Cover Story:

My journey from working in the orchards
to making world-class wine

AS TOLD TO DEBORAH GROSSMAN

I still remember my first visit to Shafer Vineyards. I was nervous.

This was my first big job interview and the winery was hard to find. It offered no flashy Shafer Vineyards sign or rambling Italian villa to announce itself. Only a mailbox marked a country lane where I turned. A long slow bend led through quiet stands of old oaks heavily bearded with Spanish moss. A quick jog to the left changed my life.

At the end of this thicket of trees, I was greeted with a breathtaking vista, a massive sweep of craggy palisades rising high against the sky. It was an awe-inspiring show of nature’s strength and rugged beauty. Nestled in the center of all this, at the end of the long driveway, I spotted a big oak tree and a simple, wood-framed winery building.
Moving closer, other details began to emerge — the smooth hillsides where vineyard rows were exposed to southern and western sunlight. Even then, I guessed this was a special place, an amphitheater of stone and soil, where fruit might grow spectacularly.

The job as advertised was assistant winemaker. During the interview, owner John Shafer and his son Doug, the winemaker, focused not on my grades at the University of California, Davis, or on my approach to cellar work or wine production. They wanted to know who I was, what my goals were, and why I wanted to do this kind of work. When John asked about my salary expectations, I told him I didn’t care about the money. I wanted the opportunity to make great wine. When I joined Shafer in 1984, we made 10,000 cases. This year, the 25th anniversary of the winery, we’ll sell about 32,000 cases of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and proprietary blends of Syrah and Sangiovese in 34 states and internationally. About 85 percent of our wine is sold in restaurants and stores; the rest is sold at the winery or to mail list members, who get the first shot at our signature wine — Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon.

ORCHARDS of DREAMS
I grew up about 10 miles north of Shafer Vineyards in St. Helena. My dad had imigrated from Mexico to California, where he met my mom while picking tomatoes in the Central Valley (where she was born). I was actually born in Stockton, Calif., and two weeks later, they packed up and moved to St. Helena to find jobs picking prunes and walnuts.

As a child, I helped them in the fields and orchards. Even then I tried to find ways to make the work more efficient. I remember once rigging up a way to improve walnut
collection by setting out buckets under the tree before the tractors arrived to shake the
nuts down. Lots of walnuts hit the metal buckets. And just as many bounced right back out like popcorn. My dad gave me credit for trying.

By junior high school, many of Napa’s fruit and nut orchards were plowed into vineyards. My father worked for a vineyard management company and during after-school hours, he gave me invaluable hands-on experience in viticulture.

During high school vacations, I worked on the bottling line at Louis Martini Winery,
where I saw the big winery side of the industry. By necessity, jobs were largely compartmentalized, so that someone who worked on a forklift in the bottling line area
would have little idea of what went on in the lab or the barrel room.

I couldn’t envision myself in such an environment and knew instinctively that I’d
need a different kind of place for my life’s work.

As a young person, it was not evident that I would be associated with wine or agriculture in any way. In the third grade, my mother had put me on a path that would
lead out of the picking fields. She signed me up for music classes and I eagerly practiced the trumpet. When our marching and concert bands competed regionally, I
enjoyed traveling beyond the slow-moving confines of tiny St. Helena.

The hours of trumpet practice paid off, and I was awarded a four-year Fulbright
music scholarship to the University of Nevada at Reno. I couldn’t wait to escape the
confines of small-town life. But by the middle of my freshman year, I missed the beauty and pace of life back home. And even though I loved music more and more, I felt a tug toward the life I’d come to know in vineyards and cellars.

To the consternation of all my English teachers, I’d never been an avid reader. That
changed at U.C. Davis when I picked up a textbook called The History of Wine during
my first semester. That fact alone steered me toward enology, the science of winemaking. I’d found a passion.

Along with the nuts and bolts of winemaking, there were other more subtle things
to pick up in college: an even tighter focus on detail, adjust your approach to the personalities (i.e. professors) around you, and use controlled scientific methods to solve problems rather than jumping to conclusions.

At Davis, I also experienced my first wine epiphany at a friend’s apartment. He served
an old Pinot Noir from Burgundy. It blew me away. I decided I wanted to taste wines
from all over the globe. On Friday nights, a group of fellow classmates including Marco
Cappelli, Pam Star, Francoise Peshon and Mia Klein* got together for themed BYOB
(bring your own bottle) nights of wine exploration.We tasted the wines of Bordeaux
and Italy, Rieslings from various regions and so forth. In this way, we plunged into the
world of wine outside the classroom and forged lifelong friendships.

the BEGINNING of a BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP
Three weeks before graduation, I was offered the job at Shafer, making me the first
among my classmates to secure a position. There I was, a 22-year-old assistant winemaker working with Doug Shafer, 26, who had been winemaker for less than a year. It’s a good thing we were young because those first years were challenging. Along with expected tasks such as fermenting and blending wine, we were carpenters, fork lift drivers, electricians and mechanics fixing things such as refrigeration units.

