NorthBay biz profiles Napa Valley’s Quixote Winery, which is gaining a reputation as one of the Wine Country’s most unique destinations.
When tasting wine, elation usually happens after the sip, not on the winery walkway before you even get in the door. But deep in the folds of the Stags Leap District, there’s a quiet little place with an iconic name, where the waking of all senses begins the moment you set foot on the walk.
Imagine an impressionist painting of a ragged mountainside with blue skies, rocky ledges and sloping patches ribbed with rows of vines. In the foreground, peeking over a sea of waving grasses, is a low-slung, adobe-colored building with multicolored columns; melodious, curving lines; and, off to the right, rising above the olive trees that grow on the roof, a gleaming, golden onion dome. The result is startling: vaguely Byzantine, somewhat Southwestern, with a slight Persian accent. (Hmm. Maybe the painting is surrealist after all.) A curving, tiled walk leads you to the entrance. It’s a short walk, but it takes a long time, because you so often have to stop, take in the scene and smile.
This is Quixote. Unique, wildly creative and utterly serene—a place where art, architecture, land and wine all come together in a kind of paradisiacal harmony. Here, feelings of delight, amusement and surprise mix together to set the stage for its raison d’être: a taste of perfectly wonderful wine.
But before we get to the wine, curiosity demands: what is this building about? What does it have to do with this place? And what has that to do with the wine.
Building the vision
A well-known Latin phrase, In vino veritas, translates to “in wine there is truth.”
“If that be so,” says Harry Rand, senior curator of Cultural History at the Smithsonian Institution (and the man who, indirectly, made the scene before us possible), “let’s say there’s truth in art, as well.”
The story begins in the late 1980s when Carl Doumani, who had just sold his Stags’ Leap Winery, was looking to build a new winery that would be unusual, colorful, welcoming and fun—an authentic expression of his love of fine wine, fine art and the beauty of his land. Searching for an architect who could fulfill his vision proved challenging. But one day, he glanced up at a calendar (in the office of an architect) and saw a strange and wonderful image, wild with colors and fanciful lines—a building designed by an eccentric Austrian architect named Freiderich Hundertwasser.
“That’s it,” thought Doumani. “This looks like an idea that could work.” Finding the man, however, was not so simple.
Doumani tracked down Rand, who, among his numerous books on 20th Century art, had published one on Hundertwasser (Hundertwasser, originally published in 1993) and asked to be connected. Years passed. “It took a bit of a dance,” reflects Rand of the long-ago contact. “I think they had to circle around each other to come together. It’s not like buying something off the shelf.” But Doumani persisted.
“Things were getting too serious,” says Doumani, a powerfully built, silver-haired man with a sonorous voice and dark, alert eyes, at ease in the curving, art-filled surroundings of his Hundertwasser-designed office. “[Winery] buildings were getting built that looked like churches or similarly important structures,” he says. “And I didn’t think that was what the wine business was about or how it should be portrayed. So we wanted to do something more all-embracing and fun. Not imposing, but welcoming.”
Both men believed a building should harmonize with the land. But the initial design proposed, as Doumani recalls, was a bit too one-with-nature. “Hundertwasser said, ‘Because it’s a winery, it should be all underground.’ And I said, ‘Friederich, this is California! We have lovely weather and we like working outside.’ He said, ‘No question!’ And he changed it.”
The onion dome was another story. “I said, ‘Freiderich, what does the onion dome have to do with wine? With Napa? With Carl Doumani? With anything?’ He said, ‘Oh no, it’s very important! Your life will change if you work under the onion dome.’”
Doumani, who wasn’t sure he wanted life to change—it was pretty good as it was—asked for alternatives. “[Hundertwasser] came up with two or three ideas, but they weren’t very good, and he knew it,” remembers Doumani. “But the dome is kind of like his pyramid, his power spot. It’s significant to him.”
Hundertwasser, who died in 2002 at age 71, explained his idea of the domes in Rand’s book. “When I put it in my paintings, it’s the promise of a good land, the holy land, the beloved land, the promised land, paradise.” For Hundertwasser, the onion dome is like a beacon. “This is what I’m doing all the time,” he told Rand, “wanting to show beauty and the way to go there.” Call it a knight-errant mission: what Quixote is all about.
Kindred spirits
Pamela Hunter, a trim and elegant woman, whom Doumani describes as the love of his life and who’s been with him for the last 20 years, describes the men as kindred spirits. “Carl has worked with a lot of architects,” she says. “Some of them come away describing him as a Renaissance man and say it’s been one of the most challenging and interesting experiences they’ve ever had. Others probably come away feeling not quite so positively about the experience.” She laughs.
