“Pioneer California Winemaker, lavish host, astute businessman, celebrated judge of fine wines, Paul Masson made his name famous by producing champagnes and table wines which held their own anywhere. Gourmet, bon vivant, raconteur, connoisseur, with an ardent eye for a handsome woman, flamboyant at times and eccentric at others, thrifty in the Gallic tradition, he transplanted much of his native Burgundy to his adopted California … a great Californian, a great gentleman and a great wine grower. ” — John Melville. The Vine in Early California, “No.2: Paul Masson.” Book Club of California, 1955.
The First Chapter
At age nineteen, an ambitious young Paul Masson (1859–1940), came to Northern California’s Santa Clara Valley in 1878 from his family home in Burgundy. The vine pest phylloxera had recently devastated their vineyard, where they had made wine for several generations, and he wanted to come to California. He found an apprenticeship with compatriot Charles Lefranc who was recognized as the pioneer winegrower of Santa Clara Valley. Following Lefranc’s death nine years later, Masson married his daughter Louise, formed a partnership with her brother Henry, and produced an excellent bottle-fermented sparkling wine in 1892 that stormed the California wine market. By this time Masson was able to acquire almost 600 magnificent hilltop acres 2,000′ above the town of Saratoga and planted 60 acres to choice Burgundian varieties Chardonnay, Pinot noir, Pinot blanc. He named his estate La Cresta, and by 1905 he had built a lovely home and his Mountain Winery. Masson, described as a broad-shouldered big man, big of body and big of heart, and thrifty with an irrepressible energy, was not daunted when his winery was tragically destroyed one year later in the Great Earthquake. He immediately began construction of a great, three-story stone and concrete winery using stones from the ruins of nearby abandoned Saratoga Winery built in the 1860s and from the magnificent St. Patrick’s Church in San Jose destroyed in the earthquake. Here he also rescued a 12th century Romanesque, round- arched stone portal — originally brought from Spain around the Horn, they say — to serve as the front entrance to his picturesque winery. In this Bonded Winery 144, he devoted some fifty years to producing the highest quality table wines and Champagnes that became famous even in France.
Paul Masson Historic Mountain Winery, Built 1907
From his first vintages, Masson’s table wines and Champagne won countless awards through the years. The prestigious Paris Award, which he won at the 1900 Paris Exposition caught the attention of the international wine world. His wines were soon being called “The Pride of California.” In 1904 Masson’s Champagne was awarded the prestigious Grand Prize Diploma at the St. Louis Exposition. Wine judges in 1915 declared his pink Oel de Perdrix (Eye of the Partridge) “The Best Sparkling Wine Produced in America.” On a later postcard, several award-winning vintages of Paul Masson Champagne were honored, including 1908, 1911 and 1914. Of his 1908 “Extra Dry Special Label” vintage, Masson observed, “The wine is remarkable for its extreme dryness and effervescence, as well as aroma and delicacy of taste, and is destined to add greatly to the fame of California vintages.”
Hotel Vendome, The Grand Centerpiece Of San Jose, Opened 1889
During the 1890s Paul Masson was using the massive basement of the Hotel Vendome as a storage cellar for his Champagne. This fine turn-of-the-century postcard gives a great view of the vintage brick basement and its luxurious hotel. The fashionable resort, recently opened in 1889 in downtown San Jose, boasted 150 rooms, gardens, exotic greenhouses, and sports amenities in a park-like setting. During the 1906 earthquake Masson lost over 62,000 bottles of Champagne cellared here. At the same time the giant San Francisco wine depots lost upwards of fifteen million gallons of wine ready for bottling. Fortunately, Masson’s business was now large enough to survive the disaster, and not long after the tremor, he had over 500,000 bottles of wine and Champagne ready for marketing. Historians have forever applauded Masson as a very sharp businessman. A note of interest: Paul Masson and his wife Louise maintained the fashionable Lefranc home in cosmopolitan San Jose where they were active in distinguished club and civic activities. The mountain-home estate was seemingly reserved for special wine-related festivities. His wife (and later grown daughter) were teetotalers.
Paul Masson Champagne Cellar Nearly A Million Bottles…San Jose 1913
There are very few early Paul Masson postcards. So far, only three pre-Prohibition postcards, issued in 1913, have been seen. Masson announced in the May 1913 issue of Pacific Wine & Spirit Review in San Francisco that he was issuing a special advertising “Masson Champagne Post Card” series for distribution throughout the country. The 1913 date doesn’t appear on the cards. Only the P.W.S.R. announcement identifies them. It is my feeling the cards were made in preparation for the upcoming 1915 S.F. Pan-Pacific Exposition. (See Oct 2024 Newsletter for the P.P.I.E. story and the Masson exhibit illustrated with a 1913 postcard “Paul Masson Champagne Cellar. Clarification on Racks. 50,000 Bottles Handled Daily, San Jose, Cal.”) Our 1913 Series card shown above records the amazing, almost shocking, sight of the Paul Masson Champagne Cellar at San Jose, with “Nearly a Million Bottles Undergoing Natural Fermentation.” Masson followed a traditional Champagne-making principle that all Champagnes were aged at least two years in the bottle before progressing to the riddling racks. Actually, when one views this ingenious stacking system, it becomes quite understandable how Masson lost those 60,000 bottles in the basement of the Vendome Hotel. Miraculously, it wasn’t closer to the million stored there.
