A Leap of Faith
At the foot of a hill on the southern end of his 50-acre vineyard, wine maker John Anderson points to grapevines separated by a waist-high fence.
“See that grape?” Anderson, 25, says of his neighbor’s vines. “That’s Stags Leap. This grape here,” he points to his side of the fence, “that’s not Stags Leap.”
By the time those grapes become a bottle of Chardonnay wine, the separation represented by that fence could be transformed into several dollars on the price tag.
In the Napa Valley, home of world-class Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, the question of what is a Stags Leap grape has blossomed into what John Anderson only half jokingly calls a “range war.”
The “war” is over the boundary of the proposed Stags Leap District viticulture area, more commonly known by the French term appellation. Intended as a truth-in-labeling concept, appellations tell consumers where the grapes used in a bottle of wine were grown. In the expanding high-priced wine market, the concept also has grown into a sales tool.
“It’s marketing, my friend. That’s all it is,” said Richard Mascola of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which labels alcoholic beverages and is the arbiter of viticultural area boundaries.
No appellation has drawn more attention than the one proposed as the Stags Leap District, a region especially acclaimed for its Cabernet Sauvignon. More than 150 wine lovers from as far away as Sioux Falls, S.D., have written to the bureau offering advice on where the line should be drawn. More than a score of others testified at public hearings on the issue. A decision is expected this summer, three years after the petition to form the district was filed.
Proposed by 22 winery owners and grape growers, including some of Napa Valley’s most influential figures, the district would take in 1,250 acres of vineyards--2,650 acres in all--east of the Napa River and north of the city of Napa. It includes land owned by the Robert Mondavi family, and the family of Walt Disney. Some wine makers say it should be a fourth its current size. But the line had to be drawn somewhere--much to the dismay of growers left out.
For vintners whose labels carry the Stags Leap name, there is a promise of more prestige for their wine, and more money. Wines from the area already command some of Napa Valley’s highest prices, with current vintages selling for up to $35 a bottle, prime vineyard land selling for as much as $40,000 an acre, and Cabernet grapes going for upward of $1,450 a ton, nearly $400 more than the Napa Valley average. Wine from the area has won tastings over some of the best French wine. It has been poured at state dinners and for Queen Elizabeth II when she visited California in 1983.
“ ‘Exclusive’ usually means higher prices. People pay more for that. It has more prestige,” a wine industry analyst said, predicting that the price of a Stags Leap bottle could rise by $2 to $5, perhaps more, once the appellation is approved.
The Andersons--John operates S. Anderson Vineyards with his father, Stan--want the district expanded by 150 acres to take in their land and that of seven neighbors. That’s not much, he says, in a district almost four miles long.
“We’re one small winery against 10 large wineries,” he said. “It includes all the rich and powerful. I guess they thought they could ignore the Andersons.”
“There are a lot of sour grapes up there,” retorts John Stuart, the wine maker and general manager of Silverado Vineyards, which initially was excluded but convinced the petitioners that it should be admitted.
“If this thing gets too big it will lose credibility” Stuart added. “If we start adding people around the fringes, there won’t be a point in having an appellation at all.”
Stags Leap wine makers insist that they aren’t counting on price increases once the appellation is approved, although they do plan a combined marketing effort aimed at customers who seek finer wines. They also have visions that one day, by helping each other with cultivation and wine making and by setting up quality controls to guard against bad wine being sold under the appellation, Stags Leap may become known as one of the top Cabernet Sauvignon areas.
Before the name of a viticultural area can be used on a label, 85% or more of the grapes in that wine must come from the district. In the decade since the system began, 99 viticultural areas have been approved, ranging in size from a few dozen acres owned by a single family to areas that span parts of two and three states.
Designer Appellations
Some areas have gained reputations for particularly good wine. Los Carneros in Napa and Sonoma counties is known for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Sonoma Valley is known for its Chardonnay. Napa Valley, perhaps the most famous appellation outside France, is renowned for its Cabernet Sauvignon.
Lately, in a reflection of the competition in the high-priced wine market, there has been a rush to create small so-called designer appellations.
The fast-growing market for the priciest California wine, which sells for more than $7 a bottle and is most affected by designer labels, accounts for only 6 million cases, or 6% of the wine produced in the state. But because of the high prices of “super-premium” and “ultra-premium” wine, it accounts for 20% of the dollar volume, or $337 million, and sales in that segment rose by 18% to 20% last year, according to Gomberg-Fredrikson & Associates, a market analysis firm that tracks the industry.
