The bottle that wrinkled time

The other night at dinner, a friend pulled out a bottle he’d found buried in his mother-in-law’s cellar. All old wines have stories, but this one appeared to be even more interesting than most. The label looked handwritten and was dated 1974. “This dry red wine is an excellent blend of California Zinfandel,” it read. “Of medium body and distinctive taste it was produced and bottled by Windsor Vineyards, Windsor, Sonoma County, California.”

At first sniff, the wine didn’t seem overly promising. It was a little musty, in fact. That’s not surprising considering it had emerged from a couple of decades of storage in a “cellar” that, like so many in Southern California, was actually an unair-conditioned closet.

But as it sat in the glass, it began to open up. And as it developed, some of that mustiness blew away, revealing a wine that was of interest for more than its unusual label. To a certain extent, many old red wines taste somewhat the same. Aging often mutes rather than accents individual character. This one smelled and tasted of what can be described only as “old red wine” with just a hint of smoke and a high-toned note of blueberry to give away its variety.

It wasn’t a great wine, and maybe it wasn’t even a very good wine. But it was a curious wine. Whether it was this quality, or the late hour, the fine dinner or even the several bottles that preceded it, we began to talk about it and the time and place from which it came.

The modern California wine business was a much different place in 1974, just coming out of its Wild West phase. The industry was still in its infancy, struggling to show the world that it deserved to be taken seriously. There were only 330 wineries in the entire state; today there are more than 1,200, with more than 230 in Napa Valley alone. To a great extent, wine was still dominated by either the old ethnic families -- Mondavi, Martini, Wente, Sebastiani, and Korbel -- or such corporations as United Vintners, Gallo and Italian Swiss Colony. The big names were essentially the same as they had been 30 years before -- Beaulieu and Inglenook.

Robert Mondavi’s landmark winery in Oakville was less than a decade old. It would be two more years, until the great Paris tasting of 1976, before California wine would begin to be considered as a possible alternative to wines from France or Italy. The concept of wine as an artistic expression was just being born. The possibility of winery ownership becoming a common status symbol among the entrepreneurial gentry would have seemed farfetched.

Even back then, though, Windsor Vineyards was unlikely to show up on anyone’s list of the top 10 California wineries. As now, it specialized in vanity wines. Visit the Windsor Vineyards website today and you’ll find that its specialty is making custom labels for clients. You too can have a wine dedicated to you on the occasion of your wedding or graduation.

This was not always so, though, as evidenced by the signature at the bottom of that oddly evocative label: Richard Arrowood, one of the real class acts in the wine business. Since 1990, Arrowood has been the wine master of Arrowood Vineyards and Winery in Sonoma, now part of the greater Mondavi family of wineries.

Arrowood earned his national reputation as winemaker for Chateau St. Jean, starting in 1974. Chateau St. Jean wines from Robert Young Vineyard were among the first of the cult Chardonnays.

But wait, if he was at Chateau St. Jean in 1974, what’s with the date on this bottle? A closer reading reveals a curious phrasing: “Release Date, 3/1/74.” That implies two things: that the wine inside probably came from grapes that were harvested at least two years earlier (most red wines spend at least that long in bottle between harvest and vintage); and that it may well have come from grapes from several different years (otherwise, it would probably carry a vintage rather than release date).

Wine master’s beginning

But why guess? I picked up the phone and called Richard Arrowood. His reaction was earthy and unexpected. “Urine,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Urine. Peter Friedman wrote those labels. He was the president of the company, and he couldn’t make his Ws right. Whenever he wrote ‘wine,’ it came out looking like ‘urine.’ That always bugged the heck out of me. It seemed even worse with the white wines.”

The Zinfandel, it turns out, did have an interesting history. It was a mix of vintages -- some of them far older than you might expect from the year on the label. Arrowood, who was just starting out, was working for a corporation named Sonoma Vineyards (later to become Rodney Strong Vineyards), which had purchased some big redwood tanks filled with wine, some of it dating back to the 1950s. The tanks had been found in the back of the barrel room at Simi winery--which had a history dating before Prohibition.

Sonoma Vineyards bought some of the tanks that seemed to be in the best condition and blended them and released them in a series of special bottlings under the name “Windsor Vineyards,” which it owned.

“The tanks that had been topped up and taken care of were really exquisite, soft and round,” Arrowood remembers. “We blended them with younger vintages and they made some really outstanding wines.”

Most of the wines were sold under a generic Windsor Vineyards tag. The best got Friedman’s handwritten labels, usually signed by either Friedman or his business partner Strong. But they allowed Arrowood to pick a few for his own signature. “That was quite a break for a young kid like me,” he says. “I was new in the business and just stretching my wings to be a winemaker.”

There was a lot of wing-stretching going on back then. Following Mondavi, a new breed of vintner was struggling to make a statement with fine wine, at wineries with such names as Ridge, Hanzell, Schramsberg, Stony Hill and Heitz. Arrowood wanted to be among them.

“I think I always had the aspiration to make world-class wines,” Arrowood says. “I remember as a young kid asking Robert Mondavi about the passion of winemaking. I remember that still: ‘How do we take this further?’

“I don’t think I ever looked back from there. As a winemaker, I didn’t want to paint houses; I wanted to paint pictures. A lot of people want to paint houses and that’s fine. For me, though, wine is an inspiration.”

From Windsor, Arrowood went to work at Chateau St. Jean as its first winemaker and was still there when it was bought out by the Japanese spirits conglomerate Suntory.

“I think I always had a dream of owning a nice little winery,” he says. “It wasn’t until Suntory purchased Chateau St. Jean that I had the time. My wife, Alis, and I thought about it. I could stay at Chateau St. Jean but do our own winery on the side. We pooled our common resources, borrowed what we could and started the facility.”

He quickly found out that owning a winery was not the same as making great wine.

“It’s not just a matter of growing good grapes, making good wine and collecting the accolades,” Arrowood says. “You’ve got a company; you’ve got to meet a payroll. There are all of these administrative duties. I hated that.”

Back to his roots

So when his old guru Mondavi asked about buying the business, Arrowood was more than willing to listen. He remains wine master of the property, so he can concentrate on what he loves best, making great wine.

And one of his projects is getting back into Zinfandel, which he hasn’t made since 1980.

“We’re still looking for the right property, but I know eventually we’ll find it,” he says. “I love the wine and I’d love to get back into it. But it has to be just the right plot of land. The best Zinfandel wines are made from older grapes. Zinfandel more than any other variety is very vine-age dependent. A Zinfandel vine doesn’t really come into its own until it’s at least 25 to 30 years old and probably longer than that.”

That means some of the young vines whose grapes he blended into the Windsor should just now be coming into their prime.

Arrowood pauses for a minute. “Now I’m really feeling old,” he says. “But I guess there has been a lot of wine pass through the hoses since then.”