Founding Dates Are Updated : Wine Historian Heintz Pores Over the Past

A typical research project for wine historian Bill Heintz often starts when a winery calls him asking him to find out a specific fact.

For example, the owners of Geyser Peak called him some time ago and said that painted on the front of the Geyser Peak Winery was the date 1910. They wanted to know if that was the date the winery was founded.

After extensive searching, Heintz discovered that a winery was located on the Geyserville site as early as 1898.

At the Freemark Abbey winery north of St. Helena, two dates are chiseled into stone above the front door of the winery: 1906 and 1895. Heintz was commissioned by the winery to find out what those dates mean and which date reflects the actual founding of the winery.

What he learned, interestingly, is that the winery was founded in 1886 by Josephine Tychson (“making it the first winery in California founded by a woman,” he said), and that the two dates in stone in the winery facade are the dates of completion of various stages of its construction.

Whose Private Reserve?

A project on which Heintz is now working is the question of whether Beaulieu Vineyard was the first winery to use the designation Private Reserve on a bottle of wine. “I’m 95% certain they were the first,” he said.

One project Heintz began some time ago was to locate the family of Hamden W. McIntyre, the man who is credited with being the main architect for such classic wineries as Chateau Montelena, Inglenook, Trefethen, Ewer (later called Beaulieu), and the Christian Brothers’ Greystone property in St. Helena.

“McIntyre was very active in building wineries, but then in 1892 he dropped off the face of the earth,” said Heintz. “I learned his family lived in New Hampshire, so in 1981 I put ads in newspapers back there asking if anyone knew anything about him.

“Before long, McIntyre’s nephew’s wife wrote to me,” providing details of McIntyre’s life.

At present he’s trying to track down the family of James Drummond in Scotland. Drummond was a retired British army captain who reportedly made one of the state’s greatest Cabernet Sauvignons in the early 1880s in Sonoma Valley.

Seeking the Medals

However, he died of a heart attack at 42 and his children and wife moved back to Scotland. All the family possessions were apparently shipped back, too, and among them were medals won for quality wines. “It would be wonderful if we could get some of those medals,” said Heintz.

Most of the research Heintz has done has been on contract to wineries or companies needing specific research on a problem. For example, he helped research the origin of the name Stag’s Leap for a group of Napa Valley wineries who were applying for that designation as an approved viticultural appellation.

These days, however, Heintz is on his own, working to verify dates and events for his two-volume history of the Napa Valley. Part one is expected to be out late in 1989.