INVENTING TRADITION : It’s been almost 50 years since the revolution that made the wine country. Today the pioneers are still producing some of the country’s most distinctive wines.

Once upon a time, this was country. The tourists who would one day clog these narrow roads and foul the pristine air had never heard of Napa and Sonoma. There weren’t many restaurants around--and none with anything you really wanted to eat--so people dined at each other’s homes. The pace was unhurried. But up in the hills, out of sight, a silent revolution was going on. It was a revolution of quality, the vision of a few people who believed world-class wine could be made here in the thin, harsh soils of the hillsides of Napa and Sonoma. These days, a new collection of high-image boutique wineries seems to rise up every year here, but the grand old pioneers--wineries such as Stony Hill, Mayacamas and Hanzell--quietly continue to make fine wine and market it the same way they always have, without fanfare.

This is wine made in tiny amounts from hand-tended vines that reflect unique vineyard sites. The wine making is gentle, and the wines are appreciated by wine lovers who spend years waiting to get an opportunity to buy the wine. “A lot of our old-time customers have passed down their spots on our mailing list to their kids,” says Mike Chelini, the winemaker at Stony Hill Vineyards for two decades. “And then they come up here, testing their auto suspension on the rutted dirt roads, to pick up their purchases.”

“We’d drive up to Mayacamas, over that awful road, once a year to pick up our Chardonnay,” recalls Barney Rhodes, a longtime Napa Valley resident and owner of the legendary Bella Oaks Vineyard. “A lot of the wine that was made in the Valley back then was made only because the owner liked it, and he was making it for himself and his friends.”

Visiting these places is like stepping back in time. The ancient wooden sign by the side of the dirt road halfway up the hill to Stony Hill still reads “F. H. McCrea,” nothing else. The crusher used at Mayacamas bears the 1948 date of its assembly by a now-defunct foundry in San Francisco.

“My friends tell me this isn’t a winery,” says Mayacamas Vineyards’ current owner-winemaker, Bob Travers, opening a creaky wooden door. “They say it’s a museum where we make wine.” The winery hasn’t changed in decades, and he says the wine remains pretty much the same from year to year--in part because the techniques and the equipment haven’t changed and also because the grape source is the same.

Much the same can be said of Hanzell Vineyards, where the old pneumatic basket press, designed by former winemaker Brad Webb and built for the winery, still crushes just one ton of grapes at a time. “When this place was built in 1957, it was considered the most modern in the business,” says Bob Sessions, winemaker at Hanzell for nearly 20 years.

No more. Science has moved on, offering all sorts of new gadgets to automate winemaking. “But the faster you make wine and the more equipment you have,” says Sessions, “the more you are separated from the product. I have resisted a lot of things like that.”

The late Sonoma County vintner Joe Swan felt much the same way--he even refused to buy a forklift. “Joe said he didn’t want a forklift around because it would allow him to make too much wine,” says his son-in-law, Rod Berglund, who now makes the wines at Joseph Swan Vineyards. Swan moved his barrels and cases by hand.

The revolution in Napa began in 1943 when a trucking executive named Lee Stewart bought a parcel of land on the eastern flank of the Valley. It had a stone winery left over from the 1880s that he renamed Souverain. Stewart was looking for a retreat, but he grew into wine on the property and before long was making some of the best in the Valley.

Then, in 1947, Fred McCrea, a San Francisco ad man, and British-born oil industry executive Jack Taylor almost simultaneously bought property on the western slopes of the Valley. Both were looking for vacation homes; neither intended to move there permanently. And neither had any ideas about making great wine . . . at first.

Old-time residents say both McCrea and Taylor planted grapes because little else would grow in the thin, arid soils. In the late 1940s, the rock-strewn western slopes had as many prune and walnut orchards as vines. The McCrea parcel was called Goat Hill by the locals because of its steep, rocky terrain. Of the 160 acres, only 50 are planted in vines. The rest are just too steep or stony.

The wine revolution began modestly. Taylor and McCrea made homemade wine for a few years until tiny commercial lots were released--Mayacamas from the 1951 vintage, Stony Hill from 1953. But the real drive to challenge the French and make world-class wine came in 1955, when James D. Zellerbach, former U. S. Ambassador to Italy and a man fascinated by the great wines of Europe, bought a 200-acre hillside block north of the town of Sonoma and began planting grapes.

