Grgich: From Zagreb to Yountville

It’s 22 years this month since American wine came of age--since the day two Napa Valley wines outscored their French counterparts at tastings in Paris and rocketed California’s wine country into the world’s headlines.

The event, staged by Paris wine merchant Stephen Spurrier, included two blind tastings by French wine experts--Bordeaux against California’s upstart Cabernet Sauvignons and great White Burgundies against California’s Chardonnays. The red wine winner was a 1973 Cabernet from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. The white wine winner, beating esteemed 100-year-old Burgundian properties: 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay.

Those wines were actually the first commercial releases from their respective wineries, and in the headlines that followed, Stag’s Leap’s owner Warren Winiarski was lionized as a king of red wines. The Chardonnay winemaker, Croatian immigrant Mike Grgich, never gained anywhere near the personal acclaim.

Not that it seems to have mattered to him. The other day, at a private dinner party celebrating his 75th birthday, Grgich was asked about the glory that should have been his.

“In my language, Croatian, you write ‘I’ with a small letter,” says the slightly built, highly animated man who is rarely seen without a beret. “For me, it was not that important, the fame. It was important to me that I did it; I didn’t want to magnify it.”

Although Grgich is half-owner of Grgich Hills Cellars in the Napa Valley, producer of one of the most popular Chardonnays in the country, he remains a rather quiet man. His wine isn’t flashy either, structured as it is for the dinner table, rather than for the tasting panel. It simply sells out to savvy longtime buyers. He also makes wonderful Cabernet Sauvignons and Zinfandels and a superb dessert wine named after his daughter Violet.

He may lack the fame of a Robert Mondavi, but he enjoys the status of elder statesman here in the southern Napa Valley town where he lives in a charming old Victorian.

Born Miljenko Grgic in Zagreb, Grgich was weaned on wine. “When I was 2 1/2, I got wine with water in it,” he says. “And I’ve been drinking ever since.” Soon after entering the University of Zagreb, he became a star student in agronomy and chemistry as well as an outspoken foe of the state government.

“In 1954, one day my professor of chemistry questioned a document that had been handed out by the Communists, so he got a notice that he had to retire without his full pension,” Grgich says. The professor had lacked only a few weeks to qualify for his full pension.

“So a few of us went to the dean to protest, to ask him to keep the professor until the final examinations. But after that, someone told me I was being followed by the secret police.”

Even though he needed only to pass a final test to earn his master’s degree, Grgich knew he had to act. One day, without telling even his parents, he fled to Germany.

Eventually he made his way to Canada, where he worked as a dishwasher and then as a chemist at a paper mill. In 1958, he was granted a visa and joined relatives in Aberdeen, Wash., before going to work for the late Lee Stewart at Souverain Winery in the Napa Valley.

Six months later, he began working the bottling line at the Christian Brothers Winery, and in 1959 he realized a lifelong dream when he was hired at Beaulieu Vineyard to work alongside the man many consider to be the greatest winemaker in U.S. history, Russian emigre Andre Tchelistcheff.

“I had heard about Andre,” says Grgich. “He was a refugee like me, and he was doing very important research into yeasts, into malolactic fermentation, into spoilage. This was very important work, because malolactic fermentation was spoilage back then. We had to learn how to control it.”

His main job at BV was chief of quality control, a vital activity in the 1950s and ‘60s, when many wines were ruined by bacterial problems. Grgich was the Napa Valley’s first quality control chemist.

“BV was one of the first wineries to use millipore filtration for all wines,” he says, “which made the wines biologically stable forever. This was very important in the development of great wine in the Napa Valley.”

After nine years at BV, Grgich moved three miles down the road to become quality control chemist and winemaker for the Robert Mondavi Winery, at a salary increase of $200 per month. His salary finally had reached $1,000 a month.

Grgich was awed by the whirlwind Mondavi, who seemed to become fascinated with every new winemaking gadget on the market. “One year he bought roto-tanks and told everyone, ‘My wine is great because of the roto-tanks,’ ” Grgich says. “Then he bought a centrifuge and told everyone, ‘My wine is great because of the centrifuge. . . .’ Every year it was something new.”

Grgich’s next challenge came in 1972, when Los Angeles attorney James Barrett hired him to head up his new project, a refurbishment of the 90-year-old Chateau Montelena, which had fallen into neglect.

“There was nothing there,” recalls Grgich, who had to redesign the winery and install new equipment. It was his first Chardonnay out of the gate here that beat nine other wines that day in 1976 in Paris.

“The style of that wine was for longevity,” says Grgich, who adds that few wineries make that style of wine today. He is proud that today, some 20 years after that harvest, carefully stored bottles of the 1973 Chardonnay remain tasty.

The headlines announcing Montelena’s victory over the French were just a year old when Grgich and Hills Bros. Coffee Co. heir Austin Hills struck a deal to open a new winery just up the road from Mondavi in Rutherford.

“We broke ground on Grgich Hills on the Fourth of July in 1977,” he says, “and people said we would never be ready in time for harvest. Well, I’m a little guy, but if I decide I’m going to do something. . . .”

Grgich Hills Chardonnay these days is made with a delicate hand, in exactly the same style as the famed 1973 Chateau Montelena. The fruit is forward, the wine crisp and leaning on fruit rather than oak and the structure perfect for food. It is unlike the more overblown Chardonnays that dominate the shelves these days. Instead, Grgich offers a wine that will age and develop with years in the bottle.

As Grgich Hills grew and added employees, Grgich says he never fired anyone, even if they made a mistake.

“If someone makes a mistake, I take him aside and talk about it, why it happened and the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he says. “Every employee can be better. It’s important that they know that I care.” He also says that few of his employees have quit.

Among his staff members is his nephew, Evo Setka-Neda, a student of mechanical engineering who towers over Grgich and now has his eyes set on winemaking. Sponsored by Grgich, Setka-Neda came here in 1985, before the dissolution of Yugoslavia. He is learning to make wine under his uncle’s patient hand.

Also on staff here are daughter Violet and a score of veteran employees.

“If you ask me what I am most proud of, it is the people,” he says. “I make good wine, yes, but I also make good people.”

In 1990, Grgich returned to Croatia to visit his homeland. He returned again in 1996 to open a small winery called Grgic, making a white wine called Posip and a red called Plavac Mali, both local grape varieties.

A small quantity of these wines will be available in Los Angeles soon.

The Posip, a dry wine not unlike Pinot Blanc, will sell for about $20 a bottle. The Plavac Mali, a deeply flavored, concentrated wine, will be about $25.

That winery project, coordinated with the University of Zagreb, was all Grgich needed to complete his long-forgotten degree requirements. On June 13, 1997, nearly 43 years after fleeing Communism and 20 years after opening his own winery in the Napa Valley, Grgich earned a master’s degree in agronomy at his alma mater.

He still uses his experiences with Communism as a yardstick to measure other events in his life. One possible reason Grgich isn’t as famous in Napa as he might be may have something to do with his most vocal support of the Napa Valley Wine Train.

Eight years ago, when the train was trying to gain permission to run up and down the valley with tourists, virtually every other winery opposed the plan. He now admits that the train debate left some of his neighbors irritated with him.

“I thought it would be a good idea for the valley,” he says. “If you are on the train, you’re not in your car, on the road.”

Then he gets a faraway look in his eyes, and he speaks of life under Communism, and how the freedom he now enjoys applies to the wine train. “It’s a quality train, each car is worth $1 million. They deserve a right to be here.”

Berger is a syndicated wine columnist living in Topanga and Sonoma County. His e-mail address is info@vintageexperiences.com