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A Wine Country Emerges from a Wilderness
This wave of newcomers in the late 1960s and early 1970s—full of new ideas and enthusiasm—was simply the latest in a series of migrations to Napa Valley over the past 150 years, each one just as bursting with energy and ambition as the one before.
Napa Valley’s first vintage date was 1841 or 1842, when pioneer George Yount (namesake of Yountville) made the Valley’s inaugural wine from a small vineyard he’d planted not far from the river. Yount, whose original Scandinavian name was Jyunt, hailed from North Carolina by way of Missouri. He was a veteran of the War of 1812, a Freemason, and a frontiersman who knew how to trap and scout and live pretty well off not much in the wilderness. Native Americans, probably members of the Wappo tribe, stomped Yount’s grapes and fermented that first Napa Valley wine in ox-hide bags strung up between trees.1 Those who tried it said it was tasty, but then again they were probably pairing it with squirrel.
When Yount arrived, this area was a region of Mexico called Alta California. The first Mexican presence had come in 1823.2 The Valley was divided up into large swaths of land that historians call the Mexican land grants. Where our winery sits today was once part of Rancho Yajome. Other land grants at that time included Rancho Caymus (which belonged to Yount), Rancho Tulocay, Rancho La Jota, Rancho Las Putas, and the peculiarly named Rancho Carne Humana (translates as “human meat”). In 1846, after the Bear Flag Revolt (which gave us an animal for the state flag but had little political or military impact) and some more serious action by U.S. armed forces in the southern part of the state, Napa Valley became U.S. territory along with the rest of California.
In the decades that followed, pioneer vintners such as Charles Krug followed Yount’s lead and established one vineyard after another, and a wine country began to emerge from a wilderness.
The first person to actually construct a commercial winery was a British immigrant named John M. Patchett, whose winery was located approximately where today you’ll find the intersection of First and Monroe Streets in Napa,3 several blocks down from the West Coast offices of Wine Spectator.
Like the sites established by Yount, Krug, and Patchett, all the first vineyards were planted, sensibly, on the Valley floor. The land was flat and easy to work, plus the Napa River and its various tributaries offered reliable sources of water.
The first hillside vineyard was planted by a German immigrant named Jacob Schram in the 1860s. Though vines had been planted on hillsides in the Mediterranean world for centuries, it was a first here. And it took some doing. Schram had to clear dense forest on Diamond Mountain near Calistoga in order to establish his vines, which he dry-farmed—meaning that he didn’t attempt to irrigate them.
Over time, Schram’s vineyard earned a reputation for producing outstanding wines, and by 1880 Charles Krug, the Beringer brothers, and many others were following suit, situating vineyards on steep sites, including Howell Mountain (Krug) and Spring Mountain (the Beringers). In his book The Silverado Squatters, celebrated author Robert Louis Stevenson writes of visiting Schram and enjoying both the man’s company and his wines. While he referred to the wine of this region as “bottled poetry,” he also clearly saw it as a grand experiment, comparing it to prospecting for gold and silver in terms of its uncertain future.4
The wine boom started about the time of Stevenson’s visit here, as San Francisco’s new crop of gold and silver millionaires looked for promising places to invest their fortunes and perhaps to take on the trappings of aristocracy. Not for the last time Napa Valley found itself awash in wealthy investors, new landowners, and would-be winemakers. In 1880 there were forty-nine wineries. Within six years that number more than tripled to 175, according to historian William F. Heintz.5
The old Mexican land grants, which had been populated mostly by cattle, were cut into parcels and sold as quickly as buyers could snap them up.
Just to the south of present-day Shafer was the property of Horace B. Chase, a wealthy Chicago merchant who built a castle-like manor house, which he called Stag’s Leap. Terrill Grigsby and family bought vineyard land throughout the Valley and built a beautiful stone winery, just south of Chase’s property, called Occidental, still in use today at Regusci Winery.
