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Mike Grgich, the winemaker at Chateau Montelena in Napa Valley, and his staff were taken aback on May 25, 1976, after they received a surprising telegram. It read in part, \u201cSTUNNING SUCCESS IN PARIS TASTING.\u201d<\/p>\n
What tasting? What success?<\/p>\n
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Winemaker Mike Grgich sips a glass of his cabernet sauvignon at the Grgich Hills Estate winery in 2008.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n Without their knowledge, Montelena\u2019s 1973 chardonnay had been entered in a blind tasting held in Paris the day before. The tasting pitted American wines against some of France\u2019s most famous, hallowed bottles. Nine French judges, including some of the leading names in the French food and wine establishment, had selected the Montelena chardonnay as their top white.<\/p>\n This result was indeed shocking. American wines back then were considered simple and rustic at best, and no match for the majestic French wines. While the French judges shrank in embarrassed bewilderment, the Americans celebrated.<\/p>\n \u201cNot bad for kids from the sticks,\u201d said Jim Barrett, the owner of Montelena. But it was Grgich, who died on Wednesday at 100, who had made the wine.<\/p>\n A cardboard cutout of Grgich greets punters at the Pebble Beach Wine & Food Festival in California in 2013.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n Even with this unforeseen success, few expected the tasting to have lasting impact. Only one reporter, George M. Taber of Time<\/em> magazine, was there. But he wrote an article that drew a flood of attention. Its ripples have been felt for decades.<\/p>\n For American wines, Montelena\u2019s triumph provided instant credibility and a shot of confidence. For Grgich (pronounced GURR-gitch), a Croatian immigrant who had struggled for years to establish himself in Napa Valley, it permitted him to realise his dream of owning his own Napa winery. Grgich Hills Estate issued its first wines the next year and is still going strong today.<\/p>\n The tasting also won Grgich lasting respect and renown. In 1981, Terry Robards, who was then a wine columnist for The New York Times<\/em>, wrote: \u201cHe may be the best maker of white wine in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Grgich took a bit of issue with that phraseology.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not calling myself a winemaker anymore,\u201d he told Robards. \u201cI\u2019m a wine sitter. I sit with the wine and see what it needs.\u201d<\/p>\n Grgich\u2019s century-long journey took him to places he might scarcely have imagined as a child. He was born Miljenko Grgic on April 1, 1923, the youngest of 11 children, in Desne, Yugoslavia, a small town near the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.<\/p>\n His parents, Nikola and Ivka (Batinovic) Grgic, were subsistence farmers. They grew grains and vegetables, raised cows and sheep for milk and cheese, and tended vines, from which they made wine.<\/p>\n The wine was not merely for pleasure. The local water supply was not considered safe to drink, so the custom was to blend it with wine for wine\u2019s antiseptic properties. Grgich\u2019s earliest memories, as he told it, were of crushing grapes for wine with his feet.<\/p>\n Young Miljenko left school at 14 to work at a cousin\u2019s store, but in 1939, with the beginning of World War II, the region was occupied by the Italians, then the Germans and finally a communist faction. Grgich recalled seeing the communists as liberators until they began seizing people\u2019s property.<\/p>\n Grgich was continually drawn to wine, which had become scarce and valuable during the war. After the war, in 1949, he began studying viticulture and enology at the University of Zagreb. Several years later, he joined a demonstration protesting the firing of a popular professor. This drew the attention of the secret police, and Grgich resolved to leave Yugoslavia for California, which he had heard described as an agricultural paradise.<\/p>\n Grgich pours his Paris Tasting anniversary chardonnay in 2013.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>AP<\/cite><\/p>\n His departure, however, would have to wait until 1954, when he received a student visa for an internship in West Germany. So began a four-year trek that took him from West Germany to Vancouver, Canada where he anglicised his name to Mike Grgich, and finally, in August 1958, to Napa Valley, where he arrived by bus with two cardboard suitcases.<\/p>\n The trip was possible only because Grgich had placed a \u201cwinemaker position wanted\u201d in a wine trade journal. He was offered a job by Lee Stewart of Souverain Cellars, then a leading Napa winery, who also procured a permanent resident visa for him.<\/p>\n In 1958, Napa Valley was hardly the wine Disneyland it is today. It was, rather, a sleepy agricultural region where scattered wineries coexisted with plum orchards and walnut groves. Stewart was rigorous and said to be difficult to work with, and Grgich lasted less than a year at Souverain Cellars.<\/p>\n He moved on to Christian Brothers, another top winery of the time, where he learned to make sparkling wine. A formative period then began, during which he worked closely with Andre Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu Vineyards, a seminal figure of mid-century American wine, and Robert Mondavi, who galvanised the rapid growth of Napa Valley in the late 20th century.<\/p>\n In 1972, despairing of ever running his own place, Grgich was offered the winemaker\u2019s job at Montelena, which Barrett was just starting. Barrett, a Los Angeles lawyer, envisioned making a world-class cabernet sauvignon but was discouraged when Grgich explained to him that in planting a new vineyard, waiting for it to yield fruit and then ageing a red wine, five years would pass before he would have any to sell.<\/p>\n To provide cash flow, Grgich suggested making a white. They would purchase grapes, make the wine and sell it after eight months\u2019 ageing or so. The heralded 1973 chardonnay was Montelena\u2019s second vintage.<\/p>\n Despite his years in California, Grgich always considered his wine European in style.<\/p>\n \u201cI know how to be a wine chemist, a wine microbiologist, a wine doctor, but I don\u2019t want to be a wine doctor,\u201d he said in 1977. \u201cI give more attention to the art of winemaking than to the science.\u201d<\/p>\n As part of his deal at Montelena, Grgich had signed a five-year contract and received a small piece of the ownership and some stock. As his contract ended, he sold his shares to raise money to create his own estate. It still wasn\u2019t enough, so he entered what turned out to be an amiable and lasting partnership with Austin Hills, a vineyard owner and a member of the Hills Brothers Coffee family, and Mr Hills\u2019s sister, Mary Lee Strebl. Grgich Hills was born.<\/p>\n Today, Grgich Hills farms more than 350 acres in Napa Valley and makes roughly 80,000 cases of wine a year. Grgich\u2019s daughter, Violet Grgich, is now president, and a nephew, Ivo Jeramaz, is in charge of vineyards and winemaking.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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