With no straight lines

DON Quixote is back.

Carl Doumani, Napa Valley’s very own Man of La Mancha, turned 70 last month, and he has a brand-new winery -- a Gaudi-like visual tour de force that features a gold dome, more than a dozen multicolored ceramic pillars, an exterior tile mural ... and doors and windows that differ in size and shape from every other door and window in the building.

The building was designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the late Austrian artist who was so fond of curves and wavy forms that he once called the straight line “the tool of the devil.” There are no straight lines in Doumani’s winery. Even his desk -- a huge, two-inch-thick slab of walnut, with a crack down the middle -- is irregularly shaped.

When Doumani took me through the winery recently, proudly pointing out the multicolored tiles and strangely shaped oak and walnut floors, he was virtually cackling about the extraordinary look of the place. But his pride in both the splendor and the oddity of his new surroundings notwithstanding, he won’t let anyone photograph it.

“All the magazines want pictures, but it isn’t ready yet,” he says. “When we get the leaks in the roof fixed and figure out what kind of grasses and trees we want to plant, then it’ll be ready and then they can take pictures ... maybe late next year.”

That’s typical of Doumani.

“He always plays by his own rules,” says Steve Wallace, a longtime friend and the proprietor of Wally’s wine shop in Westwood. “He’s a great guy, but he’s got really strong feelings about how things should be done -- or not.”

Doumani’s new winery is named Quixote. So are his flagship wines -- a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Petite Sirah.

“Quixote? Is there some personal identification there?” I ask him, recalling the various windmills he’s tilted at over the 32 years since he first moved from Los Angeles to Napa Valley.

He nods and smiles and fiddles with his moustache, now gone mostly gray.

“There are rumors to that effect,” he says with a sly grin.

The first vintage of Quixote wines (2001) won’t be released until 2004, but small quantities of a ’99 Petite Sirah was produced under his second label, Panza (as in Sancho), and they’re in a few wine stores and restaurants now. The ’99 Panza Cabernet will be released early next year.

The 2000 Panza Petite Sirah will be released next spring, at $36 a bottle, the same price as the ’99. It’s intensely fruity -- mostly cassis and blackberry -- with what Doumani calls “rounded rather than angular tannins.” The Cabernet, which will sell for $40 when it’s released next summer, has a lingering, jammy flavor.

“I like a long finish on a wine,” Doumani says, “because I’m also a cigar smoker. I want that wine taste still in my mouth when I start my cigar.”

Doumani is not fond of over-oaked wines so the oak notes in all his wines are subtle.

When the top-of-the-line Quixote wines are released, heavy oaking isn’t all they’ll lack. They won’t have corks either. Instead, they’ll be closed with a sophisticated version of a screw cap -- “a roll-on, pilfer-proof aluminum cap,” the product of 10 years’ work by Doumani, a longtime critic of the declining quality of corks.

“I’m sick and tired of pouring corked wines,” he says.

The fight against corks is but one of Doumani’s many crusades. He is, after all, the man who spent a decade -- and many tens of thousands of dollars -- battling Warren Winiarski over the right to the name Stags Leap, the district in southeastern Napa Valley known for its lush, age-worthy wines.

The battle became known as the War of the Apostrophe after the courts finally decided that neither man had sole right to the name; Winiarski kept Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars on his labels, and Doumani kept Stags’ Leap Winery on his labels.

The accidental winemaker

Doumani got into the wine business almost by accident. He was a developer/speculator in residential property and the owner of Dude’s Barbecue in Westwood in 1970 when a friend invited him and his wife to Napa for a long weekend.

“We had so much fun I decided I’d like to buy five or 10 acres and build a weekend/summer home to bring our kids to,” he says. But a real estate agent showed him an abandoned 400-acre ranch in the Stags Leap district -- so named, legend has it, because a noble stag, pursued by hunters, once leaped to safety across a massive chasm.

The ranch -- originally known as Stags Leap Manor -- had been built in the late 1880s by a San Francisco entrepreneur but it had lain fallow for almost 20 years when Doumani first saw it.

He loved it, bought it, restored it and though he was not (and is not) a winemaker, he knew how to hire winemakers -- and how to run a business.

As an outsider from Los Angeles, he had some trouble at first being accepted in the tightly knit Napa world. But he’s a big, good-natured guy, with a ribald sense of humor, and he soon won folks over. He even founded an all-male eating, drinking and joke-telling group called the Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory.

Then, in a sense, he became too successful.

“I wanted a winery that made about 12,000 cases a year,” he says, “but it grew to 55,000 cases, and it wasn’t fun anymore. I had to spend all my time managing people. I don’t like doing that, and I’m no good at it.”

In time, Doumani sold the winery, got divorced and dabbled -- fruitlessly -- with making mescal. But he kept 150 acres of the original 400 and decided to start over as a vintner, with a much smaller winery, planting just 26 of the 150 acres.

Vienna transplanted

One day in 1988, he was in an architect’s office in San Francisco, explaining the kind of winery he wanted, when he saw a calendar with a photograph of an apartment house in Vienna -- public housing with a gold dome, multicolored tiles, trees literally growing out of the windows.

“It was sheer, unadulterated fun,” he says, “and I told them, ‘I want something like that.’ ”

The building had been designed by Hundertwasser, and over several months’ time, Doumani tracked him down in Vienna, only to find that Hundertwasser had never built a winery and had never done a building of any kind in the United States.

No problem.

Doumani brought him to Napa four times over the next eight years.

“His first design put the winery underground,” Doumani recalls. “I said, ‘This is California. It’s sunny. We don’t want to be underground.’”

The two men worked together, and in late 1997, with the winery itself still incomplete, Doumani moved into his new office there. His first wines, the 1999 and 2000 Panza wines, were aged and bottled on the premises but only after the crush and destemming took place elsewhere. Finally, last year, he did everything at Quixote.

Now he’s waiting for the wines to age.

Unfortunately, Hundertwasser won’t be able to taste them. He died two years ago.

“But he didn’t like wine anyway,” Doumani says with a hearty laugh. “When we’d go to little restaurants outside Vienna together, he’d have them put one-third wine, two-thirds water in his glass.”

Was Doumani appalled?

“Nah. The wine was young and raw and water helped tame it. I even put a little water in my glass.”

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone put water in Doumani’s Quixote wines, though -- certainly not in his presence.

They’re strong wines, and some folks may feel they too need a little taming -- but with time, not water. Doumani may have a lance or two left over from previous battles, and I suspect he wouldn’t hesitate to use one on those “enemies” of Quixote whom Cervantes called “cowards and vile beings.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.