Dario Sattui, owner of Castello di Amorosa in Calistoga, thought the odds of the Glass fire crossing the Napa River were low when he first heard reports that a new wildfire had erupted on the east side of Napa Valley. The chance it might leap over U.S. Highway 29 and reach his property on the west side of the valley seemed even more remote. The very nature of wildfires makes them unpredictable though, and before dawn on Mon., Sept. 28 of last year, the fast-moving blaze did the unthinkable and accomplished both feats, reaching Castello di Amorosa and putting the winery and its landmark replica of a 13th-century Tuscan castle at risk.
Fire strikes
The fire had broken out a day earlier at 3:48 a.m., Sun., Sept. 27, in the area of Glass Mountain Road in Deer Park, east of the Silverado Trail near St. Helena. It spread relentlessly, eventually merging with two smaller fires in Sonoma County and scorching 67,000 acres in Northern California’s Wine Country over the course of 23 days. By the first night, it was approaching the Napa River in Calistoga. Sattui, whose house sits on the west side of the water, crossed the river to see what was happening and was shocked at what he discovered. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalls. He’d expected to see the fire in the distance, in the area of the Silverado Trail, but instead, a low grass field of 80 acres had burned almost to the river’s edge. A gravel road was in the fire’s path, however, and the blaze appeared to be running out of fuel, so at about 2 a.m., after firefighters had put out most, but not all, of the lingering hot spots, the two fire trucks left and Sattui went to bed, confident the fire wasn’t a threat to his winery.
His slumber didn’t last long. Less than two hours later, a neighbor called and woke him with the news that the fire had indeed made its way across U.S. Highway 29, igniting dry grass and finding new sources of fuel. He panicked as he tried to figure out what to do. His first thought was for the animals that live on the castle’s grounds, which include dogs, cats, goats, pigs, sheep, geese, peacocks and emus, and he ran to open their pens, allowing them to flee to safety.
Next, observing that one little bit of roof on the farmhouse, a building about 50 yards from the castle, was burning, he raced down the hill to summon a fire engine. Meanwhile, the fire was growing, and it soon engulfed the entire structure.
“I was dumbfounded. I never thought a brick-and-stone building would burn,” he says.
It had wooden timbers and gutters where dry leaves could collect, however, and the timbers ignited, causing the roof to collapse, giving the fire a way to get inside. It tore through the building and destroyed offices, a laboratory, a bottling line and a storage area with more than 100,000 bottles of wine, including some rare vintages and part of the current vintage, which was fermenting. “We had some pretty sizable losses. … I regret I went to sleep,” says Sattui.
By the time the fire moved on, the farmhouse and its contents were a complete loss, and a large area west of the vineyards had burned. By a stroke of good fortune, though, the 107-room castle—the winery’s main building—was untouched. “The fire got close, but then the wind shifted,” he explains, adding that his houses were at risk, too, but were also were spared. “Unfortunately, many houses and thousand of acres on the west side of the highway were not spared. I fell for those people who lost everything.”
The impact
Clean up and an estimation of the losses began as soon as the embers had cooled. Amidst an intense odor of smoke, the winery dumped spoiled wine, discarded the vintage that was fermenting and opted not to make new wine. “We won’t bottle anything that isn’t up to our standards,” says Sattui. In addition, they left grapes in singed vineyards unharvested because the volatile phenols from smoke can permeate the skins, causing the resulting wines to have an aroma of cigar or cigarette butts and a flavor similar to that of a wet ashtray. Smoke taint isn’t always immediately obvious, and the quality of wine in fermenting tanks can also be affected, as can grapes that have been harvested and stored. This undesirable phenomenon can also develop over time in wines that seem unaffected initially and go on to be bottled.
Sattui estimates the loss of wine at 110,000 bottles with a retail value of nearly $5 million. Furthermore, he calculates that replacing the 11,000-square-foot farmhouse and buying new equipment will cost between $6 and $8 million, with construction of the farmhouse expected to take two to three years to complete. “We’re going to build it exactly the way it was,” he says, explaining that the elements of the building’s construction were authentic the first time and will be again.