The share of this high-end market held by Stags Leap vintners is not known, but wine industry analysts estimated it at 2% to 3%. With their 1,250 planted acres, wine makers could produce roughly 200,000 cases of the California wine that sells for upward of $7 a bottle.
“It’s a real bread-and-butter issue to these people,” said Ed Everette, an industry analyst in San Francisco. Vintners who don’t get into one of the smaller districts fear consumers will view their wine as being of lower quality than wines from inside an appellation.
Advocates of smaller appellations talk at length about the distinctive quality of wines from the various areas, but the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau, which must decide the issue, isn’t concerned with wine quality. To differentiate one region from another, the agency merely looks at climate, soil, geography and history.
“That’s fine, that’s great, but that’s not part of the criteria,” Mascola said of vintners’ talk about the distinctiveness of wine from various areas. “ . . . We look at soil, climate, history, nothing more than that.”
Area for Red Wine
The U.S. system is vaguely patterned after the French system of defining its wine regions, although in this country there are none of the intricate rules surrounding cultivation that exist in France. The limited role taken by this government stirs some critics to complain that the U.S. system has no teeth, and that the federal bureau tends to admit anyone who wants in.
“The viticultural appellation system has evolved into something that has little to do with wine,” James Laube, senior editor of the Wine Spectator, wrote in a January column. “Instead it’s a game to see how many growers and vintners can attach themselves to a famous name.”
One such name is Stags Leap, named after an outcropping of jagged rocks on the eastern slope of Napa Valley. A picturesque and unspoiled corner of the Napa Valley, the area has become renowned for its red wine and for its disputes.
Warren Winiarski brought the area acclaim by stunning the wine world in 1976 when his Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet won a tasting in Paris over the best French Bordeaux. While he retains a reputation for making fine wine, Winiarski’s success in the cellars has not been matched by his luck in the courts.
In 1970, a few months after Winiarski selected the name Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Carl Doumani bought what a 19th-Century land baron called Stags Leap Ranch, and claimed the name, Stags’ Leap Winery. Suits were filed, and turned on such fine points as the placement of apostrophes. Winiarski uses an apostrophe before the s. Doumani uses an apostrophe after the s. The appellation uses no apostrophe.
A dozen years later, Winiarski and Doumani unlocked horns, agreeing each would use the names they originally selected. In true Napa style, they combined their skill to make a wine. And they sued Pine Ridge Winery owner Gary Andrus, a neighbor who was marketing a Cabernet with the words Stags Leap on the label.
Andrus, contending Stags Leap was a geographic name and not a trademark, won the right in a settlement to use the words. With it clear that Doumani and Winiarski could not control the use of the name, Andrus and other wine makers pressed ahead with plans for a Stags Leap District appellation.
‘Defending a Principle’
Although his land is within the boundary, Doumani still refuses to become a part of the petition. However, Winiarski, who for years strongly opposed the designation, realized he couldn’t stop his neighbors, so he joined them, hoping to influence their decisions.
“The name is now a treasure that belongs to all of us. I want to see it spent wisely,” Winiarski said.
John Shafer, of Shafer Vineyards, drove his dusty econo-box around the boundaries of what he hopes will be the Stags Leap District. Hills mark it to the north and south. The Napa River is the western border. To the east is craggy Stags Leap.
“We are defending a principle,” Shafer said, maintaining that the region as proposed has soils, climate, geography and history that distinguish it from the rest of Napa Valley, and combine to make a special-quality wine.
“Feelings do run deep,” said Richard P. Mendelson, lawyer for the vintners and grape growers who asked for the Stags Leap District viticultural area. “People look at them as decisions that will affect their sons and daughters and grandchildren.”
Richard Chambers, a grower who is just outside the proposed boundary, climbed to the top of a ridge overlooking his vineyard, and spoke about how his fight to be included in Stags Leap is as much for his children as for himself. He also spoke of the similarities between his vines and those within the district. Each year, his harvest date is the same as it is for grapes within the boundary. So is the sugar content of the grapes, important to the taste of the wine. He sells his grapes to Shafer, who has “won a lot of awards for his Merlot, and half those grapes are mine.”
“The wind doesn’t stop at their property line,” he added. “. . . The soils are the same. The hills are the same. I just don’t know know why we have been so vehemently excluded.”
A few miles south of the rock outcropping, Frank Altamura, of Altamura Vineyards and Winery, another of the excluded Stags Leap neighbors, took a break from tilling his vineyard.
“Down deep,” he said, “I feel Stags Leap is a very small area . . . maybe 500 or 700 acres.” However, with the line so close to his land, no one could possibly taste a difference in his grapes. But, then, he added: “It’s all business. It’s not the grapes.”