A lecturer in liberal arts from Chicago turned Napa Valley gentleman farmer and winemaker did something most in the wine world thought impossible in the mid 1970’s. His 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon - Winiarski’s first commercial release - beat the best of France’s Bordeaux wines in a blind tasting in Paris. It was the shot heard around the world. Warren Winiarski’s Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars wine, along with Chateau Montelena’s Chardonnay - put Napa Valley and California on the world wine map forever, thanks to the now famous Judgment of Paris in 1976.
It is fitting that Winiarski, whose parents were Polish American, had a last name meaning “from wine" or "from a winemaker” in Polish.
The wine world is mourning Winiarski’s passing on Friday, June 7, at the age of 95. The Marys first met Winiarski in 2002, when we filmed an episode of In Wine Country at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. He was the consummate gentleman and while humble, his intellect and passion were very clear. In 2016 Mary Orlin contacted Winiarski to do an interview for the 40th anniversary of the Paris Tasting, and he invited her to his home.
She remembers his house - a 1910 two-story home remodeled in 1985 - atop a hill adjacent to the winery, with big picture windows overlooking the vineyards from the living room. Winiarski was a gracious host, even serving coffee (no wine, sigh). Here are excerpts (with edits) from that interview that have not been previously published.
Mary Orlin: When you planted the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars vineyard, where did you source the budwood?
Warren Winiarski: Part of the budwood came from Nathan Fay, some of it came from (Heitz’s) Martha’s Vineyard and part of it came from the Oakville Experiment Station (from UC Davis). It’s called the Oakville clone but it’s really a selection.
MO: What are your thoughts on all the 40th Judgment of Paris celebrations and looking back on 1976 versus today?
WW: It is still growing. What happened 40 years ago, people are still discovering new meanings and new ways to understand it. It’s like that relationship between nature and art.
Steven Spurrier walked away from that tasting not thinking very much had happened. Later he says he realized that Odette Khan (one of the judges) understood something more about what had happened from the French point of view. That insight didn’t come right away. It was a tasting, an interesting tasting. For the first time something happened that had never happened before that was completely unexpected and the meaning of that continued to grow. The Smithsonian - it wasn’t until much later that they asked for bottles of wine itself. The story still prevailed. The unpersuaded multitude was still out there, especially in France, who were waiting for that magic moment when the true breeding of the French wines would show itself because they said, well California has this wonderful forwardness, French wines are more reserved, their subtleties take time to be appreciated, take time to develop and that went on until the 30th year.
When the 30 year old wines were tasted by two groups of people, one at Copia (in Napa Valley) and one at Berry Bros. & Rudd in London, it didn’t turn out to be what some thought it would turn out to be. So that part of the story took 30 years to develop to be persuasive to all but those who could not be persuaded no matter what.
What was that final insight confirmed, what some people jumped to the conclusion of in the beginning of the first tasting? I think it was that there is no artificial limit to what people might do with the grapes from any particular place, that the beauties that could emerge from any given place were not obscured by artificially setting limits to what one could expect for greatness in wine and for beauty in wine.
MO: How did you hear about the results of the tasting?
WW: It was a couple days after. Dorothy Tchelistcheff, who was on that tennis trip and wine tour of France, when she returned back from Bordeaux she called Barbara (his wife). I was in Chicago and was at my parents home. Barbarta called and I was underwhelmed when she said, you remember Steven Spurrier and I said yes, and she said, there was a tasting in Paris and I said yes. Barbara said well Dorothy called and said we won, and my response to that was ‘that’s nice.’ I didn’t know who the tasters were, I didn’t know which wines were being tasted except that ours was in the tasting. I didn’t know which California wines and which French wines were tasted. When I discovered that, my response was different, but at that time hearing it for the first time as you ask, my response was not sufficient for the occasion.
MO: What about when was it clear this had a bigger meaning?
WW: Well when I learned which wines being tasted, and I love French wines, I am inspired by French wines, they are beautiful. Those wines I have tasted afterwards, they are outstanding wines. I haven't tasted all of the wines that were in the tasting, but that only the French can make beautiful wines was the first thing that occurred to me. So having French judges in a blind tasting was significant. Its significance at that time, the limited significance but the depth of that understanding of what had happened continued to grow, and continued to deepen over time of what that meant in its fullest form.
MO: How did it change the way you were moving forward with SLWC changes in long term planning?
WW: Because I was still in charge of the winemaking at that time, directly responsible for the winemaking, I doubled down on attention to detail. I felt more responsibility now that this avenue was open to express the beauty of California fruit and thought about wine, because now no barrier, no artificial barrier existed. I felt a greater responsibility to express the beauty that California fruit had the potential for.
MO: That must have been some responsibility you felt — all eyes were on you now and Chateau Montelena too.
WW: I was glad for that because these wines were meant to be wines of moderation. They were meant to express subtleties in their composition and I was setting my sails against the late harvest Zinfandels and the wines that were being made to extract the maximum amount of varietal character. Maximal for me expressed the possibility of fatigue, and fatigue and the appreciation of beauty don’t go together.
MO: How do you think the 1973 will perform now, in a 40th anniversary tasting recreation?
WW: The most recent one I had may have been about five years ago and it was still holding its own. It wasn’t improving but it was stable and it was a little tired on the nose, but when you tasted the plumpness in the flesh, it still had time to go, it wasn’t drying out.
MO: Would you say that the ‘iron fist in velvet glove’ descriptor stands the test of time? I wonder today if we took cult wines with higher alcohol, bigger fruit, higher extraction, how that would pan out?
WW: That would be an interesting tasting. Those wines are really not meant, I don’t believe, they’re not thinking about, they’re thinking about their current qualities not necessarily having in mind longevity when they are made and it would be an interesting question to ask the producers of some of those powerful wines whether they have a time frame that they think of when they go over the protocols and procedures and steps that they use when they make the wines.