Terrill Grigsby was a leading light in that viticultural heyday and something of American royalty. His father was a nephew of General William Henry Harrison and had fought with him in the War of 1812. Harrison later became the ninth U.S. president.
Along with his social standing, Grigsby was also known to have a temper. He once went ballistic on a man he suspected of shorting him on a load of grapes, thrashing him into near-lifelessness with a shovel. Grigsby beat a murder charge only because the man happened to live.6
While numerous colorful stories and key records survive from this period, no one today knows the origins of the name Stag’s Leap. According to a story that’s been handed down for generations, a band of hunters long ago were closing in on a stag that eluded them by leaping from one crag on the palisades to the next.
It’s plausible that both the myth and the name were dreamed up by Chase and/or his wife, Minnie. The area was, and still is, home to a lot of deer (as we would later discover), and the term “leap” shows up in various place-names often associated with steep, rocky cliffs, such as Huntsman’s Leap and Byard’s Leap in England, the Priest’s Leap in Ireland, Ivy’s Leap in southern Australia, and so on.
Another possibility is that it was tied to a neighbor a mile or so down the Silverado Trail from the Chase manor named William K. Staggs. In at least once instance, the local newspaper in the 1890s referred to this area as “Staggs Leap.”7 As late as 1973, the Napa Register referred to the property next door to us as “Staggs Leap Ranch.”8
(About one-third of the original 75 acres owned by Staggs is now our Borderline Vineyard, a source of Cabernet Sauvignon for us, located along Silverado Trail.)
What this means is that the name could be the result of clever word-play, working in both the stag’s myth and the Staggs’ neighbor. Pioneers had a sense of humor, after all, when they weren’t whacking each other with shovels.
By the early 1890s, a national economic downturn was hurting the wine industry in a big way, but the darker player was a near-microscopic, root-attacking insect called phylloxera. This menace had already devastated the vineyards of France, an apocalypse so complete that in Stevenson’s Silverado Squatters he movingly laments what he sees as the end of centuries of French winemaking altogether. Now hordes of these tiny bugs did their worst here. Within a few years of phylloxera’s arrival, Horace Chase had lost 50 of his 57 acres of wine grapes. Winery owners throughout the Valley were turning to new crops, including watermelons, olives, almonds, and peaches (walnuts and prunes became widespread in the century that followed).
On the property we own today, the owner Jacob Ohl had taken to growing corn alongside his dwindling Zinfandel and Malvoisie grapes. Near where you’ll find Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, a large population of hogs was newly in residence, helping to off set the owner’s loss of grape income.9
Things got so bad that the Bank of Napa is listed in 1895 as the owner of a great deal of acreage throughout the Valley as the result of repossession.
In short order the dreams of many of those first wine pioneers were extinguished. After phylloxera, even with successful replanting between 1898 and World War I, the doom of the Napa Valley wine business was sealed with the era of Prohibition in 1919.
The landscape became dotted with ghost wineries. The mountain vineyards of Jacob Schram and the Beringers were reclaimed by the forest. Much of what had been a massive, thriving industry lay dormant, waiting for another cycle and another generation.
1. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 19.
2. Lin Weber, Old Napa Valley: The History to 1900 (St. Helena, CA: Wine Ventures Publishing, 1998), 17.
3. Charles L. Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 25.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (London: Chattus and Windus, 1893), accessed June 20, 2011, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Stevenson/SilveradoSquatters.
5. William F. Heintz, California’s Napa Valley: One Hundred Sixty Years of Wine Making (San Francisco, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1999), 121.
6. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, pp. 27 and 28.
7. Stags Leap District Appellation Committee (John Shafer, Chairman), Petition to Establish the Viticultural Area of “Stags Leap,” August 22, 1985, private archive, Stags Leap District.
8. “Napan Hurt When Horse Strikes Car,” Napa Register, January 2, 1973, 2A.
9. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, p. 39.