How new construction proceeds depends on the degree of damage to the walls. Kevin Zucco of ZFA Structural Engineers in Santa Rosa, who did the original structural engineering, explains that a testing agency will remove concrete core samples and test the samples for concrete compression strength. A comparison of the results to the original specified strength will reveal whether the walls are sound and can be saved, repaired locally or if they’ll have to be torn down and replaced. Similar analysis will determine the integrity of the reinforcing bars inside the walls.
Preliminary results are positive, according to Zucco, locating relatively small areas of wall for repair. He expects the process to have been completed by the end of January. At that point, ZFA will engineer the plans to repair the walls and replace the roof, bringing the revitalized building into compliance with current building codes.
“Since we did the original design, this process will be streamlined,” says Zucco. It should take approximately six weeks after damage studies are completed, he explains, depending on the timing and results of testing and continued inspections of the damage on-site.
Once the plans are finalized, Sattui will go to Italy in search of rare, handmade, antique materials, such as hand-made Italian tiles and bricks, and craftsmen to reproduce hand-hewn doors and ironwork that was forged over an open fire. He will also search for builders with the skills to erect a medieval structure. “Hopefully I can find the people who can do this,” he says. “Modern stone and brick masons don’t know how to do vaulted ceilings.”
Though he plans to use authentic methods and materials to replace the ruined building, experiencing a wildfire has instilled a fear in Sattui that didn’t exist before. He intends to take safety measures that will allow some protection, should another fire strike. “Fire is a real danger. We’re going to form our own fire department,” he says, explaining that it will have professional fire hoses and access to an increased number of fire hydrants on the property. In addition, he’ll take preventive measures such as clearing out brush in the forest nearby and consider going without gutters on the new building. Meanwhile, wine production will continue at the castle’s winemaking facility. Sattui also owns V. Sattui Winery in St. Helena, and Castello di Amorosa will send its wine there for bottling and then transport it to a warehouse for storage.
Family heritage
Sattui is a fourth-generation California winemaker, and a love of wine is his heritage. His great-grandfather, Vittorio Sattui, emigrated from Carsi, a village in Italy near Genoa, to San Francisco in 1882, and he started a winery in North Beach using grapes from Napa Valley. In 1885, he founded St. Helena Cellars. When Prohibition became law in 1920, he gave up the winery, leaving the business dormant, but not forgotten, for decades. As a child, Dario visited relatives in Italy frequently with his parents. “My relatives, being typical Italian, lived upstairs above their business,” he recalls, and as soon as they opened the door, he could smell the wine. He also played in the cellars in St. Helena and saw photographs and heard stories about his great-grandfather, which piqued his interest in winemaking. Even when he was 10 and 12 years old, he was interested in restarting his great-grandfather’s winery. He spent some time traveling in Europe after graduating from college, and when he returned, he didn’t have a job, so he made a bold decision. “I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted to do—start V. Sattui.”
In the early 1970s, he was living in a Volkswagen van and acquired a piece of property in St. Helena. He spent a couple of years finding investors to back his resurrection of V. Sattui and moved forward. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he says, recalling that he thought he could launch a winery with $100,000, unaware that the University of California, Davis had just released a report that placed the standard cost of starting a winery at $1 million. He rented equipment from a home winemaker and couldn’t even afford a cash register. “Everybody laughed at me,” he says, but he persisted, and the winery opened in 1976. The first year, it made $2,600, and it continued to do better and better as time went on. “I was impassioned to restart my great-grandfather’s winery,” he says. “If you have enough desire and passion, you can accomplish something.”
A passion for castles
Sattui enjoyed lengthy stays in Italy in the 1980s and lived in Rome for six-and-a-half months. “I became enthralled with medieval buildings … I was fanatical,” he says. Every weekend, he faithfully went to the countryside to look at castles. Tuscany and Umbria abounded with abandoned castles, and he always took a hammer on his outings so he could pry open a door or window to get inside and look around. Sometimes, he would dress up and pretend he had lots of money and wanted to buy a castle so he could convince a real estate agent to give him a tour. “I got into a lot of places. I love architecture, especially medieval,” he says. He eventually bought a castle outside Florence, intending to restore it, but after he returned to the United States, it was vandalized and everything of value was stolen, so he put it up for sale. He now owns Monastero di Coriano, a 10th-century Augustinian monastery in Tuscany with wine cellars underneath, as well as a Medici palace in southern Tuscany, a castle in France and a partnership in a castle hotel. “It’s not hard to want to buy them and fix them up,” he explains.