“Similarly,” she continues, “I think many people who’ve worked with Hundertwasser found the experience trying. But those two men absolutely got along famously.”
Hundertwasser believed in client involvement, but would not compromise his essential principles. “Hundertwasser would call and give a directive,” Hunter says, “like, ‘You must change this immediately!’ and Carl would absolutely do it.” The walkway is a famous example. “When the winery was being constructed, it was a foregone conclusion that the walkway had to curve gracefully from the lower level. It couldn’t be straight.” The architect abhorred straight lines, considering them an insult to nature and dangerous for human sensibilities. But, an exception was made to expedite a permit, and a straight sidewalk was laid in.
As soon as Hundertwasser saw the photos—they had to fax them every day, to Vienna, New Zealand or wherever he was working—he fired back instantly, “You must change this immediately!” He followed with a copy of the original design. “This is how it’s supposed to look!”
Hunter says that, with any other architect, Doumani probably would have kept his own counsel. “But with Hundertwasser, he absolutely did what he was told.” The walkway, if straight, would have defeated everything both architect and owner wanted.
There were some areas of compromise. “Little things,” says Doumani, “like the bathroom [design] had all these tiles, all catywumpus. I said, ‘I don’t want that!’ and he said, ‘No, it’ll be fine.’ And I said, ‘No, it will make me dizzy.’ So we compromised.” They kept the tiles in the shower, left the walls unadorned and allowed a band of tiles to, as Doumani describes with a sweep of his hand, “go around the mirror and keep going.
“He was receptive,” Doumani says. “He’d find a way to give you what you want.” Doumani chuckles to himself. “We did have a good time. We did.”
In the end, the winery building contains no two similar windows, no perfectly flat floors, no doors alike and very few straight lines—nothing that would offend a sensibility finely tuned to nature, and all perfectly complimentary to Doumani’s collection of fine art and to the land Doumani has called home for nearly 40 years.
Stags Leap in the early days
“Carl was completely dumbstruck when he first arrived in the Napa Valley,” says Hunter, explaining that, while Los Angeles was a very competitive business community, Napa in the 1970s was different—open, with a ready spirit of sharing. “I think the first person who knocked on the door was Robert Mondavi,” she says. “He handed Carl his card and said, ‘We’ve always bought the grapes from this vineyard, and we’re happy to continue. Also we have a great research and development facility, and you’re welcome to come on over.’ Carl just thought, ‘Where is this Shangri La I’ve landed in?’”
“It was a real farming community,” Doumani says, with a bit of wonder in his voice. “It was the kind of place where people helped each other as a matter of course.” He tells the story about the time, early on, when he was up at Lee Stewart’s winery on Howell Mountain picking up some wine. Stewart, a Scotsman, had been making wine there since the 1940s. On this particular visit, Stewart was grumpy. “And so I said, ‘Whatsamatter?’ He said, ‘Oh, my grower of Chenin Blanc won’t sell me grapes.’ And I said, ‘We have some Chenin Blanc at Stags’ Leap, how much do you need?’ And he said, ‘Oh, if I could get five tons, I’d be fine.’ So I said, ‘Let me talk to Mondavi. We’re selling to them, and I’ll see if they’ll release five tons of grapes.’ So I did, and Mondavi said, ‘Sure.’”
It turned out that Stewart couldn’t get grapes because his supplier had raised his price, “and Lee wouldn’t pay it,” Doumani says, with a laugh. “It was funny! So when I sent him the bill, I just wrote, ‘5.2 tons, 1971 Chenin Blanc,’ and left the amount blank.” When Stewart wrote out the check, he made it for more than the supplier’s price. Doumani smiled. “We were friends from that point.”
Big wines
The friendship led to a momentous discovery. Stewart produced Petite Sirah, and one day, Doumani was up at the winery when Stewart’s assistant winemaker, John Henderson, brought out a bottle. “I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ And he said, ‘It’s a Petite Sirah,’ and I said, ‘This is really good!’ and he said, ‘Yeah, and you have 40 acres of it.’”
So Doumani enlisted Stewart to make his wine. “We took our grapes up there. Crushed and fermented, then brought them to Stags’ Leap to barrel age them. He set the style of the wine. And that’s what we followed. I’d had that bottle, on the porch, and that was it.”
Robert Brittan, whom Doumani brought on in 1988 as winemaker and general manager of Stags’ Leap Winery, says the Petite Sirah (which Doumani prefers to spell Petite Syrah) appealed to Doumani’s gregarious nature, “because they were very big, very full wines. One thing a lot of people don’t know about Petite Sirah is that, for such a big, bold wine, it goes through a lot of very interesting changes.”
