of that property when he got Yountville?

JG He was adept with tools and split the shingles and shingled the Vallejo’s very large house at the Petaluma adobe, now partially reconstructed and a state monument. If not the sole reason, the shingle job earned Yount the deed to some two thousand acres of Napa. It was a policy of the Spaniards in those days, when they found vigorous a American who might help colonize and develop the area, to enable them some of their own land or assist in getting land concessions Mexican land grants. There were two kinds of government land transfers. Originally, there were what was properly termed the Spanish land “concessions” up to 1822; then after the revolution from Spain, Mexico then also made a policy of giving land “grants” until about 1846. There’s good book specifically on land grants in California which has all of that stuff in it — well indexed and for anybody doing research, I can’t give you the name of the author offhand, but it’s a very handy compilation of the land grants. Yes, it’s by Cowan. I’m not sure of its complete accuracy, but it’s a mighty nice job on a complex subject.

GRD Was Yount’s wife the sister of Salvador Vallejo?

JG I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I know she wasn’t. Salvador and Mariano were born in Monterey, California and their father was Ygnacio Vicente Vallejo, who had come originally form San Diego and then up to Monterey. They had a large family and Yount was not connected.

GRD When you were talking about Salvador Vallejo at Las Trancas, I suppose he had a ranching property and that he was probably distributing foodstuffs down in the Bay area, was he?

JG Well, that’s a good question, Gunther, because Salvador Vallejo was over there for one major purpose, and that was a military purpose, the purpose of a soldier. And his brother had him over there because the Indians were particularly bad, and they were on the warpath much of the time. It was a very tender problem with the new settlers to keep the Indians under control and not to have to fight them and massacre them or be massacred by them. For instance, here’s an interesting legend; and there’s more truth to it I think than many of these legends. My mother told me about how Salvador, who was a big man, these were not generally big men in those days, but Salvador was an exception, well over 6 feet. Salvador was inevitably going to clash with an Indian chief up there. They did a rather civilized thing and had a man-to-man wrestling match in front of the troops and the Indians. They first greased themselves down with bear grease (which incidentally was the Indian medicine for everything, and bear grease also has a nice faculty of not getting rancid too fast) and it happened that Salvador bested the Indian. And forever after, that particular Indian was Salvador’s unofficial lieutenant and served to help a number of Indian tribes on the Spaniards’ side, and this was the kind of primitive diplomacy that was necessary to engender the friendship of as many of the Indian tribes as possible because they needed those Indians to fight the other Indians, like the very bravest warlike Modoc Indians. The Modoc Indians could be very ferocious, wonderful people apparently; but when they learned some of the bad habits of the white man, like alcohol and got guns and this kind of thing, some turned to be marauders, arsonists and scalpers and wreaked trouble on the farmers and on many innocent people, although no doubt there was plenty of reason for these primitive people at times to turn to very savage vengeance.

GRD John, did you know anything about the Battle of Lake County on Clear Lake or any of that background? Those would have been Lake County Indians, I guess, that came down and were marauders.

JG Yes, what I know is what you know and what anyone else doing research knows; and we’ve all read the same things; so I think that would make a good footnote, but it wouldn’t add anything to the known knowledge. Yes, there were terrible skirmishes up there in Lake County; and there was a big massacre of the Indians on one of the islands right off the lake there.

GRD Was that Colonel Yount’s doing or . . .

JG Gunther, this might be another footnote. I don’t want to pretend to be that much of a historian because this is all in the books: I think you’d find a lot of this in Bancroft, among others. I’d like to add a little to the history from what I learned from listening to some of my older “parientes” like my grandmother, my mother, uncles, and authentic “old timers.”

GRD Going back to your family, John, we know about Salvador, what would he have been to you?

JG He was my great grandfather.

GRD That close to you?

JG Yes. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the general was my great granduncle. And their parents, my greatgreatgrandparents, came to California at the beginning of San Diego. Their original stock came over in 1493 with Columbus, along with the Carillio’s, who later intermarried with the Vallejos. This too is all in the books, and that’s another footnote; you can find this in Washington Irving’s book called Voyages of Columbus, which he wrote when he was Ambassador to Spain. So this is a very, very old American family that goes any further back this New World, South America included, because they came when Columbus first touched the mainland on this continent.

GRD Now what has transpired in your family from the time of Salvador to you, as it relates to the Napa Valley?

JG All right, now we’re way down to modern times — I heard a lot about the areas where some of the family was raised, up here; but they were Caifornians more than just northern Californians. My mother and my grandmother, my Spanish grandmother who lived with us, talked about Southern California just as though it was all one great big part of the same background. There was no feeling of Northern and Southern California that caused any differences. I loved the Napa and Sonoma Valley, having had some early happy childhood days there. In addition to feeling at home in the Country, the people, the fresh air and even the horses were still exciting. At an early age, I learned to enjoy and discriminate between the wines that we had at our table. We had a sort of cosmopolitan family; my Swiss grandmother, a widow and like my Spanish grandmother, both lived with us; and they had a nice bowing acquaintance and got on very nicely. Neither of them spoke fluent English as their respective native tongues. My Spanish grandmother — this was the daughter of Salvador — often spoke in Spanish to us kids and to my mother, and my Swiss grandmother often spoke French or Schweitzerdentsch in our home. I grew up amidst three foreign lingos and my father loved to declaim long and beautiful lines of Shakespeare. We had a sort of a European table where good cookery prevailed with simple ceremony and such “politeness” between grandma Frisby and Grossmutter. Aside from wine at dinner, we practically never saw alcohol. My father would make a special Christmas drink for everybody mostly out of grenadine punch. Later, as I grew up, I acquired a predilection for really good but hard to find Pinot noir, which was the great wine of Europe in those days. Seems we’ve remained somewhat insular in our narrower choices of wines in California, conditioned, as we no doubt are by what’s available locally. The Pinot noirs that were made here after prohibition were mostly of Gamay ad Gamay Beaujolais grapes, and they don’t turn out too well under any other name. But I had one friend at Stanford, John Daniels, who had a patch of Pinot noir. Johnny and I were fraternity brothers at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity at Standford, and Johnny always promised me that inasmuch as these scarcely producing grapes were “no damn good” as he said, but made a superb wine, he was going to pull them up — they were close to the house where he wanted the small area for something else — and he said he’s give me this tiny clone. So it took at least three years for me to find the property in order to plant these very special grapes, but I had in mind a wine that I wanted o make, in other words the way I got into this thing, I backed into it. Most people find a piece of property, and they decide what grapes they’re going to put on it. I had a very particular wine in mind, and I first fund the grapes that I needed to produce it. I had drunk and fallen in love with Daniel’s superb Pinot noir, which he made for private use in a very small quantity from his tiny little patch. Finally, after fine-combing Northern California, I found a little piece of Spring Mountain that fulfilled my rigorous criteria, which John Daniels suggested along with a man who also became a good friend of mine, Frank Schoonmaker, who was an aficionado of Pinot noir and an importer of the old French Pinot noirs, which was pre-1946, when the Frenchmen pulled out all of their ancient strain of very small berry Pinot noirs, because the vine population or the vineyard occupancy rate of these vineyards had gotten down so low after the war. Planted on their own non-resistant roots, their mortality had been high. What they planted were vines with much larger berries and really big producers. But lo and behold, although they got the big production, the wine was not the same. But the famous labels and the names still go just the same. They lost a marvelous, marvelous heritage for the enjoyment of humanity hen they lost those great little grapes. Fortunately at least, there have been a few, a very few, of those original small berry grapes that previously had lost their way elsewhere, like to Captain Neibaum’s vineyard, which he called Inglenook. Johnny inherited Inglenook with his sister and I inherited these grapes just through friendship with John. A long way to tell you how I got up there, but I got up there because I wanted to produce a great red Burgundy, veritable and in the classic old style. That rare little patch didn’t amount to more than about a quarter of any acres and . . .

