Regional Oral History Office the Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS Interviews Completed As of October 1998

Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Wine Spectator California Wine Oral History Series

Janet Spooner Trefethen John Vance Trefethen

TREFETHEN VINEYARDS, 1968-1998

Interviews Conducted by Carole Hicke in 1997

Copyright @ 1998 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well- informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrativ; materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in -?otherresearch collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable;

All uses of this manuscript are covered by legal agreements between The Regents of the University of California and Janet Trefethen and John Trefethen dated August 5, 1997. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley and to the Sierra Club. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreements with Janet Trefethen and John Trefethen requires that they be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Janet Spooner Trefethen and John Vance Trefethen, "Trefethen Vineyards, 1968- 1998," an oral history conducted in 1997 by Carole Hicke, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1998.

Copy no. Cataloging Information

TREFETHEN, Janet Spooner (b. 1949) TREFETHEN, John Vance (b. 1943) Winery Owners

Trefethen Vineyards, 1968-1998, 1998, ix, 10lpp.

Janet Spooner Trefethen: Colusa County family and background, Eshcol Ranch history, restoring the winery, 1968-1973, M & H Vineyards, marketing, distribution, prizes, public relations. John Vance Trefethen: family interests, archaeology, Kaiser Industries, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the sixties; Stanford, business plan for the vineyard; vineyard management, disease, irrigation, varieties.

Interviewed in 1997 by Carole Hicke for the Wine Spectator California Wine Oral History Series, the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS--Janet and John Trefethen, Trefethen Vineyards

PREFACE i

INTERVIEW HISTORY vii

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ix

INTERVIEW WITH JANET TREFETHEN

FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION Grandparents, Parents and Sisters Pack Trips and Horses The Colusa County Community and a Surprise Party High School and Rodeos Deciding on the University of Nevada Majoring in Journalism and Business A Year in France, Norway, Italy A Job in the Napa Valley at Sterling Vineyards Meeting John Trefethen at the Winegrowers' Foundation

TREFETHEN VINEYARDS AND WINERY Eshcol Ranch History Oak Knoll Appellation and More Historical Background Prohibition Times Restoration of the Winery, 1968-1973 Cooperation with M&H Vineyards Night Harvests Experiment with Mechanical Harvesting Marketing and Distribution, 1973-1997 The World Wine Olympics Prize for Chardonnay The International Market: Europe and Asia Public Relations Estate-grown Concept Food and Wine Concept

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TREFETHEN

FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION Early Years Agricultural Interest and Connection to Winegrowing Vineyard Beginnings, 1968-1973 High School Experience in Archeology Avocation as a Pilot Summer Jobs with Kaiser Industries University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1962-1966 Civil Rights in the Sixties Changes Naval Duty Stanford University, MBA, 1971-1972

IV TREFETHEN VINEYARDS Business Plan on Starting a Winery Janet Trefethen Planning for the Vineyard Planting Beginning the Winery, 1973 Sharing Equipment with M & H Vineyards Consistency in Style Making a Dry Riesling Opportunity to Replant Changes in Replanting Blending Different Barrel Types Subsurface Irrigation Pierce's Disease Walnut Trees as a Buffer Good Farm Management Winemakers, Vineyard Manager, and the Team Changes in the Napa Valley Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association and Napa Valley Vintners' Association Napa Valley Wine Auction Utah 1088 Endurance Motorcycle Rally Trefethen Children, Loren and Hailey

TAPE GUIDE

APPENDIX A Frank J. Prial, "Wine Talk," New York Times, April 20, 1994 B Alan Goldfarb, "25 years of Trefethen wines," Montclarion, May 10, 1994 C "How and Why 'Eshcol?'" D Charles Robbins, "Trefethen: The early years" E EshcollTrefethen Winery: Statement of Significance F Trefethen Vineyards: Wine Price List, Napa Valley Cooking Class

INDEX PREFACE

The California wine industry oral history series, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated by Ruth Teiser in 1969 through the action and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Wine Oral History Series with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The selection of those to be interviewed has been made by a committee consisting of the director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery organization; Carole Hicke, series project director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.

Until her death in June 1994, Ruth Teiser was project originator, initiator, director, and conductor of the greater part of the oral histories. Her book, Winemakinn in California, do-authored with Catherine Harroun and published in 1982, was the product of more than forty years of research, interviewing, and photographing. (Those wine history files are now in The Bancroft Library for researcher use.) Ruth Teiser's expertise and knowledge of the wine industry contributed significantly to the documenting of its history in this series.

The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on California grapegrowing and winemaking that has existed only in the memories of winemen. In some cases their recollections go back to the early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real paucity of information on the Prohibition years (1920-1933), although some commercial winemaking did continue under supervision of the Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry in subsequent years will be of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his or her own point of view.

Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its collection of materials readily available for the purpose. The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft Library.

Carole Hicke Project Director The Wine Spectator California Wine Oral History Series

July 1998 Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS Interviews Completed as of October 1998

Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industry, 1974

Leon D. Adams, California Wine Industry Affairs: Recollections and Opinions, 1990

Maynard A. Amerine, The University of California and the State's Wine Industry, 1971

Maynard A. Amerine, Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies, 1988

Richard L. Arrowood, Sonoma County Winemaking: Chateau St. Jean and Arrowood Vineyards & Winery, 1996

Philo Biane, Wine Making in Southern California and Recollections of Fruit Industries, Inc., 1972

William Bonetti, A Life of Winemaking at Wineries of Gallo, Schenley, Charles Rrug, Chateau Souverain, and Sonoma-Cutrer, 1998

Charles A. Carpy, Viticulture and Enology at Freemark Abbey, 1994

John B. Cella, The Cella Family in the California Wine Industry, 1986

Charles Crawford, Recollections of a Career with the Gallo Winery and the Development of the California Wine Industry, 1942-1989, 1990

Burke H. Critchfield, Carl F. Wente, and Andrew G. Frericks, The California Wine Industry During the Depression, 1972

William V. Cruess, A Half Century of Food and Wine Technology, 1967

Jack and Jamie Peterman Davies, Rebuilding Schramsberg: The Creation of a California Champagne House, 1990

William A. Dieppe, Almaden is My Life, 1985

Paul Draper, History and Philosophy of Winemaking at Ridge Vineyards: 1970s- 1990s, 1994

Daniel J. and Margaret S. Duckhorn, Mostly Merlot: The History of Duckhorn Vineyards, 1996

David, Jean, Peter, and Steven Ficklin, Making California Port Wine: Ficklin Vineyards from 1948 to 1992, 1992

Brooks Firestone, Firestone Vineyard: A Santa Ynez Valley Pioneer, 1996

Louis J. Foppiano, A Century of Agriculture and Winemaking in Sonoma County, 1896-1996, 1996 Alfred Fromm, Marketing California Wine and Brandy, 1984

Louis Gomberg, Analytical Perspectives on the California Wine Industry, 1935- 1990, 1990

Miljenko Grgich, A Croatian-American Winemaker in the Napa Valley, 1992

Joseph E. Heitz, Creating a Winery in the Napa Valley, 1986

William H. Hill, Vineyard Development and the William Hill Winery, 1970s- 1990s, 1998

Agustin Huneeus, A World View of the Wine Industry, 1996

Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry, 1974

Amandus N. Kasimatis, A Career in California Viticulture, 1988

Morris Katz, Paul Masson Winery Operations and Management, 1944-1988, 1990

Legh F. Knowles, Jr., Beaulieu Vineyards from Family to Corporate Ownership, 1990

Horace 0. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi, California Grape Products and Other Wine Enterprises, 1971

Zelma R. Long, The Past is the Beginning of the Future: Simi Winery in its Second Century, 1992

Richard Maher, California Winery Management and Marketing, 1992

Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, Wine Making in the Napa Valley, 1973

Louis P. Martini, A Family Winery and the California Wine Industry, 1984

Eleanor McCrea, Stony Hill Vineyards: The Creation of a Napa Valley Estate Winery, 1990

Otto E. Meyer, California Premium Wines and Brandy, 1973

Norbert C. Mirassou and Edmund A. Mirassou, The Evolution of a Santa Clara Valley Winery, 1986

Peter Mondavi, Advances in Technology and Production at Charles Krug Winery, 1946-1988, 1990

Robert Mondavi, Creativity in the Wine Industry, 1985

Michael Moone, Management and Marketing at Beringer Vineyards and Wine World, Inc., 1990

Myron S. Nightingale, Making Wine in California, 1944-1987, 1988 Harold P. Olmo, Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties, 1976

Cornelius Ough, Researches of an Enologist, University of California, Davis, 1950-1 990, 1990

John A. Parducci, Six Decades of Making Wine in Mendocino County, California, 1992

Antonio Perelli-Minetti, A Life in Wine Making, 1975

Louis A. Petri, The Petri Family in the Wine Industry, 1971

Jefferson E. Peyser, The Law and the California Wine Industry, 1974

Joseph Phelps, Joseph Phelps Vineyards: Classic Wines and Rhone Varietals, 1996

Lucius Powers, The Fresno Area and the California Wine Industry, 1974

Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, Perspectives on California Wines, 1976

Edmund A. Rossi, Italian Swiss Colony and the Wine Industry, 1971

Edmund A. Rossi, Jr., Italian Swiss Colony, 1949-1989: Recollections of a Third-Generation California Winemaker, 1990

Arpaxat Setrakian, A. Setrakian, a Leader of the San Joaquin Valley Grape Industry, 1977

Elie Skofis, California Wine and Brandy Maker, 1988

David S. Stare, Fumt5 Blanc and Meritage Wines in Sonoma County: Dry Creek Vineyard's Pioneer Winemaking, 1996

Rodney S. Strong, Rodney Strong Vineyards: Creative Winemaking and Winery Management in Sonoma County, 1994

Andre Tchelistcheff, Grapes, Wine, and Ecology, 1983

Brother Timothy, The Christian Brothers as Wine Makers, 1974

Janet and John Trefethen, Trefethen Vineyards, 1968-1998, 1998

Louis (Bob) Trinchero, California Zinfandels, a Success Story, 1992

Charles F. Wagner and Charles J. Wagner, Caymus Vineyards: A Father-Son Team Producing Distinctive Wines, 1994

The Wente Family and the California Wine Industry, interviews with Jean, Carolyn, Philip, and Eric Wente, 1992

Ernest A. Wente, Wine Making in the Livermore Valley, 1971

Warren Winiarski, Creating Classic Wines in the Napa Valley, 1994 Albert J. Winkler, Viticultural Research at UC Davis (1921-1971), 1973

Frank M. Woods, Founding Clos Du Bois Winery: A Marketing Approach, 1998

John H. Wright, Domaine Chandon: The First French-owned California Sparkling Wine Cellar, includes an interview with Edmond Maudike, 1992 vii

INTERVIEW HISTORY--Janet and John Trefethen

Janet and John Trefethen, founders and owners of Trefethen Vineyards, were interviewed as part of the Wine Spectator's California Wine Oral History Series to document their contributions to the history of California wines.

Janet Trefethen grew up in Colusa County, California, riding and showing horses and going on pack trips with her father. Along the way, she acquired a strong interest in agriculture. Graduating from the University of Nevada with majors in business and journalism, she spent a year in Europe, then took a job at Sterling Vineyards, where she met John Trefethen.

John Trefethen grew up in Oakland and Piedmont, California, and spent weekends and summers on the family ranch in Walnut Creek. He attended the Webb School in Claremont, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1966, served in the navy for two and a half years, and obtained an MBA degree from Stanford University in 1972. He used the skills he had acquired to prepare a full business plan for starting a winery on the property his father had purchased in 1968.

They began the vineyard plantings with six grape varieties: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewiirztraminer, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot. In 1972, they began making wine under the Trefethen Vineyards label. In their winemaking style--highly acclaimed--they aim for consistency as well as quality. "We're going to make wine that we believe complements the social situation that people are in, and wine that we like," John declares.

The Trefethens were interviewed in August 1997 in their winery offices, beautifully restored from the historic winery built in 1886.

Janet Trefethen is interested in the history of the winery and the local area, but she was on a tight schedule and did not have the leisure to detail the work she has done in uncovering this history. She provided an animated interview with lively gestures to emphasize her points.

John Trefethen is also busy as co-owner of Trefethen Vineyards. His relaxed and informal attitude during the interview belied the meticulous care he has devoted to making Trefethen wines a success.

They both reviewed the transcript carefully and thoroughly. I am especially grateful to Mary Ware of Trefethen Vineyards, who made arrangements, kept track of transcripts, and furnished pictures. This series is part of the ongoing documenting of California .story by the Regional Oral History Office, which is under the .rection of Willa Baum, Division Head, and under the administrative direction of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Carole Hicke Project Director

June 27, 1998 Regional Oral History Office Berkeley, California INTERVIEW WITH JANET TREFETHEN

I FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION

[Date of Interview: August 5, 1997]##'

Grandparents, Parents and Sisters

Hicke: Let's just start with when and where you were born, please.

Janet T: Do I have to? I'll tell you when, I'll tell you the date, but I won't tell you the year, how's that?

Hicke: Well, that's all right for today, but for historical purposes, fifty years or a hundred years from now--

Janet T: I was born in Woodland, California, on November 1, 1949.

Hicke: Okay. And did you grow up there?

Janet T: I grew up in Colusa County. My parents had the only white fence between Williams and Colusa.

Hicke : What was the fence for?

Janet T: Oh, the horses.

Hicke: Soyougrewupridinghorses? Iknowyoustilldoalotofthat, which we'll get to eventually.

Janet T: I used to tease, that's the way my dates could find the house. I'd tell them it was the only place with a white fence between Williams and Colusa.

'This symbol (##) indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript. Hicke : Well, that sounds good. Was there a school nearby, like for the first grades?

Janet T : I went to a Catholic parochial school in Colusa, which was ten miles away. And went to high school in Colusa, and then went to college at University of Nevada in Reno.

Hicke : Tell me about your parents and grandparents.

Janet T : I never knew my father's parents. His mother died when he was eleven, and my Grandpa Joe died when I was four, I believe. He was a farmer, and he farmed rice about thirty miles north of where my dad currently farms rice. My father, Chet Spooner, was born in 1910, and farms rice in Colusa County.

My mother--let's see, I probably should say Dad was mostly French. They came from France through Canada and kind of migrated down, and ended up in California. Their name was like Portaquiere--

Hicke : This is your grandparents?

Janet T: Yes, this is my father. Dad actually was born in California, but his parents spoke French to each other, but they would not speak French around the kids, because there was a very different attitude at that time in America, and if you were going to be an American, by God, you spoke English. So that's kind of my dad's background.

And my mother, Elizabeth Nelson, was the daughter of John Nelson and Elizabeth Hannah Nelson. Grandpa was Swedish and Grandma was Scotch-English.

Hicke : How did they get here?

Janet T : They had wonderful stories about their parents coming overland in covered wagons. Really fascinating to hear, and I can't help but think about my dad, who as I said was born in 1910, but he can remember going out and harvesting rice with a mule team that pulled an old reaper. Whereas today, he still actively farms at the age of eighty-six, and he has a highly mechanized harvester that will tell him how many individual grains they're actually losing on the ground. So it's a pretty dramatic change, but I guess we're here to talk probably about the wine business.

Hicke : Well, I think that's one of the pluses of doing some of this, is to get some very old history of the early Californians. I think that's definitely important. Janet T: My mom was born in California. She was born in Glenn County; I think she was born in Maxwell. My grandfather used to drive a delivery wagon--you know, a horse and wagon. He'd go out and deliver things. My mom was born in 1914 and passed away three years ago, and she was an amazing lady.

Hicke: Well, tell me a little bit more about why she was amazing, what influence she had on you.

Janet T: Let's see, Mom went to Heald Business College. She learned how to--she was a very good secretary. My dad also went to college and is a very interesting character. Dad went to UC [University of California] Davis, but I think it's very interesting, because that was at a time when education was not as highly sought after as it is today, and they both came from families that didn't have much money to send them on to school. Mom worked for the American Title Company, I think, and was a very good secretary.

I said she was an amazing lady; I wonder if I can put this into words without getting emotional. She could do anything. She was just--she was very practical, she'had a great business mind, but she also was creative and lots of fun. She was a woman that could go to a party at the White House and look terrific and fit in and act the way that she should, and she also could put on her jeans and her boots and go out with a bunch of cowboys and fit right in.

Hicke: That's a good illustration.

Janet T: And she gave a lot to the community, gave a tremendous amount. I have three sisters. I am number three. We're spread out by seventeen years. And she gave a lot to us.

Hicke: Both your parents must have had what we call family values that really stressed education, or did they develop that sort of ambition on their own?

Janet T: Education meant a lot to them. Of the four of us, I was the only one to graduate from collegq, and to me, it just seemed like a very natural thing to do. I mean, there was no question. I didn't think about doing anything else. That was just part of what I would do. You know, they made such a big deal out of it, and to me, I never realized how much it meant to them, I guess, until a long time after I graduated.

Hicke : You said "the four of usw--did you have a brother?

Janet T: No, I have three sisters. Hicke: Oh, three other sisters besides yourself.

Janet T: There are four girls. My poor dad--I guess he was--he kept on trying, but doggone it, you know, it never worked--to get a son.

Hicke : [laughs] I'd say he was lucky, probably.

Pack Trips and Horses

Janet T: But I think that Dad also had a lot of fun with we girls, in that we had good exposure from my mom in how to be a woman, and also from my dad, I can remember the first pack trip I went on with my dad. I was eight years old. We would pack in to the Yollo Bolly Wilderness Area to a place called Hammerhorn, and I wasn't quite old enough to shoot, or I wasn't really interested in shooting, but they'd go buck hunting. We'd pack in with our horses and a couple of mules for a couple of weeks. It was quite an experience, because it truly was a wilderliess area. I remember, you might see two people the entire time you were in there. I remember coming around the trail once, all of us--we're in a line, because it's a narrow trail up in the mountains--and we ran into some hunter, and he just couldn't believe his eyes, first of all to see some other people, but then to see these little girls. [laughter] It was a lot of fun.

I know that those times actually had a strong impact on my life in terms of independence and feeling like I could survive. I think that's important, out there in a wilderness area, that I could survive. I think that's important for people.

Hicke: Oh, yes. I'm sure that was an excellent experience for you.

Janet T: I had a lot of fun. My mom wasn't there; I didn't have to take a bath or shower. [laughs]

Hicke: Comb your hair, pick up your things--

Well, back to school: what do you remember about your school days?

Janet T: Just in general? Anything in particular?

Hicke: Well, what did you like best? What did you do after school, summertimes? Janet T: Well, the days certainly are different today. I have a son, Loren, who is fourteen, and a daughter, Hailey, who is ten. Our biggest challenge is trying to decide which of all these wonderful sports, music, whatever--all these opportunities that they have after school for us to go to. Are we going to soccer, are we going to dance, are we going to music, are we riding a horse? Which of these activities are we going to participate in and still get our homework done?

Whereas, when I grew up on a rice ranch in the middle of the Sacramento Valley--I mean, Colusa County is one of those few counties when California was really in its population boom and heydays, and California was growing by leaps and bounds--Colusa County was one of the few counties that actually decreased in population. And so we didn't have the opportunities of what we were going to go do.

And so after school, I just went to the barn. I would take care of the horses. I wanted something to do, I wanted to be busy. Mom did take me to tap-dancing lessons for a little while, and some piano classes for a while, but when I think about what she did for all of us, it was a ten-mile drive to get anywhere. And you know, when you have four kids, that's a tough thing to haul everybody around and get everyone to their proper places at the proper times.

The Colusa County Community and a Surprise Party

Janet T: One of the things I would like to say about growing up in a community like that, and one of the greatest things, and I think that people experience it less and less in today's world, is that there was this tremendous bonding and loving that came from the community. There were the Spooners and the Dwyers and the Joneses, and there was a unit of all these families, and we all went to Santa Cruz together in the summer for two weeks. We had the opening day of dove season, which was major, and we all went out and we'd have a big shoot, and then we'd have a wonderful feast of some kind afterwards. There was the opening day of duck season, and there was the opening day of pheasant season. And there was the annual Easter egg hunt. The Easter egg hunt continues today. I take my kids; they are the third generation. You see the parents that are still around that were the grown-ups when I was a little girl, my friends who are now grown--and their children. When my mom passed away, and she was loved by everybody in the community; I've never seen--I mean, there were people pouring out the church, because they couldn't fit in. There's this tremendous tradition that you cook something and you take it to the house of the person that's passed away. We probably had 250, 300 people that came over to the house after the service, and we didn't cook anything. But we had all sorts of food to put away after everyone left. I mean, just the generosity of the community is very overwhelming, something that I feel really fortunate to have grown up with.

What do I remember about school? I remember the nuns in their black habits, and how hot they must have gotten in that hot, hot country. Because there was no air conditioning in the schools. The penguins in their hot outfits. I was always very active in school. I was student body president of my grammar school. I was student body president of the high school, like one of the first women, or the first girl, to do that, I don't remember.

Hicke: Did you have to campaign for that?

Janet T: Oh, I campaigned, yes, but Mom had lots of practice at this, because both of my older sisters had campaigned for something in school, and it was so funny. There was a tradition, and being a Spooner, we'd get these little plastic white spoons and you'd write "Vote Spooner for--" whatever it was. We'd sit around and we'd write on these plastic spoons and put a ribbon around, and then we'd pass them out to everybody.

I was always very involved in making parties happen. I'd do all the d6cor for the junior prom and the Christmas formal, that kind of thing, which I think again was an offshoot of my mom's. She loved that creative part, and having a party. I think that still carries on with me today in the wine business.

Hicke: Yes, I can imagine it might be very helpful.

Janet T: Just that celebration coming from those feasts that we would have, the annual dove hunt, the annual day of whatever hunting season opened, and sharing that time with all our friends, those were great memories.