MO: Why are we still celebrating 40 years later? Why does it matter?
WW: I love that question, that is a very good thought behind that question and I think there are still things to explore the depth of. So many places now are still looking for the fulfillment of their place and the Paris tasting is a kind of bell out there that keeps ringing for them to invite them to explore how to get the most beauty from their fruit and how to express it. If you take George M. Taber (the only journalist at the tasting, who reported it for Time and wrote the book Judgment of Paris), he thinks lots of things wouldn’t have happened. I can’t speak to that but all over the world there are places where people are hearing the bell that the Paris tasting expressed for the first time, not bound by any artificial barriers for what they might achieve.
MO: What do you see as the most significant changes in Napa Valley, in the American wine industry in the past 40 years?
WW: At one point, I don’t know if it was prior to, but when I came to the Napa Valley in ’64 there was Chardonnay planted in the upper part of the valley. Gradually Chardonnay drifted down to Carneros and we’re still looking for the best places for the varieties, and we’re still looking for the best places for Cabernet and for how to grow it. We went through a rough time in the early 80’s, later we got the chance because phylloxera came back in the XR1 rootstock.
We went through the big vines era. The 8x12 planting size allowed the vine to spread out and we gradually saw the spreading out and the big vines that were possible because they had all that space to explore. But it didn’t make the best fruit, so we put aside the thoughts that we had to make room for our tractors and began thinking about what makes the better wine, not what makes more efficient vineyard operations. We got narrower spacing to control vigor. We got leaf trimming to control the number of leaves so the vine wouldn’t accelerate the photosynthetic energy surplus that it was accumulating. We had a better relationship between the vegetative phase of the plant’s life when it is making leaves and the reproductive phase when it is making fruit. We shortened the time when the plant was allowed to grow and grow and grow and concentrate more on the fruit. It is the difference between the upper part of the SLV vineyard and the lower part. The upper part has a shorter vegetative life, it gets to the business of fruit earlier than the lower part.
We farm them differently and we control more down here. But down here where the vegetative phase lingers a little longer, that makes for the softness or the velvet glove and you have to be thinking, you need a velvet glove, you need the iron fist from the upper parts and you have that in between because you can’t relate directly to each other you have a clash, an unresolvable clash unless you take the middle and use the middle to relate the two extremes. Then blending comes into play. Blending for structural components and the fruity soft part.
MO: Nathan Fay is someone important to Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Tell me about him.
WW: Nathan Fay was the first to plant Cabernet in Stag’s Leap. His 1968 Cabernet was the one that inspired me, and his 1968 inspired a number of other winemakers.
MO: What was your first vintage, in 1973, like?
WW: I remember going through the vineyard with Andre and Dorothy Tchelistcheff. It was near harvest time and I wanted him to taste the grapes, even though it was my decision. I was still kind of a rookie at this game. I only came here in ’64 and now we’re in ’73. I had worked at Mondavi as the first winemaker at Mondavi in ’66. I also worked as a consultant for Parducci (in Mendocino County) when he was converting his winery from a bulk producer to a bottle producer. I helped with that. I was always making someone else’s wine, so this is the first time I’m making my own wine, and I get nervous making my own decisions for my partners and myself of course. You want to make sure, so Andre was here, walked through the vineyard. My question to myself is, is this the right time to pick, is everything gonna go to the kind of wine I want to make, is it ready? Andre was very pleased and he says ‘this is like honey, divine honey.’ He suggested it’s time to pick. I think it was a couple of days later that everything was ready and we picked the grapes in that first block where the budwood had been chosen and all my decision making came to the point of harvest time. When to pick is very important.
MO: Youmust have been relieved when Tchelistcheff said divine honey.
WW: Yes
MO: For you personally what is the greatest legacy of the ’76 tasting?
WW: You know I am very pleased with all the implications of it. I was very pleased to be part of it. My name means winemaker’s son.
It was so many things. It seemed to be chance. The fact that Patricia Gallagher had come to visit us. Robert Finnegan, who was a very strong supporter in the beginning, had a newsletter for wine. He called and he said Patricia Gallagher, a colleague of Steven Spurrier is in town. She’d like to come visit, would you like that? We could entertain having her visit, and at this point we were looking for opportunities to expose the wine, so there was no hesitation whatsoever to say yes. She came, she liked the wine, she loved the wine. We made a Gamay Beaujolais that she thought was like Fleurie and so we were happy.
She must have gone back just putting things together. I’m just imagining what might have happened and she said after she made visits to other wineries she must have said to Steven you have to go yourself and see what’s really going on in California these days. It’s not commodity wines, they’re making some beautiful wines. Because he came about a month or so afterwards and he bought the wine because he liked it. He collected a number of other wines from California which he liked.
So how many chance things happened? That (George) Taber was there, that he understood French, that he could hear the confusion of the judges? All of these things seemed by chance, and could there be another concatenation of chance events all coming together and making a tasting? Eventually someone was going to have such a tasting. Would it be the one that had the greatest impact? Maybe not, maybe, who knows? So I’m grateful to chance, I’m grateful for the fortune, the good fortune, to have been a part of that. I think it was good for California.
People said, how did Warren do that, or what kind of wine was he trying to make? To the extent that I contributed to the other phase of California potential, not the extracted fruit bomb phase, but to lend my support to wines of moderation and subtlety, I am happy to do it.
We’re still exploring. Between now and the 50th anniversary that’s what’s going to happen, and it’s good we are doing that to fulfill Jefferson’s supposition that we will make as great a variety as they have in Europe. They will be different but doubtless as good. He was optimistic and we should all be optimistic in that regard.
We’re definitely ahead but we’re not finished. I was glad to be a part of it.