Full Circle

Grgich Hills Cellar uses Old World methods to create new, world-class wines.

    What goes around comes around” is an old American saying that’s most often understood as an expression of justice, the idea of one getting one’s just desserts. A kindred saying is, “It all comes out in the wash.”

    All the same, I sense another meaning therein, one that’s not often investigated or annotated. This is the sense of the circle of life, whereby what’s once been “old” becomes new again. There are many practices, particularly in agriculture, that have been cast aside in the relentless, breathtaking search for modernity (read “efficiency” and “speed”); many of these practices are now being reincorporated into our farming communities like long-lost friends…because they make more sense in the long term. Even though they may have a higher startup cost, they’re being brought back into the soon-to-be mainstream because they’re sustainable, because they’re closed-system practices that leave our immediate (not to mention our greater) environments healthier for both plants and animals.

    For the longest time we assumed our planet had unlimited reserves, that our home orb was an open system with resources that could be plundered without repercussion or depletion. Now, we’re beginning to learn differently. It’s a new morality—one that’s just “coming around” from the old one—which suggests we all ought to be (and live in) “closed systems,” that we shouldn’t take more than we give, that we should work our farms in a sustainable manner and that we should use renewable energy resources.

    Miljenko “Mike” Grgich is one of those folks for whom the old ways are a happy reunion. And he’s immensely pleased that his nephew—Ivo Jeramaz, vice president of vineyards and production at Grgich Hills Cellar—agrees with that philosophy.

    It all begins with the most basic of principles. “I’ve always known you need great fruit to make great wine,” explains Grgich patiently. “It’s taken us a long time to get to this point. But now that we’re an ‘estate winery,’ we control everything from ground to glass. Since our first day, we’ve strived to produce balanced wines with quality, consistency and longevity. Owning your own vineyards is the very best way to achieve those goals.”

Big on biodynamics

    Excuse, please, another hoary old cliché, one that’s honored more in its breach than in its adherence. Yet, like all clichés, it got to that place of boring re-utterance by toting a healthy measure of truth. “Great wine is made in the vineyard,” Grgich continues. “That’s why we practice biodynamic farming: to produce naturally pure, healthy grapes. This agricultural philosophy, as you well know, incorporates the principles of organic farming—no artificial fertilizers, pesticides or fungicides are used—but goes even further by treating the Earth as a living organism. It utilizes natural preparations, cosmic rhythms and nature’s basic life forces to bring about balance between the grapevines and the Earth. The results are healthier vineyards, purer grapes and more authentic wines.

    “I was always taught to treat grapes and wines as if they were living things, like our children. For me, the winemaker’s job is to create an environment that lets the wines develop with as little interference as possible. Winemaking, you see, is a natural process. The less we disrupt it, the better our results are likely to be. So, working as constructive caretakers—somewhat in the manner of the baker who uses whole grain to make bread—we try to retain every last thing the grape gives us. We try to make ‘whole’ wines, as it were. Since we carefully ‘baby’ our vineyards and our wines, our final results are handcrafted rather than mass-produced.”

    Grgich’s nephew takes up the thread of Mike’s story seamlessly: “At Grgich Hills, we’ve been organic since 2000. We began biodynamic farming practices in early 2003 at our Yountville vineyard. The vineyard looks great and we presently farm all 366 acres biodynamically. We believe that makes us the largest biodynamic grape grower in the country. The difference between biodynamic and organic farming is that biodynamic recognizes cosmic forces and uses them to enhance and balance the vine growth, while organic farming is a more passive approach. Biodynamic and organic farming both use many similar approaches: no use of pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilizers. They rely on compost for nurturing the plants.”

Powered by the sun

    In keeping with that trend, Grgich Hills has also made the move to solar power. “We installed some test panels in December 2005 that generated 30 kilowatts,” continues Jeramaz, “and even though it was winter, we were so pleased with the results and the potential savings, we started planning to create all of our energy that way. It was actually an easy sell to my uncle. As soon as I told Mike there was a way to generate our own electricity and not depend on PG&E, he was all for it! Not only does it virtually eliminate our electricity bill, this conversion to a renewable and pollutant-free energy source follows our philosophy of environmental sustainability.”