And then putting on parties. I guess--I must not remember. that well, because I can't remember if it was the fifth grade-- I'm inclined to think it was the fifth grade. On the ranch where I grew up, there was the main house, and then there was a little house out in back that was vacant. My mom was born on December 17 and my dad on December 19, so I decided I'd give a party for them. [laughs] When I was in the fifth grade! And I got a girlfriend to help with this.

Hicke: Was it a surprise?

Janet T: Yes, it was a surprise party. So I took that little house, and I started decorating it. I'd come home from school, and it was too wet to ride, so I'd go out in the little house and start decorating and putting these little Christmas scenes up and everything.

Anyway, and then I made tuna sandwiches, and what else? I made some other things, and we sent out invitations to all Mom and Dad's friends--I hope they were their friends! [laughter] They were who I thought were their friends. [tape interruption]

I can remember Dad trying to not offend me and sneaking off to our house, to the main house, to get some booze, because I think I had punch and milk or something like that, but you know, the grown-ups wanted--I hadn't thought about that part. I'd forgotten about the alcohol. So that was funny.

High School and Rodeos

Janet T: Grades? I got good grades. I thought I did pretty good until I saw my son's report card this last time around. He got straight A's.

Hicke: Oh, good for him.

Janet T: But I had good grades.

Hicke: Was there any particular subject that you liked? Like science and math, or literature and art, or--

Janet T: No, I think I still came from that era when the boys were supposed to be better at math, and the girls--

Hicke : Yes, I think it's still--

Janet T: And I didn't need to fight that uphill battle.

And in high school, it was all college prep. I did all the classes you were supposed to. I think I liked P.E. [laughter] Hicke: Tell me about your horses.

Janet T: My horses. Which ones?

Hicke: Well, the ones you rode growing up.

Janet T: When you grow up on a ranch, you kind of look for things to do, and my mother always had this great love for horses. But she never rode. And one of the other treks that the community had as a group was to go into Black Butte, all of us. This was before they ever built Black Butte Dam. I think it was in that general area. And we'd pack in there for a week, but it was like picking up part of Colusa County and moving it over there.

There was a whole group of us that would ride. I had girlfriends that lived in Colusa, and on the back roads we'd ride and meet each other. It was a good ten miles. They'd start out in the morning from their house, and I'd start out in the morning on my horse from my house, and we'd meet halfway. [tape interruption]

Oh, I guess that's something I could say that was quite an experience for me. In my summers, Mom would take us on the show circuit, and we'd spend a lot of time hauling horses and going to horse shows. It was only after I turned sixteen that I got a really good horse that I could go to the bigger shows and win. My parents let me haul it by myself. I hooked up the horse trailer. I can remember driving to a show in San Jose, and you know, from Colusa County to San Jose was kind of a long junket for a sixteen-year-old girl by herself with a horse trailer. But it seemed really natural to me.

Hicke: Did you have to have some training in how to show the horses?

Janet T: Well, I should have had a lot more. I would like to have had a lot more, but my folks didn't want to spend much money on that, so I'd get to go to a lesson maybe once a month over in Pleasant Grove.

But what I did do that was fun is Mom--this was Mom--she got me signed up and sponsored by the, I think it was the Colusa County Chamber of Commerce to be Miss Colusa County so I could go down to the Salinas Rodeo and run for the Sweetheart contest. Because Mom thought that would be a lot of fun, a fun thing to do. So we did that, and there were seventeen girls that competed. You had to represent your county. Lo and behold, I won. It was really amazing. It was judged on horsemanship, scholarship, and personality and appearance. You had to go up and present yourself on stage one night, and there was a specific horsemanship pattern that we ran, and there was a scholarship test that we took. It was just really loads of fun, because I met so many really neat gals.

The most incredible part for me, I think, was that the girls are all lined up in the arena where the rodeo--rodEo [corrects pronunciation]--you know, you're in Salinas; I had to learn how to say rodEo. It's the Salinas RodEo. Anyplace else in the world, it's Rodeo. But all the gals are lined up there on the track and they announce the winner--me! So I got off my horse and walked up. And the newspaper, the Salinas Californian, had my name written in red and three inches high, I'd never seen anything like it before. And nobody knows who's going to win, but they've been able to run it through the news presses, and they announce it and pass it out, and it was just amazing.

Hicke: Do you still have a copy of that?

Janet T: Oh, you bet, I have a copy of that in my scrap book. And the people down there were just so wonderful. I won a $500 scholarship to the college of my choice, which I hate to say-- that $500 went a lot further then, because that talks about the time difference, but that helped a lot.

I remember they used to bring over the boys, the military soldiers from Fort Ord would come to the rodeo, and after you became sweetheart, then you had to stay and reign over the rodeo for the next three days, and wave to them all. It was so much fun, and the military guys were there and you'd go riding by on the track, and there would be this roar that would start at one end, and you'd keep riding by, and the roar would just continue.

Hicke : A wave.

Janet T: It was incredible, it was like a wave.

Isn't that funny, the things you do remember? Anyway.

Decidinn on the University of Nevada

Hicke: How did you decide where to go to college?

Janet T: I think my mom did this again. I was very influenced by her, and I had grown up in a small community. I think there were 400 kids in all of my entire high school, which covered four years. My graduating class had a little over 100 kids in it, and it was the biggest graduating class that the county had had, I think, maybe ever.

So despite the fact that my parents had really tried to get me to go away to school to Santa Catalina, I didn't want to leave home, and I think Mom was pretty smart in knowing that I was relatively nalve and had been protected an awful lot in my life. I was--was it '67, '68?--the fall of '67 was my first year as a freshman. I had grades and the extracurricular activities to go to UC Berkeley, but at that time, if you'll recall, Vietnam was a very hot topic.

Hicke: Berkeley was a hot campus.

Janet T: And Berkeley was a very hot campus. So Mom had said, "What about UC Davis?" and we both agreed that it was too close to home. I needed to have the experience of being a little farther away. So we looked at Claremont College down in Orange County, and I think when I went it was kind of smoggy or something. I wasn't real impressed--

Hicke: Probably it was.

Janet T: --with the area. I didn't really want to do that. And we also looked at University of Nevada, and my folks had a cabin up at Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side. I'd skied some.

I kind of liked skiing, and it wasn't so far away that I couldn't go home some of the time, and so I ended up at UNR, for better or worse.

Hicke: What did you take?

Janet T: I took 101 everything. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I'm kind of a curious individual anyway. I knew I wanted to graduate, but I didn't know what in. So I took 101 everything to learn a little bit about everything, to try and get a little bit better direction.

Majoring in Journalism and Business##

Janet T: For some reason or another I ended up in the Journalism Department, and I also took a good number of business courses, business school. Dad had always pressed business: "Why aren't you taking bookkeeping, Janet? Take some bookkeeping." So where I was going was journalism and business. It's a good combination, because I think that if someone wants to start their own company today, you have to know how to market yourself. You've got to know something about marketing, and when I say marketing, I mean that both from a P.R. sense and from a business sense.

And so my option in journalism was public relations. That's what I specialized in. I also took quite a few classes over in the business college, and I think that's a healthy combination to have. I would encourage other people to do that.

Hicke : Well, it's clearly been successful for you.

Janet T: I raced for the University of Nevada; I was on the girls' ski team, which helped me meet people and helped me adjust to school, because I didn't know anybody, and I was pretty unhappy when I first went there.

Hicke: Yes, it was a big place. A lot of unknown people, I'm sure.

Janet T: Yes. I continued on, I was very active in student government, and I was a senator-at-large representing the entire campus as a junior and as a senior. It was a very interesting time to be in school, because of Vietnam, because of the draft, because of the black-white situation. That got a little spooky too, when you were in my shoes coming from such a tiny community without exposure to all this.

Hicke: Did they have any trouble on the UNR campus? Civil rights disturbances, or war protests?

Janet T: There were so many protests going on. I think I was in my senior year taking a class in revolution, and to get extra credit you had to go to UC Berkeley for a weekend and take some seminar, which, boy, did that turn my eyes around, in terms of comparing the two campuses. At the time, Jim Hardesty was our student body president, and we had something called "We Appreciate Ed" Day. N. Ed Miller was our president, and we all got together, and we marched for him. Which made national news, of course, because everybody else was marching against Vietnam.

And there were definitely some of those marches for sure. Reno couldn't avoid that, as rednecked as it might have been. So there was that, but we also had the other.

Hicke: You had a positive approach. Janet T: Exactly. We wanted to show a positive aspect, and that all college kids weren't bad. And that worked pretty well.

Hicke : So you graduated with a major in journalism and--

Janet T: Graduated with my degree in journalism.

Hicke : What year was that?

Janet T: It was 1971. And you know, even then--I think I was right on the cusp of--do I want to say the feminine movement almost--I was just a little bit ahead of it. Because it was still, I can remember going around and applying for jobs at various places, and the first thing I was asked was, "How fast can you type?" With a college degree, in 1971.

I had done a couple of things that were really quite interesting. I had interned with the press secretary for the governor of Nevada as my internship program in the Journalism Department, put on an event or two for him. It was Governor O'Callahan at that time.

Then when I graduated, I didn't have my heart set on being a reporter; I was still kind of looking around, quite frankly--I learned that I could make a heck of a lot more money as a cocktail waitress at the Top of the Wheel at Harvey's than I could going to work for a newspaper or P.R. firm.

Hicke : That does not surprise me.

Janet T: And I wanted to make some money, and I wanted to go to Europe. So I spent my summer and up until October, I graduated and went to work as a cocktail waitress--

Hicke : Oh, I think that's fabulous.

Janet T : --at the Top of the Wheel at Harvey's Wagon Wheel. It was great, because I could live for free at my folks' place there. But you know, you made money--I did pretty darn good, actually. It was pretty lucrative. I hustled. When that place was busy, I hustled.

Hicke : It's hard work, I think, also. A Year in France, Norway, Italy

Janet T: Oh, it can be, but I don't like having a lot of time on my hands, and so as long as they were busy, I was happy. But in October, all the tourists went home. Actually, they went home in September, and things really slowed down in October. I'd been talking to my folks, and I'd set up a--I'd learned about a French program in a little town in France called Besanqon.

Hicke : Oh, yes.

Janet T: You know Besanqon?

Hicke: Iwastherelastspring.

Janet T: You were? What were you doing in Besanqon?

Hicke: Traveling around.

Janet T: Nobody goes to Besanqon.

Hicke : Oh, yes, we did.

Janet T: And did you go to the citadel?

The citadel--Besanqon was--the whole Europe experience was a very good one for me. But I went to Besanqon because I wanted-- I'd had two years, I guess, of French in college, and I wanted to go to Europe. I didn't want to just travel around and be a tourist. I wanted to put my feet down somewhere and feel what it was like to live there and to be a person there.

I went to Besanqon because they had a Centre Linguistique Applique, and it was an audio-visual method of learning French. I think I only had one year. But anyway, so that became home base for me.

I had asked if you had seen the citadel on your visit to Besanqon because I remember it having a very strong impact on me. I think my trip to Europe in general had a very strong impact, but getting back to the citadel, it was an old fortress that had been built in Roman times, on the Doubs [River], they always had water to help them set up their fortresses. During World War 11, the Germans took Besanqon. They went to the citadel and they killed some of the leaders of Besanqon.

I remember when I was going through the citadel, some French mother was talking to her wee little children about how to hate the Germans, and explaining where they had tied the mayor or whoever it was, and that they had shot him right there in front of everybody. And you could see the hatred that still existed.

That had a very strong impact on me, because it gave me a little bit of a feeling that the Europeans still had, from the war, and it also made me think, How are those young people ever going to get along with their neighbors? That this was a new era, that you couldn't bring your kids up like that if everyone was to really get along. Who could ever forecast at that time that the Berlin Wall was going to come down, and the changes that have certainly transpired? But that was fascinating for me, Europe.

The other thing, my mom had always been a really terrific cook, but I was probably one of the pickiest eaters to ever walk the earth. I must have driven her nuts, because I would only eat this, and I would only eat that. But she really was a wonderful cook. Many of her recipes make up my repertoire today.

But in Europe, even in the cafeteria, the food tasted so good. And it was that emphasis on freshness, and boy, did that awaken my culinary interest to--I'd always loved to bake. I started making cookies in the fifth grade, and I'd always make bread, special things for my friends at Christmas time to give them--yeast breads and whatnot. But this really--oh, boy, did things taste good. It was not that I wanted to eat a lot more, it's just that the flavors were so wonderful.

And I also learned about wine. I lived with a French family for a while, and you just automatically sat down at the dinner table and everybody had a glass of wine.

Hicke: Was that your first experience with wine?

Janet T: Other than some of the hunters that used to come for the opening day of whichever hunting season, and they would bring wine with them. And I always thought they smelled so good afterwards. And the priest as well at church, after communion, he'd come over and have breakfast some of the time at the house, and I thought he smelled so good. So I would get a little bit of wine when the hunters would come, and I thought that was a pretty nice way to live.

But Europe was what really did it.

Hicke: Did the family you lived with drink their own local wines, or-- Janet T: You know, I want to answer that, but I just remembered, it wasn't necessarily Europe that did it. I wonder what really did do it, now that I think about it. Because I remember going out in college on dates, and I never really enjoyed spirits, the hard stuff. We'd go to a bar, and if they didn't have wine, I didn't know what to order, because I didn't like any of those other things.

Hicke: So you were drinking some--

Janet T: And so I was drinking wine then. I remember Robert Mondavi Gamay Ros6, right? Their Gamay. And that's--when I couldn't really afford it, boy--that's what I really stepped up to. I remember going out a couple of times with older guys that were out of college, and if they'd order a bottle of Lancer's or something, ah! You knew, that was pretty wonderful.

But then I think the wine in Europe just reinforced it, and the family that I stayed with, they only took in boarders because they had to. Vin Joly, that's kind of what they got, and they would take the bottles back to the store and get them refilled from the barrel. But still, everything tasted so good. The whole Europe experience was very positive for me. I learned a lot.

Hicke: What were you doing there, like during the days?

Janet T: I went to school. In Besanqon, I went to school at the linguistic center. How long did that last? I guess I went in October and I left Besanqon--you weren't there in the winter. But it's a very, very cold place. It's surrounded by the Doubs. Besanqon is in the center of the Doubs. And as a result, you get that heavy fog that comes in in the winter. The people there were really relatively cold. They were very similar to that climate. It was hard to break into really knowing those people. And I'm a California sunshine believer, in that I really think that sunshine affects people's attitudes. I really do.

I went from Besanqon up to Norway, and it was warmer in Norway. I spent Christmas up in Norway with--University of Nevada Reno used to import Norwegians to ski--I'm going to have to shorten this up so we can talk about Trefethen.

Hicke: Let me stop a minute--[tape interruption]

Janet T: Anyway, I guess we could probably leave that. But it was warmer in Norway. And then I found--and maybe it was because I was with a very lovely family--but the people were very friendly, and it was a fascinating experience.

After that, I went by myself down to Rome, and through Verbiers; I skied Verbiers, did Rome. And the people just were lots friendlier where there was a little sunshine.

A Job in the Napa Valley at Sterling Vineyards

Hicke : Yes, I think there's something to that. Okay, and then you came back, and what happened then?

Janet T: Let's see if I can make it short.

I had a couple of different jobs, but I think the one probably that relates most to me today is, before I left for Europe, I had come to the Napa Valley, and I'd left my resume anywhere and everywhere that I thought anybody might be interested. Mom and Dad had friends here, with the Woods, that live on Zinfandel Lane. Betty Wylie's mother, Mrs. Foot, had a place over towards Alexander Valley--Knights Valley I guess is where it was--and we used to come maybe once or twice a summer and stay with them, and I'd always thought the Napa Valley was a spectacular place. And by then, I really knew that I loved wine.

And the other thing I had learned about myself is that I love agriculture. I really am tied somehow to the soil. So I thought the Napa Valley would be a terrific place to live and work.

So when I got back from Europe, I got a call--how did all this happen? I originally went to work for Sterling [Vineyards]. Sterling was owned at that time by the Sterling Paper Company, of which Peter Newton was the president, and Martin Waterfield was a vice president, and he was my boss. He hired me to do some work for Sterling. And at that time, Sterling was not yet built. They had a little trailer at the bottom of the hill where they are now. They hired me in a P.R. fashion, and my first mission was to go to any and all wineries and critique the tour. They wanted to know what kind of a tour did who have? It included everything from the type of the tour, quote unquote, from Martin Waterfield, to the kind of toilet paper they used in the restroom. Then I wrote up a big paper, of which I really wish I had kept a copy. Hicke : You don't have a copy?

Janet T: And I handed out--it was like being back in college again--I remember the deadline of trying to get that paper done.

I went to Martini Winery here in the valley. I went to Krug. But there weren't very many wineries at all that had any kind of a public tour. They did not exist. And I also remember going down through Monterey--what was the place, and what winery? Anyway, I went to a number of those places, and criticized the tour, and came back, and reported to Martin.

Meeting John Trefethen at the Winegrowers' Foundation

Janet T: Then they wanted me to go to work in San Francisco for them, because they really weren't quite ready to fire up the operation here. I lived in San Francisco for long enough to realize that it really wasn't my cup of tea. And so we parted ways, and I went to work for the Winegrowers Foundation in St. Helena. At the time, we were a three-person operation. There was Ren Harris, who ran it, and Rafael Rodriguez, who was the field man. Sally and I were the office staff.

This was a fascinating time as it relates to the wine industry, because one of the things the Winegrowers Foundation did and its real reason for existence was to be able to give grape growers a labor benefit package that they could give to their people that worked in the field, as an alternative to Cesar Chavez. And Cesar was in his heyday at the time, and he was marching--he marched in the Napa Valley.

And there was a major--Proposition 13 was a proposition that we spent so much time on. Sorry I can't remember all the details.

Hicke: The Californiaproposition?

Janet T: Yes.

Hicke: That had to do with property taxes, as I recall.

Janet T: We spent so much time that year working politically, trying to help it all get set up so that people could offer their own labor packages and whatnot. I'm sorry, my memory is vague on all of this, but we spent a lot of time doing that. And through this whole experience, I learned that at the time, I guess to be politically correct you want to say Hispanic --I learned that the Hispanic people felt that a vote against Chavez was a vote against Mexicanism. They didn't think logically through benefits. They didn't look at it from a logical standpoint as we would. And I think the reason why is most of them had never had the opportunity to have those benefits and really couldn't compare packages.

But it was a time when they really didn't look logically at what was offered to them as a choice. Cesar stood for me, "La Raza," he stood for the Mexican people. There was this tremendous emotional feel that went on with it that was very strong at that time. Things are quite calm and have been quite calm in Napa Valley for ten years now, but it was hot then.

So then you're going to say, okay, how did I end up at Trefethen? One day, John Trefethen came in to the Winegrowers Foundation to learn more about it, and so I sat there and told him all I could. Three hours later, he followed me into the bathroom and asked me out. I mean, our conversation went on for that long a time, learning about wine growers and what he did, and what we could do for Trefethen, because it was a big property, and it would have been a nice jewel for us to have in the organization.

And then I say he was looking for cheap labor, because he was going to start the winery, so he married me. [laughter] He didn't know it was going to be so expensive!

Hicke: So you got married.

Janet T: We got married in August.

Hicke : This was '72?

Janet T: '73. And we planned our wedding and everything around harvest, because that was critical, and it was our very first crush. This building was not at all then as what you see today. When I first saw this building in '73, it hadn't been used as a winery since-- it was used as a storage facility in 1940, and that was the last use it ever saw. I really don't know the last time any wine had been made here. It was probably in the twenties. The place was really falling apart, and when I first saw it, I asked John--we weren't married then--I asked him if I could keep my horse here. It looked very much like an old, run-down barn, and there was nothing but dirt floors in it. I1 TREFETHEN VINEYARDS AND WINERY

Eshcol Ranch History

Hicke: Well, chronologically, I don't know how it goes, but I know one of the things you've taken an immense interest in is restoring the winery, so maybe you can talk about that. I don't know exactly what to leave for John and what you want to talk about.

Janet T: You have a long list of questions right here.

Hicke: Why don't you pick out what you think is important?

Janet T: History of the old Eshcol Ranch--I think that's probably more in my bailiwick.

The Goodmans came here--the Goodmans were leaders in the Napa Valley. They were bankers, and they built the first library in downtown Napa, and they built this winery in 1886, and they hired Captain Hamden McIntyre to build the winery. I like to bring him in because he was really the leading winery architect at that time. He built the old Greystone Winery where the CIA [Culinary Institute of America] is today. He built Inglenook. He built Far Niente, and he used--I don't remember now if he built Far Niente first or this one, but I think he used the same blueprints for both of them. Because before they remodeled Far Niente, I could walk it blindfolded. It was exactly this building, but it's one foot shorter.

Hicke : Was it wooden also?

Janet T: The bottom half is stone. It's built into the side of a hill. And they all were built to take advantage of gravity flow, so they all were built into the side of a hill, and this is the only one that I know that wasn't built into the side of a hill. Why? All we can do is guess, I've never been able to find any direct descendants of the Goodmans or find any of their actual writings, but they owned the hillside property that we own today. The two pieces have always sold together. So they had the option of building into the side of the hill if they wanted. Why didn't they do it?

My theory is that, you see this fantastic oak tree right out here? There were two more just like it at each end of this building that we've lost since we've owned it. And I think they just loved the magnificent oak trees that were right here, and I think that's why they built the winery where they did rather than building it into the side of the hill.

And then as you saw the photographs right out here, what they did to overcome--I think the other thing is they figured they didn't need a hill, because what they did is they built that elevator type of contraption that worked to bring the grapes from the ground up through this door, and then they would--and it was a horse-operated elevator or platform, and then they would walk up an incline and manually dump the grapes into the stemrner- crusher that sat right there. You can see the boards in the floor that are new, that are different. And all these different pulleys up here in the ceiling. That's what operated or gave them the power source to move everything around, and they could still operate by gravity flow from here in making the wine.