GRD Have you budded it on and increased the size?

JG Yes, but not the size of the grapes; but yes, I’ve proliferated the tiny clone, still very small. Among the optimal criteria that was needed was a little cooler climate than we get in the Valley. I knew I had the correct genetic stock which is what you start with, the most important thing. And then I wanted good drainage; so it was best to be up in the mountains. I knew I’d get good drainage, and I’d also get a cooler climate. I finally bought a place up on Spring Mountain, close to the top; and this clone was transferred from the valley up to an elevation of about 1,500 feet. Where we get, oh, a difference of maybe eight to ten degrees cooler in the late summer than the valley. Also, we don’t get the scorching late afternoon heat as summer moves into August and September. The vineyard is baffled by the crest of mountains and the high trees that arise on the western sunset side, and it keeps that scorching sun off the vineyard for the last hour or hour and a quarter in August and September. So it’s ideal as far as temperature is concerned, and then the rocky soil is fortunately endowed with content in the form of a small calcium wash apparently a geological anomaly on the vineyard emanating from what we call Chalk Hill. This volcanic calcium, a form of carbonate, is something the ancient Pinot noirs have been bred to for thousands of years or more, all the way back to Charlemagne’s time; the rare vineyard environment of Domaine Conti around Beaune in France is over a kind of calcium dome. In a few places in France the calcium carbonate is so concentrated it has to be ameliorated. So I had calcium carbonate in the soil in a natural way, and I had good drainage; I had good altitude to keep the temperature down, good genetic stock; and then all I had to do was find the money to buy this place because the man didn’t want to sell it, and I had to make a loan finally, and it took me several years to persuade him top sell it to me. Finally, he said he’d sell and when he did, however, he was a smart and able, wonderful gentleman, he had another buyer lined up against me. So I really had to stretch; Johnny Daniels helped me figure out what the other guy was offering; and I nosed him out, thank goodness, because I got, I think, the ideal place to cultivate these grapes and in its own right one of the very beautiful places on the face of this earth with great and abundant spring water at its top, but never used to irrigate my grapes.

GRD Whom did you buy from?

JG I bought from a man named Richard Sheehan, S-H-E-E-H-A-N, I think that’s the way he spelled it. He was one of an old Irish family that had homesteaded the property and had planted grapes here. There were maybe 120 tons of grapes when I bought the property, all worked by horses, . . .

GRD No electricity?

JG No electricity, no tractors, no steam, no nothing, the only steam they had was from when they would make grappa up one of the canyons there, with the nice cold spring falling waters to act as a condenser and they raised their own hay and made charcoal for this market, amazingly self-resilient and capable folk. They fixed up their own hard liquor. I’m deviating from your question, however, it suggests how primitive things were. I found the old still abandoned up the canyon; I dismantled it completely because I didn’t want any trouble of any sort. Incidentally, there was an Indian up there who was in league with Sheehan, who helped him make this grappa or maybe he looked upon Sheehan as tenants of his. He camped with his squaw on what we called the upper meadow; he was called Chiefy. There’s more of a story about Chiefy which I might tell a little bit later that is possibly more legend than history. Well, that’s how I got up into the Napa Valley to produce this vino and inevitably to provide a healthy and appropriate environment in which to raise three fine sons, John, Steven and Anthony, away from the city whenever possible.

GRD John, your vineyard is known as Schoolhouse Vineyard; it’s the schoolhouse on Langtry Road, is it?

JG Yes.

GRD I understand, John, that the schoolhouse is quite old and so was the old house on the ranch, is that true?