Paul Masson Grand Prize Diploma St. Louis Exposition 1904
This beautiful image is a reproduction of the Grand Prize Diploma awarded Paul Masson Champagne by the International Jury of Wine Experts at the 1904 St. Louis International Exposition. Masson was justly very proud of this award and from that date until Prohibition, his advertising material displayed the Grand Prix Diploma, “The First and Only Grand Prix Ever Awarded to Any California Champagne.” The rear caption pays tribute to the distinguished French wine experts and famous wine trade connoisseurs on the Jury. There were six American wine experts on the 28-man panel, including California’s Henry Lachman, long considered one of the premier wine tasters in the world.
Paul Masson, age 69, in Paris, 1928.
Masson was a storied judge of fine wines and traveled to his home country regularly to sample the wines and keep his award-winning California Champagnes among the best. You can’t tell who is the more honored in this happy scene of Paul Masson in 1928, age 69, tasting rare old Champagne vintages in a Paris cellar with Monsieur Carmer, champion wine-taster of France. But perhaps our jovial Burgundian Masson, famous epicurean and flamboyant host, was entertaining his French friend with another telling of a favorite story — how in 1917 he famously gave the vivacious, beautiful French actress Anna Held a Champagne bath at his Mountain Winery estate. Sometimes the story involves a bathtub, but in truth, a shaken magnum of Champagne foam was sprayed splendidly over the lovely lady. Good stories never get old. It is noteworthy that in this Prohibition-era publicity postcard, Paul Masson remains actively involved in the wine industry. During the Dry years, Masson held the only government permit to make “medicinal champagne” and prospered nicely. He also created a substantial business shipping grapes to home winemakers in the East. Yet, shortly after Repeal, the Champagne-making father of the best sparkler in the New World retired, and in 1936 sold his Mountain Winery to Martin Ray, who would become a legend on that mountaintop himself. Paul Masson died in late 1940 at age 81. In 1943 the House of Seagram purchased the property, intending to use the historic Masson mystique to build the brand into a national and international leader.
“New Paul Masson” Wine Properties, 1960s.
The Last Chapter
There was an unimaginable leap between “Old Masson” and “New Masson.” Overlaid on an early 19th century French map of California, this c1960 postcard from the “Commemorative Series” * shows the “New Masson” properties owned by Seagram (lacking the 640-acre Sherry Cellars at Madera): the old Mountain Vineyard Winery and the new 1959 Champagne & Wine Cellars in Saratoga; the new San Ysidro Vineyard near Gilroy; and the new Pinnacles Vineyards & Cellar in Monterey County with the catchy advertising phrase “For wine, no earth on earth matches the Paul Masson Pinnacles Vineyard.” Already in early 1955 the Paul Masson Vineyards enterprise had begun a U.C. Davis-assisted search for new vineyard acreage to supplement their 330-acre Gilroy vineyard on Pacheco Pass. The expansive 5,000-acre Pinnacles Vineyards project in the Salinas Valley near Soledad was planted in 1962, and its 2.5 million-gallon wine facility was ready in 1966, and soon to be enlarged to eleven-million-gallons. * On the completion of the new Saratoga winery in 1959, nearly twenty years after founder Paul Masson’s death, the winery issued a superb “Commemorative Set” of six two-color postcards depicting some of the early Paul Masson history. Four of these timely postcards are used in this story.
Paul Masson Champagne Cellars & Visitor Center, Saratoga, est.1959
Local winery of humble beginnings becomes a giant corporation with world-wide fame — this bright scene of the new futuristic-looking, ultramodern Paul Masson Champagne Cellars would be a familiar and exciting Santa Clara Valley destination throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Designed by renowned architect John Savage Bolles (think San Francisco’s Candlestick Park) the wine facility incorporated the newest technology and equipment in every department. Accordingly, when the new 2.5 million-gallon crushing plant in Salinas Valley was completed in 1966, the juice was ready to be received at the Saratoga home facility for finishing, blending, bottling and binning. Astounding. Also astounding, a commonly uttered word here, is the metal sculpture that towers above the winery entrance. It is called “Effervescence of Champagne” in honor of founder Paul Masson, who often used this favorite phrase to describe the “dancing bubbles” of a fine Champagne. The award-winning artwork, set in a large reflecting pool, was designed by Gurdon Woods, a highly talented abstract sculptor and arts educator and onetime Director of the California School of Fine Arts from 1955 to1965. Fine works of art set the tone throughout the facility.