Janet T: Eshcol, from my historical research and with the help of William Heintz, who also did some historical research for Eshcol, is a biblical reference. Moses sent Joshua and Caleb to the land of Canaan, and near the brook of Eshcol, they found this huge, huge bunch of grapes that was so large that neither one of them could carry it by themselves. And so they put it over a staff, over a branch, and put it over their shoulders, and carried it back to Moses.

What is fascinating to me is since I did that research, I also learned that there is a type of poppy, and its Latin name is like Eshcolnaea--

Hicke: Ah, yes, I've heard of that.

Janet T: --which I'm thinking--now I really wish the Goodmans would come back and haunt me, because I have so many questions for them in terms of which is really the true source. I do think it's probably the biblical reference. But there used to be a main driveway off of Highway 29 into Eshcol, and there was a big archway, and they had "Eshcol" written in it. It's the only way that I've been able to figure out the proper spelling of Eshcol, [spells], because in my historical research, half as many writers spelled it "Eschol" as the other. I figure that the true spelling was in that archway.

But the Goodmans were very active in--should I just give you some paperwork?

Hicke : I have some--Julie or Mary, I've forgotten which, sent me some of that history. So we can include that.

Janet T: I have some even more recent, even I would like to say I think more interesting history on Eshcol today as it pertains to the development of the Napa Valley.

Hicke: Oh, yes, we could just include that.

Janet T: As a matter of fact--[tape interruption]

Oak Knoll Appellation and More Historical Backpround

Hicke: You were just saying you were going to submit a petition.

Janet T: Yes. I've been working very hard on a petition that we're going to submit to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms to have this area of the Napa Valley recognized as the Oak Knoll District, and in doing so, we had to submit--

Hicke: As an appellation?

Janet T: Exactly, as an appellation. In doing this, we have to have a lot of historical background and research done that points out that the area is distinctive and unique. Charles Sullivan was hired by our committee, the renowned historian, and if you turn it off for a minute [tape interruption]--

I'm going to meander here a little bit, but in terms of looking at Sullivan's history, it reminds me of something that I forgot to say earlier, and that this ranch was once upon a time owned by a Grigsby that was actually one of the participants in the Bear Flag Revolt.

Hicke : Really?

Janet T: Yes. And the other thing that I find very fascinating is the story of our hillside property, and as I mentioned earlier, those two pieces, the hillside piece, which we are calling HaLo Vineyard for our children, Hailey and Loren, and this piece, have always sold together. They've always been a unit since the 1850s. There's a fascinating reason for it. There's no natural water source here at the winery, and we have natural springs up on the hillside. They used to feed the water from those springs here to the winery, and that was the water source.

The hillside piece is fascinating because the Indians used to live there. We have a stream that flows through the property, and we found a mortar bed rock that according to Yolande Beard, who has passed away, indicates that it was a relatively small group of Indians that lived on our hillside.

But what I was thinking about is that years ago, around the 1850s, the Mormons were passing through Missouri, and they went to the governor, and they asked for permission to settle in Missouri, and he said no. A few days later, somebody took some shots at him as he was sitting in his house, and he decided he was going to leave. So he got hold of his friend Vallejo, who gave him a land grant. Our hillside piece, the HaLo Vineyard, and this piece, all were part of that land grant. It sounds like a far-fetched story, but it's true.

And then another thing just in quickly referring to Sullivan, he had said--I think this is really interesting--in that Emerson, who was at Eshcol, sold the spread to Napa bankers James and George Goodman for $75,000. That was, I think it says 1881. But isn't that funny? What you could buy then for $75,000, and what you can buy now.

I guess you can take this and look through here at your leisure, but there's one part in particular. There were blind tastings that took place, and there was a wine--I'd feel better if I could quote it--

Hicke : In Sullivan?

Janet T: --but maybe you can find it. There was a tasting that took place in the 1800s. First awards went to Eshcol and Tokalon in the Sauterne category. It's right here, if you let me find it.

Hicke: I can turn it off if you want to look.

Janet T: Yes, I do. Ultimately, if I can find the right place in here--in here is Sullivan's comments, he is talking about how critical Eshcol was to developing the Napa Valley reputation for fine wines. And in the 1800s there were a number of tastings that took place, and Eshcol, through the wines that were produced here, really put Napa Valley on the map as the fine wine producer. And I think that's very important in the history of the Valley.

Hicke : That is. I've often wondered, because there are other winegrowing areas, but how did Napa--

Janet T: It's fascinating to read that, and I'd be happy to give this to you as an appendix.'

But to continue on with the Eshcol history, it was quite illustrious, as you can tell, winning these marvelous awards. And then one of the Goodman brothers died, and he was the mover and shaker. The other brother sold the place to a man by the name of Clark Fawver. Clark Fawver, from the research and information I've been able to find on him, was an interesting fellow. He never drank wine. Anyone who would ever have a winery and not enjoy the product is beyond my imagination--or understanding, I should probably say. But he continued to make wine at Eshcol, but he sold it all in bulk. The Eshcol label was lost. I would love to find the old Eshcol label, but I'm inclined to think that if there were any government records, they must have gone with the earthquake in 1906.

I think the other point to consider about the 1906 earthquake is the fact that this structure withstood that, and that it has withstood all of the recent earthquakes that we've had. We have had a few that I can tell you personally about, and one of the most interesting things is the way this building is built, and the fact that it's all redwood, so it gives. But I have been up here on the third floor in my office, and I can feel the building sway, and I know there's an earthquake. I'll go racing downstairs, and by the time I get to the ground floor, they have no idea whatsoever that there's ever been an earthquake. Just, the building takes it up here [third floor].

Hicke: Oh, that's amazing.

Janet T: Clark Fawver, to finish this up quickly if I could--boy, is my memory getting rusty--passed away in 1930, I believe. He had no children, he had no direct descendants. The property fell into a receivership and went to a large group of relatives. Ben Skillings was the manager for the group, and was a relative.

So they leased this building to Beringer [Winery] as a storage facility until, I believe, 1940. From 1940 until we

'See appendix. bought it in '68, nothing took place here. And that's much easier to understand when you realize what a grape and wine depression the country was in at that time, and that people weren't drinking fine wines. When you realize that we hit the all-time low for the least number of wineries in the Napa Valley in 1960, and there were fewer than twenty-five, it helps to put this into perspective.

So much of the property here, which I failed to point out, a very key fact, is that the winery is centered in 280 acres. That was the Eshcol Ranch, and Eshcol has always stood for truly estate-grown wines. Because it utilized those 280 acres of its own product right here at the winery. Let's put that in bold and underline it.

Hicke : We can. What happened to the vines during this period?

Janet T: Well, there's an aerial photograph downstairs that will show you what the property looked like when we bought it in '68, and it was a mess. The vines that were planted were things like Alicante-Bouschet and Grand Noir and olden Chasselas, and they all were mass-producing grapes, around fifteen tons to the acre.

Prohibition Times

Janet T: What I'm told is during Fawver's era, during Prohibition, he continued to crush here. What he did--it's the only piece of modern equipment that we found here when we came--was a pipeline that went directly from here out to the railroad spur, and he would just pipe everything out in bulk--

Hicke : The wine?

Janet T: --out to the railroad cars. I'm told that they would add signs to the railroad tanks that would say, "Do not add sugar or this will start fermenting." So of course, by the time these railroad cars got back East, everybody knew exactly what to do with them to make the product. [laughter]

I talked to Louis Strala, who has passed away, and he had some great stories about what they all did during Prohibition. I don't know if you interviewed him--

Hicke : No. Janet T : But he--one thing, I think it's worth deviating to this, because it was so funny.

Hicke : Yes. Those are hard to come by, stories of Prohibition.

Janet T : I talked to him, I talked to George Hyde who farmed here in the twenties, trying to learn all I could about the history. Unfortunately, those guys have passed on, but Louis Strala in particular was a real character. He was a white-haired older gentleman when I met him and knew him, and I imagine he was a real go-getter in the Prohibition days.

But he talked about how he and some of his friends would bottle up this wine, and they'd put it in a casket. And then they were pall bearers and they'd take this casket to the railroad, to the train. I guess they did this like every Friday.

Hicke : [laughs] Caused a little suspicion.

Janet T: Until finally, I guess that they ended up getting the same conductor on the train too many times, and he started to recognize the pall bearers, and I guess they got wise and opened it up and found all this wine in the casket.

Hicke : Oh, that's a great story.

Janet T : So I think we were up to '68 when we finally got the Trefethens entering the picture.

Hicke : Yes. And John can probably tell me about buying the property; his father actually bought it, as I understand.

Janet T: Right, and he can say that there was absolutely nothing here, when I see your notes about "early equipment and cooperage," oh, gosh.

Marketing and distribution is my bailiwick.

Restoration of the Winery, 1968-1973

Cooperation with M&H Vineyards

Hicke: Okay, let's go to that. And the restoration-- Janet T: And so I'll give myself fifteen minutes here or something. Let's see: first, John made home wine on a home winemaker's scale in '71 and '72, and decided that it was good enough that we could go ahead on a commercial basis in '73. Oh, boy, how long can we talk? There are such great stories that people need to know, or should know.

We just cemented over the north room so we could make wine in '73. And John really had it all done and all laid out and under control for us to make our approximately 2,000 gallons of wine. He was all set. We had a little press, we had a few little tanks, we had this and that. And I think it was in May, my mother-in-law [Catherine Trefethen] went to a cocktail party put on by Count Robert-Jean de Vouguet of Moet-Hennessy, and she of course asked him, "Well, what are you doing here?" and he said, "We have been looking for two years all over the world for a place to start a sparkling wine facility, and we've decided that it's here. We're going to do it in the Napa Valley. But we need some grapes, and we need a place to start making some cuvees .'' She said, "Oh, you should talk to my son Johnny." [laughs] And so this probably is June, and John Wright, who was the president--I think they had three employees at the time--of M&H Vineyards, Moet-Hennessy in America, talked to John Trefethen, and we worked out an agreement where they would utilize this building and we would sell them a lot of grapes.

That was the beginning of Domaine Chandon. This winery probably--I don't know how many other wineries--has the distinction of actually having been two separate, bonded wineries in one facility for a while. The ground floor was all Trefethen, and the second floor was all M&H Vineyards.

There was a time at Trefethen that there were like 150,000 bottles of sparkling wine lying on their sides on the second floor, en tirage, going through secondary fermentation. And it was really quite amusing, because as you know, the atmospheres of pressure build up in the bottle as the wine goes through the secondary fermentation, and inevitably, if the glass is not made perfectly, the bottle explodes. The second floor is not watertight. So there was a time at Trefethen that if you were standing in the proper place on the ground floor, you would get a bath in champagne. [laughter] Quite by accident. Night Harvests

Janet T: But we learned a lot of things. Seventy-three was a critical year. I think that it was a critical year for us, it was critical for MLH, it was critical for the California wine industry. We learned so much, oh! Chandon never intended to make a cuvee du Pinot, and we were out there harvesting Pinot for them, and they were getting too much color. So the mother of invention walked along and said, "All right, we're going to have a cuvee du Pinot," which I think for a while was their top selling wine.

But because of that, we all put our heads together and said, "Well, what can we do to reduce color?" And we said, "Why don't we try harvesting at night? The temperature is reduced, you'll get less pigment. The skins will be a lot cooler, we'll pick up less color in the grapes." So we tried night harvests. I think we probably were the first.

Hicke : Yes, I have read that somewhere.

Janet T: We learned that not only did you get less color, but you got more fruit. And you got the freshness, the quality of the finished product had more freshness, vibrancy to it.

Experiment with Mechanical Harvesting

Janet T: That also was a time when the chef du cave at Moet said, [in accent] "No mechanical harvesting, and this was not acceptable to de French!" So we did a major experiment, and we went out in our vineyard without a premonition one way or the other, and we hand- harvested one row of Chardonnay grapes, and we mechanically harvested the row right next to it. They had been viticulturally managed exactly the same way, planted at the same time, same clone, same everything. Brought them to the winery, kept them separate of course. Fermented them exactly the same, and produced wine from them, just in stainless steel.

And then the chef du caves, and there were three of these wonderful people that really knew their stuff. It was a tremendous advantage for us, because we had access to these people that were making champagne in Moet [and Chandon] that were the fifth generation and had these wonderful palates, and knew all the new techniques, and everything else. Hicke : Was that Edmond Maudiere?

Janet T: Edmond--did Edmond come the first time around? I'm trying to remember. Edmond I think may have been one of them. I'm trying to remember the older fellow who's now retired that really was the head guy. I don't think he's alive any more. And Philippe-- Philippe Coulon.

Anyway, those three fellows came over, and we had the advantage of their expertise. But we sat them down, and they tasted these wines blind, and they couldn't tell the difference. So they loosened up just a little bit about using the mechanical harvester.

They ended up--I mean, '73 was amazing. They air freighted over two Vaselin presses, these humongous, huge things. Something that was certainly beyond our capabilities at that time, but since they were Moet, they could do anything. So I think they learned an awful lot, and we learned a lot.

One of the other major things I think that they learned is that in Champagne [France], they like in their cuvees to use a lot more Chardonnay than Pinot Noir, and over here, they really love the Pinot in the cuvees. And from that, we learned about mechanical harvesting at night, among other things. I mean, we just learned an awful lot.

John and I made 2,000 cases of wine in '73, and there were three of us at the time. He can expand on how all that's changed since then.

Marketing and Distribution, 1973-1997

Janet T: I probably should move on to marketing and distribution, in terms of our timing on coming into the marketplace with our first product, it was something like a dream. I have over here a bound book that is my waiting list of accounts that wanted the product when it became available. One of the other advantages of Chandon is that they knew all of the press, and they brought them here to show them the facility and show them what they were doing, and while they were here, they also learned what Trefethen was doing. So we got a little press from that.

At the time our first product was coming into market, the market was hot, there was more demand than supply. There weren't a lot of new wave pioneering vintners at the time, and the market, consumers wanted to have new, young guys coming on the new wave of pioneers. It was exciting.

And so my most difficult job was knowing that we were going to grow: how could I keep these people interested that called that I simply didn't have enough product to support them at that time? I think to this day, there are probably still a couple of people that don't like me because I couldn't sell to them. What could I do? That's a tough position to be in.

I had a very, very strong commitment to making sure that our wine went to the right places. They were my kids; I wanted to make sure that they had good exposure, people would take good care of them. And so I went to every single account before I ever sold to them. I tried to follow my waiting list as carefully as I could. I remember driving around in my rental car in L.A. trying to find this one store that had called, and I found myself in the middle of Watts at a liquor store with bars on the windows and everything else, and it was not the time for a little woman like myself to be there by herself. So I didn't even go in to that store. I was a chicken.

Hicke: The one exception.

Janet T: So that was very important to me, but our timing was just phenomenal. And I can't lay claim to the timing. I just happened to be born at the right time, the Trefethens bought the property at the right time, and the market was just ripe.

Nineteen seventy-four was the first year we made Cabernet [Sauvignon], and 1974 was one of the greatest vintages for Cabernet.

Hicke: You made Chardonnay first?

Janet T: We made Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in '73. In 1974 we added Riesling and Cabernet. It wasn't long after that, I don't know if it was a year or two, I got a call from the great Harry Waugh in England, and Harry said, "Janet, I just had some of your '74 Cabernet. I think it's incredible, and I want it for the QEII [Queen Elizabeth 111." Because he did the buying for the QEII. Well, this was before Falklands and before the QEII ever was used for anything other than luxury, ultimate luxury cruises, and to get a call like that from someone like that was just one of the. greatest thrills of my life.

That convinced me that we should go into the U.K. market, which we did in a very small way. Because we didn't have enough wine to cover the U.S., let alone anything else, but we've always believed in an international market.

The World Wine Olympics Prize for Chardonnay

Janet T: That led to Greg Bissonet and his partner deciding that they wanted to import California wine to France. I thought they were absolutely nuts. But as a result, some of our Chardonnay ended up in France, in the World Wine Olympics that was sponsored by Gault Millau magazine. We learned about all this after the fact. In the Chardonnay category, the Trefethen came out first, over all the Chardonnays in the world. That was in 1979-'80, it was that winter.

Time magazine came to Trefethen, and John and I were not here, and my father-in-law [Eugene E. Trefethenl] was photographed with the wine. He was so thrilled. Here was this man, who had built the Bay Bridge and Grand Coulee Dam, and built the Kaiser enterprise, but had never been in Time magazine, but all of a sudden, the wine with his name made it, and there he was, and he was just like a peacock. It was so great.

Janet T: And then Robert Drouhin, the French shipper from Burgundy, was very upset at the results, and so he challenged the imports--for once, we were the imports--to a rematch. It was once again sponsored by Gault Millau magazine.

So at the Hospice de Beaune, the capital of Burgundy, they had the rematch, and the Trefethen Chardonnay came in first again. Which was really quite--you know, we didn't learn about any of this until afterwards, and it's probably just as well, because I would have been sick to my stomach worrying about how we were going to do. But that really, I think, reinforced the quality of California wine around the world.

Hicke : Oh, sure.

Janet T: It certainly, I mean, it really helped develop the Trefethen reputation, put us on the map, but I was already sold out of that wine. I started getting calls for this wine from all over the world, but I didn't have any more. It was long gone. It was gone before the competition ever took place.

'See Eugene E. Trefethen, Jr., History of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, 1986, and Kaiser Industries, Trefethen Vineyards, the University of California, and Mills College, 1926-1994, 1997, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The International Market: Europe and Asia

Janet T: But those were--let's see [looks at outline]. Marketing and distribution. We've always believed in an international market. I'm sorry to say that the European market has really shriveled up on us, but John's picked up the Asian market, and that is very hot right now, and that's where the future lies. The European market is not very healthy for California wines. I believe there's a lot more interest in Asia.

The European market for California wine has never been tremendous, but right now it's not really very interesting at all. It's much more interesting to look at Asia. I have Europe; John has Asia. So he can tell you more about the Asian market, but in terms of marketing and projecting ourselves, I think an international image or reputation is critical.

Public Relations

Estate-grown Concept

Janet T: Public relations: what do you want out of there?

Hicke: I guess one of the things I'm interested in is what kind of niche you established your wine in, and how you present [interruption] your wine at events, and how you differentiate it from other wines.

Janet T: Trefethen wine is unique, and it's because of our philosophy, which comes from the 600 acres that surrounds us, in that we're the largest contiguous to a winery, vineyard, in the Napa Valley. I imagine if you added family-owned and operated, it could probably make it even more exclusive. I think that estate-grown concept is so critical to help the consumer understand what it really means. I think most consumers don't know today what estate grown, produced, and bottled really means. And I think it's a critical time for them to understand that, more critical now than any other time in my history in the wine industry, because we have a number of California producers bringing in wines--we have a number of Napa Valley producers bringing in California wines. Not only are we going outside Napa Valley, not only are we going outside of California now, but they're bringing in off shore wines. And I think people need to know what they're getting. They need to know what they're paying for, and if they buy an estate product, they're guaranteed that the wine is made 100 percent from vines owned and cared for by the proprietor. We made it, we planted it, we made the wine, we put the cork in it, from A to 2. It is a guarantee of authenticity.

The other point that is part of the estate concept is related to our philosophy of winemaking, and that is that our grapes are right here. We're like a chef in the kitchen that gets the very finest produce he possibly can to make the very best finished product. And in my mind, whether I'm winemaking or I'm in the kitchen, to me, if you start out with a really, really wonderful, fresh, perfectly ripe tomato, you want to do just a few little things that emphasize the natural goodness that's already there. You want to add just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of my most favorite balsamic vinegar, and a little bit of tarragon or basil.

In winemaking, a very similar philosophy is that we want that natural character of the fruit that we grow to shine and resonate in the finished product. You should hear the voice of the vineyard in the glass. So for us, we have a very different philosophy, especially when it comes to Chardonnay, because we believe in minimal handling. I believe you use oak, a bit of oak, a bit of malolactic, as you would like olive oil or vinegar on a tomato. Enough just to bring out the natural goodness that is there, but for goodness' sake, please don't overdo it so you can't find the natural character that's there. That's critical, and that's critical in all our wines.

We have had the luxury of entering the industry at an extraordinarily good time. By that I mean that we could go and we could play around, and we could try and find our stride. We didn't have to do it with the very first vintage we came out with, which I think is critical, has been critical at times in our industry in the last twenty-five years. So we didn't, John and I didn't emulate a style. We didn't have a taste on our palate that we wanted our Chardonnay to be just like that. We were able to go--and it was like John made wine for two years before we ever went commercial, just playing around with the grapes. Are they good enough to make a commercial product? I mean, that was our basic question in the beginning. Food and Wine Concept

Janet T: So we were able to go out into the vineyard. We learned in particular this area produces white grapes with extremely good acids. They're there naturally, so rather than making the Riesling sweet, we made a dry Riesling. And then we found out, you know something? It's terrific with food. Rather than the really sweet ones which go best with dessert. You take Trefethen Riesling, and it's the perfect wine with Asian food, Pacific Rim food, in addition to what the German Rieslings go with. It's a very versatile wine.

Hicke: I know that one of the things that you're doing a lot with is the food and wine concept. Can you talk just a little bit about that?

Janet T: I think that wine is absolutely delicious by itself, and I think food is delicious by itself, but I don't think either one can be as great separately as they can when they take each other together to the next height. I truly believe that. And our wines are food wines. It used to be, I got so tired of hearing about food wines when was it, ten years ago? Everybody said it, but they are truly meant to be enjoyed at the table. Our wines don't knock your socks off. They slip them off [whispering]. And they're meant to be that way. They don't come in and just hit you over the head with all the power or all the oak or all the butter. They just kind of come in and gently caress, and they caress your palate and the food that you're having with it, and they go together because of that. They emphasize the best in food, and the food emphasizes the best in the wine, and it's wonderful.

I said five minutes ten minutes ago, but this is it.