Doumani agrees. “The Petite Sirah that we make has good fruit up front, and a lasting, long finish. I like to take some wine and eat some food and I like the flavor of the wine there when I’m having the food, and vice versa. So that’s what we are and what we’re trying to make—a wine with good fruit, varietal flavors and a long finish.”
“Surprisingly enough,” says Brittan, “for such a big wine, with a reputation for being almost too powerful, it is actually quite indicative of the land on which it’s grown—its terroir.
“I love this word ‘terroir’ when it’s used correctly,” Brittan continues. “It’s not talking about just the dirt. It’s talking about the climate, the soil, the geology, the people and the history. And Petite Sirah is one of those varieties that truly shows all that. The Stags Leap area makes a very unique Petite Sirah.
“The Stags Leap area is renowned for Cabernet,” says Doumani, “and we produce a very typical Cabernet of the area. We’re very happy with it.”
Which wine he prefers depends, he says, upon the meal. “If it’s a roast leg of lamb, Cabernet’s going to be better,” he explains. “If it’s a barbecued leg of lamb, Petite Sirah’s going to be better. The flavor profile of the Petite Sirah goes better with the barbecued lamb. Like with grilled salmon, a Pinot Noir is better than a Chardonnay. If it’s a poached salmon, the Chardonnay will probably be better.”
The winery offers two labels, Quixote (named, of course, for the knight-errant of La Mancha) and Panza, which honors his faithful, long-suffering sidekick Sancho Panza.
Organic farming at Quixote
Quixote Vineyard Manager Michael Wolf knows the wines from the soil on up. “Growing Petite Sirah in Stags Leap says a lot,” he says. “It’s a very unique spot. It’s in a little bowl at the foot of Stags Leap, and you get the rocky effect of that. It’s not really a hillside vineyard, but it’s more of a kind of bench-landy type vineyard, with some variable soils mixed in with it.”
From the organic perspective, it’s all about the soil. He describes a typical organic practice: planting cover crops every fall to build up organic matter, using a lot of compost and adding some biological materials to feed through the drip system to enhance the microbiology of the soil. “Typically, for grapevines, there’s enough stuff in the soil. You just have to create an environment where the vines can get it.” He wants there to be a lot of biodiversity and no synthetic fertilizers “which tend to be pretty salty.” Herbicides, of course, are harmful, because they reduce the bioactivity under the vines as there’s no organic material to break down and the soil compacts and ultimately wears out.
Doumani knows this from past experience. “For the first 10 to 15 years at Stags’ Leap, we disked to get rid of the weeds. And then we used all these chemical sprays, which kill the seeds and all, which saved a lot of money, but killed all the good stuff, too.” In 1996 and ’97 they had to replant and decided to go organic from the start. “We did it,” says Doumani, “because it was important to build the ground up for what we wanted it to do.”
“We realize we have a special place here,” says Wolf, “and people really want to preserve it and keep it as close to the way it is as they can.” Doumani acknowledges there are higher costs with organic farming, especially at the outset, but says, with a slight shrug, “Fortunately, land and grapes are worth enough here that you can afford to do it right.”
The question arises as to whether Doumani considers himself a farmer. He smiles and eases in to another story about a locally famed farmer back in the 1970s, Manuel Barboza, who one day watched Doumani try to prune. “And he said, ‘You know, if you’re going to do this, you have to look at the next vine while pruning the one in front of you.’ Then after a while, he said, ‘What are you trying to do here? What do you want from this vineyard?’ And I said, ‘I want to produce grapes to make a wine that I’ll enjoy drinking.’ And he said, ‘Then why don’t you stay out of the vineyard?’”
Doumani pauses. “Farming,” he says with a slow smile, “wasn’t my calling.” But business—that’s another thing.
“Business is an art form,” Doumani says. “Managing, getting it done, developing, financing, working with people—all of it. It’s an art form. There are so many ways you can do these things. It’s not a computer that figures it out. There’s a great deal of artistic ability that’s needed to be a successful business person. I don’t care what field it’s in.”
The journey of Quixote—named not for tilting at windmills, but for the deeper aspects of Cervantes’ novel—has taken 20 years. “The story is about Carl and his vision,” says Quixote Winery Manager Lew Price. “His goal was to build a fun place to make wine. A place to make people smile.”
For Doumani, it was his knight-errant’s quest for a perfect, special place: “A place where you want to go. A place where you’re happy,” he says, searching for a summary phrase. “I come to work every day, and it’s great. It’s fun. It’s learning. Dealing with people who are passionate about what they’re doing.”
A thought crosses his mind, and he chuckles. “Winemakers are really characters. You have to be a little crazy to be a winemaker. You’re tasting and making decisions depending upon how this fermentation is going and what these grapes are doing, and so there’s a lot of intuition involved. But when it works, Wow.”