JG Yes. They’re beautiful old buildings, much of the wood, if not all, was grown and sawn on the property. There are great big interior redwood boards that may be, of, 24 inches across, 2 inches thick, the rough saw marks are on them; and they were used to build the interior, and the framework was very rudimentary, and actually the buildings stood up mainly on these boards that formed the interior of the building, and then redwood rustic was tacked on the outside. Up until a few years ago, there were still people who used to come up there to see where their parents and grandparents had gone to school. One of the great people who went there, he was a grand character, was John McCormack. He owned the big sheep ranch at the end of what is now called Langtry Road, which runs from Spring Mountain Road through my property on through what is Fritz Maytag’s, used to be Hummel’s and previously Lanza’s and before, I believe, say about 4 or 5 miles from Spring Mountain Road, Schilling’s place and the road terminated out at McCormack’s ranch. The McCormacks went to school in this schoolhouse and any number of the former denizens of Spring Mountain. About the geography, this is in the Mayacamas Range, and this range runs north and south, more or less, and generally along the ridge dividing Napa and Sonoma Counties. Where we are the range runs up to a height of about 2,000 feet. There are many beautiful views towards the East and South from my property. Towards the south, some eight miles more or less, along the Mayacamas range and rising west of the village of Rutherford. Mt. St. John is visible, casting a charm over the Napa Valley; Mt. St. John is right behind John Daniels’ Inglenook vineyard. “Mayacamas” means “screaming mountain lion” as I understand, in the Wappo Indian language, and as there was no actual name for mountain lion, but it meant a mountain beast; it could have been a screaming wolf or a screaming coyote, but Spring Mountain obviously was named because of the abundance of beautiful, fresh water. It is a phenomenon, because it comes out at the top of the range. There’s been a lot of discussion, but no definitive proof of how the water gets there and where that water originates. We have high rainfall on the mountain; we get double the rainfall that you do in the valley, but this could hardly account for the continually running springs. During the drought we had a few years ago, which lasted for three years, those springs never ceased to flow; nor did they appreciably diminish in volume. The theory is that this water comes down from the Sierra under a deep layer of clay in the Sacramento Valley that could not bodily punctured the clay in the valley, so the water pushes up again, out of Spring Mountain. It’s just the most superb water for drinking; ladies like to wash their hair in it, and you can wash your dishes with very little soap. The mountain in many years has a little snow, but not every year. The trees are abundant and varied; there’s the greatest combination and range of varieties of trees on the whole Pacific coast, according, I believe, to the University of California. It’s just a beautiful place for everything from redwoods to various kinds of oaks, and the oaks seem to hybridize up there so that you’ve got all kinds of combinations with them and various leaves and acorns. Madrones are more prolific, and at one time they had big stands of cedar trees, pencil cedar; and it just seems that every single cedar has been cut down, as most of the first stands of sequoias have been cut down. We still have a few patches of sequoias; I have a few of them still on my property down in the canyons, it’s a marvelous place for trees to grow to monumental size. We have our share of poison oak, and we have a few rattlesnakes; we had our share of mountain lions until they began to diminish as people in California increased. I’m not completely against rattlesnakes, just somewhat because I was bitten by one about three years ago and survived nicely by my own first aid. I got conveniently bitten on the top of my wrist; so there was no trouble to suck the poison out right away, and I didn’t even go and see a doctor, and I certainly wasn’t going to put a tourniquet around my neck. Well, how far should I go on with this thing?

GRD You’re a brave guy. Well, I wanted to ask you, you’ve referred to Langtry Road, How did it get its name? You know that, don’t you?

JG Langtry Road was, really if there is a misnomer, it should never have occurred. As things developed up there, and with the road being paved, and the county had a little money; so they were beginning to put up signs saying what streets and roads were. We had one neighbor who is a lovely lade, still alive; and I understand Mrs. Blanchfield, who has sold most of her property there, went to the county and asked them to name it Langtry for some reason of her own. It was not, I understand, Lily Langtry after which the road was named, but for some other reason that Mrs. Blanchfield had. The county didn’t discuss it with anybody else that lived in the area — I think I would have been much nicer to have called the road McCormack Lane or something of that sort, which would have been of a historical background. That’s the almost meaningless story of Langtry Road. Now maybe Mrs. Blanchfield could give a good reason why she did that, but none of us can figure it out.

GRD John, at the base of Spring Mountain, there was a brewery at one time, wasn’t there?

JG Gunther, you’re absolutely right; and as a matter of fact, there’s a beautiful spot right at the foot of the mountain, down around below where, just where the county road begins to rise, and the Spring Mountain York Creek which comes down the road broadens up to a gravel spot and there was a brewery there called Foutz’ Brewery. Now this is heresay evidence, Mr. Detert, because you are an attorney; and I know that heresay evidence is not the best, but it’s good heresay because my father told me about this. He was there, and he went to Foutz’ Brewery he said, for many a nice lunch out under the linden trees which they had planted over this gravelly area; and they had some of the local lads from St. Helena who played instruments and gotten themselves up as a German band and wonderful Limburger cheese and black bread with Foutz’ beer. The horses and wagon were parked outside there, and it was a great rendezvous spot in the evenings and particularly when you’d get a cool drink of beer in the summertime. The unfortunate thing that happened was that the government decided they’d have to close Mr. Foutz up because of some of some altercation on whatever tax laws were in those days, and I don’t want to desecrate Mr. Foutz’ historical image; but be that as it may, the government shut him up, the brewery, I mean. Everybody bemoaned this fact, and they finally put enough pressure on: so the government relinquished their iron hold and let him open again. Well, you know what happened? Mr. Foutz did it all over again, and this time things went a little tougher, and they shut down the brewery forever. That’s too bad because it brought a lot of joy and pleasure according to my father, and it was a lovely beer that came right out of York Creek spring at the foot of Spring Mountain. And the irony of nature and the beauty of nature is that way back up adjoining my place to the south, we now have one of the greatest brewers in California; and that’s my friend Fritz Maytag, who has now bought the Anchor brewery in San Francisco, improved the brew to ultra, moved the brewery off the lowland point and up a bit on Petrero Hill. Here’s Fritz who’s producing fine wine grapes up on the mountain and in San Francisco he’s producing beer, which is superb, according to Hoyle and my palate.

GRD Fritz Maytag and you, your properties both originally came from out of the Schilling vineyards and winery area didn’t they, on the mountain?