We again just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and there were--you know, you take 1973, and if you wanted to show your wine to one of the few writers that existed then, you usually took him home to eat, because there was no place you wanted to take him to in the Napa Valley. Number one, there were like two restaurants that were any good, and they really weren't very good. So I'd take them home. For the first ten years, I probably did all the cooking--I did everything from A to Z if a writer came, or friends, or whatever, to show our wine, because we knew they'd get a better--they'd at least get a good meal. We knew that.

Hicke: And a good wine. Janet T: You know, it's funny talking about it, because the Napa Valley has gone from desert to oasis. I don't think there's any other place in the world that is this size that offers so much from a culinary standpoint. It's just incredible, but it's hard to believe.

So in 1973, a number of ladies got together and said, "Why don't we share our own cooking techniques with each other?" And that was the beginning of the Napa Valley Cooking Class. Then Jamie Davies, I think, showed us all how if you hand-whipped your egg whites, you could make a much higher souffle. Things like that. And then the following year, we decided, Well, Narsai [David] sure was good, and our friend Darrel Corti sure knew a lot about food, and so we brought them over. And then for a number of years, Belle Rhodes, who is such an extraordinary person in the kitchen, did the classes. We brought in a number of different people, but it was a group effort.

The cooking class started at Vintage 1870. When the Schmidts sold it in 1977 the cooking class moved here, and it's been here ever since. We've always been interested in food. We grow everything here in the garden. You barely have to go to the store. So it all fit together.

Hicke : I take it we need to come to the end.

Janet T: We do need to come to the end. Boy, would I love to talk about designing a label. But anyway--what a trial that is. Is there anything in particular that we didn't do that--we didn't go through the expansion of the winery and how we really developed it. Whoever did this outline really got an awful lot--they really did their homework. Additional products: olive oil and orange marmalade.

Hicke: Is that your handiwork?

Janet T: Yes, that's my handiwork. I hate to see things go to waste. My mother-in-law planted all these orange trees, so I'd see the oranges falling on the ground, and I couldn't make enough--orange cake, bread and marmalade to use them all. Napa County wineries and the evolution of the Napa Valley is something we--John probably can do that just as well or better than I can. But I think that's important. And I think the changes in the industry from the seventies to the nineties, boy, we sure have matured as an industry.

But why don't you wait and see what John tells you, and afterwards, we can talk about what's missing? How's that? Hicke: Okay, that's good.

Transcriber: Shannon Page Final Typist: Shana Chen

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TREFETHEN

I11 FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, AND EDUCATION

[Date of Interview: August 6, 19971 #/I

Early Years

Hicke: Let's start with when and where you were born, please.

John T: I don't remember. It was a long time ago. [laughter]

Hicke : I must say, that's a new answer. [laughter]

John T: Oakland, California, on July 15, 1940.

Hicke: And did you grow up in Oakland?

John T: I grew up in Oakland up through the seventh grade, and then we moved to Piedmont.

Hicke: And you went to the local school system? Or did you go to private school?

John T: I went to the local school system up through the eighth grade, and then I went to the Webb School of California down in Claremont. I stayed there through graduation, miracle of miracles. Would you like some more school history?

Hicke: Oh yes, definitely.

John T: From there I went to the University of North Carolina.

Hicke: Okay, well let's back up here. Elementary school was Oakland?

John T: Elementary school was Havens in Piedmont. And what's now called middle school and was called junior high school was Piedmont. Hicke: Let's stop there for just a minute. What kinds of things did you like about school? What sorts of subjects? Or any teachers that particularly impressed you?

John T: Probably back in that part of my school career, not a lot about school that I particularly enjoyed and remembered, which was probably part of the reason why I launched off to a different school in ninth grade. I think the activities were probably more important: sports. I remember the whole Cub ScoutlBoy ScoutlEagle Scout scenario. I did a lot of that, a lot of camping and outdoor activities. That's what I remember more than any great academic career in my elementary school.

Agricultural Interest and Connection to Winenrowing

..Hicke: Did your family do a lot of these outings, also?

John T: Not too much, no. Actually, my mother was very supportive of the whole scout activity. My father was pretty busy doing other things.

In the early 1950s, the family bought a walnut orchard--a walnut ranch--in Walnut Creek, back when there were walnut trees in Walnut Creek. It was forty acres, and it was north of Mt. Diablo, so we called it the North 40. That's where we spent a lot of weekends and summers. That was a great interest of mine because of the agriculture. The walnut orchard, actually, ultimately expanded to be about a hundred acres. That was my initial exposure to agriculture, and to equipment, and tractors, and pulling things out and discing, and irrigating, and harvest. I was involved as a kid doing that during the summers. It was a great summer place to be. So that's what we did as a family during the summer.

Hicke: So you drove a tractor and did all those kinds of things?

John T: Oh, I have great pictures of me and my father, with me kind of sitting in his lap, driving a tractor. Then, in fact, I did as I got a little bit older and could do it. I was almost gainfully employed discing and irrigating.

Irrigation was fun, because you would go out and move these big aluminum pipes. Every twelve hours you would have to move them. The ground, of course was absolutely soaked; it was mud. The fellow that I worked with had these big rubber boots, and he would tie them on with strings because you would walk into this and the suction would just pull your boots off. Of course, I just did it barefoot. It was great. So we would go out and move pipe, and then you were walking, essentially, in this great mud and picking these big pipes up and trying to walk with these big pipes, with the mud kind of sucking you down into the earth. Then you would get on the dry part, and then it was kind of tough on your feet and you would lay the pipe down. But by the end of the summer, I could walk across nails barefoot. So that was great.

Then we did those types of things I think that families in northern California do. Lake Tahoe was a big destination for us. Those are my memories, again: of that kind of thing or working on the ranch, going to Tahoe--

Hicke: Skiing? Or hiking?

John T: Hiking, water skiing--. I did a little snow skiing, but I wasn't a big skier--I didn't get involved with that a lot. [phone interruption]

Hicke: Okay, we were just talking about agriculture, and I think it's really interesting that when I first started learning about the wine business, agriculture was not a very big part of it, but I came to realize it's a farming business.

John T: We--you probably heard this--but we very specifically refer to ourselves as winegrowers, and that's a term that really puts together the two aspects of it, rather than winemakers. Because winemakers--it sounds like you're in this factory, concocting recipes, and that doesn't have anything to do with making wine at the premium end. I think that my early interest in agriculture really ultimately--after I'd done some other things--propelled me back into agriculture, and that's really what I do. When we make wine, we're out in the vineyards an awful lot of the time, and when we're working with the vines and tasting wine, we're tasting individual lots from pieces of the property for different clones or different trellis systems. So even when we're in the winery, the focus is the vineyard.

Then, just to carry the whole thing one step further, we do all of our own sales and marketing--as I'm sure you've learned from Janet--and when we're out talking to people about the wine, what are we talking to them about? We're talking to them about Napa Valley, soil, climate, trellis systems, clones--all the differences that come from soil that make these wines distinctive from our neighbors' wines. So that emphasis on agriculture is absolutely true; it is factual; and it carries through every aspect of what we do in our business.

Vineyard Beginnings, 1968-1973

Hicke: That's why it's important to get a person's background in the history. I think, also, you must have been very early pioneers with this concept. I don't think people were thinking that way in the early seventies, am I right?

John T: Well, in the late sixties--of course, we started the vineyard in 1968--and early seventies, first of all, we weren't making wine; we were growers. We were concentrating on this piece of property which had a lot of grapes, but it had a lot of other things, too. It had prune trees, and apricot trees, and hayfields, and walnut orchards--and it went on and on and on.

The first thing that we did was to essentially plant this vineyard. To plant this vineyard, you have to find out all about your soils and climates, which is on a very small basis. You can move, literally, from one field to the next, and that next field is perfect for one grape and imperfect for another grape.

So we studied that, and, from 1968 to 1973, what we did was plant the vineyard, sell grapes to other wineries, have those wineries hold some of our wines just for us without blending them with anyone else's, actually bottle those, and then we would learn about our vineyard from tasting those wines. So that is what happened early in 1968 to 1973.

By 1973, we had the information back, the wines back, from other wineries that had been making wines out of our grapes. We were also very involved--and this was essentially John Trefethen and Tony Baldini. Tony worked with us in the North 40 in Walnut Creek as an independent custom farmer. He was the fellow that came in and helped us run our walnut orchard. When mom and dad bought this property, they invited him to come up and be the vineyard manager. He did, in fact, come from Ygnacio Valley, where he was born and grew up. He came to Napa, and then they-- being my parents and Tony--really started planting the vineyard.

Hicke: Okay. We have to back up. [laughter]

John T: Oh, we have to back up? High School Experience in Archeolo~y

Hicke : Yes. That's all good. We'll get a little bit more detailed, but let's first find out about high school and anything you particularly remember about those years.

John T: High school, I moved.to Claremont, California, and went to the Webb School, which was a choice that my parents gave me, but it was a choice that I made. I went down there and very much liked the school and the concept of doing that. I would have been a candidate to go to some school on the East Coast. I was very definitely a California boy. I was very intrigued by southern California, and so I moved down, and I did my high school years at the Webb School.

I think the things that stand out--again, I certainly was not an exceptional student. I think my interests were broad. I was able to develop a lot of interest in literature and kind of went on in college to comparative literature as an English major. But I developed this love of books and reading and writing. I think that's probably the most important scholastic gift that I received there. I got along in math all right. Science was interesting, but just as a kind of a diversion. I think my love, really, was literature and books and reading and writing.

The other thing that I did very actively in high school was to become a member of something called the Peccary Society. A Peccary is the ancient wild boar. This society was started and run by Dr. Ray Alf. It is still a part of Webb School. It's a separate institute now, with a very well-recognized museum of fossil history.

That kind of got me back, almost, to my scouting and my camping, because we would go out on two- to three-day weekends to places like Barstow, the Grand Canyon--all sorts of destinations where there was a history--paleontology.history or archaeology history--and hunt, essentially, for fossils. Dr. Alf was very well recognized in that field, and he was also a teacher at the Webb School. So it was a very special situation.

Each summer they took a trip which was either six weeks or eight weeks--I think six weeks. They left from southern California in kind of a caravan of four or five vehicles with trailers and all the camping gear. We went diagonally across the United States to North Dakota and back. We were camping out for two months. It was interesting, because we were high school kids, and the kids were essentially kind of slave labor, because we were out there hunting for dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers and all this stuff. The only way you do that is literally go out and walk through the Badlands, walk through the deserts of America. You're out there. I mean, you can be at a place that is eighty miles down a dirt, almost unpassable road to the next town, and then that's your base camp. Then you go out into the deserts from there, and then you walk all day. We would come back absolutely just brown. If we knew what we know about melanoma today, we probably wouldn't do it.

It was great. We would get up early, and there would be coffee going and the big pancakes and these great breakfasts. Then we would leave, literally, with a hat, a pair of shorts, and a couple of canteens of water. You would be gone all day in the Badlands of South Dakota, or in the deserts of California, Nevada, and Arizona.

Eventually, someone would locate something. Then the whole team would come in, and we would uncover it, and put plaster of Paris all around it, and then lift it out, put it in the trucks. All of this stuff was gathered over the six weekltwo month period, and then brought back to the museum. Then, at the museum, for the rest of the year there were students and also professional people who would start working through the plaster of Paris, taking all the dirt away, and ultimately expose the skull of a saber-toothed tiger or something.

Hicke: Fascinating.

John T: When you were search in^ for these things, all you would see on the surface is just a little bone fragment. It may be a tooth or it may be a piece of skull or something. You had to recognize it, then dig around, then see if you had something that was really important. If you did, then you had to stop, because you 'would invariably mess it up. You had to get all the team in, and then kind of go through this process.

Hicke: I'm surprised you didn't become an archaeologist. [laughter]

John T: Well--

Hicke: Maybe that was a bit much.

John T: Archaeology or agriculture--either way--but it had to do with the soil; it had to do with the land; it had to do with the climate. [laughter] So I did two of those trips: one, I think, when I was in the eighth grade; and then I drove one of the trucks when I was sixteen or seventeen. I became one of the leaders and drove one of the vehicles to bring out all the students. The interesting thing was that people would fly in and meet us from the National Museum--we should probably correct this--something in Washington, D.C.

Hicke: The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?

John T: Yes. The place for archaeology and paleontology. They would go out there. Their plane would fly over, and pretty soon it would land somewhere and we would go out and pick them up. They would come and work with us for a week, because we were really one of the most active groups going and doing this.

Hicke: You were doing professional work.

John T: And there were all these--as I said--all this slave labor, all these kids who wanted to go camping for two months. It was just a great experience.

So I think that kind of also tied me to the land a little bit--and reading and thinking and being out in the wilderness-- and I have always enjoyed that, and I think it's a part of what I do today in my vocation and my avocations.

Avocation as a Pilot

John T: The other thing that I developed a very early interest in, which was really when I was more like fourteen or fifteen, is that was the kid who was hanging around airports. I would wash an airplane for a half-an-hour ride in an airplane.

Hicke: Which airport were you hanging around?

John T: I was out at the Buchanan Airport in Concord.

Hicke: Okay, so it was at home.

John T: I would get a ride out there and do that. So I was able to get my student license when I was sixteen, and started a long love affair with flying, which I continued to do. I have flown all my life. That really started back in those fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-year-old days. Hicke : That was pretty young, wasn't it? To get a pilot's license?

John T: That's as early as you can do it. The summer that I was sixteen, I was working in one of the Kaiser operations out of Pleasanton in a place called Radum. I don't know what that word meant, but it was a sand and gravel plant where they essentially mined sand and gravel and made ready-mix, and all the trucks came in. So I had a summer job there, and I was spending whatever I was earning on flying. It was kind of a zero-sum summer. [laughter] Because I was living at home, my mother was, thankfully, cooking for me, and I was working and spending all money learning how to fly. But I did, in fact, learn how to fly. I've done it all my life, and it's been very, very helpful in the winery in all our sales and marketing trips--which we'll get to in the next chapter.

Hicke : Right. And do you take family vacations? Do you take your family in that plane occasionally?

John T: Oh, well, I mean, it's a major source of transportation for us. Actually, the history of the flying--1'11 have to skip around a little bit--was that once the summer job was over, the flying stopped. I continued as best I could, but I really didn't get back into it until I was at Stanford Business School, some years later and needed a diversion from the academic pressure of being at Stanford Business School. [laughs] That's when I actually got my license and started to fly seriously. I've had an airplane and have been flying ever since. We do most of our travel in the airplane, and we do an awful lot of the winery sales and marketing trips as well--all through the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Hicke : That's great. Were you flying out of San Carlos?

John T: I was flying out of San Carlos.

Hicke : That's where I live.

John T: And then, obviously, I started flying out of Napa. We've been flying out of Napa for years. For a period of five or six or seven years we actually kept the plane on the vineyard. And there's a long driveway that comes into the vineyard that you drove in on?

Hicke : Yes.

John T: That's where we landed the plane. So, for years, we had a plane here and there was a hangar here. Two things happened: the planes got a little bit bigger and we couldn't get them in here. Then we started this winery, and more people started coming to see us. They did get a little rattled when they were driving in on the driveway and a plane was landing in the other direction. [laughter] At some point we decided that it was probably time to move the plane to Napa.

Hicke : Oh, what a picture. [laughter]

John T: Well, it was a picture. There were a number of times that people would just drive off into the vineyard rows. I obviously wasn't going to hit them, I mean, we just wouldn't land. But it would look to the person who was just driving in through this vineyard like this plane was trying to drop on them.

Hicke : Head for the vines. [laughter]

John T: Head for the vines--that's what they did. So we decided after a while that there were probably a couple of reasons to move the plane to Napa.

Hicke : All right, backing up again--how did you decide where to go to college? You went to North Carolina, you said?

John T: I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I kind of covered the country with my applications to Berkeley, Oregon, Cornell, and North Carolina. I didn't really, at that point, have any knowledge or interest in what we used to call a "fly-over." It was kind of the East Coast and the West Coast, and that's it.

Hicke : Oh, and that's in between?

John T: The only thing in between is what you flew over. I now find that the area that is the "fly-over," which is Colorado and Montana and Wyoming--all of that area--is some of my favorite parts of the United States.

Summer Jobs with Kaiser Industries

John T: I had worked summers in Oregon. My first summer job was in Pleasanton. Then my second summer job, when I was seventeen, was in Bellingham, Washington.

Hicke : With Kaiser. John T: There, I worked at another Kaiser operation, which was a cement plant. The actual limestone mine where the limestone was mined to be brought back to the cement plant--that was Bellingham. I was working with a friend, and we stayed in a rooming house and took some of our meals at the university there, and worked that summer either in the plant itself or at the mine. That was--I don't know, how do I say it--pretty industrial.

We were kids and we kind of liked to be on the outside, so we moved up to the limestone mine where we really had two jobs. One was that we were repairing the railway line that brought all of this stuff down; so it was big, kind of heavy duty John Henry work. We moved these big--the actual steel rails. Then we would put the ties in--the wood that goes across--and then we would get the hammers and knock the spikes in. It was just great for a couple of seventeen-year-olds. We thought we were John Henry.

Then, the other thing that we did which was extremely interesting was to be on the crew that went up and set the explosives in the hill. We would do that all morning--drilled holes and setting the explosives--and then a big whistle would go off. That meant that you were to light the explosion. We literally lit them.

Hicke : You did?

John T: We literally went around with a box of matches and lit the fuses. After a while, there was a very urgent whistle, and that meant "get out of town." You would go down and open your bag lunch, sit down, eat lunch, and about ten minutes later the whole mountain would just start erupting with these charges that we had all set. Then, in the afternoon, you would go back up and do it all over again, hoping that all the charges did, in fact, go off.

Hicke: Well, yes.

John T: So that was a great summer job. We might as well do all the summer jobs, because we're not in college yet.

Hicke: Yes, and they've all been outdoors so far.

John T: So my next summer job was Spokane, Washington, with my same friend--a fellow by the name of Peter Trommald, who lived in Oregon. We went to Spokane, Washington, and worked in the aluminum plant in Spokane, Washington. That was probably the most kind of indoor, industrial, in the city job, and, as a result, was educational and fun, but it was probably our least favorite job that we had done together. Then my final job that kind of came because of our relationship with Kaiser Industries was when I was at the University of North Carolina, my sophomore year I went down to Argentina.

John T: I traveled to Buenos Aires; stayed there for about three days, and then went up to a town called Cbrdoba in the mountains and spent pretty much the summer with an Argentine family, and worked in the automobile factory of Industrias Kaiser Argentina making Renault cars and Jeep vehicles. That, of course, was just a spectacular opportunity, a spectacular summer. I learned Spanish, which I have since forgotten. I had great opportunities with the family, and the work was a lot of fun. So that was kind of the last of the summer jobs, vis-a-vis the Kaiser connection.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1962-1966

John T: I decided to go to Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina pretty much because I had lived in southern and northern California, so I kind of wanted to go somewhere else. I had worked my summers in Oregon and Washington, so I kind of wanted to go somewhere else.

It was very funny, when you think about this. I applied to Cornell, and they would not let me in to the main school because my scholastic history wasn't up to their standards, but they said, "You can come into our hotel school and stay as a freshman. If you do well, you can then transfer to the main university system." Well, of course, now the hotel school is world-famous and it's very difficult to get into--probably harder to get into than Cornell itself. Ad, of course, if I had gone to hotel school it would have been perfect for what I'm doing now, because we obviously are in the hospitality industry. We sell to hotels all over the world. It would have been a great background.

But I went back in springtime to visit these two schools-- Cornell and Chapel Hill--and decided where I wanted to go. From an academic standpoint, I thought either one would be fine. I had this interest in comparative literature. Chapel Hill actually had a better literary department; Cornell, obviously, was a very well-known school. I went to Syracuse, New York, and it was fifteen degrees, and I never saw a soul, all the girls were covered in parkas. I was living in southern California. [laughter]

So, I went down to Chapel Hill, and, oh, the flowers were out, and it was beautiful weather, and everybody was running around in shorts, and the girls were pretty. It just seemed to me that that made a lot more sense. [laughter]

Civil Rights in the Sixties

John T: So I went to Chapel Hill. And there was a second reason, actually, for thinking about that. That was in--I'd better check these dates--1962? Yes, '62. And there were obviously a lot of race relation activities going on in the South. That was a very, very active time with civil rights, and I had grown up in Berkeley and southern California, where there's just a whole different attitude about those things. There are certainly problems anywhere in the United States, but the difference in the South was that this was something that was ingrained, and it was there. So I had an opportunity to go and be a part of all that. I was clearly someone from the outside. I was a California boy, and I talked kind of funny, and my ideas were pretty liberal. I'm probably not the most liberal guy in the world, but I was pretty liberal back then.

Hicke : And in that area.

John T: In that area. So my freshman year was really traveling through the South, going to a lot of parties. The academic level was not very difficult for me because I'd come from the Webb School--a very good school. The freshman year at Chapel Hill--at least, at that time--was not academically challenging for me. It turns out that the sophomore, junior, and senior years were very challenging--that's a very good school--but the freshman year, they kind of have to go through that transition period.

When I came back in tlie sophomore year, I had arranged with four other students to have a house, and none of them made it back to school--which might have been an indicator of what I was doing the first year. One was a Cuban, and he couldn't get out of Cuba; they were having problems there. One was a fellow from the north who got into some alcohol and drug problems. One person was from North Carolina, and didn't make it back academically. So it kind of left me--. Hicke : With a house. [laughter]

John T: With a house. So the house went away. I went to the housing office, and there was no on-campus housing. For about four weeks I lived in the furnace room of a dorm in North Carolina in September. It was just stifling outside, but it was unbearable inside. And this is a true story. Every day I went to the housing office, there was nothing available, and I was living in a furnace room. One day I went in, and the woman in the housing office says, "Well, there is one room available; but, of course, you wouldn't want it."

