The Wine History Project

When Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma was founded in Sonoma Valley in 1823, the small pueblo that grew up around it became the cradle of Sonoma County wine making. Gen. Mariano Vallejo, the esteemed young commandant of San Francisco Presidio who was sent with...

Throughout Northern California wine country there are many postcards that preserve for all history our past winegrowing vineyards, large and small. Napa Valley’s Howell Mountain is no exception. In the early 1880s, Howell Mountain and its “thermal belt” reputation, along with a grape boom land sale, quickly attracted several pioneer winegrowers from the valley floor, including Brun & Chaix of Oakville Nouveau Medoc fame who set out a 120-acre vineyard and built a large stone wine cellar in 1886 on White Cottage Rd two miles west of Angwin near the mountain summit. About the same time, John Thomann of Sutter Home in St Helena bought land, set out forty acres in red wine grapes and built a winery. Of course, Charles Krug, the wineman who validated the soils as being excellent for wine culture, had a 100-acre presence on Howell Mountain. Winfield Keyes, son of the founder of Edge Hill Winery west of St. Helena, planted one hundred acres to vines and built his attractive one-story stone Liparita Winery in 1880. But these familiar large-scale operations are not those we seek-out for our Vintage Tour as we explore several successful resort owners on the mountain who planted vineyards. The 1893 survey of the vineyards in Napa Co. counted twenty-six wine growers who had vineyards of 30 acres or less, sixteen near Angwin, another ten in Pope Valley. Our personable resort owners fall into this small, yet historically significant, category.

The Louis Roesch Company was one of more than fifty major printing and lithography firms in San Francisco around 1906, which together employed over five thousand workers. Roesch was a pioneering and prominent craftsman who specialized in high-quality lithographic labels and posters, especially for California’s booming agricultural and wine industries.

Millionaire Finnish sea Captain Gustave Niebaum (1842–1908) had made his fortune early in the Alaska fur trade, and was solidly established in San Francisco running his Alaska Commercial Company when he purchased a Rutherford property called “Inglenook” in 1879. He added a thousand adjoining acres by1881, and soon began planting his vineyard to premium varieties brought from France. Niebaum was a perfectionist, student, and linguist (five languages), he studied the world’s viticulture, surveyed methods of constructing and equipping wineries, and amassed an important wine library. His mission was to produce “the best California wines ever placed on the market.” As his winery was being constructed, Niebaum stated, “I have no wish to make any money out of my vineyard by producing a large quantity of wine at a cheap or moderate price. I am going to make a California wine that will be sought after by connoisseurs and will command as high a price as the famous French, German and Spanish wines, and I am prepared to spend all the money needed to accomplish that result.”

In the years following the Gold Rush, the grain fields of Napa Valley were giving way to vineyards, and wine was being made – not the wine that was to make Napa Valley famous – but wines still made in the primitive manner of the Spanish missionaries, trod out by foot for home consumption. The man who introduced modern winemaking into Napa Valley was Charles Krug (1825-1892), a young teacher and free-thinker from Prussia who arrived in San Francisco in 1852 to be the editor of Staats Zeitung, the first German-language newspaper on the west coast. Impressed by California’s agricultural expansion, Krug soon left his editorial desk to pursue a career in farming, and the new field of winegrowing. He met Agoston Haraszthy and followed him to Sonoma where he bought land, planted a vineyard, and learned to make wine.

Chiles Valley is a narrow, remote little valley of 6,000 acres nestled in the Vaca Mountains above the northeast side of Napa Valley, a rugged fifteen miles east of St Helena or Rutherford. Col. Joseph Ballinger Chiles (1810–1885), the enterprising trail-blazer from Kentucky, gave the valley his name. He was granted the 8500-acre Catacula Rancho in 1844 and built his home ten years later. While primarily a cattleman, by 1860 he had “planted a small vineyard, made a little wine, and had 280 gallons of wine on hand” [Peninou, Directory…1860, the earliest record available.] Col. Chiles also built here the first grist mill in Northern California and brought in the first Missouri mules, among other pioneering endeavors.

Santa Clara County is one of the original counties of California formed at the time of statehood in 1850. Located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, stretching west to the Santa Cruz Mountains and easterly past San Jose to Alameda County, its southern boundary is near Gilroy — almost 840,000 acres perfect for wine growing. Between 1856 and 1887 the county’s grape acreage grew from 220 acres to nearly ten thousand. The early settlers bought land and created a modern eden of orchards, nurseries, ranches and vineyards in all sections of the fertile valley. By the mid-1880s the Santa Clara Valley was one of the leaders in the state’s production of high-quality table wines. Several revered wine figures were instrumental in the industry’s founding — Delmas, Lefranc, Masson, Stanford, Mirassou, Pellier. Yet the earliest vineyard keepers in this magnificent land were the padres at Mission Santa Clara de Asis founded January 1777, number eight in the Franciscan chain of twenty-one Alta California Missions.