JG I don’t recall that the Sheehans’ property I now own came out of Schilling’s. I believe Fritz’ did. Mine came from a different property going back to part of it which was called Kilduff. From Sheehan, I bought 40 acres of what was the Kilduff place; and I also bought the Sheehan property as well. Although my property is not large, one of the main reasons the mountain hasn’t become desecrated with population is because even then the holdings are still relatively large to the valley. I’ve got 160 acres there, and the Schilling property was much greater, and the Schilling property had gone through a number of hands before it became the Schilling property. I think that this is pretty well recorded; I could try to go through this, but it would be kind of redundant to do it; this is all in the records too. Some of the other people who have made records I see here are knowledgeable on that; no doubt they’ve covered the exchange of properties up there on the mountain. Further up on Spring Mountain, as you get near the top, my property is near the top, possibly within a couple of hundred yards in some places, you get up to a ridge where the winds blows like nobodies business from the north, and you get a very different kind of climate. So far as the climatology goes, once you get off on the slope to the east, you get a much more livable climate. The mountain lions used to come down from the ranges further in the north and follow down the top ridge of Spring Mountain. And every spring we’d hear them screaming, caterwauling; and if you’ve never heard a screaming mountain lion, you have no idea what a terrible sound it is. It’s really ferocious. It sounds like human beings being murdered or sacrificed, and it apparently is part of their mating operating, and the mountain lions settle down at, of all places, the spring of my property, which is one of the main springs on Spring Mountain. We’d give the mountain lion plenty of leeway and never intrude! I would love to see my friends; they’d turn blue when they’d hear this screaming match night. We knew what they were, and we just kept away. They would go down and often feast on poor John McCormack’s sheep; so this is one reason they had to give up their sheep ranching, because of the depredations of the mountain lions and the coyotes too. I’ve seen the mountain lions, interestingly enough; most people think they are big cats. Well, they are big cats just like African lions are big cats. These are big cats. I have seen them when they have been shot and stuffed, with measures underneath them, showing that the are 14 feet from nose to tail when they are allowed to get to full maturity. These are huge creatures that look exactly like an African lion, which I’ve also seen in Africa myself; they look like the female of the African lion but without the ruff around the neck. Seldom so they ever reach maturity anymore, before they’re killed, although they have laws now to protect them.

GRD How about bear up in this area? Do you have any of those?

JG Yes, the valley used to be full of grizzly bears, which is one of the most aggressive and dangerous animals the world has ever known. They were aggressive, and one of the sports of the Spaniards was to lasso grizzly bears and this kind of thing, a very dangerous sport. But, there are no more grizzlies; a few years ago a cinnamon bear, I think they call them, got down along the Mayacamas range and went through a few of the properties up here and frightened a few people . . . one of the ladies got one of the state game hunters up, and they chased this poor bear for a week and finally shot him. The bear went through one of my vineyard fences like a Sherman tank, and this bear weighed out as the third heaviest cinnamon bear ever recorded in California. I think if they hadn’t chased the poor bear for about a week, the bear would have had time to feed; and he might have been the biggest bear. He was an older bear, and apparently the younger bears get the older ones out when they get a little too old and chase them out, and this poor lonely bear came down there and was sacrificed on the mountain. The bear was loaded onto a truck by my friend Ed Learned, who was John McCormack’s son-in-law, and then taken down to, and through the village of St. Helena; and this you will find was a picture that appeared in the St. Helena Star. The springs on the truck were dragging on the ground, or almost, with this huge bear. Yes, I suppose that’s the last time that’ll happen up here because they’re just not too many of these creatures left anymore.

GRD John, about what year did you come into the Spring Mountain area?

JG I was smelling around there in around 1938 or 1939 when I was looking for a place to put this clone of Pinot noir. I found the property which had John Daniels’ encouragement and approval along with Schoonmaker in around ’39 or ’40, and it took me until about 1940 to decide to buy it, and by ’41 to have all the papers go through. Incidentally, I should say this for anybody who is interested in grape culture. I don’t pose as a wine maker; but after many, many years of following it and doing some of it, and with a bit of chemistry background, actually, I know something about what’s happening; but I do feel I know a great deal about the variety called Pinot noir and a lot about who we don’t know of its genetics, which is also what I have interested myself in up there when I moved this clone up to the hill. I moved the entire clone; I just did not take preferred buds because I knew by that time what the Frenchmen should have known, but they don’t know. They removed their vines and kept only the big producers, but they were looking for the bigger buck and volume. I was looking to keep this quality up for that wine that they used to call the king’s wine, the great Burgundy. So I took the entire clone from John Daniels; and we routed out the vines completely, and I took the clone which meant the leftovers, the righthanders, those with blue eyes, brown eyes, cockeyes, and so forth, which made the family, to keep the family mixture of that colony of grapes together. In technical terms, I realized that I must keep the genetic fidelity of that tiny clone absolutely intact and as a set, at least until I could unravel more of the mystery of the phenotype. Since then, I have perpetuated it and built it up to a few acres now from a fraction of an acre, but I have, through observation ad tagging the vines and the genetic problems which I think we are beginning to understand more of what is known as the phenotype. I have divided these phenotypes into subsets. Now I’m talking about a bit of mathematics and a bit of genetics, and this probably has no place in an informal document of this sort, but the science of subtypes and phenotypes has developed a lot further from the time of Dr. Wendell Stanley, who was a professor in this field at U. C., felt that we didn’t even have a good genetic doctrine until we could explain what the anomaly was that came about by the variation in the phenotypes of Pinot noirs. If we need any more detail on that, I think I could put out something like a book on the subject. It’s an interesting study all in itself. However, fine wines are produced of this kind in the vineyard; and then you need a fine winemaker who takes the good material and goes on form them; but without great grapes, you can’t make a great wine. This is what I set out to do, and I’ve made friends who have been, I think, among the top winemakers in California who have helped me produce this truly fine Pinot noir from my special little clone. There have been about five or six of them who’ve done it over a period since the time I put the clone in. I suppose that we had better go on, Gunther, here, and pick up what other general material you’re looking for.

GRD You had some relative by the name of Hartman that lived in the valley, I think, wasn’t it?

JG Oh yes, another character. Hartman was a Swiss relation of my grandfather’s who was courting a girl up in the valley, and my father used to repeat the story he heard of how Hartman used to row across the bay and by arduous transport get on up to the narrow footpaths of Northern Napa Valley, and unpack his saddlebag and put on a pair of striped pants, a morning coat and a high hat like Mr. Lincoln. This was just before he was about to get to the ranch of the beautiful girl whom he was courting. The first time he was on his way through, bedecked and highly bedighted his way, an Indian jumped onto the path and held him up, just made him stop. Hartman, quick witted, took off his hat and put it on the Indian’s head, feather and all under the hat; and this pleased the Indian so much that the Indian turned with a big smile and said, “Pasa, capitano.” – they all spoke a little Spanish. But every time that Hartman went up to see his girl, the Indian seemed to know Hartman was approaching; and Hartman always took a little gift for the Indian, which the Indian got to expect; but I think this is an interesting story because there’s more that happened later on that proves that this is just about the way things were up there in those primitive days and among savages, Indian and Grizzly bears.