    In September 2006, the folks at SPG Solar covered 13,000 square feet of the winery’s red tile roof with 860 photovoltaic panels. At peak production, figures Jeramaz, “the panels will generate 142 kilowatts and provide close to all of our electrical needs. That translates into a savings of $70,000 a year!” The winery is now on a “net” meter, which keeps track of how much the solar panels contribute to the power grid, and the winery receives a statement each month reflecting the balance. On sunny days, the winery exports power to the grid, spinning the meter back; on cloudy or high-use days, the winery uses that credit to import electricity. “The panels have a 30-year life expectancy,” says Ivo. “We believe they’ll pay for themselves in five years.” The overall cost of the project was a shade over $1 million, offset by a rebate of nearly $400,000 and depreciation.

The man behind the magic

    I remember the first time I met Mike Grgich. He was still winemaker at Chateau Montelena, and his 1973 Napa Valley Chardonnay had just been voted better than the best White Burgundies of France—by an expert French panel. It was the famed “Judgment of Paris,” and it put California wines on the world’s vinous map for good. Indeed, since that time, French vignerons of great note have been sending their winemaker-to-be children to study at UC Davis and Fresno State or to serve apprenticeships at noted California wineries.

    Since that time, Mike Grgich has continued to wear his signature blue beret, has continued to raise his bushy eyebrows in merriment at the wine world’s many inconsistencies and has continued to produce world-class wines that delight the senses, intrigue the mind and push the social self into a much wider cultural world.

    That he has, in all this time, kept an open mind to new methodology makes him a force to be reckoned with. Witness both his relentless move to make his own Napa Valley winery—Grgich Hills, where ground was broken on the Fourth of July 1977—a wholly integrated operation, relying solely upon grapes grown organically on winery-owned properties, and his renewed focus on becoming self-sustaining in terms of energy consumption. It’s a marvelously funny world, of course, where these “new” frameworks are, in fact, the recreation of more human-sized technologies that our grandparents could easily have vouched for.

    “Home” has always been an important concept to Grgich. And, for the longest time, he was fairly certain he’d never be able to return to his beloved, war-ravaged, native Croatia. “I came to Napa Valley to escape the Communists and find freedom,” says the wily winemaker. After winning the Paris tasting, he went on to cement his name permanently in the books by extending his Chardonnay mastery at his own winery in Rutherford (Grgich Hills Cellar), then took dead aim at Cabernet Sauvignon. His 1994 Yountville Selection put that variety securely into the record books as well. 

    Still, “home” has always been a prime topic of conversation with Mike, despite the avid patriotism he brought to his adoptive America. Quick to chide those who failed to recognize the vast opportunity freedom availed and those who lagged in their duty to vote and serve, Grgich seized the opportunities he saw. With the instant success of his opulent, creamy, buttery, apple-rich Grgich Hills Chardonnays, winery production leapfrogged from 30,000 cases in 1985 to twice that a decade later, and 80,000 cases as the last century closed (production has dropped some—to 70,000 cases—following the switch to estate-grown fruit only). And, from the 2004 vintage onward, all of his Napa Valley wines have been, and will continue to be, estate grown.

Croatian roots

    Mike loves to talk about the new winery he built in 1996 at Trstenik, on the Peljesac peninsula of Croatia (near Dubrovnik), facing Italy. The winery is called Grgic Vina (there’s an accent mark over the “c” that gives the “ch” sound). The white wine is Posip and the red is Plavac Mali. Grgich is convinced the latter is, if not the direct ancestor to the grape we know as Zinfandel, at least the very closest of cousins.

    Grgich says that when he began working for the original Souverain Winery (now Burgess Cellars) in 1958, he was taken with the startling similarity of Zinfandel in California to the Plavac Mali he remembered from home. “When I was first able to return to Croatia in 1993,” he says, “when the Communists had finally been ousted, I took samples of Zinfandel leaves, grape clusters and canes to compare the two varieties. I am convinced that the two are actually the same grape.” The current genetic testing at Davis indicates that it’s actually an ancestor of Plavac Mali—called Crljenak (try pronouncing it “sirl-yen-knock”) that’s really the kin to Zinfandel. Even so, Grgich just smiles his enigmatic, elfin smile and asks you to taste the wines. The similarities are undeniable, even if an exact DNA match continues to prove elusive. Kinship aside, the Plavac Mali is seriously tasty stuff.

    “In the Adriatic, we have the gentle, mistral winds that cool the vineyards in the summer and keep the temperatures uniform so the fruit can ripen without losing acidity,” says Grgich. “We ferment the Posip in stainless steel tanks at 45 to 50 degrees to preserve aroma, then age the wine for about three months in new Limousin barrels for just a kiss of oak.”