With the long hours of work came just as many hours of debate on every aspect of
the process. We discussed at length when to pick, what labeling machine to purchase and the type of wax coating to use on our corks. We deliberated about barrels and yeasts.

Even with the long hours, we still weren’t making wines that were winning over critics
and consumers. The team here realized it was time to challenge ourselves further.
We hired Tony Soter to consult with us. At the time, he was the winemaker at Spottswoode, whose wines we admired a great deal.

With Tony’s encouragement, we threw out our enology textbooks and every preconceived notion of how wine was supposed to be made. We started listening to the wine. Winemaking, I realized, was like a jazzy trumpet solo because it, too, came from intuition and experience. Musical solos aren’t scripted; the music comes from the
way you feel, what you hear and the environment. With wine, there is no recipe and
only practice gives you the power to improvise.

It was exciting to finally reach this phase of our careers because now we could start
taking risks and fine tuning our house style.

In the late 1980s, we began to rethink our approach to our vineyard and began immersing ourselves in sustainable agriculture practices. We planted cover crops such as barley and oats to enrich the soil. When the new cover crops attracted hungry gophers, we built hawk perches and owl boxes to attract the animals’ natural predators (rather than rely on heavy-duty rodent poisons).

We also began ramping up our hand work in the vineyard, training vineyard workers
to prune vines more surgically and pull leaves to ensure uniform fruit ripeness. This
process made picking and sorting grapes cleaner at harvest. Harvest is make-or-break
time for a winemaker — you can’t put the grapes back on once you’ve picked them.

Once the fruit is crushed, it needs to spend many months in a cellar, where countless
things can go wrong. Every surface that wine touches must be absolutely clean. Microbes lurking in the corner of a tank can spoil all your work. We continually work to improve the cleanliness and order of the cellar.

the SMELL of SUCCESS
As for new barrels, I stick my nose in each one. It’s tedious, but the idea is to literally
sniff out moldy characteristics which can ruin the wine. Each year we catch a few
off barrels. Corks live with your wine for years, so getting top quality is key. I’ll examine and smell a couple hundred each year from various batches.

We fine tuned the crush pad equipment and upgraded the bottling line. Doug and
I designed a first-of-its-kind stainless steel racking system for our red wine barrel storage room. The layout of the racking system made it quicker — and less labor-intensive— for my team to pull a barrel for sampling or bottling.

With just two full-time people and one part-time person in the winery operation, we work as a close-knit team. In the vineyard, my fluency in Spanish helps me explain
to the workers exactly how I want the grape clusters and vines managed.

By 1994, the winery had grown significantly since the early days, and that was reflected in some shifts of duty. Doug became president of Shafer Vineyards in 1994; I
became winemaker, and John took the title of chairman.

These hillsides have been named among the world’s top 25 vineyards, and honestly,
I wasn’t surprised. These vines continue to amaze me with year-by-year consistency.
The day we pick and crush produces must that is mouthwatering — jammy, juicy, with
a mouthfeel like liquor. The resulting wine is Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon.

Two elements came together for us in the 1990s. We had 10 years of hard-earned
experience under our belts, and Mother Nature delivered a string of unprecedented
vintages. With attention to detail on quality grapes and operations, Hillside Select
Cabernet Sauvignon has become, in my opinion, a world-class wine.

Three years ago, we introduced a wine called Relentless, a field blend of Syrah and
Petite Sirah. I was quite moved when Doug and John announced that they’d named the
wine to honor what they called my relentless pursuit of quality.

A GREAT BEGINNING
After almost two decades of winemaking, other accolades started coming. In 2002,
I was named winemaker of the year by both the Quarterly Review of Wines and Food
& Wine magazine. That same year, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund honored me at a
White House ceremony. I met President Bush, but the memory is a blur because it
was crush time, and I kept worrying about the grapes.

This latter honor was especially meaningful since it related to a world larger than that of wine. When is comes to community contribution, my friend John Shafer has long been a role model with his support for health centers for low-income and migrant
workers. I periodically discuss the importance of education to Hispanic students who
visit the winery. Doug and I currently share the never-ending roll call of winemaker
dinners and charity events.

Balancing work and family is very important to me and to Doug, who has become one of my closest friends. Being a father to my three boys is my biggest responsibility now. I coach their basketball and soccer teams and enjoy coaching their efforts in our
small vineyard at home.

At 43, and with a few good vintages left in me, I don’t spend much time wondering how I’ll be remembered. Although I will say this is an exciting time to be a part of the wine industry in California. In comparison to the celebrated wine regions in Europe, the industry is so young — merely 150 years old in Napa Valley. It’s great to be a part of the beginning.

I’d like to imagine that a hundred years from now, someone will open a bottle of wine
that I’ve had a hand in making. They’ll pour it into their glass, give it a taste and say,
“ Not bad.”

Deborah Grossman is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and columnist on wine and food. She likes to travel with her husband, cook with her grandchildren and discover new wines.

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