GRD John how do you spell Paso, capitano?

JG Pasa, pass captain.

GRD Oh, I see. And the phenotype. . . .

JG [Spanish words}, pasa, pasa, capitano. And they called Hartman capitano because the Indian also knew a little flattery also didn’t do any harm.

GRD How about phenotype, that P-H-E-N-O?

JG P-H-E-N-O-T-Y-P-E-S. Phenotypes. These may be contrasted with genotypes. A genotype is an organism, wither plant or animal by sexual mating whereas a phenotype is the resultant organism, as it is affected by its environment and which may be reproduced from cells other than gametes (ova and sperms are gametes which go to make up fertilized seeds). By my definition of a phenotype, one expects a replicated biological carbon copy. For instance, a grape vine may be bred from a phenotype, usually arising form a graft of a certain tissue, often a bud. Of the two major kinds of reproductions I refer to, one is genotypic, nature’s way, and more often than no, a random way. The other way, phonotypic, and is in relative control of the result. From genotypes you can get hybrids, purebreds, etc. From phenotypes, in the sense that I use the word, you are supposed to get much more exact replication. The Pinot noir grape is an anomaly in the genetic sciences because their phenotypes vary widely as other phenotypes of other grapes do not. The mystery has been how and why these “man-made” offspring vary as they do. Apparently, from what I’ve been able to find, they nevertheless do follow doctrine but within a wider, more complicated and cryptic range. Dr. Wendel Stanley died with the idea they did not. To him, the biggest “monkey-wrench” in the genetic doctrine was an anomaly, a grape vine know as Pinot noir. As science continues to reveal more, it seems that this strange plant does not upset the whole genetic doctrine. I had the honor and the pleasure of knowing Dr. Stanley, and I feel my grape vines did too. We enjoyed, together with our discussions, some of the wines concerned with my cultivar. His contribution towards the knowledge of nucleic acid chains won him a Nobel, prize. I’ve found my phenotypes have characteristics and traits that suggest classifications as subsets to my set or clone. How these subsets show up varies far to widely to be explained by doctinaire genetics. Such wide variations of phenotypes now appear to be due to strange phenomena that I’m at long last beginning to learn more about, the possibility of heretofore unknown operating and migrating genes within chromosomes or helixes. Some of this is the Nobel prize winning theory of Barbara Crittenden, a wonderful American scientist at Cold Harbor, Long Island. She devoted her lifetime to researching the mysteries of the genetics of corn. She is an admirable person now well into her eighties.

GRD John, can you tell me briefly something about the wineries of the old days that you can recall?

JG When I bought my property in 1941, there were very few wineries up on Spring Mountain. A little to the northwest was an abandoned vineyard owned by the Conradi family, and there was a winery there which had fallen into complete disrepair. That has since, through a series of different owners, bought by Charles Hazeltine, a friend of mine, and then again sold in part to a man named Werner. It then passed to Keenan. This beautifully constructed winery is now operating, and the vineyard is now producing fine grapes. Then over on the mountain, beyond my place to the southeast, was the Schilling winery, on the hill, which is on the other side of the canyon as you come to Spring Mountain Road. It was also in disrepair but which was largely rehabilitated by Jerry and Virginia Draper as a charming and spacious dwelling. In part of the old winery, they stored a lot of beautiful old equipage and wagons and carriages and horse harnesses formerly used by the ranch.

GRD Between your place and the Draper place, is that your creek in the bottom there, which is between you?

JG Yes. Between me and the Draper place flow the south fork and the north fork and a couple of forklets of York Creek. The north fork of York Creek originates right at the top of my property and joins the north fork part down the mountain, all becoming one stream running into the upper two reservoirs used by the City of St. Helena.

GRD The Draper place is the old Schilling place, I guess, is it?

JG That’s right.

GRD And that was operated by Hummel, was it, and also I think Cal. Wine Company Lanza.

JG That’s exactly right. Hummel didn’t operate the winery. Hummel operated the vineyard. I think that Lanza was a vineyard operator or partner. Then the California Wine Company I think was something that Lanza was interested in; and between the wine company and Lanza, they sold out to Hummel and his cousins, likewise known as Herman Hummel, both fine men but quite different. They were often distinguished as little Herman and tall Herman, the former married and the latter a bachelor. As of this time, little Herman happily is still spry; but his cousin died a few years ago.

GRD And then Hummel sold out to Draper?

JG When the Hummels first acquired their large property, it was based on a complicated but interesting contract, concerning a loan and a sharing of profits; but assumption of all expenses became very burdensome for Hummel. Then Hummel sold part of his property to Draper. That was during the second World War; things were very tough, and it was very hard to get labor and so forth, and Hummel sold with tears in his eyes because he loved that area but kept the upper part of the property, which in later years he then sold to Fritz Maytag, who presently owns it. The whole area was and remains a superbly beautiful part of the face of the earth, forests, vineyards, lovely views, sparkling springs, and a great climate. The Hummels, like some of their early neighbors like the Volpi family, are very hard working, intelligent and beautiful people.

GRD Then, let’s see, you’ve mentioned Conradi and the Schilling winery. There was the Chevalier in there too, wasn’t there?

JG Chateau Chevalier was at the bottom of the road, just a little bit above Spring Mountain Winery, both of which have been reinstituted, both of which were old wineries on beautiful separate estates. One was the estate of the Parrott estate, and the other was owned by a man named George Hyde. Gregory Bissonet bought the Chevalier place, and Mike Robbins bought the old place below that and called it Spring Mountain Winery, although it is at the foot of the mountain. He has planted some of his own grapes and has had a lot to do with publicizing Spring Mountain because the recent moving picture, which is televised. Called Falcon Crest, brought a lot of visitors here.

GRD Now, do you care to talk about swiping of your genetic stock, the King Charlamagne and Chiefy, and so forth?