I said, "What do you mean?" [shouting] I said, "There is one room available and I live in a boiler room!"

She said, "It's with a Negro."

So after I jumped over the table and throttled her, [laughter] I moved in, and it was a very memorable experience in my life, because it was perfectly all right in mg opinion to move in with this young black man. It was not all right with either him or a lot of my white friends. There were some friends whom I'd made from the house from the previous year who never spoke to me again.

Hicke : Is that right? Oh dear.

John T: The young black man was there--he was varsity basketball in pre- med on a full scholarship. I mean, he was so far more qualified than I or any of my friends, and yet he came from a small town in rural North Carolina, and he had a very, very difficult time with having a white person living with him.

Hicke : He didn't have any choice?

John T: No. I don't think he had any choice. I arrived one day and parked. [laughs] And we formed a very nice friendship. I spent a lot of time with him.

Hicke : Oh, he did get used to it?

John T: He got used to it, but when we would go places together-- frequently, it may have been a coffee shop--and they had a place for him to sit and a place for me to sit, and we were trying to break that down--. We would walk to campus together. Chapel Hill was one of the first, I think, state university systems to be integrated, & you had to be a very qualified student, if you were black, to get in. We would walk there, we would go through the cafeteria line together, and then he would go over and sit with his black friends. The first time it happened, I was sitting there with my tray, and I realized I wasn't supposed to go over there. sb I went and sat at another table.

It was a very interesting time, and that's another reason why I chose Chapel Hill. I had a great time at Chapel Hill. I was a comparative literature major. I very much enjoyed it. I grew up in some part of the country I had never seen before.

Changes

Hicke : Did you see some changes by the end of the time you were there?

..JohnT: There were dramatic changes by '66. Chapel Hill was pretty integrated legally, but in fact there were a lot of things that blacks couldn't do.

Hicke : Are you talking about the university or the town?

John T: I'm talking about the town.

Hicke : Okay.

.John T: I mean, it was a liberal university small town, but even though all those things were open, and the university was integrated, there were places that you just didn't see black students. But it was pretty open. Once you went over to Raleigh-Durham, it was part of the South in 1962, and it was totally segregated, as I remember--you know, separate bathrooms, that whole business. Of course, if you went down to Georgia or those states, it was totally segregated. All of that started to change while I was there. Obviously, we still had problems with it, but it's much different than it was in '62.

Hicke : You were certainly there at the time when everything was fermenting--pardon the expression. [laughter]

John T: Oh, yes. It was fermenting. Well, it was great fun. I think it was a huge part of my educational experience--riding on buses with black people who, prior to that time, had to sit in the back and wanted to sit in the front. We went and sat in the back and the bus driver wouldn't move the bus. We did sit-ins in restaurants. We would all go in and sit down, and we would intermingle, so that if somebody came to wait on us, there would be a white person and a black person and a white person and a black person. You know, the wait staff would try to just wait on the white people and tell the black people that they had to leave. That all went on, and it was probably the biggest part of my education when I was in college.

Naval Duty

John T: The other thing that was going on, unfortunately, was Vietnam. I was classified lA, and in my junior year, I started rather late to try to get into one of the officer candidate schools. They were all filled, because there were a lot of people that had that same idea, but who had had it a lot earlier than I did. I certainly had questions about what the United States was doing there, but when I look back on it now--it's very different to look back at it now, versus being a junior in college in North Carolina and having an awful lot of people in the student body supporting--and a lot of people not supporting the war and the draft--right there, right on you--to the extent that you either had to go to Canada or you were going in the army. Those were the two choices. So I finally found the navy.

The navy has officer candidate schools. They also have an aviation program, and I had a long history in aviation, obviously. So I went to Norfolk, Virginia, and was there for three days going through testing, and I got into the aviation program. So the threat of the draft kind of went away.

Hicke : This was '66?

John T: This was '66.

Hicke: You had graduated?

John T: I had not graduated yet. I had to go through the senior year. In the middle of the senior year, I was taking a comparative religion course. This was 1966 in the United States of America, and I was taking this course--and I was asking a lot of questions about various religions and why this happened and that happened. Most of it was qualitative testing--essays--as opposed to anything else. I was failing the class, and the reason I was failing the class was that my questions were too liberal in what, essentially, was a Southern Baptist comparative literature course--which meant that you kind of looked at the history of other religions, but you certainly didn't question anything, least of all your own--their own--religious background.

I went to the dean. I said, "You know, I'm going to fail this course, and if I fail the course I won't get into my navy aviation program and I'll be drafted. And I'm failing the course. I may not be a great student--I may be getting a C, but I'm not getting an F." He asked me to bring over my essays, and I brought all of the tests, and he read through them, and essentially overruled the teacher. There was a compromise reached which was that I could drop the course and take a correspondence course during the summer. To my knowledge, at least up to that point, I'm the only student who has ever graduated from Chapel Hill on a correspondence course. I mean, universities don't do that--they didn't back then. So I didn't graduate with my class. I came back to California and took the correspondence course and passed the correspondence course; therefore, I graduated, and was able to go on into the navy, rather than the draft--which was obviously a big issue.

So then I went on to Pensacola, Florida, for a quick officers' school and became an officer in eight weeks. You kind of went through an incredibly concentrated program, both physically and mentally. They took you through boot camp, and you had marine drill instructors that were yelling at you the whole time. Anybody who has been through boot camp knows what I'm talking about. It was a very, very intense period.

I got through that and was commissioned. To get into the program, the one problem I had was what they call a lazy eye. In the final analysis, they said, "You can sign up and be in the aviation program for five years, but we can't guarantee you'll be a pilot. You'll probably be a navigator."

I said, "I don't want to be a navigator for five years."

So I didn't fly in the navy. I went on and was in intelligence in Guam and the Philippines and Japan and Australia --and actually had a very interesting, educational, and successful tour in the navy during the time when most people were having very bad tours, because it was in the middle of the war.

My activities there and my performance were really what got me into graduate school, because my grades had never been outstanding. So I came back from doing that for two and a half years, and I applied to Harvard, Cal, and Stanford. Interestingly enough, I was accepted at all three, and I chose to go to Stanford. That's my school career. [laughs] Hicke : You went to--. You got an MBA from Stanford, right?

Stanford University, MBA, 1971-1972

John T: An MBA from Stanford--very intense, I might tell you, because I had no math background. Stanford is the most quantitative, I think, of those three schools--at least back then, that's how it was kind of represented--and I had no math background. So I had to go to Golden Gate University and take an accounting course, got an A--which I was very impressed with--and then I arrived on campus two weeks early. They took all the math dummies through this entire range of mathematics, from essentially absolute basic math through differential calculus in two weeks. [laughter]

Then, the first year was just--. I mean, I was just so overwhelmed with the quantitative analysis. I did it, but it was extremely challenging for me--but a great base, because I now have it, and I can understand it, and I deal with it. The second year was very qualitative: it was business plans and writing, and I'm very good at that.

So I got through there, and in the second year we had a small business class. In the small business class, I got together with four other students, and we did a proposal for starting a winery. I had worked the previous--.

Hicke: What year are we in?

John T: We're in '71-'72.

IV TREFETHEN VINEYARDS

Business Plan on Starting a Winery

Hicke: So your father had already bought the--.

John T: So the vineyard was here. I had come up and worked for about three months on the vineyard. I had started to--. I'd been doing a lot of the planning, but also a lot of the planting. I was out in the fields, learning about all of this as we were planting the first vineyard.

I, at that point in time, didn't think I was going to be involved any more, other than as a family member, but it gradually started to grow on me, and I started to realize my interest is in agriculture and the outdoors and the soil and the climate and the weather and all that sort of stuff. So I started to concentrate on that a little bit more--sold grapes to wineries, got involved in that, started making wine, home winemaking activities with Tony Baldini here at the winery.

We had some great first-time tries. We had a house that was vacant, and the house had an air conditioner, and it was vacant during harvests. So one of the big advances in quality of making white wine in the sixties and early seventies was, essentially, the ability to have good equipment and cold fermentation so you could cool the whole process down. Well, the winery building was kind of leaning over on an angle, had dirt floors, and this one hadn't been used in twenty years. So we crushed Chardonnay grapes into, essentially, plastic garbage cans that we had put a plastic liner in. We would crush the grapes in there. We started fermentation--

Hicke : Stand on them? [laughter]

John T: And then we put all of this in the house that had the air conditioning, and we would turn the air conditioner down as low as it would go. Well, this was September of 1972. I was at Stanford at school, so I did that on the weekend and then I drove down to school. We would just keep the air conditioner running. I would come back a week later and see how my wine was doing.

Well, it fermented very slowly. It fermented for a month. The electric bill on that house was astronomical! [laughter] I mean, talk about a terrible waste of energy--but the wine came out marvelous. It was an intense, very fruity, full-bodied wine. We said, "Wow! Our grapes must be good and we must know what we 're doing. "

We also made red wine a little bit differently.

Hicke : Cabernet?

John T: Cabernet. And so this opportunity, due to this small business class, came up. We did a full business plan for starting a winery. We were going to place the sales office in Camel, and we were going to sell all the wine direct to tourists and then people in Carmel. It's very interesting, when you look at the wine industry today, one of the biggest problems in the wine industry today is the distribution of wines from 800 wineries through a very narrow distribution channel of distributors--there being just very few distributors. So many small wineries are trying to sell as much as they can direct. We always try to sell as much as we can direct. But our whole business plan, when we were back at Stanford, was to sell 100 percent of it direct. That's essentially how we were going to make this whole thing work.

Hicke: So you were on the cutting edge?

John T: Well, we did the business plan, everybody else graduated--went on to become very successful people in big corporations--and John Trefethen came up to the Napa Valley and started a winery. [laughter]

Hicke: Yes,well, butwhatawinery! Ithinkwehaveto say alittle something about that. Janet Trefethen

John T: Yes, 1972. And as Janet probably told you, Janet and I met right about then. In 1973, we got married on August 11, and we started crushing grapes here a little bit less than a month later.

Hicke: She said that you planned it so that it wouldn't interfere with harvest.

John T: [laughter] That's right. I had to plan our wedding so it wouldn't interfere with harvest. Sure. Our first vintage of making wine.

Planning for the Vineyard

Hicke : Well, tell me a little bit about that.

John T: [laughing] Does that mean that we've arrived at that point?

Hicke: Yes,welve arrived at that point. I stilldon'tthinkIknowas much about why you chose the varieties to plant. Or who chose them? Tony Baldini? Perhaps he did some of that?

John T: Well, back then we were working very closely with [University of California,] Davis. Tony was very much involved. I was very much involved in that, because that's--remember when I told you we were planning and planting?

Hicke : Yes.

John T: The planning is, "What are you going to do?" We were all trying to learn, because the industry was in its infancy. I mean, there's been a long, rich history of winegrowing in California and in Napa Valley, but in 1968, the industry, as you know, was very small--very, very tiny by comparison to what it is today, by comparison to what it had been in the previous century. So we were struggling with these decisions. It was a lot easier than it is today.

It was easier because there were two rootstocks: AXR and St. George. If you were in a drought area, as we are up on our hillside, you planted St. George; and if you were on the valley floor, you planted AXR. That was that. That was what the university said, that was what all the advisors said, and so that's what you did. So then, the only decision to make beyond that was what varieties, and what sort of--.

Well, let me go beyond that. The spacing was pretty much not a decision. The spacing and the trellis systems--there were probably two choices, and that was it. We didn't know enough to know how complex it could be. So what it really came down to was the question of varieties. And the varieties that we chose, we chose not for the immediate marketing or sales reason--what happens to be hot that year, because especially during the seventies and early eighties, that changed dramatically. In one year wineries would be screaming for one grape, but next year they'd be screaming for another grape. That's because this whole industry was in its infancy, and you had a consumer base out there that was just starting. If a few of them went one direction, everybody had to make that wine.

We pretty much ignored that, and worked at what are the best varieties for this particular ranch--because of the soil on this ranch and because of the climate. And on this ranch, which is 600 acres, there are different soils, & there are different climates. So we tried as best we could to match those. Of course, we didn't have thirty years of history of doing this here. So we guessed a lot. I think that the proof that we did a good job was that we never pulled out any vineyard and replanted it to something else because it wasn't doing well, or because we had the wrong varieties and no one would buy them.

Planting

John T: We planted a large amount of Pinot Noir; we planted a large amount of Chardonnay. Back then, those two varieties were probably the most perfect varieties down here on the flat, but we also planted some Riesling. And those three varieties we still have. Excuse me--four varieties. We also planted Merlot and some Cabernet--

Hicke: I think we lost that last, when you planted--.

John T: Well, we chose the following varieties to plant: Pinot Noir--a large amount of Pinot Noir; a large amount of Chardonnay; a small amount of Riesling as kind of an experiment--we thought it would do well here; some Gewiirztraminer--we thought that would do well here, but again, a smaller planting; and Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot . Why did we plant Merlot? We planted Merlot because my mother had helped us with our wine knowledge over the years, and we had the opportunity to enjoy a lot of French wines. I'm trying to say this as an example of how ignorant we really were back then.

Hicke : I don't think anybody had even heard of Merlot.

John T: No! [laughter] We knew that Merlot was a grape that, obviously, was used in many Bordeauxs. So we found out what one particular winery did in terms of their percentage, and we planted that percentage of Merlot versus our Cabernet. So we had a nice Merlot vineyard. It certainly was not a known grape or as popular a grape as it is today. We planted Cabernet, both here and up on the hillside.

Hicke : I want to interrupt and ask, is White Riesling a grape variety?

John T: White Riesling the grape variety, and everybody--.

Hicke : Okay, because I've heard of Grey and Johannesburg, but--.

John T: Yes. Well, Johannesburg is White Riesling. We don't call it Johannesburg Riesling, because we are a long way from Johannesburg. Actually, it's Johannesburger Riesling, which means "Riesling of Johannesburg."

Hicke : Oh, yes. Okay.

John T: So, the actual name of the variety that makes Johannesburg Riesling is White Riesling. There's a White Riesling and a Grey Riesling. Grey Riesling is a much lower quality. It's something that is not very interesting. White Riesling is the grape that makes the great Rieslings of Germany and Switzerland.

Hicke : Thanks.

John T: So we planted that. We went forward and we had, over those intervening twenty years as a grower, continued to grow most of those grape varieties--either for ourselves or for other people. The only one that has really fallen by the wayside is Gewiirztraminer. We did, in fact, take Gewiirztraminer out and replant something else. But all the other varieties that I've mentioned, we still have, and we either sell to other people or produce it ourselves. We made those decisions over a period of five years. So this was a long planting process to plant 600 acres. In fact, that whole process took us ten years to get the whole thing planted. Over those ten years, we were learning about our vineyards, about the wine, people were making wine for us, we were making wine, we were changing the decisions. And we essentially made some good decisions.

The only other grape variety that did not reappear was that we did have some Zinfandel that had been planted before we had gotten here. We did not replant Zinfandel, because we think another area has a competitive advantage. I mean, Zinfandel needs a really hot climate; we're not a hot climate. I would have loved to have had Zinfandel, but it's not the right grape for here.

We didn't plant Gewiirztraminer, because for years there was no market. We had ten acres of Gewiirztraminer. We always sold it, but it was always a struggle. I would love to have ten acres of Gewiirtztraminer today, but back in the seventies, it was hard to sell. So that went away. But all of the other decisions, we stayed with, and essentially now that we have replanted the vineyard once again, we have changed some of those decisions. But we'll get to that.

So, in 1973, we started the winery, and we made two thousand cases of wine, as Janet has told you.

Hicke: This was Chardonnay, I think, mostly?

John T: This was Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, I think. Then in '74, we made Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Pinot Noir. That year was a very exciting year, because not only were we kind of starting this pilot winery--this little micro-winery--. We were doing that because we had interest, but it would have been presumptuous, I think, or it would have been really gutsy for us to say back then, "Oh, we're going to start a winery and we're going to grow a brand and use three-quarters of the grapes on a 600-acre vineyard." That's not what we were doing. Beginning the Winery, 1973

John T: What we were doing was starting a small winery, with a low product that we could sell under our own label, to learn about our grapes, to learn about the process, and just become part of this. We were doing this because we had this huge vineyard, and we wanted to know more about it and have a little brand and kind of be involved, but it was a very small project. The big project was the vineyard.

Hicke : The vineyard, yes, that's interesting.

John T: So we did that, and we went through a period where the bulk wine market--which is where we were going to sell our wine--kind of collapsed, and I think we sold some wine for 73 cents a gallon that year. So that wasn't very interesting. I mean, you've got to get, today, like thirteen dollars a gallon?

Hicke : Yes.

John T: Yes. So we started marketing, and bottled about half of that wine, and sold it with another fellow. His company was MV, I think. So we had this kind of MV Chardonnay.

Hicke : Was that John Wright?

John T: No. We did some for MV, and then we did some for Trefethen. It turned out it was very good wine, because we had kind of gone back to that experiment. We waited for the grapes to mature until they were very ripe, because we wanted to emphasize and capture all that varietal character--that fruit--because we were growers. We wanted the fruit. We wanted to show off our vineyard.

Hicke : Never mind the test tubes. [laughter]

John T: Yes, the test tubes. And then we did some very cold fermentation. Sharing Equipment with M & H Vineyards

John T: We had met John Wright; we had made an arrangement with what is now Domaine Chandon, which was M & H Vineyards, then; and we had made an arrangement for them to share the winery--to buy some of our grapes and share the winery so that they could get a head start on making wine before they built their major winery. So the trade was that I had the building and the license, and they air freighted some equipment in from France. So we had some equipment. This all happened in late July, and we crushed in late August for them. We air shipped a press from France; we had people making stainless steel tanks here. They had never made a stainless steel tank before in their life, and we gave them three weeks to do it. [laughter]

We got started, and we literally would press right into the new tanks. The tanks would arrive. The press and everything was right in front of the door leading into the winery, and a tank would arrive. We would stop crushing and pressing; we would move the equipment over to the side; we would bring the tank in; we would move it back; we would clean the tank; put the valves on; and fill it up with the grapes that were coming in that day. I mean, that's how it was absolutely immediate. [laughter]

The beauty of it was that the champagnelsparkling wine harvest happens first, and then the still wine. So we used all this equipment for John's wine and the tanks, and then he was finished with all of that when our still wine came in. That arrangement went on for seven years.

Consistency in Style

John T: But back to kind of first harvest that we did. We found that the best way, really, was to start selling the wine--something that we hadn't even thought of. We were just going to start this pilot, make some wine, sell it, bottle a little bit of it for our family--but we ended up bottling some and starting a cellar. That was really the beginning.

Since then, we've kind of zeroed in on a style and a type of wine. Back then, we just said, "What kind of wine are we going to make? Well, why don't we make wine that we like." We didn't have any marketing studies. We just said, "Well, this is the type of wine I like, so I'm going to make it." We did that, and we pretty much stayed with that philosophy. We don't follow this trend or that trend, we have stayed with a constant style of wine. We hope that we're always getting better at doing that. We hope that we're learning more about our grapes and about our winemaking, all of that, and we're getting better and better at doing it, but when it gets back in the final analysis to "what kind of wine are we going to make," we're going to make wine that we believe complements the dining table, complements the social situation that people are in, and wine that we like.

Hicke: Soconsistencyis some sortofagoal?

John T: Consistency is a huge goal. It's only possible because we control the grapes, because most of the changes come from the grapes. So we've used the same grapes all these years. We have very similar winemaking techniques. We are interested in anything that comes along, we examine it: How can we improve our wine by using this? But we don't want to change the style, the flavors, the tastes of our wines because, first of all, we like them; second of all, because it's a recognized style; and third of all, because there's a whole market out there that likes that style of wine that we have developed.

The biggest example--well, the two easy examples are probably white wines. Chardonnay is made in--we tend to emphasize the fruit; we tend to use oak judiciously so the fruit comes through. There may be some complexities that come from either barrel fermentation or oak aging, and those are very good, but we don't want to overwhelm the fruit, because we spent thirty years out here trying to develop this fruit as the distinctive flavor that is Trefethen. That's what makes us different from everybody else, and that's what makes everybody else different from everybody else. So we have concentrated on that--improving quality all the time--striving for that, but remaining consistent with the style.

Making a Dry Riesling

John T: The other one that is easy to talk about is Riesling. There aren't very many Rieslings made, and ours is a dry Riesling. We make it so there's just a touch of sugar, just kind of at your threshold, but it's essentially a dry wine. It is just a superb wine with certain foods--as an aperitif and as an afternoon wine --and that's a style that was developed in the first few years-- kind of experimenting this way and that way, been doing it ever since. We think we're better at it, but we're doing it the same way.

Hicke : I have a feeling there weren't too many people making dry Rieslings when you started.

John T: There was nobody making dry Rieslings, that I know of. There aren't many now. [laughter]

Hicke : So why did you?

John T: Well, we did because we wanted to make more than one white wine. Riesling is kind of the other noble white grape of the world. I think that we will see it more and more in the future. I think it's had a checkered career in the United States, and it may have to get over that, but it is a distinctive, marvelous wine, and German winemakers have been trying different things but coming back to their roots. They're coming back to Riesling.

Hicke : Why did you make it dry, as opposed to everybody who was making sweet?

John T: Well, what do you do with a sweet Riesling? Have it for dessert or something? I mean, we like wine to go with our food. If you have an overly sweet Riesling, it doesn't work with most of what you and I probably eat at our dining table. We can get a lot of characteristics that Rieslings are known for--the beautiful flowers and perfumy nose--and the wine is very fruity. Some people say, you know, that's sweet. It doesn't happen to be sweet, but that's okay. There's a lot of fruit in it, and it's a very refreshing wine, and that's the way we like it.

Hicke : Yes, that's what it comes down to, isn't it?

John T: Yes.

Hicke : It depends on how you like it.

