Grower Spotlight: Dick Steltzner

BY KELLI WHITE | JANUARY 11, 2017

It was January 7, 1976 and only eight days remained in duck season. Dick Steltzner and a friend had spent the better part of the day hunting in Chiles Valley, but had little to show for their efforts. They loaded their meager haul into Steltzner’s single engine plane and pointed back towards Napa, but Steltzner remained unsatisfied. Somewhere close to the east-facing slopes of the Vaca mountains, he decided to buzz some irrigation ponds, flying lower and slower than is recommended, in the hopes of spotting some ducks. Instead, he unbalanced his typically nimble little “flying jeep”, as he calls it, and smashed into the hillside, ending ‘wheels up’ in the worst way imaginable.

With his seriously broken legs framing the sky above him, Steltzner might have hardly considered that he had found himself, once again, in the right place at the right time. And yet, several thousand feet overhead, a skydiving plane was preparing to unload its passengers, an orthopedic surgeon among them. The pilot radioed in the crash’s location while the doctor jumped down to assist. It took the fire department six hours to cut a path through the thick mountain scrub, while the doctor worked to stabilize the two men’s injuries. If the crash had not been spotted immediately and a doctor not been on-hand, Steltzner’s probability of survival was almost certainly zero.

Steltzner spent the following 52 days in the hospital and, despite the severity of his injuries, his spirits remained high. Friends came and went constantly and almost always brought wine, which they gladly shared with patients and hospital staffers alike. Once he gained in strength, Steltzner would race around the hallways in a wheelchair. By the time he left, empty bottles lined all the sills of his room and Steltzner had formed the basis of a surgeon-studded mailing list for the wine brand he would launch the following year. The nurses said they’d miss him, and more than one confessed that they could practically find their way to his room with their eyes closed, drawn towards it by the smell of wine and the sound of constant laughter.

A young Dick Steltzner, shortly after his arrival in Napa Valley

Dick Steltzner was born and raised in Piedmont, California – just outside of Oakland. His mother was a member of the extended Schilling family of Schilling spices (now McCormick). Although this particular branch of the family had effectively run through their fortune by the time Steltzner came along, the name still carried weight within San Francisco society, and they retained a handful of aristocratic tendencies, such as regular travel to Europe and the drinking of wine with dinner. The Wente family of Livermore moved in similar social circles, and young Dick Steltzner spent much of his childhood playing on their ranch. Those bucolic summers instilled in him a love of farming and gave him a familiarity with viticulture, which would prove handy in the years to come.

After graduating college with a degree in the ceramic arts, Steltzner sought a quiet, inexpensive place to live where he could focus on his pottery. As he had family in Napa Valley (his uncle briefly owned La Perla on Spring Mountain, now a part of Spring Mountain Vineyards), he moved to Calistoga in 1960. Soon, however, he found himself drawn to the wine industry. A self-described Riesling fanatic, Dick worshipped Stony Hill, and convinced Fred McCrea to allow him to scour the vineyards after a harvest and keep any crop left on the vine. He scavenged enough fruit for one barrel, which he fermented in the caves at Schramsberg. When the resulting wine earned a nod from his father, Steltzner’s commitment to the wine industry was cemented.

Steltzner (right) in the cellar, circa 1980