JG All right, let’s talk about some of the grape stock that grew on the hill when I bought the property. These were grapes that were largely what they called Green Hungarian; they has some Golden Chasselas; they also had Petit Sirah and Gran noir and Zinfandel. Zinfandel, of course, is an old grape in California, somewhat steeped in the mystery as to how it got here; and I just don’t think this is any place for a long discourse on that. I could have fun talking about it as so many other people could also. It makes a lovely wine that goes through various stages; it’s beautiful in its young stage and lovely in its medium stage; and as it gets older, it makes a very fine type of claret. One of the early and white grapes that was planted on Spring Mountain, however, was know as a Green Hungarian, which is tough-skinned, big producer; and this is one of the grapes that, for instance, Herman Hummel grew a lot of; ,and it was such a big producer that one year Louis Martini, Sr., who with a few other wine makers of the region used to get a handful of us grower together and give us a big feed down at the Niramonte Hotel, told all of the grape growers: “You guys, (and he used rough language, but it was in a very endearing sort of way, and everybody liked his way of friendly but unpolished expressions because it was Louis, Sr.’s familial way) you got one message this year and that’s to pull out all these gall damn Green Hungarians, they’re no damn good.” So a little gentleman by the name of Mr. Holmes, who spoke with a great English accent, who lived at the foot of the hill, got up at the head of the table and said: “Mr. Martini, I resent what you say about my Green Hungarians; and I want you to recant every word you say; I warrant you’ve made a profit on them; you’ve bought them every year, and now you are being very unfair.” So Martini again gets up to the head of the table and ponds the table an almost knocks it to the floor He said: “Mr. Holmes, what I say about the Green Hungarians I mean. He only kind of wine that grape makes is horse piss. I mean pure horse piss.” Well, there were only gentlemen at that table that night; and everybody sort of quieted down, and Mr. Holmes rushed to the end of the table and jumps on Mr. Martini’s back — Mr. Holmes is a little man; Mr. Martini a big fellow — and pounds his back; and we, Johnny Daniels, who is my host, and I were sitting together; and we separated them; and they went to it again on the street, fighting about the Green Hungarians. Before we got on the street though, Gantner, me, I had to put my fact into the thing, I said: “Listen, Louis, you should not label it Chablis which it’s not. Everybody’s disappointed because it’s a very poor example of a Chablis, if you call it by its varietal name, Green Hungarian — there’s a new mystique abut it, and it’s got a truly romantic name, and it has a unique and attractive greenish color — you can sell it as a varietal, you’d make some money on it.” Many, If not most, of those grapes were pulled out that following year; and other wineries labeled and produced them with increasing success, and the price of Green Hungarian grapes that were left rose, and with some competition the Green Hungarian wine improved, and for awhile it was one of the most profitable white wines that came out o the Napa Valley. It was often sold as Green Hungarian Mountain Wine. This is how the romance of the economy goes, fortunately coupled with just a little bit of good psychology. Louis Martini would never admit that this “bete noir” of his was anything but what he called it. Petit Sirah has been a misnomer in my book because they call it in America; we louse things up awfully badly, like we call Grey Riesling a Riesling; it isn’t a Grey Riesling at all — it’s a Chauche Gris. We call Petit Sirah in this country Petite Sirah, using the feminine form of the adjective for a masculine name. There’s no more masculine name than Sirah, which mean sire, sir; and apparently this is where the word “monsieur” comes. And Caesar and Kaiser; and you can’t think of using a feminine French adjective for a noun that’s masculine. But we’ve called it Petite Sirah ever since we’ve made the mistake in California — we seem to be using this bad French on our labels. I see recently in the last several years a few wineries now are getting to calling it Petit, P-E-T-I-T Sirah, instead of P-E-T-I-T-E Sirah. This is also part of the story of the way varieties change fashion; Petite Sirah is used basically as a blending grape, heavy in color; it’s one of the same family that produces some of the great wines in Chateauneuf-Du-Pape, and originally they feel it was a North African grape also called “Duriff.” A Carignane is an old French blending grape, and sometime called Mourastelle; it makes a big, heavy color; and the Golden Casselas, also known as a Spanish Palomino, from which Sherry is made, it’s basically a Sherry grape, a little golden grape with freckles; and it’s very closely related to the German grape which we call Gutedel, which is a grape grown in Southern Germany — cheap quality stuff. Now most of these grapes have all been taken out, and they’ve put in fancy varieties on the hill; and some of them have done exceedingly well, like White Riesling, which we all call Johannisberg Riesling. This is a grape that I think has got further possibilities, and they’re doing awfully well, and they were making a fine quality up at Smith Madrone out of that, and then a few people put Cabernet Sauvignon up in the mountains, but I don’t think that they necessarily do any better in the mountain than they do in this valley, but they do as well. Since the advent of Fred McCrea in about 1943 on the slopes north of me, white grapes have done exceedingly well have been Chardonnay and Johannisberg Riesling. These resulting wines by Fred McCrea at Stony Hill, in my book, have all the charm and beauty of really great white wines of California. Although Fred is no longer with us, his wife, Eleanor, continues to account for a distinguished and always limited production.

GRD While you’re about it, of course, you have pioneered Pinot noir up on the hill, have you found anybody else interested in Pinot noir?

JG That’s a leading question, yuh. With this clone and with some of the small success I had with the way the wine turned out, there was written publicity, published publicity; and shortly after one brief but learned article came out, I was in my vineyard early one morning during the middle of the week; and I found down in one patch of the vineyard a small pickup truck with a couple of men picking up canes that had just been pruned. So I approached the gentlemen, “What are you doing here?” He said: “Oh, we’re trying to help clean up your vineyard, Mr. Gantner, you’ll be burning these pruning.” I said, “The heck you are; you’re stealing my budding wood.” The said, “Oh, we wouldn’t do that.” I said, “Well, all right then, what the hell are you doing here?” And I got their names and license number from the truck; and I reminded them that they had enough on board there to be committing quite a felony. They began to appear quite ill at ease, and I found that this man was — I will not mention names — he was one of the leading nursery men of Sonoma Valley, whose business it was to sell grape stock and horticultural products from his nursery. I got a verbal promise from him never again to show his face on Spring Mountain, to get off my place very damn fast. I told my sons about it; they are three fine young men (John, Stephen, and Anthony) who all happened to be up there that weekend; and one said: “Dad, why are you always such a soft soap? Let that guy get away with those cuttings, did you?” I said, “Sure.” They said, “Well, why did you do that?” I said, “Because he was in a Petit Sirah patch, and he didn’t know the difference.”