He hired a brilliant student of viticulture and enology, Brad Webb, and gave him a free hand to create great wine. Zellerbach named the winery Hanzell, from his wife’s name, Hannah, and the first letters of his last name.

The death of Zellerbach gave the next pioneer, Joe Heitz, a boost in kicking off his winery. When Zellerbach died, Heitz had just opened his own winery. The Hanzell was still in barrel but not bottled; Heitz and two partners bought the wine, blended and bottled it, and sold it under the Heitz name. Heitz Wine Cellars was off and running.

Through the early 1960s, the pioneers continued to trickle in. Jack and Jamie Davies bought the bat-infested Jacob Schram property, Schramsberg (which Robert Louis Stevenson had written about in “Silverado Squatters”), and began making sparkling wine. And a limited partnership with Webb as winemaker began making wine as Freemark Abbey Winery.

The Stony Hill wines began to get a reputation for being lean and delicate. John Kongsgaard, who worked at Stony Hill for the 1975 harvest, says one reason was that “Fred was Scottish and he didn’t like to buy new wood (barrels). And when you grow grapes in the mountains, it’s a hell of a lot of work to get the grapes into the winery. So when you do and they’re good grapes, Fred thought it was better for the wine to taste like that vineyard rather than someone else’s barrel.”

Meanwhile, another wine lover, Bob Travers (he had worked as a cellar-man at Heitz), bought Mayacamas from the Taylors. The industry continued to be a collection of quiet, dedicated people who cared not for high production or heavyweight marketing.

Rhodes recalls those days as idyllic. Winemakers chatted amiably and eagerly with other winemakers, sharing information. “This whole valley was a small town,” he says. “Everybody knew your business, and since we never dined out and always entertained in our homes, we got to know everybody.”

Many mark the start of the changes in the wine country to 1965 and the falling out between brothers Robert and Peter Mondavi, who jointly ran the Charles Krug Winery. Robert left on what was called a sabbatical; a year later he was making wines at his own winery in Oakville, to the south, closer to San Francisco and potential visitors.

This was the birth of the tourist boom that made wine--and the wine country--more accessible to more people. In 1950, there were five wine-tasting rooms in the Napa Valley; now there are more than 75.

While the tourists pour into the tasting rooms on the main routes, up in the hills others quietly follow the tradition of the pioneers. Stu and Charlie Smith tractored out part of rugged Spring Mountain for their Smith-Madrone Vineyards; Randy Dunn left Caymus Vineyards to trailblaze at Howell Mountain, where he now makes a much-sought-after eponymous Cabernet Sauvignon; Francis Mahoney put Carneros Creek Winery in operation in 1971 in a region--Carneros--that had yet to be developed. Kent Rasmussen still makes wine out of his in-laws’ garage. Patrick Campbell etched Sonoma Mountain soil in a tractor to develop Laurel Glen Vineyards.

And little has changed at Stony Hill, Swan, Hanzell and Mayacamas. Stony Hill is now run by McCrea’s son, Peter, and his wife, Willinda. Production remains what it was two decades ago--about 4,000 cases a year. Travers and Sessions carry on the early traditions at Mayacamas and Hanzell, where about a quarter of the production is sold to mailing-list customers. At Stony Hill, that figure is as high as 95%. The same is true at Joseph Swan, where Berglund now makes wine the way his father-in-law did. “A lot of our original customers were Joe’s contemporaries,” says Berglund, “and they’ve died, so we actually have a few vacancies on our mailing list.”

At each of these old properties, visitors--as always--must have an appointment, and tasting isn’t routinely offered. “We still get visitors,” says Stony Hill’s Chelini. “Usually they are people who are picking up the wines they’ve bought.”

But every now and then he will open a bottle of Riesling on a warm afternoon to pour for someone who has just braved the little dirt trail up to the old barn where the sublime Chardonnay is made. It’s not a sales pitch, he says, as much as hospitality--a word that reflects the casual, pre-tourist days of the past.

“It was really a great time to be in the business,” says Sessions, reflecting back on the 1950s. “It hadn’t become a boom yet, and you just made the wine and sold it to people who were crazy about it.”

HEIRS APPARENT? Who are today’s Zellerbachs, Heitzes, Taylors and McCreas? Meet the contenders. H33