Visitors’ Entrance At Paul Masson Champagne Cellars, c1960s
Inside the beautiful rock-wall entrance is the Reception Rotunda, with its uniquely decorated ramp leading into the Visitor Center and winery cellars. Astonishingly, there is no known postcard showing the stirring 153′-long mosaic mural covering the rotunda ramp wall. “The Story of Wine” was accomplished by the masterful Don Jose Moya del Pino, renowned California artist, muralist, and one-time painter to the Court of Spain. The story runs up the ramp from biblical times to the present; inset is a panel of Paul Masson in front of his Mountain Winery, cradling a bottle of Champagne. As a collector of wine-y treasures, it was fun to learn that Moya also designed a series of authentic ceramic replicas of beautifully decorated 16th C “aristocratic apothecary jars” used as container-decanters for Masson Rare Brandy. A few of these jars, usually empty, are sometimes seen on eBay. The Visitor Center, and its up-to-the- minute embellishments, was a highly popular tourist destination, and they came by the busloads. Overseeing the entire operation was president Otto Meyer, a partner in the venture, who had been in charge of Masson production since way back in 1945. Under Meyer, in 1960, Masson became the first American winegrower to establish an export department. With loads of clever advertising such as “If you insist on drinking an imported wine, try it there,” as a bottle of Masson wine sits in a Parisian scene, or Italian, or any one of fifty other countries around the world. By the end of the 1960s, Paul Masson was America’s largest-selling premium wine in Europe.
Paul Masson Champagne & Wine Cellars, Saratoga, c1960s
The Visitor Center was cleverly developed with a spacious ten-foot catwalk to tour the facility, including views of the wine cellar, blending, finishing and bottling rooms, packaging and warehousing, and Champagne ageing and processing room. No wine was crushed here. We also learned the staggering fact that nine million cases of wine were finished and bottled annually at the facility. That’s 216 million gallons. This great photograph of a group of visitors overlooking some of the several hundred redwood vats and oak casks in the ageing cellar was taken by Ansel Adams, one of America’s most renowned photographers. In 1959 the new winery, deemed the most modern in the U.S., inspired a traveling photographic exhibition based on the work of Adams and his partner-assistant Pirkle Jones, along with a companion book, Gift of the Grape. Paul Masson Vineyards, illustrated with nearly thirty winery photos taken of Paul Masson, new and old. In my collection of modern-Masson color postcards, three are credited to Ansel Adams, which is very cool.
Visitors Sample Wines In The Paul Masson Tasting Hall, c1960s
At the end of the self-guided tour, visitors were warmly welcomed into the beautiful Tasting Hall to sample the wines. Sometimes as many as sixteen or seventeen different wines, including sparkling, were offered. We can see the long sampling bar running along the left of this postcard and we notice the airy, relaxed table & chairs atmosphere. Not just any table and chairs. These chairs, first released in 1952, were designed by Harry Bertoia, the celebrated Italian-born American artist, a central figure in American modernism and a “metal-smith ahead of his time.” He once noted his polished-steel mid-century-modern mesh chairs, “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them.” Today Bertoia’s chairs, highly sought after by furniture aficionados, are quite valuable finds.
Award-Winning Paul Masson Bottles And Ribbons, c1960s
Behind the length of the tasting bar are attractive, lighted cabinets that prominently display many Paul Masson award-winning bottles and their ribbons. This card, created as a salesman’s tool with listed wines and prices on the back, features several Blue Ribbon winners, including the Rare Cream Sherry in its heart-shaped bottle specially made to honor the founder’s birthday date on Valentines Day. Very nice touch. From their opening day in 1959 Paul Masson Champagne & Wine Cellars continued to produce award-winning wines and delight winery visitors for almost thirty years. In the early 1980s production was moved from urbanized Santa Clara Valley to rural Salinas Valley, and in 1987 Seagram sold the Masson brand. In 1990 this remarkable house of wine was demolished. Housing developments and a freeway took its place. A fruitless effort has been made to learn the fate of the Masson artworks – the Bertoia chairs, the “Effervescence of Champagne” sculpture, the Moya mosaic mural. In the hills above Saratoga, Paul Masson’s original Mountain Winery is now Historical Landmark No.733 and is celebrating over sixty seasons of summer concerts, remembering the old adage printed on the back of many Paul Masson postcards, “Good Wine Makes Good Friends.”
OF PAUL MASSON INTEREST —
Balzer, Robert (1912–2011). This Uncommon Heritage. The Paul Masson Story. 1970. A well-illustrated history.
Book Club of California. The Vine in Early California. 1955. BCC Keepsake Series, 12 Folders. “No.2 Paul Masson.”
Marinacci, Barbara. “Vinaceous Correspondents: Martin Ray’s Friendships with Eminent Enophiles.” Wayward Tendrils Quarterly. 2003–2008 (v.13 #2 – v.18 #4). The compelling saga of legendary Martin Ray written by his step-daughter and co-author of Vineyards in the Sky. Online at WTQ website.
Marinacci, Barbara. “The ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and the Wrath of Grapes: The Friendship of John Steinbeck and Martin Ray.” Wayward Tendrils Quarterly. 2012 (v.22, #1-2). Online at WTQ website.
Ray, Eleanor and Marinacci, Barbara. Vineyards in the Sky. The Life of Legendary Vintner Martin Ray. 1993.
Reeve, Lloyd and Alice. Gift of the Grape. Based on Paul Masson Vineyards. 1959. Photographs by Ansel Adams and Pirkle Jones. Library of Western Industry.