A love for medieval architecture was his inspiration for Castello di Amorosa. The property, three miles south of Calistoga, is 171 acres of hills with a lake, a stream, a forest and a three-story Victorian house with a wrap-around porch that Col. William Nash built in the 1840s, after coming west from Tennessee. Nash also planted some of Napa Valley’s early grapevines and built the county’s first schoolhouse on his property. Sattui was enamored with the house and the history, and he bought it as a place to live. “I didn’t buy this property to build a castle,” he says. However, he purchased it in January 1989, before the Napa Wine Definition Ordinance, and it came with a building permit that allowed him to produce 250,000 gallons of wine a year and construct 130,000 square feet of buildings. “I gave zero thought to that,” he recalls, but then he decided to plant vineyards and make some Italian-style wine to sell directly to consumers instead of restaurants and stores. He planted 30 acres with Sangiovese, Cabernet and Merlot grapes and decided to build a small, authentic medieval building in the midst of the vineyards to showcase the wine. The building got bigger and bigger, and Castello di Amorosa became his dream project.
During his visits to castles in Italy, Sattui had taken measurements, sketched ideas and photographed castles, and to do more research and find materials, he returned to Italy, making Monastero Di Coriano his headquarters. As the result of a chance encounter, he met Lars Nimskov, a former naval architect from Denmark who was living in Italy and had some experience constructing historic buildings. Nimskov agreed to come to the United States to help Sattui create the plans for a small castle, and construction started in 1993.
The underground caves and cellars came first and took 10 years to build. The intent was to use the subterranean area for aging wine in barrels and tasting rooms, and it includes 80 unique rooms that measure 80,000 square feet and occupy two acres. The above-ground building came next, and in 2004, Fritz Gruber, a master builder from Austria who was knowledgeable about medieval construction, arrived in Calistoga with seven men to build the first two rooms and demonstrate their methods so others could learn from them. Then in 2005, Paolo Ardito, an Italian builder from Bologna, took charge of the remaining construction and saw the project to completion. The final castle, with four stories above ground and four below features all the elements of a classic castle, including a moat, a drawbridge, towers, secret passageways, a torture chamber with authentic equipment and outbuildings, such as the Tuscan farmhouse that burned. Planning and construction took 15 years, and Castello di Amorosa opened to the public on April 9, 2007.
Looking ahead
Castello di Amorosa was closed for less than two weeks after the Glass fire and reopened on Oct. 9. Sonoma County’s measures to control the spread of SARS CoV-2 had a further impact, however, as they resulted in two extended closures that put the grounds off limits to visitors. In a normal year, Castello di Amorosa has wine education nights for customers and eight wine club events of different types. Last year, however, the winery was forced to cancel most events. “It was a shame to have the Halloween Pagan Ball cancelled,” says Sattui, adding that he considers 2020 a throwaway year. “I’ve never seen a year that approaches it,” he says. He reflects on how horrible it was and says he’s hopeful 2021 will be better for all of Napa Valley. He observes that the local economy, which depends heavily on tourism, has been devastated, as the lack of visitors is detrimental to restaurants, hotels and peripheral businesses as well as wineries. Sattui feels for everyone within the region, especially employees who can’t work and people who are unemployed or underemployed. “It’s just sad for everybody,” he says.
Fire and the coronavirus pandemic have significantly impacted Castello di Amorosa, but Sattui is optimistic and looking forward to better days ahead. The wine club has a full slate of events on its calendar for 2021, though when life will return to normal is uncertain. He’s also preparing for a new foray into medieval architecture, giving him an opportunity to indulge a passion, as he prepares to rebuild the farmhouse. It’s been a tough year, and recovery will take time, but he’ll continue to offer fine wines and a taste of old-world history in Napa Valley.
