The Wine History Project

The postcard invites all to come “taste the wine where the Flags are flying.” Oakville Vineyards Winery was next door to the 1877 stucco-fronted Brun & Chaix Winery on the Napa highway at Oakville, south of Rutherford — a premium wine enterprise launched in 1970 by a group of connoisseurs headed by Wilfred E. (Bud) van Loben Sels of Carmel, an affluent asphalt company executive. The grand entrepreneurial undertaking became one of the major California winery failures of the 1970s. Van Loben Sels huge 400-member partnership acquired the Andrea Bartolucci Madonna Winery, originally built in 1892. It was large, with a capacity of 600,000 gallons and three hundred acres of vineyard. In late 1972 Van Lobel Sels also acquired, from the estate of John Daniel in Rutherford, the 1600-acre Niebaum Ranch, including the 1890 mansion and 110-acre prime Cabernet vineyard. The grapes were contracted to Oakville Winery. Inexplicably, even though the wines were a critical success, the partnership collapsed in 1976. When the Bartoluccis reclaimed their winery, they sold it to Heublein (who owned Inglenook). Robert Mondavi acquired the wine inventory and brand, while Francis Ford Coppola bought the Niebaum home and vineyard.

Our tour begins in 1894 when almost half of California’s 200,000 acres of vineyard were producing wine grapes, yet the wine industry found itself in a difficult situation. The country was in the midst of a lingering financial depression; there was continued over-production in the vineyards and wine cellars, and the prices of grapes and a novelty such as wine were at rock bottom. California wines were being sold and delivered in the important New Orleans market for as little as ten cents a gallon, and both the winemakers and the vineyardists were in dire financial difficulties. In an earnest struggle to stabilize skidding wine prices and bring a standard of quality to the California wine industry, seven of the State’s largest and most powerful wine firms incorporated as the California Wine Association. Headquartered in San Francisco, under the brilliant leadership of financier Percy Morgan, this giant organization came to control 84% of all pre-Prohibition California wine and owned vineyards and wine cellars in every major wine-producing area of the State. At the beginning of the 20th century, the C.W.A. had $10,000,000 invested in the industry and controlled nearly eighty of the State’s largest wine facilities. This special vintage postcard tour will visit member wineries from six counties representing one of wine country’s grandest enterprises.

One of the more important names in the early years of the California wine industry, Agoston Haraszthy (1812-1869) was one of the prime movers in the development of commercial winegrowing. In 1864, eight years after Haraszthy purchased the “Old Kelsey Ranch” located some two miles northeast from the Sonoma Plaza, Harper’s Magazine published an extensive article titled “Wine-Making in California” featuring Haraszthy and his Buena Vista enterprise.* The pages are overflowing with early California wine data, painting a detailed picture not often seen.
On the six-thousand-acre wine estate, four hundred acres were planted in vines, 260 of them with Mission grapes, and another 140 acres with imports from all wine-growing districts of Europe.

Those spectacular, rugged volcanic rock cliffs jutting from the steep slopes overlooking the Silverado Trail just south of the Yountville Crossroad have been known as Stags Leap Palisades since the 1870s, and play a critical role in the local terroir. The bare rock facades absorb and reflect sunlight, enabling the vineyards below to warm up more quickly during the day than other parts of the valley. These same formations funnel cool marine air from the San Francisco Bay into the area at night, creating the extreme temperature swings that define the region’s wines, while their distinct volcanic soils result from erosion deposits from the cliffs onto the valley floor. Interestingly, wine growing never dominated the Stags Leap area in the early years, and following Prohibition, there were still more acres of prunes than of grape vines. Its conversion into a premium wine district began in the 1960s.

A visitor to the Sonoma Valley in 1893 exclaimed, “If this is not Paradise, there is no such spot on earth. The beauty of the scenery, the wealth of the soil, the perfect climate are united here.” A beautiful, rare double foldout postcard shows the little township around 1900 with tidy vineyards extending up the northern hillsides. The budding city’s vineyard acres clearly outnumbered its inhabitants, three to one. By 1892, the area population was 750 while there were 3,000 acres planted to vineyards, mainly Mission and Zinfandel but with plots of Riesling and Semillon.
Wineries dotted the landscape. During the last half of the 19th century, a number of winegrowers established their wineries near or overlooking the Sonoma Plaza. One very rare turn-of-the-century postcard led to this wine country story.