Grace Cabernet: Short in Supply, Long in Demand

Basic economic theory says that if the supply of an item is limited, the demand will be high and thus price is sure to be high.

When the product is one of the best Cabernet Sauvignons made in the world, the price usually reflects its quality; in this rarefied atmosphere, wine lovers ignore the price and hock their cars to get some of the precious nectar.

Such is the case with the Cabernets of Dick and Ann Grace, the wines of the Grace Family Vineyard, a tiny Napa Valley winery whose wines are not only next to impossible to find but so good that they command ludicrously high prices at auction.

Two weeks ago, 12 bottles of varying sizes of Grace Cabernet, each with hand-painted labels, sold for $42,000 at the ninth Napa Valley Wine Auction. The buyer, a Florida wine shop owner, said he would put them on display.

To be sure, these items are collectibles and, as one-of-a-kind, defy the traditional supply/demand equation. So the prices are somewhat artificial. But all the rest of the Graces’ production fits the equation perfectly.

Measured in Bottles

That’s because the entirety of the Grace Cabernet world is measured in bottles, not cases. In 1986, for example, the Graces made only 1,380 bottles of wine off their 1.05 acres of land. This wine is not actually commercially available. The 290 persons on the Grace mailing list who are permitted to buy wine directly from the winery all buy the maximum permissible: four bottles.

And at $50 a bottle. Even though the price is elevated, most folks on the mailing list would happily buy a case or two if permitted. Moreover, 600 other names are on a waiting list to get a few bottles of magic from this miracle vineyard.

There is another way to get a bottle of this wine. Paul Smith of Northridge Hills Liquor, David Breitstein of Duke of Bourbon in Canoga Park, Steve Wallace of Wally’s in Westwood, and Doug Margerum of the Wine Cask in Santa Barbara all carry a few bottles of Grace Cabernet. They sell them only to their best customers, a bottle at a time, usually at prices higher than Grace’s.

Dick Grace himself is a curiosity--self-effacing on one hand and proud to the point of egotism on the other. The pride is in the wine he makes from vines he planted himself as a family project; the modesty flows from his dedication to his adopted valley and to his family.

It began for Dick and Ann as fear. The fear was that they were too successful. At the time, in 1975, they were in Orinda, living the good life.

He was a stock broker, a star at Smith Barney in San Francisco, one of that firm’s top-10 salesmen every year in a company that had more than 2,000 sales people. His life consisted of hard work followed by party time.

“I was concerned that the kids would leave home and think that life consisted of tennis, golf and cocktail parties,” said Dick. “I wanted to give them something more.”

In 1976, on a trip to the Napa Valley, the Graces found a 3.5-acre parcel of land on the west side of Highway 29 north of St. Helena on which sat a run-down Victorian home and old olive trees. After a quick tour of the land, they wrote out a $1,000 check as a deposit and bought the place.

Mike Richmond and Laurie Wood, both then with Freemark Abbey Winery across the road, helped Grace decide what variety of grape to plant. “We didn’t want to plant what we wanted, but what the land wanted,” said Dick Grace.

Wood, Freemark Abbey’s viticulturist, and Richmond, now with Acacia Winery, both said Cabernet was appropriate.

So over the next year, the family planted. The three kids who might have seen little more than the inside of a country club now lived in the country, and on weekends they lined up stakes and drove them into the ground, strung wires, dug holes and planted vines.

“We had no idea we would make wine,” said Grace. “It was a family project, that’s all. We didn’t know what we’d do with the grapes.”

Today his attitude has changed: “I’m just the custodian for the valley. We have to preserve this area or we’ll lose it.”

To some degree, this vineyard has saved Dick Grace’s life.

It is a life that to some seemed inordinately successful. In his best year, Grace earned an extremely handsome salary. Yet his life was lived at rat-race pace and led to what Grace perceived as weakness.

He thought that he was drinking too much alcohol. Even after he moved to the idyllic Napa Valley, the pace of his life merely got more hectic.

“My typical day was, I was up at 4:05, on the road at 4:25, into my office by 5:45,” he said. Then, armed with two double espressos, he would push hard without a break from 6:10 a.m. through the end of the Wall Street day.

“I was addicted to adrenalin. I did not leave the office, even to take a coffee break, until the stock market closed,” he said. “After work, at about 1:30 p.m., I’d have a small lunch--and four or five beers.”

The “four or five beers” routine was becoming a crutch on which Grace couldn’t permit himself to lean. He wasn’t an alcoholic in the traditional sense: “I never drank in the morning, I never drank alone, I was never picked up (for driving while intoxicated). And I rarely if ever had an excessive consumption of wine. But when I drank too much, I realized that I was overdoing it.

“Alcohol wasn’t interfering with my life, but it was an aspect. It was an enabler of very grandiose behavior. Sometimes I became a little more cantankerous. After a while I realized I could have a better life and run a better winery (if I stopped drinking alcohol).”

So 18 months ago, he quit, cold turkey.

It bothers him that some may feel that his abstinence from wine will indicate that he recognizes the harm in it. But he puts it in perspective for others: “There are benefits in wine for many people, but for me, at this time in my life, I don’t need it.”

Marine Discipline

The discipline he shows in this, inculcated during a four-year stint in the Marines as a captain, has helped Grace gain greater control over his life.

“I no longer have the need to be No. 1; I have consciously cut back on the intense adrenalin needs,” he says.

These days, he goes to his San Francisco office only three days a week. The other two days he spends in front of a Quotron machine on his desk at his home in the completely refurbished Victorian that also serves as the home for Ann’s personal venture, the Napa Valley Mustard Co.

The mustard business was founded in 1982 by Ann, Susan Simpson and Ruth Rydman. Today, the company produces three gourmet mustards and a gourmet catsup. Mustard case sales hit 18,000 in 1988. The three flavors are a Dijon-style herb-flavored mustard, a green chile/garlic and a sweet hot.

The company hopes to hit $1 million in sales by 1991.

The Grace Cabernets are exceptional. Running through them in late 1987 in a vertical tasting Grace staged for wine writers, I noted that these wines avoid the vagaries of vintage variation in that every wine, regardless of the vintage, achieves a degree of harmony rarely found in wines of Grace’s neighbors.

This, he says, is the product of being small. He can (and does) walk through the entire vineyard and pull suckers off the stalk, unclog emitters from the drip irrigation system for a single vine, and taste the grapes from each block of the vineyard and decide if they should be picked.

“This area of the vineyard,” he says, sweeping his arm in an arc over the southern tip of two rows of vines, “wasn’t picked last year because we tasted the grapes and they tasted too vegetative.” It meant that he made 115 cases instead of 125 cases. But the 115 that were made are great, he pointed out.

As for the Grace kids, they have grown up well, certainly not in the mold of rich kids with annuities and no prospects.

Kirk, 29, is now assistant vineyard manager for the new St. Supery Vineyards in Oakville, south of here; Mark, 27, is Boston-area sales representative for the Robert Mondavi Winery, and Kimberly, 25, works in sales and marketing for the San Francisco Hilton.

The Graces’ production is growing. They’ll have 225 cases of the 1988 Cabernet and by 1990 hope to have as much as 400 cases, with a newly planted vineyard of 0.95 of an acre providing nearly half of total production.

And how does Dick Grace know when he has a good wine, now that he’s not sipping any of it?

“The nose still works,” he says.

Wine of the Week: 1986 Chappellet Chenin Blanc ($6.50)--One of the last remaining dry Chenin Blancs on the market, this delightfully melony wine is crisp and a sure bet to fool your local wine snob. A cross between Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc at a fraction of the price.