GRD But he’ll find a difference in four years!!

JG That’s right Gunther. Another one has happened where I’ve had a guy get to a person with access to supposedly secure storage for some of my cuttings. When the thing was revealed and admitted to me, for the sake of one of the involved characters, I later decided I would try to forget that very wicked incident. This is what happens; certain people will steal and suborned others to get a rare genetic stock; and when used by the unknowledgeable or incompetent people, this can and does cause much damage. Another point is that these people who do this don’t realize that, in order to reproduce and copy the wine which comes form these grapes, one has got to retain the commercial fidelity and character of the entire set or clone. A clone is like a harmonious musical cord — which makes up the complex character of the wine. You can’t just take one subset of phenotypes of Pinot noir and produce you clonal character, as one might do with other varieties. You’ve got to have the right proportion of the subsets. When I use the word “set.” A mathematical term — a good analogy is a set of chessmen, you’ve got so many pieces — you’ve got kings and queens, knights, castles, and pawns. Their numbers are not all equal, and their functions vary with their classification. The whole makes the set. But if you are missing part of the set, you’ve got next to nothing. Take up checkers, it’s easier.

GRD John, Charlemange, do you want to talk about . . . ?

JG Oh, yes, a pretty little story about wine and my favorite variety again, Pinot noir, Charlemagne was Charles the Great, Charles I, no, Charles II, I guess. Anyway, there were a couple of Charles’s, either the first or the second, but he was also known as a Charles Barbarouche, Charles-With-The-Red-Whiskers.

GRD He was the Holy Roman Emperor, wasn’t he?

JG Oh, yes, yes, Holy Roman Emperor, that’s right. And he lived in Gaul, and he had these gray whiskers; but he was an intimate and close friend of the Pinot noir, which stained his beard. And his wife was always ashamed of him and said, “Listen, you lose your dignity when you come into court with your beard dribbled with Pinot noir.” He finally agreed to plant a few white grapes for his queen, which he did; and he ripped out a few Pinot noirs in the very area where they’ve grown for years and years until they were ripped out again for good, apparently, in 1946, just above Beaune, in the great little vineyard of Romanee-Conti and the adjoining area above the railway tracks. I’m speaking about Beanue in France, in Burgundy. Anyway, he planted some white Chardonnay for his queen and the ladies; but he still always got Pinot noir in his whiskers; he was very generous; he loved to share his wine with his military men and courtiers. This beautiful product goes all the way back for centuries and centuries to Charlemange’s time. This is the kind of challenge, the romance, that had something to do with my long years of interest and attention to this little grape. It’s a tiny little thing; it’s so small it hardly resembles any other wine grape, and it produces a small amount of no more than a quarter of a ton to an acre on my place. And this is relative, we’ll say, to other varieties like Cabernets, who will do 3, 4, 5, 6 even 7 tons under some conditions, to an acre. This is why it’s so expensive to raise this grape, and particularly when it’s raised and dry farmed and not irrigated. It must not be irrigated if you’re really trying to get your quality; you’ve got to send the roots deep, deep, deep down in the Mother Earth; and to get them to bore that far, I’ve had to plant three and four vines to get one vine that is viable; and that’s shy, it’s another reason it’s so costly to produce these things, in time, labor and effort. This is all kind of rambling, and I would — this is because we’re trying to put history of people, history of geography, legends and what have you, all together in one interview for which I’ve been grateful for the opportunity. If you have any further questions, Gunther, I’ll try to answer.

GRD Do you want to talk about Chiefy?

JG All right, another legend up here on the hill where we had the — where I inherited that still at the canyon where the Sheehan family made their own grappa. This was a product that’s made very easily, simply by distilling a good wine. You don’t have any mess; you don’t have any lees to throw away, very little smell. And up the canyon where there’s a lot of ice cold water running, I found this still; and Mr. Sheehan told me how they always — were never so foolish as to buy this product at a liquor store because they could make it much better and cheaper up there. I got rid of the still, which they ran, incidentally, on charcoal; they made their own charcoal out of mesquite wood or manzanita. Chiefy used to go around there with a little flask on his side, and he always had grappa in that, just to keep him going. The name Chiefy came from his squaw wife who was a good psychologist; and she just flattered him, calling him Chiefy; but he was no Chief at all, but she made him think so. Chiefy was out one night, apparently, hunting with his bow and arrow. The clouds play tag up there, among the woods; and it’s a very mysterious place under some conditions, and the time to hunt there is at night, and at the same time the mountain lions are also, out hunting deer very often. Chiefy was always followed at a respectable distance by his faithful squaw, because she was afraid maybe he’d fall down one of those canyons or something of that sort, keeping warm from that canteen on his side. But all of a sudden there was a huge, huge roar ahead of Chiefy, as the legend goes; an Chiefy stopped dead in his tracks, and the moon went behind the cloud, and he was there in total darkness, and he turned to look over his shoulder, and there he saw his squaw. In addition, he looked at her, and he said — and his squaw had never said a word to him — and he looked over and said, “Too damn much talk, time to have a drink.” And they had a little drink, and Chiefy knew that this was nowhere for him to continue pursuing a mountain lion with a bow and arrow when the mountain lion was after the same quarry that he was.

Rather than make a lot of comments, which Gunther suggested maybe on some of the current wines that are available off of Spring Mountain, I could simply say that there is a special character; and this isn’t because I happen to have a little place up there, but it’s because I knew this before I did, the special character comes from mountain grapes, not only due to the drainage, but it’s the kind of soil that we have up in that particular spot. We get a special radiation up there. The radiation is cooler. We get lots of radiant energy, but the temperature of that radiation is less — which is good for the wine, good for the grapes, god for the leaves, which makes photosynthesis that store the sugar in the grapes and all the goodies in the skins of the grapes. But I would rather not just take each wine and comment on them. They’re all current, available in small quantities; and I say that relative to the grapes that are grown elsewhere, when the wine is carefully made as it is by most of those winemakers, you get a wine that has a great deal of distinction and character all its own, because of it being quite high up on the mountain. And the higher you go the better. As you get down close to the valley, you get less distinction.

GRD Would you care to list the present wineries?