John T: Well, that kind of works well with a lot of foods. Red wines are a little bit more difficult to characterize so easily. Our major red wine has been Cabernet Sauvignon with Merlot. It now has Merlot and Cabernet Franc. It has evolved in that we want to make an elegant red wine. We want to make a-winethat is soft and smooth and elegant and luscious and goes, again, and complements your table.

We don't want to make a hugely tannic, oakey, heavy wine that offends my palate--stands out, but offends my palate. So we have always strived to make wines that a restaurateur can use in his restaurant, rather than wines that sit on the shelf, or get opened and somebody has a glass and says, "Wow, that's very big!" [laughter] You know? But they don't want anymore because their mouth is all puckered up, and they can't talk; there's no saliva left in their mouth. I mean, what's the point? [laughter] That's not what wine is all about. Wine is to be enjoyed, and to be used with friends, and in restaurants, and with food. It should be a part of the dining experience; it shouldn't be the dining experience. So that's kind of how we make wine, and we still do it that way. It's interesting that we still do it that way, I think--but we do it much better.

Opportunity to Replant

John T: The big thing that's changed now is that we have had the opportunity--and I say "opportunity" after getting over the financial issues of having to replant an entire vineyard--I have had the opportunity of planting a vineyard twice in a lifetime. I hope I don't have to do it three times. Most people don't have that opportunity.

The opportunity came because we only had one rootstock in the sixties. It was AXR, and it finally succumbed to phylloxera, and everybody knows that story. But, for us, our vineyard really was ready to be replanted. We had already started a replanting program. The reason to replant and kind of get started was so that you don't end up with an entire vineyard of fifty-year-old vines. You don't want that.

So, years ago, back in the late eighties, we started a program of taking out vineyards and replanting them so that we would have new vines coming along to balance the old vines that were getting older. And also because we knew so much more now than we knew back then. All of a sudden, we had soil differences that we didn't even know we had back then. We had rootstocks to go along with those soil differences. We had trellis systems that were different. We had clones that are different. Those weren't available in 1968. So we had this marvelous opportunity to go back and do it again. Because of that, the wines out of Napa Valley, the wines out of Trefethen are going to be better in the future than they've ever been in the past, because we had this opportunity to go back in and use all this knowledge that we've gained in the last thirty years to replant. But now it's very difficult, because the choices are overwhelming: your soil type, your climate type, which rootstock, which clone, what spacing, which trellis system? There's just an infinity of possibilities out there that you can put together. So we've been doing that, now, for five years.

Changes in Replanting

Hicke: Let's talk a little bit about how things have changed--what changes you made when you replanted.

John T: I think the first thing is that we know much more about the ranch. We know, not only the technical stuff that comes out of doing the soil profile or something, but you just kind of know what grape vines do well here and what don't do well here. Sometimes it's not so clear technically, but you know that this piece tends to produce drier and mature Cabernet very well, and this piece over here tends to be wetter and cooler and the soil is heavier, and so that tends to be more of a Chardonnay or a Pinot Noir piece.

Hicke: So just experience?

John T: Yes, the experience. But then within that field where you said, "Well, this field is Cabernet," there may be, now, four different fields within that field that is Cabernet. Those four different fields now we know are different. So when we go back in and replant, now rather than going in on that one field on the hillside and planting one root stock and one clone and one spacing, we'll go in and plant up to four different root stocks, probably at least two--maybe three--clones, and the spacing system may or may not change, but probably will a little bit as we go along. All of that, now, is different.

So as we look at the vineyard, we, first of all, have a lot more experience. Second of all, we have a lot more options as far as rootstock: Do we want deep, vigorous rootstocks? Do we want shallow rootstocks that are vigorous? Do we want shallow rootstocks that are not vigorous? What is it that we're trying to get at the end of the day? So you match that rootstock--not only to the soil type, but what you're trying to get on the top. Do you want a very sparse vine that's kind of stressed and has a nice balance of leaf structure and fruit? Or, for a different variety, you may want more vigor. You may want more foliage and more fruit. So you have all of those choices. Then, once that choice is made, then you have to work on the spacing and the trellis, because if the vine is going to be naturally vigorous, you can't stop it. You can't plant little vines all next to each other because they'll run into each other. So if you have an area so tight, and a clone, and a variety that's vigorous, then you put it on a fairly large trellis system and try to use up that vigor so that the plant is balanced. If you plant it small and try to keep it small, it's going to try to keep growing and put out all this vegetation, and it isn't going to work. The other side--180 degrees to the other side of that is that you plant the low vigor rootstock on a non-fertile soil, and then you can put the vines close together. But you can't force a vine to be different than what it is and get quality.

What we've done at Trefethen for the most part is we've put Pinot Noir and Chardonnay on a vertical system. They kind of are moderately vigorous--not really vigorous--and we've put them on a vertical system. We had an eight-foot row--we used to have twelve-foot rows--we put them five or six feet apart, and we tried to match that trellis system so the vine will fill out the entire trellis system and stop. The fruit is more evenly exposed to sunshine, so it ripens more evenly. If it ripens more evenly, the winemaker has got a much better start on making a good wine.

We tried to get the fruit exposed for another reason, and that is that we want to reduce the possibility of disease and the use of any sort of chemicals. We have certain things we have to treat, but if you expose the fruit and open the vine up to the air and the sunshine, you don't have so much of a problem. So we want to concentrate on that.

Vice versa, on something like a Cabernet. Cabernet is a fairly vigorous vine, and up on the hillside we can control the vigor because the soil is not very fertile and deep--it's more rocky. Down here, even though we have some rocky soil, the vines will grow. So we tend to put them on a wider spacing with a lot of trellis system to kind of support that vigor, but again to open the vine up.

If you were to compare what we did in '68 and the early seventies to what we're doing now, no matter what the trellis system is and what the spacing is, the single biggest change might be that the vine and fruit is opened up and controlled. We know where the foliage is going to be; we know where the fruit is going to be. The fruit is exposed; it's open; the sunshine can get in there; and the breezes can get in there. The goal, obviously, of all of that is to produce a higher level of quality in the fruit. And there's no question that we'll get it.

Blending Different Barrel Types

John T: We still had a lot of the old vineyards. We didn't want to make this huge change all of a sudden. The wines changed, so we had a blend of old vineyards and new vineyards, but you taste the wines from the new vineyards and they're better--I mean, every single one. I mean almost always they're better. That kind of flies in the face of this myth that you have to have an old vine to get good fruit. That would be more of a typical Old World, European take on this whole thing. Our take on it is it's good to have that because there are different characters there, but we have learned so much in viticulture that the grapes coming off the young vineyards are almost always superior. So we like the balance of having both. Just like in the winery--we have a balance of having old barrels and new barrels, and French barrels from one manufacturer and another manufacturer and another manufacturer, plus American barrels. We like the blend, and we can control that blend. We can have a lot of new barrels of one particular wine type if we want to emphasize that, but what we usually end up with is a blend of barrels of multiple manufacturers, multiple countries, and multiple years. That gives you a consistency, because that doesn't change dramatically.

That's number one; number two, you don't end up with toothpicks in your wine. We make wine out of grapes, not out of oak. So oak needs to be a part of the process, not the process. There are examples of wine where I don't think the fruit makes any difference at all. I mean, you just bring it in, oak it up, and all you can taste is oak. You might as well have used pineapple juice. [laughter] So that's my fairly clear take on the subject.

Hicke : Yes. I understand that. It certainly makes sense. It's interesting because, as you said, you come from a vineyard background--or agricultural. You are approaching it from that end, rather than from the chemical-mixture-type thing. Subsurface Irrigation

Hicke: Let me ask you about a couple more things. Subsurface irrigation? You were a pioneer in that, I think.

John T: We've done a certain amount of subsurface irrigation. I kind of have to go back and explain this. With the old vineyards on AXR, they were a very deep-rooted system, very efficient at searching out water and nutrients and bringing them up to the vine. So you didn't have to do much; it was pretty easy farming. You typically didn't irrigate; you might irrigate a young vine coming up. You typically didn't have to put nutrients in the soil. We're farming much more intensely now with different root stocks.

John T: We're farming much more intently today with the different rootstocks, different clones, and different spacings. One of the things that happens is that a selection of rootstock might be a shallow rootstock. If you have a shallow rootstock and you plant it in California, and it's not a drought-resistant rootstock either, and then it doesn't rain--as it doesn't in California from spring all the way until November--the vine will probably die if you don't give it some water. So the trick in farming-- especially, I think, in winegrowing--is to get the right amount of water and nutrients to the vine and not overdo it. If you overdo it, your quality just goes.

But when we had visitors from other parts of the world, sometimes they don't understand that this is a desert for six months. Most of France--. It's very interesting. If you look at the precipitation in some of the winegrowing regions of France and California, and you look at it on an annual basis--it's about the same. The difference is theirs comes equally through the entire year, month by month, and so they've got some precipitation in the summer. Ours, as you know, comes in the middle of the winter and then it stops and that's it: there's nothing.

So we started working with subsurface irrigation as well as surface drip irrigation to bring the new vines along and to support shallow rootstocks. With deep rootstocks--and we have both--you don't need to do it. You have the drip in to bring them along when they're young grape vines, and then you use it less and less. At the end, when the vines are mature, you might not use it at all, because they have got a very deep root system. The subsurface system is interesting, because it is the most efficient use of water because there is no evaporation. You're not wetting a bunch of the surface soil, where there aren't any roots, anyway. You're putting the water right where the roots are. So it's a way to minimize your water usage.

Second of all, it takes all those hoses and everything and puts them underground. Those hoses are susceptible to damage from UV, from the sunshine, from coyotes eating on them, from workers as they're going along pruning, or equipment coming along can do damage. So you have that.

The third reason is that you don't get any weed growth. If you water on the surface, you're going to germinate the weed seeds that are on the surface. If your water source is eighteen inches underground where there are just roots and there aren't any seeds, you can water during the summer and not have to deal with weeds coming up all summer long. Those are the reasons.

Hicke: Was anybody else doing this? Did you have a chance to observe it be£ore--?

John T: Well, ,I think, probably, the person who, to my knowledge, does a lot of that is Murphy Goode. I think they do a lot of it. I'm not sure who else does a lot of it. We have probably a third of the vineyard in subsurface drip; we have a third that hasn't been replanted, so it hasn't been done; and we have a third that probably has overhead, standard drip.

Hicke: But you didn't have a chance to see how this was working before you actually put it in?

John T: No. There were a few people who were working with it when we were working with it, and it's one of those things where you just put it in.

We are doing it differently now. What we did, first, was to put a line about eighteen inches underground, offset about a foot or eighteen inches from the vine. The problem with that is that when you then send a tractor down, you're sending the tractor down right over the wet spot. What we're doing now is we're putting the drip right in the middle of the row, and there's nothing that goes in the middle of the row. The roots will get there. What happens in a lot of drip installations is you get a little ball of roots in one place; then, if you don't water it, the thing suffers from a drought. We don't want to develop that type of a root system. What we want to develop in a root system is a broad-based and deep-based root system. So, with the subsurface, now, we're putting it in the middle of the row, and you force the vines to go over there and get that water. But in the meantime, they've had to travel three feet down, because water goes down; it doesn't go sideways. You really have to saturate something before water will start moving sideways in your garden. It goes down. So by putting that drip in the middle, we have made the roots work for that water, and we like that. Plus, you're not driving over your wet spot with your tractor, compacting it.

Pierce's Disease

Hicke: Okay. Pierce'sdisease? Isthataproblem?

John T: Pierce's disease is a larger problem. It is the largest problem that we have now because there is no answer. For instance, on phylloxera there is an answer--you just replant. All it takes is money and it's over. I mean, it's done. It's over. It's finished. It's perfectly curable. We don't know how to deal with Pierce's disease.

What we're doing from a preventative standpoint is that we're trying to eliminate the habitat. The habitat is not anything that's green. I mean, we're not going in and making a desert out of everything around the vineyard. There are specific plants that are hosts to the sharpshooter. So we want to go in, eliminate those, put in plant material that is not a host. That's number one.

Number two, we want to get the foliage up off the ground. A great place for the sharpshooter to live is in kind of an evergreen situation down on the ground that's very bushy and impenetrable the whole year. So, on a lot of areas around our vineyard, we've gone in and pruned whatever the plant material is so that underneath it can be clear and we can get in there and make sure that it's not home for the sharpshooter. So that's kind of the second thing we have done.

We can have areas between the habitat and our vineyard that aren't planted to vines. Sharpshooters essentially live either in landscaped areas or along riparian areas, along creeks and rivers. So our vineyard that's closest to the creek--we planted 250 feet of walnut trees between the creek and where the vineyard starts. Now, underneath those walnut trees, we will properly cultivate the soil, and it will be nice, clean earth, and then we'll have walnut trees.

Now there are all sorts of philosophies about what sort of tree you should put in or what sort of plant material you should have in this barrier. You know, one barrier might be 300 feet of pavement, but you don't want to do that. [laughter]

Walnut Trees as a Buffer

John T: The reason we came up with walnut trees is going back to the history that we've grown walnuts all our lives--the Trefethen family. What we do with the walnuts that are all around the perimeter of our property is we pick those and then we share the walnuts with a group of our workers who crack them. Then they take some of them and we take some of them. We put them in little burlap bags, and we say, "Trefethen Vineyards Estate-Grown Walnuts." They're perfect halves, and we send them to all our friends all over the world.

Hicke: I saw some framed letters thanking you for walnuts.

John T: They're really good walnuts. So that's one reason. The second reason is that we had a bunch of walnuts along a particular perimeter of the vineyard.

Hicke : Already?

John T: Yes. I mean, it was there. And for twenty-five years we had a Pinot Noir vineyard right next to it. Then we had a house with a lot of just overgrown foliage, and it wasn't taken care of--a neighbor place--and for twenty-five years, we had this experiment going on. By the walnut orchard there was no Pierce's disease, and a hundred yards over here by this person's house with a lot of bushes there was Pierce's disease.

Hicke : Scientific deduction. [laughter]

John T: The scientific deduction is that it's better to have walnut trees than bushes. So we planted walnut trees as a buffer between our riparian areas and the vineyard.

Hicke: How long ago did you do this? John T: The new planting is probably four years old. So the vineyard went in four years ago, and the walnut trees went in four years ago.

Hicke: And it's working, I guess.

John T: Well, so far it's working. [laughter] We'll see. It takes a little while, sometimes, for these things to work through.

Good Farm Management

John T: The other thing that I think you can do with Pierce's disease is just good farm management--agricultural management. For instance, if you have a vineyard with above surface drip and you put that drip on during the summer and you don't take care of your weeds and the weeds grow tall up into the vines, you'll get Pierce's disease.

So I think we need to be very cognizant of preventative maintenance, essentially--making sure that all the perimeter areas don't have a lot of host plants. But there's nothing you can do. There is no cure. There isn't any bullet-proof way of preventing it. Then, when you do get it, you plant those vines back and it just gets kind of a cross thing that you can deal with.

Winemakers, Vineyard Manager, and the Team

Hicke : I don't know how much more time you have, but can you tell me a little bit about your winemakers?

John T: Certainly, I can. As you remember, we started the winery in 1973. I was making the wine, Janet was doing everything else, and Tony was helping me--Tony Baldini, our vineyard manager. But the nice thing that I also had, is that I had the chef de cave of Moet in France making the sparkling wine for Domaine Chandon.

Hicke : Who was that?

John T: That was Edmond Maudiere. We developed a long friendship. He's a pilot, I'm a pilot. Clearly, there were some other people from France who were here as well, but we exchanged a lot of ideas, and I learned a tremendous amount from them all through the years. They, obviously, were looking to get knowledge about this place called California and Napa Valley where now they were trying to make wine, and they didn't have any history and we had some.

In 1974, I was able to meet David Whitehouse. David was an enologist and had worked for Mondavi and then had gone down to Temecula. We met, and it is kind of a funny story, because it goes back to when we were literally doing everything. I mean, if you wanted something done, you did it. There wasn't any crew around helping you. David came for his interview, and I was in a building, loading stuff on pallets and moving them out with a forklift. I had to get it done, and he arrived, and I said, "Can you drive a forklift?" He said, "Yes." So he got on the forklift and I was loading stuff on the pallet and we were doing our interview. [laughter] By the time we got the building cleaned out, he was on board. So David joined us in '74, and was winemaker for many years. We need to get these dates, because I'm not exactly positive when David moved to become vice president of operations and Peter Luthi became winemaker. So David was a winemaker for many years and joined us in 1974, and now he's vice president of production for both the vineyard and the winery.

So one of the things, I think--as we think about consistency in wines, striving to make wine better each year in that style that we have chosen--one element is the grapes. The other elements are the people. Tony Baldini came with us as our vineyard manager in 1968; he's still with us. David Whitehouse came in 1974 as winemaker; he's still with us. And the people that have come along to take their places have been with us.

Our vineyard manager now is Steve Baldini, who is Tony's eldest son out of eight children. Steve worked on a joint venture project up in Esparto with me, farming vegetables, and then became our mechanic here at the vineyard, and then became kind of a lead fellow, and eventually became vineyard manager, which he is now. His father is vice president on the vineyard side.

On the winery side, we've really followed the same idea. Peter Luthi came to join us as someone who would work with David on the winemaking side; then, in the year that we don't quite remember, became winemaker, and has been winemaker for us for either ten or twelve years. So we have tried to have a consistent grape source; the people working with the wine have a long history of learning about the vineyard, learning about the techniques, so that each year they can adjust their techniques because of the vintage differences. You can't do that if you don't have a history of knowing about the grapes, because you don't even recognize the difference. We do, because everybody has been here for a long time.

We have a great program of having interns from Davis--from the university program of enology--come and work with us for up to six months or a year at at time. So we constantly have a source of the new ideas that are coming out of the university system, and those people are having the opportunity to work in a real winery and get their practical knowledge down. What we get from it is that we get young, stimulated people coming out of the university system--or the university system, going through their training--who work for us for a period of time and become a very important part of our team. So I think that consistency and knowledge of past vintages you can really only get by having people who have been here, and who have been striving to make that wine better and know those vintages. Then you have Janet and John Trefethen who are in there at all the tastings--

Hicke: They'vebeentherealongtime!

John T: They've been there a long time too! [laughter] I think that is all very key.

Just to mention another just invaluable person that's been with us is Richard DeGarmo. Richard was the second person that we hired after David Whitehouse. Richard had worked with David in Temecula and at Mondavi. He was there, and we knew that he was going to be the first person that we could add, but we weren't big enough. We finally got big enough that we could add him, and we invited him to join us. He came in and was the other person. So Richard and David and John Trefethen were hands-on, working every day together for years at making these wines. Richard is now in charge of all of our purchasing. He is in charge of all our maintenance. He is an integral part of why Trefethen works.

Hicke: I suspect that one of the reasons you have these long-time employees is because you have a clear appreciation of the work they're doing, which you demonstrate to them.

John T: Well, I hope so, but we all probably have to do that more. These people are part of the family. I mean, it goes long beyond just the top people. Everybody in our organization is really a part of our family, and we all act that way. We're all professional in our jobs, but we're also very good friends. They know that what they are doing is just an integral part of the success of making the wine or producing the grapes. The Baldini family and the Trefethen family has been together, and David has joined us, and Richard, and Peter Luthi. It's not a part of making wine, but our chief financial officer has been working with my family for thirty years. He is now the chief financial officer of the winery.

These relationships--in the winery and also out in the trade--or the people that we sell to, the people that we go out and visit are the key to this whole industry. The wine business- -or part of the business of the wine industry--is personal relationships. It's very, very important that Janet and I and David and Peter travel a lot. Peter is Swiss. He goes to Switzerland and Germany and Europe a couple of times a year. I go to Asia; David goes to .Asia; Janet goes to Europe. All of us are all over the United States. These personal relationships, and keeping those up so that people know that the Trefethens have a style of wine, and that they're really there, and that this whole team is here, and we produce the grapes, we make the wine, and then market the wine all ourselves--I think this is just a very important part of our business. I don't know another way that you can do it. It's a personal business. It's not like a lot of businesses.

Changes in the Napa Valley

Hicke: Well, do you have a few minutes to just talk about the Napa Valley and your participation in some of the changes that have been going on? Do you have time?

John T: Yes, I do.

Hicke: You tell me when you're going to run out of time.

John T: Yes. I think we have got about ten minutes.

Well, I came up and really moved to Napa Valley, permanently, in 1972. Before that, I was here in and out.

In those early years, everybody around here was certainly concentrating on the vineyard aspect. We were growers, and the majority of our business--I mean, maybe 90 percent of our business--was selling grapes to other wineries. One of the things that we didn't have was any sort of organization where the growers could get together and share ideas and what about this and what about that technique, and even, "Who are we?'' We don't even know who we are. There was a farm bureau, but the farm bureau has a lot of other things besides growing grapes.

Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association and Napa Valley Vintnerst Association

John T: So we formed the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association. I was a founding member of that organization and its first president. That organization, I think, was necessary, because there was no way for the growers to communicate on a whole bunch of different issues. One of the kind of sticky issues was, "Gee, we need to get paid for our grapes. How do we market our grapes to Napa Valley wineries?"

So I was active in that organization for many years. Then, as you do, we kind of moved on in this whole world of wine, and the winery became a bigger and bigger part of what we were and what we did. I was invited to become a member of the Napa Valley Vintners' Association. The Napa Valley Vintners' Association then, I think, was twenty-two wineries, and you were invited. Just because you were a winery did not mean that you were a member of the Napa Valley Vintners' Association. I was very pleased at that. We had been in business for a number of years before that invitation came. I served on the board, I think, two different times, and I was president of that organization.

That organization, when I first joined, met monthly for a well-lubricated lunch. If there was any business to be conducted, it was conducted after the tasting hour and three- quarters of the way through the lunch. Let's say the discussions were lively. [laughter] And the interest in becoming a professional trade organization was very low. Nobody really wanted to do that.

