One of the biggest bangers in wine history, on a May evening in 1976, barely caused a ripple at the home of Warren and Barbara Winiarski, owners of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley.
The day before, a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon had won a tasting in Paris that pitted some of the best French wines against bottles from up-and-coming California. But when a friend who had been in France called Ms. Winiarski (pronounced win-ee-YAR-skee) to tell her of the victory, she had only a vague idea of what the caller was talking about. So she called her husband, who was away on business. He also couldn’t remember any tasting or understand its potential significance.
“That’s nice,” he said.
The tasting itself might have remained as inconsequential as it seemed to the Winiarskis if George M. Taber, a Time magazine reporter, had not been there to witness it. His article, “The Judgment of Paris,” announced a shocking David-over-Goliath triumph that gave the fledgling California wine company a quick dose of international credibility.
“The unthinkable happened: California defeated all of Gaul,” Mr. Taber wrote.
Nearly 50 years later, marketers still use this tasting and recreate it countless times to sell California wines around the world.
It was certainly significant for the Winiarskis and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, a startup that was virtually unknown before the tasting. There was little demand for the 1973 Cabernet, the winery’s second vintage, but that was about to change.
“The phone started ringing pretty quickly,” Mr. Winiarski recalled in 1983. It continued to ring for years.
He died June 7 at his home in Napa, California, a representative said on his behalf. He was 95.
For Mr. Winiarski, who only began working in the wine industry at age 35, the victory in Paris was an abrupt reversal of fortune. He had been a wine-obsessed humanities lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1964 when he and his wife decided to leave academia and try their hand at the wine business.
They packed their belongings into a U-Haul trailer, loaded their two young children into a Chevrolet station wagon and set off for Napa Valley, then a sleepy, remote agricultural community where walnuts and plums were more common Grapes.
With few resources but an invitation to harvest at Chateau Souverain, a winery on Howell Mountain, they arrived in August 1964 and set up in a nearby cabin with a wood-burning stove.
As the second man in a two-man operation at Souverain, Mr. Winiarski learned the basics of viticulture and winemaking while mastering the menial tasks of stacking crates and keeping the winery meticulously clean. But his academic training was never far behind. He studied all aspects of agriculture and winemaking and over time developed a wine philosophy that emphasized balance, harmony, subtlety and elegance rather than weight and power.
Within a decade, he was the owner of his own winery—and making a wine that would shock the world.
After tasting, Stag’s Leap became one of Napa Valley’s premier wines, an attraction for tourists and connoisseurs alike as the region transformed into a wine wonderland. Mr. Winiarski acquired additional vineyards and expanded the business, which grew from producing about 1,800 cases of wine in 1973 to 150,000 in 2006.
In 2007, at age 78 and with none of his children willing to continue at Stag’s Leap, Mr. Winiarski sold the winery for $185 million. Current vintages of the $6 bottle that won the tasting now sell for about $250.
Warren Paul Winiarski was born on October 22, 1928 in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood to Stephen and Lottie (Lacki) Winiarski, who ran a paint shop in their largely Polish neighborhood. While the Winiarskis – the name roughly means “from a winemaker” in Polish – didn’t drink wine regularly, Warren’s father made his own wine with honey, fruit or dandelions, which the family drank on special occasions. Mr. Winiarski later recalled listening to the bubbling of wine fermenting in his father’s cellar.
As a youth, Warren was more interested in books and philosophy than wine. He studied humanities at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he also met Barbara Dvorak, whom he later married.
He is survived by their three children, Kasia, Stephen and Julia, and six grandchildren. Ms. Winiarski died in 2021.
After graduating from St. John’s, Mr. Winiarski studied political science at the University of Chicago. He spent a year in Italy where, while researching Machiavelli and other Italian Renaissance figures, he became part of a close-knit group in which food and wine played a central role.
He returned to Chicago but maintained his fascination with wine and food. It wasn’t until a friend brought him a bottle of American wine that he began to imagine making wine and living a more rural life.
The transition to Napa Valley wasn’t easy for the Winiarskis. Their first attempt at planting a vineyard—three acres on a 15-acre plot high on Howell Mountain—was unsuccessful. They sold it, thereby reducing their losses.
In 1966, after soaking up everything he could at Souverain, Mr. Winiarski took a job at Robert Mondavi Winery, a new project that was the most ambitious winery built in California since Prohibition and set the tone for what was to come Napa Valley pretended.
Mr. Winiarski was hired as assistant winemaker, but since Michael Mondavi, Robert’s older son, was the winemaker and served in the military, Mr. Winiarski was essentially in charge of the wine.
Moving from Souverain, an artisanal, almost primitive operation, to Mondavi, a large, futuristic winery, was a huge transition, but after two vintages, with Michael Mondavi back in the fold, Mr. Winiarski felt ready to put on his own show.
He had spent his free time traveling the valley looking for potential sites for a vineyard. Unlike many of his colleagues who believed that grape selection and winemaking were most important, Mr. Winiarski believed that choosing the right location was crucial and that the best locations impart special characteristics to the wines could. In this sense, he was an early proponent of the French concept of terroir in Napa.
He found the place he was looking for in Stag’s Leap, an area in the southern part of the valley, where he was impressed by a wine made by Nathan Fay, a farmer and home winemaker. After assembling a group of investors, Mr. Winiarski purchased 50 acres of land next to Mr. Fay’s farm. He also became friends with Mr. Fay and purchased grapes for one of the three top wines that Stag’s Leap would produce. Two of these were single wines, Fay and SLV, as wines from the original Stag’s Leap vineyard were labeled. The third, Cask 23, was a blend made only from exceptional vintages.
After selling his winery, Mr. Winiarski continued to farm grapes and became a philanthropist. He made major donations to the Smithsonian Institution, where he was honored in 2019 for his contributions to American winemaking, and to St. Michael’s College, where, as a former humanities scholar, he taught in the summer classics program for many years.
“You always have the dream of doing your own thing,” he told the New York Times in 1983. “Looking back, it was an extremely unwise thing to do. But we were riding the crest of the wave. Yes, I had it all planned out, but I couldn’t really predict what was going to happen.”
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2024-06-13 15:25:14
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