JG The present day wineries are, starting from the bottom of the mountain, Spring Mountain Winery, owned by Mike Robbins; Chateau Chevalier, which has just recently been sold by Bissonet — I understand that he sold it in two parts, the winery to one outfit and the vineyard to another; and then as you come up the mountain, there is nothing until you get close to the top again, and that should be Keenan — Keenan is very close to the top, and he’s on what used to be the old Conradi place; and then as you get to the top, you get to Smith Madrone, which is right at the crest of the mountain, a beautiful spot overlooking the whole area, as most of these places are; they all have an enthralling view from one spot or another because they look over the valley; and much of the year you look down over a whole sea of haze and fog; it looks like a sea with a few islands sticking up in the middle, as though it was a scene in a far-off Japan someplace. On the other side of Spring Mountain Road is a small lovely spot owned by a man named Fred Aves, where he’s built himself a stone castle and a perfectly beautiful winery, and he calls it Yverdon. Yverdon produces very little wine; it’s more of a hobby, I think, for his own predilection; but I must say that there’s one wine which I have tasted there that I thought was the best I’ve ever tasted, ever, out of California; and that was a Traminer, not a Gewurstraminer, but just a beautiful Traminer, made by a little lady winemaker by the name of, I think her name was Corazon, Kathy Corazon. And then in addition, what’s the other one you asked me about?

GRD Stony Hill.

JG Oh, Stony Hill, who I mentioned is my friend McCrea, who made the lovely Chardonnay. It’s north of Spring Mountain, but in some respects it could possibly be called the north flank of Spring Mountain, coming off the Mayacamas Range. Stony Hill’s bellweather has been that great and beautiful Chardonnay. They also have produced smaller amounts of Gewurtraminer and White Riesling at a time with experiments of several other small batches of wine.

GRD John would you have any prognostication as to what direction the Napa Valley wines in particular are going to go from here?

JG As I’m not professing to be a professional historian, I don’t know why I should have any more skill as a professional prognosticator, Gunther. But let me give you a little idea of what the trends are at this moment, and one can try to use some projections on these trends. In the last recent years, let’s say six or seven years, the consumption of California wines has gone over heavily to white wines, as compared to red wines; and the planting of white wines, white grapes, has therefore been much greater than the red grapes which have been neglected. This is more or less a fashion situation and an economic situation. It’s relatively cheaper to produce a white wine, usually, because it doesn’t take as much again and finishing and the last — the years that I’m talking about interest rates in America and the world have gone sky high and therefore it’s made it prohibitive to cellar large inventories of wine and the aging of wine and cost of interest has mitigated against red wines in favor of white wines which can be sold and drunk young. Although interest rates have come down somewhat, the prospects are and the hopes are that they will come down further; and the other interesting thing is that Americans are learning to drink more wine, and as further states in the union are opened to our California wine market, those who have learned to drink wine by learning to drink first maybe a white wine and then a red wine are beginning to find how interesting the complexities are of some of the great red wines. There’s no doubt in my mind that red wine requires a great deal more care, skill and certainly time and then some of the art of the blender shows up more in red wines such as great Cabernets and this kind of thing. Incidentally, Cabernets are blended as you know. Pinot noirs, the good ones, the real ones of the old days in France, were seldom blended. However, it’s an art. We are now, according to the trends in the last year, some of the groups that I belong to who buy wine and buy it in fairly large quantities for these groups, have shown a marked increase in the consumption of red wines again, which is very good. It looks as though we’re swinging back more to a normal relationship in the consumption of red wines vis-à-vis white wines. And I think you can project that onto a few years ands say that it may be that we’ll be back when we can afford to produce more fine and well-aged red wines and that we will have more good red grapes produced in the vineyards. Our red wine grapes in California are principally Cabernets and Zinfandels. And the rest of them we know very little about; and as a matter of fact, we don’t like, we won’t admit it; but we’re pretty provincial in some ways in our wine drinking habits out in the West here still. We drink very few white Bordeaux, for instance, we drink very few of the great after-dinner Ausles, Trockenbeerenauslese, and the Dequem. We drink very little Pinot noir, if any, because it’s hard to get, we drink instead Gamay, Gamay Beaujolais, which is really only a second cousin to the real pinots, cheaper and big producers. I think the red wines are going to be coming back again, and I hope so; it will be a great further addition to the art. California has produced a fine crew of professionals through the great work that University of California at Davis has done. We have other schools now that are coming along too, such as Fresno Sate University; and I think that the outlook for wine has never been any better, if you take it on a slightly projected, long-term look; and I don’t think you have to look for more than three or four years ahead for us to get over this situation where we have had, only for the last couple of years, an over production of grapes. But we’ve been able to make the wine and store them. I don’t think there has been any great suffering. I would like to see the wineries, however, be willing to use better grapes and to pay for better grapes because I think us grape growers come out very badly on the bottom line. I think the wineries figure where their profits should come, they figure that in, and then they figure what they’re going to pay the grape growers after they’ve had a chance to figure this year’s program; and the grape grower gets it in the neck. You’re not going to really improve much without improving the quality of the grapes that are grown. There’s not an awful lot more land; most of the land that is being planted today is planted because it’s all that exists, and there’s been a lot of marginal land planted that yield only marginal quality wines. It’ll grow grapes, but it doesn’t grow quality. You can grow all kinds of grapes on cow pasture, but you can’t grow quality on it. By that I mean there’s a lot of stuff that grows on 15-18 inches of soil, which is often underlaid with a big layer of impervious clay; and there the roots won’t go down but actually horizontal or up to seek sustaining irrigation. And so they have to irrigate the heck out of it, and you get enough volume to produce sugar-watered fruit; most years you get plenty of sugar, but you don’t get the quality that comes form deep roots into well-drained Mother Earth. The grape lands are more and more marginal. We’re finding interesting other areas slowly; they’re experimenting all the way down to the Santa Inez Valley, up in Amador County; but they all have different problems; and as you get to follow California wines, you can often easily distinguish from what part of the state they come from just by a good examination of the wine without knowing what’s on the label. The viticultural environments of California are many, diverse and distinctive. I won’t predict any further, but I do hope that with improved practices including better grapes right through to better finishing and cellaring, we will be able further to exploit the possibilities of more fine wines in California than we’ve ever had before, and particularly with the red wines.

GRD John, thank you for a very valuable and entertaining commentary.

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