But as wine grew in Napa, and as there were more wineries, and as there was more competition from other areas, we really needed a-trade organization that could consolidate all of the knowledge, that could represent all of the wineries of Napa Valley, and that would be very active in the marketing of Napa Valley. As a result, the Napa Valley Vintners' Association began a slow process of moving in that direction. This took years. When I was president, we had just, four months prior, hired the first executive director of the Napa Valley Vintner's Association--the only, therefore, paid employee in the association. When I became president, we had to let the first director go.

Hicke: What year was it that you became president?

John T: I don't remember, but we can look that one up.

The result of that was that Michael Martini, who was then treasurer, and I ran that association as a trade association for that first nine months without any staff at all. Then we were able to find that first executive director, and it started to grow. Now I think the organization is a full-fledged trade organization.

Napa Valley Wine Auction

John T: We are involved with the Napa Valley Wine Auction. We are involved internationally in marketing wines from the Napa Valley, as well as nationally. It's a repository of a tremendous wealth of knowledge about the Napa Valley. Wineries that are wineries are automatically--membership is available to them. The staff has grown and is professional and exceptional. I think that the focus of that group, now, continues to be, "How do we continue to tell the story of Napa Valley, not only nationally, but internationally?"

A lot of programs that we're doing now are international. Trefethen has always felt that we need to be in all of the major markets of the world. Years ago, the reason for that was marketing reasons. If you are represented in those areas, then you are a brand. People who travel--and those are the people that we sell to--see your product worldwide, and that is very different from seeing your product just in California. So we started a program very early, and I think that the same thing now applies to all of Napa Valley.

We need to be--. This is a global industry. Ownership, distribution--everything is global. I mean, you go up and down this valley, and there are people from all over the world making wine in Napa Valley. That wine is sold all over the world, and wine from all over the world is sold in the United States. There are joint ventures, and distribution arrangements, everything. It's one of the most globally integrated industries that I know of; so I think that the vintners have jumped at that challenge, and are now as active internationally as they are nationally. That's very important.

The reason that it's important is not just to sell another case of Trefethen wine. The reason it's important is that we are really caretakers of this place we call Napa Valley--those of us who are privileged to kind of live and work and own a piece of it. What we have to make sure is that the Napa Valley wine industry and the Napa Valley vineyard industry is just as healthy nationally and internationally as we can be, so that we can protect this for generations to come.

Every time I think of marketing and going out and saying, "This is the story, why are we doing this?" I do that so much when I don't have any wine to sell. So why do I do it? I do it because long-term--. I want the next generation of people in Napa Valley to be able to do what we're doing. I think it's a great gift that we have in Napa, and we need to protect it. The best way to protect it is to promote it.

[tape interruption]

Hicke: You were just saying you were president in 1985.

John T: And I was president of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association from 1975 to 1976.

Hicke : Wait a minute. In 1985, you were president of the Vintners'?

John T: Yes. In 1975, I was president of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association.

Hicke: Okay.

Utah 1088 Endurance Motorcycle Rally

John T: And in 1996, I was a finisher in the Utah 1088 Endurance Motorcycle Rally. [laughter] It's another thing I do: I do long-distance motorcycle rallies.

Hicke: Oh, you didn't even tell me about that. John T: And a fabulous one is called the Utah 1088. It's sponsored by the Utah Highway Patrol and raises money for Alzheimer's. These are twenty-four-hour rallies, which means you get on a motorcycle at six o'clock one morning, and you get off of it at six o'clock the next morning.

Hicke: Oh, you're kidding.

John T: I'm not kidding. [laughter] And you do a minimum of a thousand eighty-eight miles. That's what 1088 stands for. To finish well, you have to do quite a bit more than that. So I had participated in that particular rally in 1995 and 1996.

Hicke: Okay, '95 and '96. And which one did you win?

John T: Well, I've never won one, but there are seventy-five invited riders--you have to be invited--and the best I did was when I placed thirteenth, which is very good.

Hicke : Yes, I believe it.

Trefethen Children, Loren and Hailey

John T: So that's just another love of mine. We do a lot of mountain biking and hiking and bicycling with the kids. I hope that Janet talked about the kids. They're great kids.

Hicke : She didn't tell me very much. She missed quite a few things, actually, because we didn't have much time. She told me their ages. You have Loren?

John T: Loren is fourteen--our first son--and he's an excellent student, loves soccer, loves mountain biking, and actually loves surfing. He goes to surf camp down in Santa Cruz in the summer.

Hicke : Oh, nice.

John T: Hailey, our daughter, is ten. She seems to be leaning towards-- she has a lot of artistic talent. She's a great drawer, and she can just put things together and draw things or make things, and it's just totally natural to her. I'll be sitting there struggling with something, and she'll come in and say, "Oh, Dad, I can do that," and it's just done. Marvelous, marvelous artist. She loves soccer. Janet--I don't know if Janet mentioned it, but Janet is very active in riding cutting horses competitively. She is a very tough rider. Our son, Loren, is riding cutting horses, and has been seated number two in the western division. There's an eastern division and a western division. A couple of years ago, he was the number two rider in the western division. He and a fellow by the name of Buster somebody, and Tanya Tucker won the celebrity cutting, which was a benefit for MLS in Ft. Worth, Texas, which is the center of the cutting world. Hailey rides western pleasure horses, and is--we hope--starting to get a little bit of an interest in cutting horses. John Trefethen thinks that horses are to take you from the bottom of a mountain in Colorado to the top of a mountain in Colorado, [laughter] and is absolutely overawed at his wife's, son's, and daughter's ability to stay on cutting horses at all, let alone do as well as they do competitively.

Hicke : Sounds like a talented crowd.

John T: Yes, that's the athletic talent.

Hicke: One thing that we didn't talk about--did you have wine in your family growing up? And do you serve wine to your family at dinner?

John T: Yes, yes. I would say my mother started getting wine on the table when I was in high school, certainly. No--earlier. What I remember are those jugs of Mateus Rod. I guess it was earlier, because I would have been living in Piedmont, so I would say in the 1950s. Then my mother started to put a wine cellar together and collect wine during the late fifties or sixties. We had a wine cellar in our home in Piedmont, and had, by the way, a marvelous selection of German Rieslings, which age very well, and some of which we still have. They're just exquisite wines. But had a lot of Bordeauxs and Burgundies, and became very interested in that.

Janet and I, obviously, enjoy wine, and our kids enjoy wine any time they want. They're more sippers than anything else. They kind of think some of it is strange-tasting, but they are encouraged.

I think that the important thing that we're introducing to them is--first of all, it's kind of sensory perception and being able to then describe it, which we as Americans, I don't think concentrate on very much. I mean even smelling flowers, which you have to do, smelling wine, tasting it, describing it, looking at the color. They're growing up with that. They're also growing up with something that I think is just critically important, and I think that we're all wrong in the United States. I think they're growing up with the opportunity to have a little wine with their dinner at home if they want to. Wine is a part of our life, it's a part of our meal time, it's our meal-time beverage, and it's not something that you get and go out and get blasted on and get in your car and go out and kill somebody. We need to teach our youth--introduce our youth to responsible use of beverages that happen to have alcohol in them. That isn't something that happens magically when you're twenty- one years old. If you grow up with it, you're not anywhere near as inclined to abuse it and to think of it as something that you've never been able to do, so let's do it big time now. I think that's very, very important, for families to give the youth the opportunity to be responsible about something that's going to be available to them all their lives. If you don't give them the opportunity to kind of see their role models using it responsibly, then why in the world do we think they're going to be responsible about it when they grow up? So, certainly, wine is our meal-time beverage, and it's available to our children, but obviously in moderation.

Hicke: Right. Thank you for taking time to participate in this project.

Transcribed by Caroline Sears Final Typed by Shannon Page TAPE GUIDE--Janet and John Trefethen, Trefethen Vineyards

Interview with Janet Trefethen, August 5, 1997 Tape 1, Side A Tape 1, Side B Tape 2, Side A Tape 2, Side B

Interview with John Trefethen, August 6, 1997 Tape 1, Side A Tape 1, Side B Tape 2, Side A Tape 2, Side B Tape 3, Side A Tape 3, Side B not recorded

APPENDIX

A Frank J. Prial, "Wine Talk," New York Times, April 20, 1994 82

B Alan Goldfarb, "25 years of Trefethen wines," The Montclarion, May 10, 1994 83

C "How and Why 'Eshcol?'" 84

D Charles Robbins, "Trefethen: The early years" 86

E EshcolITrefethen Winery: Statement of Significance 9 1

F Trefethen Vineyards: Wine Price List, Napa Valley Cooking Class 98

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Janet and John Trefethen, who own nlore than for six or eight Itlonths- ferent direction. Gone is the softn&s .: Well, some people like it that way. and operate the Naps Valley winery of the earlier wines. Replacing it -is , . . A, that bears their name, were in New Time after time, good chardonnay elegance and restraint, The wine has York a few nights ago to try to prove is fla~edby too much MYand by too more backbone, more structure, ap that the old wine-making spirit still much oak in the taste and in the parently because of the heavy use, for lives jn the form of their wines. They aroma. It's n~orelike a dessert wine the first time, of more tannic &apes . brought along wine spanning 20 years than a table wine. from hillside vineyards rather than of work, from their.1973 chardonnay California is blessed with an abun- grapes from the valley floor.- ---. and to their 1993. dance of all the things that go into The new style, more in kee$fig' They brought cabernets and a ries- good wine. But one thing in short with what other top Napa Valley win- : ling, too, but Trefethen Vineyards supply is restraint, which happens to eries are doing, followed through in Winery is known for its chardonnay. I be a hallmark of the Trefethen wines. the 1987 Reserve, the winery's &st.-

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Tuesday, May 10,1994 83 APPENDIX B

The 9 Montclarion 1983 - &me character-inducing oxidation with subdued fruit and oak nuazccs in the nose; very rich, viscous and opulent on the palate with mouthfuls of aeamy pear and pineapple on a long, soft finish with a bit of subdued oak and spice; drink over the next 3- 5 years. 1982 - Soft pineapple essences on an The otherwise closed nose; rich and opulent Wine File . with magnificent pineapple and hazelnut flavors with softening nuances of wood; gorgeous and still all there for another 3-5 Y-- 25 years of 1979 - Closed in the nosc; soft and rich; drinking now over the next 2 years. Trefethen wines W6 - Soft and elegant with bready, Of the nearly 800 California wineries yeasty, toasty aromas; nice aeamy fruit, now in operation, less than four dozen can viscous; delicious to drink over the next 2 boast 25 years of existence and 21 vin- 3 years. tages. Such is the case with Trefethen Vine- W3- Vegetal, sour ilavon; over- yards. thehill There were only 30 wineries in the Cakmer Sawignom - l992 (barrel Napa Valley in 1968 when the Trefethens .sample) - Soft blackberries, cassis and purchased their property at the southern chocolate in the nosc; intense, sumptuous end of the valley. fruit; great balance with some nice new The Trefethens were among the second oak wave of vinmen who began purchasing W (not released) - A bit closed vineyard property, replanting and creating although there is some nice cassis emerg- the California wine boom of the '70s. ing; good balance but with a bit of an Chardonnay, with sumptuous fruit and alcohol taste in the end; soft tannins, rich subtly constrained oak, define Trefethen's and lovely for aging over the next 3-10 signature varietal. But it also produces Y- some beautifully balanced cabernet 1989 - Eucalyptus and bemes in the sauvignons aud lovely rieslings. nosc; extraordinary fruit exhact; big, bold, TheTrcfethen's recently celebrated their mmplex; chewy and delicious; drink over 25th annive~~yat a small dinner party at the next 3-12 years. Stars restaurant in San Francisco, the high- 1988 - Closed in the nosc with some light ofwhich was vertical tastings of nine cassis showing; already exhibits softness chardonnay and 10 cabernet vintages. with deliciousjammy blackbemes; elegant .I was struck by the consistency of al- and rich with a long chewy, juicy finish; most all the wines. That is, vintage by soft tannins for aging 2-12 years. vintage replications of tight. mineral-like 1987-Herbal, eucalyptus, blackberry mas;flavors of opulent hit;and lengthy bouquet a huge, gorgeous wine with great finishes punctuated by oakiness. berry extract and some chocolate; great My tasting notes: balance with a long £inish for aging 1@15 Chordo-s - 1993 (stainless steel Y-a tank sample) -Grassy aromas with some 1986 -Floral, powerful berry aromas; pineapple; a bit of COZ, with good pine- amazing softness for dridhg now but a apple fruit flavors on a long finish; too powerful wine with a decade or more of early to be definitive. potential. 1991 (current release)-Brcady, yeasty 1978 - Bepinning to take on brown but othenvise closed nose; round, smooth, edges of age; a bit of caramelized oxida- restxained fruit with a tight citrusstructure; tion with herbal, minty aromas; loads of a bit hot in the end. character with some oxidation and bram- 1935 -Some mineral and clay aromas bly hitfrom the American oak; long fin- but othenvise tight; a touch of oxidation on ish; drink over the next 2 years. the palate. which gives it some charaaer, 1975 -Some nice leathery, mintincss soft pineapple fruit with smooth, lovely in the nose; mineral notes in the fruit, oak on the finish; drink up. giving way to soft berries and mint; still r/1984 - The same mineral and clay some tannins for another 3-4 years. notes in the bouquet; very soft and round 1974-Inky color, tight nosc with some witbsomc pearand pincapplc; a hint ofsoft raisiny fruit and pretty, minty berries; still oak with a bit of spice and hotness in thc all there for aging another decade; fruit is finish; drink up. still intense, acids are in balance.

84 APPENDIX C

HOW AND WHY 'ESHCOL?'

The Statue of Liberty was unveiled: the year was 1886. In the Napa Valley two wealthy bankers, brothers James and George Goodman, hired local architect Captain Hamden McIntyre to build a winery on their estate they had named Eshcol, recalling the passage in the Bible where the word refers to an especially enormous and delicious cluster of grapes in the Promised Land. The word Eshcol decorated an arched entryway to the ranch. McIntyre, who also designed Far Niente, Greystone and Inglenook, created a three-story wooden building which operated on the principles of gravity. Horses pulled an elevator where grapes would be hoisted to the top floor to be crushed and then literally travel downwards through the next floors as they cycled through the phases of winemaking. The fir and redwood building cost $1,500 to build, and had a capacity of 250,000 gallons. Today the building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and is Napa Valley's only remaining wooden gravity-flow winery: it is painted in a shade of terracotta or pumpkin which is as close as possible to its original color. Another unusual distinction is that the Trefethen estate in 1996 is the Napa Valley's largest vineyard property contiguous to a winery under single ownership, with 600 acres being farmed.

Valley Oaks Four impressive Valley oak trees around the winery are part of a larger grove on the property, which Robert Louis Stevenson commented on when he visited in 1880. One tree south of the winery proper has been estimated to be 800 years old. An enormous specimen in the courtyard as you approach the winery was a century old when the building was constructed in 1886, making that tree more than two hundred years old today.

From the Bible Eshcol is a Hebrew word meaning cluster or bunch generally, and a cluster of grapes specifically. The word is very ancient and there are many sister-words in other Semitic languages: Ethiopian ('askal - grape), Ugaritic (utkl - grapes) and Arabic and Aramaic. The word and its cognates were used widely throughout the Ancient Near East.

When we consider the relatively hot climate of much of the region, it is not surprising to find the eshcol, the cluster of grapes, functioning as a symbol of abundance. Perhaps the most famous employment of the cluster is found in the story of the twelve spies who were sent ahead by Moses to scout the promised land. They return from their mission carrying a single cluster of grapes so great that it must be borne by two men, saying: "We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit ..." ...more ...

@ 1160 OAK KNOLL AVENUE. PO. BOX 2460 NAPA. CA 94558-0245.707-255-7700. FAX: 707-255-0793. E-MAIL: [email protected] (Numbers 14:27). In this passage, the cluster serves as proof to the Children of Israel that the land is fecund and produces rich crops. Not surprisingly, the giant cluster being carried by two men has been adopted as the symbol of Israel's Ministry of Tourism.

Returning to the Bible, eshcol is mentioned a number of times as a symbol of spiritual or ethical abundance. The prophet Isaiah, after a harsh vision of the punishment that will be meted out to the wicked, tempers his message with the following words: "As, when new wine is present in the cluster, one says 'Don't destroy it; there will be good in it,' so will I do for the sake of My servants, and not destroy everything" (Isaiah 65:8). The cluster's ability to produce new wine here illustrates the Lord's decision to spare the People of Israel---perhaps they will be able to produce some good within themselves.

Similarly, the prophet Micah laments: "There is no cluster to eat, not a ripe fig I could desire. The pious are vanished from the land, none upright are left among men" (Micah 7:l-2). The absence of morally upright men is likened to the absence of a cluster to eat. The ripe cluster is equivalent in its perfection to that of a righteous man.

Perhaps the most striking use of the cluster-image is in the erotic verses of the Song of Songs. "How fair you are, how beautiful! 0 love, with all its rapture! Your stately form is like the palm, your breasts are like clusters..." (Song of Songs 7:7). And again, "Let your breasts be like clusters of grapes, your breath like the fragrance of apples, and your mouth like choicest wine" (Song of Songs 7:lO). In these verses, the full ripeness of the cluster combines with the fecund figures of the fruit to form a highly charged erotic image.

Awards Some parts of the vineyard had been planted as early as 1856 by Napa Valley pioneer Joseph Osborne. A Cabernet Sauvignon from Eshcol won first prize at the San Francisco Viticultural Fair in 1888. Fast forward to 1979, when the 1976 Trefethen Chardonnay won "Best Chardonnay In The World" at the Gault-Millau World Wine Olympics in Paris, France. Amongst many continuing honors and awards, Trefetheri's 1989 Cabernet Sauvignon was judged "Best In The State" at the California State Fair in 1994.

The illustration Trefethen is gathering a database of illustrations of the scouts carrying the eshcol (cluster) of grapes. Please call Julie Ann Kodmur if you would like to use one of these illustrations.

[with research assistance from Azzan Meir-Levi] APPENDIX D

Charles Robbins About 1,100 219-Eighth St. .. ' Petalma, CA 94952 707-76;-5865 707-765-4402

ms TEl.; The early years

In 1988, at the San Frar~ciscoViticulture Fair, a cabernet sauvignon from Zshcol v~ineryxon first prize. The \;inning wine v;as made from grapes gram at Eshcol in' 1236, a yezr that had yielded a particularly lush ad aburdznt harvest from the vineyards' fertile soil, The victory celebration at Eshcol r11irroreL the glo~rcf zntica2atory ostinisa shared b3- people throughout the Wit2i States during those prosperous years. Thc frontier ~~sscloset, a2 the country >:as bursting with chmge md pror~ise, Inventors and industrialists, scientists and. ~;erchar,tswere caught in the tumultuous excitnsnt of a nation in xilotion. Automobiles aid electric lights, telephones, phonographs, and typkuriters transformed Arrlerican lives.

mgines were replacing horses, electricity and stem gave industry new powers. And the inventicn of such nicztie Trefethen--The early years

as the tuxedo in 18g6 added a heightened sense of civilized , refinement . . .,. .. - . The Napa Vslley and its people were determined to share in the prosperity. James and George Goodinan were ?Taja Valley bankers an6 financiers who were, vigorous promoters of their valley. particularly interested in grzpes, they hzd purchased land in 1882 north of the town of I.iTapa. The Soodrnans narned their vineyzrd Zshcol, a Hebrew tiord for cluster. The word appears in the 3ible as the rime of a brook where several of l.;oses's followers found grzpe. clusters

so bis that one cia could not carry thein. Implicit in its definition is the hint of ripeness fertility. Thirty yesrs jefore the forciation of ::shcol, the Tjapa 'Jalley farrners had begun the zcreage cultivated in grapes. 3ut on tkie 22d acres purchasa5 by the Soohans, progress had been slow. C~vidBmerson, the previous ovmer, had riot tended the lad and, in fact, had not planted grapes mtil 1891 hen he devoted only 40 zcres to the poject. The GooL~znsbrought enerdy and money to zshcol. In concert viith equally energetic neighbors, they made the land blosson with wheat and grapes. The lgSOs were fruitful, and by 1889 the valley was home to over ll+0 vineries. The Eshcol vineyard and vdnery established new stuldards of erellence, The soil pias particularly fine and judged by may to be well suited for grovcing recl grape varieties, Trefethen-The early years Page Three--Bobbins

The Naps Re~isternewspaper devoted an 1886 supplement to the . Eshcol property. The;'buildings.'ad land had been very dilapidated when purchased by the Goodmans, but four years later all tias renovated, the vineyards carefully tended, the orchards replanted, the buildings restored. Special attention was given in the article to a new building constructed in 1866 to a design by California's foremost winery architect, Captain h'amden b:cintyre. The winery was three storys high, with the crushing room on the top floor adthe press on the second. Below were offices adstorage. A horse powered elevator delivered grapes to the upper floor, then gravity insured a saooth floii of juices to complete the vine inaking process. To maintain constvlt interior temperatures, dead air compartments tcere build into the walls. The length vas 125 feet; tridth, 60 feet. Most Kapa Valley vine buildings constructed before 1887 were of stone. The Cshcol structure is rare in being all wood and in still being used for its originzl purpose. A tribute to the tenacity and spirit of the Fspa Balley settlers, the lovely winery marked a milestone in ~shcol's history and seemed a portent of good fortune. Unhappily, James Goodman died in 1888, leaving his brother George to manage their financial empire. Zshcol rsnained in George's name until 1693 when he .leased it to James Clark Fahver, son of a IJapa Valley pioneer. 8 Trefethen--The early years Page Four--Robbins

