Book Excerpt: Appellation Napa Valley – Stags Leap District 

RICHARD MENDELSON I JULY 25, 2017

In the early 1970s, neighbors Warren Winiarski and Carl Doumani were the Hatfields and the McCoys of Napa Valley. Their legal wranglings, all of which concerned the rights to the Stags Leap name in its various spellings – Stag’s, Stags’, and Stags – are legendary. Each named his new winery after the historic cliffs known as the Stags Leap Palisades that lay to the east of their properties. In early 1970, Winiarski began producing and selling grapes and later making wine under the name Stag’s Leap Vineyards and Wine Cellars. Doumani around the same time formed a limited partnership, Stag’s Leap Associates, that used the names Stag’s Leap Ranch and Stag’s Leap Winery. Warren and Carl battled over the Stags Leap name and the apostrophe for more than a decade. When their vintner and grower neighbors later joined the fray by filing a petition to establish the Stags Leap AVA without any apostrophe, the name dispute between the two men turned into an epic neighborhood battle. Winiarski and Doumani were men of very different backgrounds. 

Winiarski grew up in Chicago. Winiarski means “winemaker” in Polish, and Warren’s father, in fact, did make dandelion and fruit wine, and even mead, in his spare time. Warren recalls putting his ear to the barrels to listen to the fermentation, and on special occasions he would be allowed to taste the wine. But Warren was drawn to a different calling – academia – at least at first. After graduating from St. John’s College, he pursued graduate studies in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. After two years there, he moved to Italy to conduct research on Machiavelli. In that foreign environment and at that time of his life, wine, grapegrowing, and the culture of wine stirred his passion. Although he returned to Chicago to teach at the University College for six years, his interest in a life outside the city, devoted to grapes and wine, never waned.

In 1964, Warren decided to leave Chicago. He moved to Napa Valley to work as the assistant winemaker at Souverain Cellars, and he stayed there for two years and two crushes. After that, his rise in the world of wine was meteoric. In 1966 he was hired as a winemaker at Robert Mondavi’s newly opened winery in Oakville, and he stayed there for two years, deepening his understanding of grapegrowing and winemaking. By then he was ready to strike out on his own. As Warren stated in his oral history, “After two two-year cycles, one having to do with what you might call a village art as practiced by Lee Stewart (at Souverain) and the other with a high technology component as at Robert Mondavi, I thought I had seen both poles of the possibilities for the industry…. I thought it was time to move on.”

Warren bought his own vineyard on Howell Mountain, consulted for other wineries, and served as an itinerant winemaker. In 1969, he had the good fortune to meet winegrowing pioneer Nathan Fay, who was the first person to plant Cabernet Sauvignon beneath the Stags Leap Palisades. Warren wanted to learn about Nate’s new irrigation technique, but he also relished the opportunity to taste Nate’s homemade 1968 Cabernet Sauvignon wine. That wine was so gorgeous that it fulfilled everything Warren was looking for in a California Cabernet. Warren still waxes eloquent about that wine 45 years later. To him, this was a wine that “went to the limit, the most beautiful expression, inspirational, with perfect structure, wonderful perfume, and moderate alcohol, just like Nate himself who was a man of moderation.” The next year, Warren purchased the vineyard next door to Nate and his wife Nellie, and the rest is history. A short four years later, Warren made the 1973 S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon from that very vineyard. In 1976, that wine won the Paris Tasting, which would soon be recognized as a landmark event in the history of American wine. This singular event sealed Warren’s reputation in the world of wine. It also increased the value of the land around his and, ironically, set up one of the most celebrated battles in Napa Valley history, a battle that eventually hinged on a lone apostrophe.

Carl Doumani took a different route to the Napa Valley. He was living in Los Angeles, where he invested in and developed restaurants and real estate. But in 1968, on a trip to Napa Valley, Carl met Jack and Jamie Davies of Schramsberg, and he shared some of their sparkling wine. Carl had so much fun that he decided to look for a small property in the valley where he could build a cabin for family getaways. But that modest search soon turned into something far more grandiose. One day in 1970, his real estate agent showed him an historic 400-acre property located below the Stags Leap Palisades, a piece of land once owned by Horace Chase, a Chicago financier. Carl was immediately captivated, and in June of 1970 he purchased it. 

Chase had built a wonderful stone manor house on the property in 1892 for his wife Minnie Mizner, but it had been long since abandoned. That manor house, Carl soon learned, had a colorful, but checkered, history. Over the years it had been used in a variety of unusual ways by different owners: as a resort, a post office, and a rest facility for naval officers at Mare Island. There are lots of unsubstantiated stories, too, about mob connections, a speakeasy, a brothel, and even a ghost in the manor house, the latter being a story I can’t resist recounting. 

Frances Grange, widely known as “The Duchess,” owned the property after the Chases. According to legend, Grange was a world traveler and on one trip brought back with her from Egypt a mummy that she would bring out as a curiosity at parties in the manor house. When her daughter-in-law Amparo sold the property in 1954, the mummy was moved from the “go down” (a drive-through barn that the Granges used for storage) to an upstairs closet on the third floor of the manor house. Later, and perhaps inevitably, the new owner happened upon the mummy and was scared out of his wits. He immediately called the police, who in turn phoned Amparo’s children to inquire if they knew anything about the mummy. The kids revealed everything, and in a fitting tribute to their mother, donated the mummy to their local high school. The story made the news headlines and quickly became part of Napa Valley lore.

Whether that mummy’s spirit is the ghost of the manor house is unknown, but Carl, in any event, was undeterred. He restored the manor house and went into the wine business as Stag’s Leap Winery, with the same placement of the apostrophe as Warren’s Stag’s Leap Vineyards and Wine Cellars. Although not trained as a winemaker, he knew how to hire winemakers and run a business. 

His staff also knew a thing or two about public relations. They relished the story about the ghost of the manor house and recounted the ghost sightings in the winery’s 2001 newsletter, under the title “A Ghost and a Mummy.” As the newsletter told it: Some have seen her. Robin Gonçalves (a winery employee) was a skeptic until she and her husband stayed in the Bees’ Bedroom of the manor house after attending a golf tournament at Silverado. He was shaving so she walked out into the hallway to use the other bathroom. Where the hallway jogs left, she met a woman who had just walked out of the wall and proceeded to pass right in front of her. Robin ran back to the bedroom, jumped under the covers and hid. She was frightened, but didn’t feel threatened….

After having spent the night in the Ghost’s Bedroom, fresh from sleep, Robert Brittan (the winery’s General Manager and Winemaker from 1988 to 2005) walked out into the upstairs hallway and saw her in the bright morning air. Kathy Nelson, eminence of all things administrative for Warren Winiarski winery and estate, feels sure there is a spirit here, and senses that she’s very kind. Her description is familiar, as if she were describing a long-lost sister, or an old friend.

Doumani’s purchase of the Chase estate made him a neighbor of Warren Winiarski, and in terms of temperament the two men could not have been more different. Warren was an intellectual with a stubborn streak; Carl was a maverick with a mischievous side. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Carl quit the NVV because it had become too political and, with Justin Meyer of Silver Oak, he founded the GONADS, the politically incorrect, irreverent, all-male Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory Society. Carl loved all-night poker games, expensive Cuban cigars, and Mezcal. Warren, by contrast, was a professor at heart and a relentless perfectionist with a taste for art and refinement. He was, in sum, a man who would not be caught dead in any organization called GONADS. Perhaps it was inevitable that the two men would one day clash.