Wine Country Postcard Stories: The Multiple Lives Of Greystone Cellars: A Busy Story

For the half-century of its modern life, most people have commonly referred to the magnificent, mammoth stone wine structure just north of St Helena in Napa Valley as Christian Bros Wine & Champagne Cellars. Historians readily call it by its birth name, Greystone. The years in between were busy years. Within a decade of its completion in 1889 by Bourn & Wise Wine Co, Greystone began its succession of property owners. In 1894 Charles Carpy, a Napa Valley wine pioneer and power in the industry, acquired it. When Carpy became a founding member of the giant California Wine Association that year, so did Greystone. The immense facility became the icon for the enterprising C.W.A. for three decades. Four years into Prohibition in 1924, the C.W.A. had judiciously removed all of the 200,000 gallons of wine stored at Greystone. A year later, the Bisceglia Bros. of San Jose purchased Greystone, where they produced sacramental wines until 1930. Following a three-year hiatus, the Bisceglias restored operations at Greystone in late 1933. During that inactive period, ownership was transferred to California Vineyards Co., who sold the facility back to Bisceglia at the end of 1932; following Repeal, Central California Wineries owned it for a couple of years before selling it to Schenley in 1942. Christian Bros entered the picture in 1945 when they leased the cellar. Five years later, they purchased Greystone and saw forty-one more vintages before selling to the Heublein Wine Group in 1991. It did not take Heublein more than a year to find a buyer and the current resident, the Culinary Institute of America. We heartily bid them a long life at storied Greystone. — Timeline excerpted from Carl Wehr, Twenty Years at the Helm: A Story of Greystone, c1980.

Beautifully located with historic Beringer Bros Winery (est 1876) its neighbor on the south toward St Helena, and pioneer winery Charles Krug (est 1861) directly across the main road, Greystone was conceived by William Bourn – Napa Valley vineyard owner and rancher, financier, and developer of the Empire Gold Mine (now a historic park) – as a huge storage cellar for aging Napa Valley wines before sending them to market as a quality product. Set imposingly against the western hillside, the structure was hailed as the finest example of 19th-century winery architecture and advertised as the “largest wine cellar in the world.” From its earliest days, Greystone, its cellars, and its stone arch gateway have been popular subjects of a bountiful crop of postcards. Today, all pre-Prohibition Greystone postcards are dear and very rare, while special favorites are those scarcities with postmark dates and wine-y messages.