Nany of George Goodman's friends may have assumed that he let go of Eshcol .simply because he had tired of the wine business. On the other hand, his timing was excellent, for the Napa Valley was soon to face several difficult years. Few people realized that soon the Eshcol property and, indeed, all the Napa Valley would be threatened with destruction. Phylloxera, a plant louse, had begun to invade the valley in the 1990s, The disease v:as not far advanced when Goodman lezsed Zshcol to Favxer. Nonetheless, the lease papers did car-ry an injunction to care for the grapes and to fight the new pest. European vineyards had alre~dysuffered grievous damage. As the blighted Zuropean vineyards deteriorated, many hardened Napa Valley farmers rejoiced because the rnarket for their grapes began to improve. But the pnylloxera onslaught spared no one. By 1930 it had devestated 15,000 of the 18,000 vineyard acres in the valley. Ultimately vine nakers lezrned to graft phylloxera- resistant American roots on fine wine grapes. Sy the early years of .the twentieth century, growers had begun to recover lost ground, Unfortunately, the corning of Prohibition in 1919 almost- destroyed the industry again. The Great Depression , then World War 11-further retarded growth, so that by 1959 a mere twenty wineries remained in the .Naps valiey. Trefethen--The early years Page Five-~obbins

With dogged tenacity James Fawver had battled the elements and pests and financial cycles to keep his land, He had purchased Eshcol from coodman in 1904 and held it until his death in 1940 when the land was leased as a storage facility to other wineries, Now, in the full cycle of time, the vineyards and the buildings have been restored by the Trefethen family, After 100 years of struggle and triumph, the Eshcol winery endures, the fertile soil still repays careful husbandry superb grapes. A full century after Sshcol produced its award-iri&ing wines, the Trefethens continue to reap a bountiful harvest from this blessed land.

b . 91 APPENDIX E

ESHCOL/TREFETHEN WINERY: STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

The Eshcol Winery Building appears eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places under criterion A, events, for its place in the development of Napa Valley, California, winemaking, and under criterion C, architecture, as a rare building type. The Napa County Historic Resources Survey of 1978 found the building apparently eligible and declared: It is the only remaining example of a 19th-century three-level gravity flow winery constructed entirely of wood in Napa County, and was designed by the leading [winery] architect of the 1 period in California, Capt. Hamden W. McIntyre. The building was constructed in 1886, during a decade of immense growth in Napa .county's wine industry, for Napa bankers James and George Goodman, who had owned the 280-acre Eshcol Ranch since 1882 and had planted much of it to fine wine grapes in the early 1880s. At the time of construction the ranch was managed for them by a mafi named Smith Brown, and in 1894 it was leased to James Clark Fawver, son of 8 Yountville pioneer, who bought the property in 1904 and continued to produce wihe from his own grapes in this building until Prohibition. In 1922,. when a large cropcombined with a railroad strike, Fawver produced a last crush, which he stored here and sold after the Repeal of Prohibition. The Napa County Historic Resources Survey recorded some eighteen winery buildings constructed before 1887, not all of them still enjoying their original us@. Most are stone; the only other 19th-century wooden wineries recorded are Frank Sciaroni's (1881, 2 stories, Survey No. 28-4572-41) and Jacob Meilv's . (1885, 13 stories, Survey No. 28-4.574-44). both in St. Helena and both of board and batten exterior. Two winery buildings in Napa County are California Historic Landmarks: Krug and Beringer. Eshcol/Trefethen is rare in its survival both as aMgden winery and as one still being used for its original purpose on its original acreage. Napa county winemaking had begun in 1838 when George Yount planted Mission grapes at Yountville, not far from Eshcol, grapes which were yielding 200 gallons of wine a year by 1844.' About 1846 Frank E. Kellog planted vines north of St. ~elena,and Wells Kilburn planted some near ~alisto~a.~in the 1850s a dozen more growers followed; in the Napa-Yountville area where Eshcol is found, they included John and Terrel Grigsby, Lilburn and Henry Boggs and Joseph W. 0sborne.l me first stone wine cellar, a 33x50 ft. affair west of Napa City, was built by John Patchett in 1859.~ In 1861 Charles Krug began planting vines and building e winery near St. Helena, and from then on the industry grew and grew. Robert Louis Stevenson devoted a whole chapter of Silverado Squatters to "Napa Wines," observing: 9 2 Wine in California is still in the experimental-stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for precious metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; a third is best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. . . Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured,.and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favorite. 6 The 1880s were a boom decade for Napa Valley wines. Stevenson had visited on his honeymoon in 1880. Palmer's 1881 county history spends fifty pages on viticulture, "as it is the leading industry of the county and will doubtless always stand at the head."7 There were 52 active wineries in 1880. 63 in 1883. 97 in 1884. and 142 in 1889.~ Then came the wine bust of the 1890s. from phylloxera, vhich by 1900 had wiped out all but 3,000 acres of the 18,000 recorded in 1891 as Napa County vineyards .' The winemakers learned to graft fine wine grapes onto phylloxera- resistant American roots and had barely gotten back on their feet when Prohibition arrived in 1919. Then economics forced most of the growers out, in spite of shipping unpressed grapes, producing wines for religious use, and attempting survival by various novelty techniques such as the "wine brick." Repeal in 1933 did not instantly produce profits: too many wine grapes had been grafted over for shipping varieties, too few customers were interested. Only in the late 1960s did boom times return to the Napa Valley wine industry, and they have continued more or less unabated ever 10 since in this, "the winiest county in the United States." Some of what became known as the Eshcol ranch may have been planted as vineyard in the 1850s. either by Joseph W. Osborn, whose state prize-Winning farm at Oak Knoll may have been here,'' or by the ranch's 1852-1860 owner Angus Bogps, son of Lilburn 12 Boggs, a known Napa County grape grower of the 1850s. In any case, Eshcol was recorded as having no grapevmes1879-1880. l3 Its owner 1872-1882, "extensive farmer' David Emerson (b. Ohio 1823). planted 40 acres-worth in 1881, l4 but he let the .. property go to seed. In 1882 Emerson sold the ranch, or lost it through foreclosure, to James H. Good- man (1820-1888) and his brother George Edmund Goodman (b. New York State, 1823), Napa City's first bankers and in 1826 its fourth largest tax payers. A former grocery and produce wholesaler, George Goodman also was Napa County treasurer in the 1860s, active

in Napa City's gas works, water company and Presbytbrian church.15 In 1857 he had helpedJoseph Osborn, Smith Brown and others found the Agricultural Society of Napa County; in 1865 he and Brown served on the local committee for a Lincoln memorial 93 Statement of Significance ESHCOL/TREFETtEh' page three

service; and in May 1883 Goodman was a vocal member of the Napa Grape-growers ~Ssociation.l6 In 1901 he donated the city's library building, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The property's name Eshcol (sometimes misspelled 'Eschol') has been found in print as early as 1885,17 and it remained in use until September 1941. l8 'Eshcol' is the Hebrew word for 'cluster', and it is given in the Bible as the name of a brook or valley where Moses' scouts found a grape cluster so big it took two men to carry it.19 The 1912 county history records that Eshcol had formerly been called the Emerson ranch;2o if so, the Goodrnans chose the name. There used to be an arch reading "ESHCOL" at the entrance to the property. The Goodman brothers hired as manager of Eshcol a man named Smith Brown (b.Rhode Island, 1819). a peripatetic, never quite successful entrepreneur in a variety of businesses: manufacturing rubber shoes and toys (before Goodyear), a stove foundr), a woolen mill, a livery stable, a Petalume-Napa-Sacramento stage line, the Napa Hotel, 2 grain and stock farming, the Napa-Calistoga Railroad, and quartz mining. 1 The Goodmans and Brown put Eshcol on the wine map. An 1886 article in the Napa Re~isterextensively described what was happening there. 22 Of the 280 acres, 160 were in vineyard, divided into rectangular blocks each with its own kind of grapes: "Zinfandel , Chasselas, Fontainbleau and Golden Chasselas, Reislings, Lenoir Gr . Blanc, Bourgoyne or Burgundy, Mataro Sauvergnonvert, Semillon, Burger and Malvoise," and so on, about fifty varieties in all. The "general dilapidation" into which the buildings and farm had slipped under David Emerson was cleaned up, the barn and outbuildings were replaced, a new carriage house and a new bunkhouse were built, orchards were renewed and fruit trees planted along the fences. The subject of this paper, called there a "wine cellar,11 was in process of construction. The Register quoted the designer's description: Length, 125 feet; breadth, 60 feet; main portion of the building to be three stories high. The crushing room will be upon the third floor, the press-room upon the second, while the first floor front will be used as an office, with tool, wash and pump rooms in the rear. The wings have two'floors, the upper to be used as a fermenting room and the ground floor for storage. The machinery will be operated by steam. An elevator will be used to deliver the grapes to the crusher, and the entire product after crushing will be distributed to the fermenting vats, pressers and stora5e below. The building will be constructed of wood and heavy tann[?] paper, the latter being used for lining and diaphragm between the studding, toform two dead air compartments in the walls to insure a suitable and even temperature. Thorough ventilation and drainage is secured. Capacity of winery, about 175,000 gallons. 23 Statement of Significance ESHCOL/TREFETH~N page four

.The designer was Capt. Hamden W. Mclntyre (b. Vermont 1834), Niebaum's winemaker at Inglenook 1881-1887, and thereafter Leland Stanford's winemaker at Vina. An enthusiastic student of chemistry and math, McIntyre had learned winemaking at New York's Pleasant Valley Wine Company, which made New York State's first champagne in 1865. Mclntyre had ample experience in engineering and business as well: organ maker, superintendant of a Canadian lumber firm, machinery manufacturer', and Civil k'ar gunboat machinery engineer. After the Pleasant Valley experience he continued to read about wine-making through ten years on St. Paul's Island as agent for the Alaska Commercial Company. In California he not only supervised the wineries, he engineered or helped design at least ten other wineries, including Bourne's Greystone Cellars at St. Helena and the Goodman's Eshcol. He seems to have been 24 California's premier winery designer. By 1891 the Eshcol winery and vineyards were prospering. With 200 acres of. bearing grapevines--'Chasselas, Cabernet Vert, Burger, Zinfandel and twenty other varietiesf1-it was the fifth largest vineyard in Napa ~ount~.*~As planned, the winery building held storage on first and second floors, fermenting on .the second floor and grape crushing on the third; its capacity was 300,000 gallons. The finished wine was 'I sold to the trade in Napa and San Francisco. tt26 In late 1893 George Goodman leased the Eshcol to James Clark Fawver (1863-1940), son of a Yountville vineyard owner and winemaker. The second paragraph of the lease provides that Fawver was "to prune, tie up, cultivate, hoe, succor, top, sulphur and otherwise care for the vineyard on said premises, to pull out such portions thereof as in his judgment are too badly diseased [with phylloxera] to produce a marketable or profitable crop; and when the grape crop is ripe . . . that he will pick and deliver such grape crops . . . In case the parties hereto shall deem it most advan- tageous, and to their best interests, to cause the said grape crops to be make into wines [sic] upon the premises [sic], the said second party [Fawver] is, at his own cost and expense, to cause them to be so manufactured into wines; and . . . it is to be sold in the name of the first party ." Fawver was to receive two-thirds of any selling price, Goodman one-third. Smith Brown and his family were allowed to stay 2 7 on the farm till spring. Fawver ran the Eshcol winery the rest of his life, buying it from Goodman in 1904 and crushing only his own grapes, grown here and on his late father's 97 acres at Yountville. Where originally a horse-powered treadmill had provided the power to raise the grapes up to the third floor crusher, in the teens Fawver substituted a

15 h.p. 3-ton Foos gas engine, now obsolete but reconditioned and on the property. 95 Statement of Significance ESHCOL/TREFEI3eJ page five

Though not a wine drinker himself, Fawver produced both red and white table wines; wine authority Leon Adams remembers going there to taste them in 1934. Fawver's obituary says "His wines were famous for their excellence and flavor and won premiums and highest awards at many expositions." During Prohibition Fawver shipped uncrushed grapes east in railroad cars, except for 1922, when there were both an especially large crop and a railroad strike; that year he made wine and stored it on the site. Wine Institute records show that he preferred to sell the wine out of California, not bottled or even in barrels but by the carload lot. When he couldn't sell the wine-an employee remembers he didn't seem to care whether.it sold or not-- 28 he simply stored it, building on lean-to sheds for the purpose. A 1912 county history of Napa pays a good deal of attention to grape-growing and wine making. It says Eshcol still has 200 acres of grapes, "one of the largest individual properties of the kind in the county." The winery "is in splendid condi- tion" and makes dry wines. It says that in 1890 there were 100 wine cellars and 35 distilleries in Napa County, but "A large number of these have since gone out of business." Production had been centralized into larger estates, and the book names 2 9 29 of these larger estates, including Eshcol as the only one at Oak Knoll. The four venerable Valley Oak trees around the winery building are part of a larger grove around the nearby residence. Robert Louis Stevenson, traveling through the Napa Valley in 1880, found that "A great varietv of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becomming grove, among the fields and vineyards. lt30 In 1886 the Na~a Register's "Eshcol" article noted, "A few noble oaks are scattered throughout the tract, which enhances its appearance very much."31 They still do. The c. 1915 photo of Eshcol shows one oak just west of and towering overthewinery; it has a bent trunk easily recognizable as the same as the tree there today. The present owners have been told that one south of the winery is some 800 years old. Certainly all of them were here before construction of the winery, and even before any Spanish settlement. After Prohibition ended, Fawver immediately returned to wine making, producing 160,000 gallons of dry wine in 1933. He diedin the late summer of 1940, and a year later his heirs discontinued Eshcol and leased the winery and vineyard to Beringer, which stored wine here for about fifteen years.32 When the Trefetkns bought the. r property in 1968, the building was empty. They cleaned and restored it, adding reinforcements to the second floor support system so Domaine Chandon could age its heavy bottled champagne there until its own facility was ready. In the late 20th- century resurgence of the Napa Valley wine industry, the Trefethms have again renewed the vineyards, filling the entire 280 acres with fine varietal grapes, and 96 Statement of Significance ESHCOL/TREFETHEK page six

adding more to the east. As in the days of the Goodmans, Smith Brown and Fawver, the 100-year-old winery is aging only the product of its own vineyards, though the "extra" space not used for crushing and fermenting, which happen in a new building, but for visitor reception and offices, Under Fawver the building was Bonded Winery No. 403; Beringer discontinued that number in 1941, and in 1973 the building again.became a legally Bonded Winery, No. 4635. Of the 142 Napa - County wineries Frona Wait found in 1889, very few have fared so well through the years.

1. Napa County Historic Resources Survey, "Trefethm Vineyards," 1978, No. 28-4558-18.

2. Leon D. Adams, The Wines of America, Boston, 1973, Houghton-Mifflin, p. 206.

3. Irving McKee, "Historic Napa County Winegrowers, " California, Sept. 1951, reprint, [p. 1-21,

4. Ibid. Adams, p. 206-207. R.P. Hinkle, Napa Valley Wine Book, St. Helena 1979, Vintage Press, p. 19.

5. McKee, p. [I].

6. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters, New York 1895, Scribner's, p. 30-31.

7. Lyman L. Palmer, Historv of Napa and Lake Counties, 1881, p. 227.

8. Ibid., p. 218. F.L. Jackson, Napa Countv and its Many and Great Resources, Napa c. 1885, p. 31. Frona Eunice Wait, Wines and Vines of California, 1889, Bancroft, p. 106.

9. Adams, p. 206-207. Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Directory of Grape Growers, Wine Makers and Distillers of California, Sacramento 1891, p . 83-98. .. 10. Adams, p. 205.

11. Napa County, Great Register, 1872-1873, Napa Precinct. Peninou and Greenleaf, A Directory of California Wine Growers andwine Makers in 1860, Berkeley 1967, Tamalpais Press, p. 34-35. C. . . 12. Chain of Title, Eshcol Ranch. C.A. Menefee, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Book of Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino, Napa 1873, p. 152. McKee, p. [2].

13. Palmer, p. 214.

14. Ibid. p. 214, 458-459. Chain of title. 97 Statement of Significance ESHCOL/TREFET&.N page seven

15. Chain of Title. Gift, Somethinp about California, Napa 1876, Napa Reporter, p. 27. Memorial and Bio~raphicalHistory of Northern California, Chicago 1891, Lewis Publishing Co., p. 460-461.

16. Wallace, History of Napa County, Oakland 1901, p. 42-43, 48-49. "The Napa Grape-Growers," San Francisco Merchant, 1 June 1883, p. 162, col. 2.

17. Jackson, op. cit.

18. Records for Bonded Winery No. 403, Wine Institute, San Francisco.

19. Holy Bible, Book of Numbers, ch. 13, v. 23-24.

20. Tom Gregory et al., Historv of Solano and Napa Counties, Los Angeles 1912, p. 913-914.

21. Memorial and Biographical, p. 446-447.

22. "Eshcol," clipping in archives, attributed to the Napa Re~ister, July 1886.

23. Ibid.

24. Mclntyre's biography is in Memorial and Bio~raphical,p. 744-7A5. Realtor F.L. ~ackson,op. cit., also attributes the Eshcol cellar plans to McIntyre, and says of the Inglenook building that "William Mooser of San Francisco is the architect of the building, and W.H. [sic] McIntyre, the superintendant of the Niebaum cellars, provides the machinery plan and is the general designer ," p .27-28.

25. Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California, Directorv of the Grape Growers, Wine Makers and Distillers of California, Sacramento 1891, p. 87, 83-98.

26. Memorial and biographical, p. 446.

27. Lease, Goodman to Fawver, 29 Dec. 1893.

28. Chain of title. Gregory, p, 913-914. Trefethen archives. Janet Trefethen interview, 12 May 1986. George Heid interview, 4 Feb. 1981 (notes by Janet Trefethen). Leon Adams, interviews June 1986. "James Clark Fawver Dies at 'Esh~ol,"~.~clippingin Trefethan archives, attributed to the Napa Renister (between 30 July and 29 October 1940,according to Wine Institute records).

29. Gregory, p. 147-149, 913-914.

30. Stevenson, p. 30-31. 3 31. "Eshcol" clipping.

32. Wine Institute records for Bonded Winery No. 403.

9 8 APPENDIX F

WINES FROM TREFETHEN VINEYARDS APPROXIMATE NATIONAL RETAIL PRICING

1995 Dry Riesling: $1 1 .OO

1994 Estate Chardonnay: $20.00

1993 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon: $23.00

1991 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon: $40.00

1991 Library Selection Chardonnay: $35.00

All of the above are estate-grown and estate-bottled in 750 ml format; half bottles and magnums are available in selected vintages and varietals.

The Eshcol Wines [the property's original name when established in 18861:

1995 Eshcol Chardonnay: $10.00 papa appellation]

1994 Eshcol Cabernet Sauvignon: $10.00 [California appellation]

@ 1 160 OAK KNOU AVENUE. PO. BOX 2460 NAPA, CA 94558-0245.707-255-7700. FAX: 707-255-0793 E-MAIL: [email protected]

INDEX--Janet and John Trefethen

Alf, Ray, 40 marketing and distribution, 28- appellations, 21 31, 59 Martini, Michael, 76 Maudigre, Edmond, 71 Baldini, Steve, 72 McIntyre, Captain Hamden, 19 Baldini, Tony, 39, 53, 55, 71-72 Murphy Goode Estate Winery, 68 Beringer Winery, 23 Besanqon, France, 13-16 Bissonet, Greg, 30 Napa Valley Cooking Class, 34 Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association, 75, 77 cooperage, 66 Napa Valley Vintners Association, 75-77 Napa Valley Wine Auction, 76-77 DeGarmo, Richard, 73 Nelson, Elizabeth [mother], 2-3, Domaine Chandon, 26-28, 60 6, 9-10 Drouhin, Robert, 30 Newton, Peter, 16 equipment, 28, 60 phylloxera, 63 Eshcol Ranch, 19-24 Pierce's disease, 69-70 Prohibition, 24-25 Proposition 13, 17 facilities, 53-54 public relations, 31-35 Fawver, Clark, 23-24

rootstocks, 55, 63, 65, 67 Goodman, James and George, 19-22

Spooner [father], 2-4, 7, 10 Harris, Ren, 17 Sterling Vineyards, 16-17 harvesting, mechanical, 27-28 Strala, Louis, 24 harvesting, night, 27 Hyde, George, 25 Trefethen, Catherine, 26, 79 Trefethen, Eugene E., 30, 37 integration, 47-50 Trefethen, Hailey, 5, 78 irrigation, 67-69 Trefethen, Loren, 5, 7, 78-79 Trefethen Vineyards, 53-74 Trommald, Peter, 44-46 Kaiser Industries, 44-46

Utah 1088 Endurance Motorcycle Luthi, Peter, 72-74 Rally, 77-78 vineyard, planting of, 39, 55-59, 63-66 walnuts, 70-71 Waterfield, Martin, 16 Waugh, Harry, 29 Whitehouse, David, 72-74 Winegrowers Foundation, 17 winemaking, 58, 60-63 winery, beginning of, 59 World Wine Olympics, 30 Wright, John, 26, 60

WINES

Cabernet Franc, 62 Cabernet Sauvignon, 29, 54, 56, 62 Chardonnay, 29-30, 58, 61 Merlot, 62 Pinot Noir, 29, 58 Riesling, 33, 61-63

GRAPES

Cabernet Sauvignon, 57, 65 Chardonnay, 56, 65 Gevurztraminer, 57-58 Merlot, 57 Pinot Noir, 56, 65 Riesling, 56-57 Zinfandel, 58 Carole E. Hicke

B.A., University of Iowa; economics

M.A., San Francisco State University; U.S. history with emphasis on the American West; thesis: "James Rolph, Mayor of San Francisco."

Interviewer/editor/writer, 1978-present, for business and law firm histories, specializing in oral history techniques. Independently employed.

Interviewer-editor, Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1985 to present, specializing in California legal, political, and business histories.

Editor (1980-1985) newsletters of two professional historical associations: Western Association of Women Historians and Coordinating Committee for Women in the Historical Profession.

Visiting lecturer, San Francisco State University in U.S. history, history of California, history of Hawaii, legal oral history.