    Grgich sees his return to Croatia as more than just a homecoming. He laughs when he talks about coming home to finally earn his lost diploma, and nearly cries when he talks about building his modern winery to demonstrate how world-class wines could be made in a country that had been politically forced into mediocrity.

    “In 1958, I chose freedom over my diploma at the University of Zagreb. For nearly 40 years, I’ve been dreaming a thousand times of finishing my studies and earning my diploma. Well, when I returned and began making wine, I wrote my thesis. It was a 20-page dissertation on the new means of producing Posip in Croatia.” On June 13, 1997, in one of the proudest moments of his then 74 years, Miljenko Grgich was awarded his diploma by the University of Zagreb. (As it happens, both his winemaker at Vina Grgic and his winemaker at Grgich Hills—Ivo—are Zagreb grads. Try and say “Zagreb grads” six times quickly.)

    Mike makes it clear that there’s always something to learn. “My father always told me, ‘Do today the best you can…then tomorrow do just a little bit better.’ What that means is, you have 365 days each year in which to make 365 little improvements. As you know, Chardonnay is about half of our production at Grgich Hills, but we’re always looking for ways to make it just a little bit better. Mostly that happens by trying new clones, by blending from an array of clones—we have seven different clones in our vineyards today—and by always looking for new sites that might add a little something more complex, more interesting to the blend. That’s why we bought new vineyard land in Carneros and in American Canyon [southeast of the Napa Airport], to add that extra nuance to what was already a pretty good wine.”

    Grgich has always been stridently against “Private Reserve” designations. “All our wines are Private Reserve,” he maintains. “We put everything we have into every wine we make.”

All in good taste

    Fume Blanc 2005 Estate Grown ($25): We have a tendency to think of Sauvignon Blanc as a simple variety, but Mike and Ivo bring several levels of complexity to this one, with a bright celery entry, plenty of lemon and lime, grass and grapefruit, a touch of talc and chalk, along with an oily quality that suggests the ability to handle bottle age with grace. Sure, have a few bottles now; but do put some away for a few years, too. “The coolness of our vineyards in American Canyon and Carneros controls vigor and lets the grapes develop a crisp liveliness that’s impossible to achieve in warmer areas,” notes Ivo.

    Chardonnay 2004 Napa Valley, Estate Grown ($38): There’s always been, in the Grgich Chardonnays, a subtleness, an almost reserved quality, that initially holds the inherent fruit back a bit, as if it’s waiting for the proper moment to unfold. Yes, the pineapple and the hazelnut qualities are there, as is the creaminess of the texture, but it always seems to be holding back just a bit. Be patient, for these wines do unfold. And when they do, it’s something to behold.

    Chardonnay 2003 Carneros, Estate Grown “Commemorative” ($73): The creaminess is not subtle here, with lots of brash oak toastiness and rich, oily Fuji apple, hazelnut and warm French bread bakery aromas. (This one was released in 2006 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the world famous Paris tasting.)

    Zinfandel 2004 Napa Valley, Estate Grown ($30): Raspberry and blackberry fruit, so “berry patch-like” that you can almost feel the thorns. There’s a sharp edginess to this wine, with hints of violet, that makes it ideal for anything with a rich tomato sauce.

    Zinfandel 2003 “Miljenko’s Vineyard, Old Vines” ($69): This one is, in a sense, rather Cabernet-like, with dark chocolate and iodine up front, and perky black pepper and tarragon in the middle. Spicy and alive, save this one for the veal parmesan or its kin.

    Cabernet Sauvignon 2002 Napa Valley ($58): This wine is dense and compact, yet all the parts are on display, as if held back from the public by a velvet rope. There is black currant, violets and tobacco leaf; the oak is subtle, in the background. Great balance. Just wait.

    Cabernet Sauvignon 2002 Napa Valley—Yountville Selection ($135): This is the real jewel of the collection, a wine that’s already soft, silky and expansive in the mouth, but with loads and layers of cassis, currant, chocolate, blackberry and green olive fruit. “We knew exactly what rows we wanted from our Yountville Vineyard, which surrounds my old house there,” Mike once told me. “Just the gravelly part of the vineyard, where the berries and clusters are smaller and the fruit’s more concentrated.”

    Mike Grgich has been around the vinous block a few times, a few more times, in fact, than the rest of us. But he’s always come home—come to earth, to be precise: to the roots and the values he started out with. That’s a pretty good place to reside.