We had dreamed of making wine, which we were now doing. We were even managing to sell it. Still, we hadn’t seriously envisioned having a winery until just before our return from Austria. Wow, did we switch gears. In hindsight, we’re thrilled we did, but we certainly had no idea of the political travail, business ordeals, and emotional drain in store.
The loss of our wines in the fire had set us back in terms of finances, time, effort, and energy. As a result, our whole winery project had become pretty iffy. But we were not deterred. We had decided that we wanted our own winery in order to control the harvest and production. We planned to locate it next to our home in Rutherford on the east side of the Valley near the Auberge du Soleil hotel. This would turn out to be a massive, time-intensive undertaking. It took more than a year of hard work to get the proper permits. Then it took another year and a half to build a winery and hire the right team.
One of our earliest tasks was finding consultants who could lead us in the right direction. Dirk Hampson, one of the partners at Far Niente Winery, was a huge initial help in teaching us how to look for excellence in every detail. Early on, Dirk introduced us to the supportive spirit among vintners in Napa. He continually refused payment, saying he just wanted to help us.
On Dirk’s recommendation, we brought in winemaker Ashley Heisey, also a Far Niente veteran, to consult on our winery development. We spent hours talking about winemaking in every aspect. We knew we had a great asset in the vineyard. But how could we make it all that it could be? And how should we develop a winery that was the best we could make it within the constraints we had?
We wanted Ashley to join us as our full-time winemaker, but she was pregnant and not interested in starting a new job. However, she told us she had a friend, Mike Reynolds, who would be perfect. They had graduated from the same class of only 14 people at UC Davis’s enology and viticulture school.
Mike had gone on to get an MBA at UC Berkeley while at Schramsberg, where he had worked his way up from cellar rat (the term for someone who labors in the cellar) to general manager and head of operations before turning that role over to Hugh Davies, son of Schramsberg founders Jack and Jamie Davies. Then he had gone to work for Jess Jackson (think Kendall-Jackson and more), who ran what some people in those days dubbed the wine business’s “evil empire.” (Jess, who was brilliant at creating and marketing brands, was a fierce competitor and a great winery pioneer. In financial terms and in his day, he might well have been the most successful winery owner in the history of the world.)
Mike was a star of the operation as the general manager of Jess Jackson’s Stonestreet, a 500,000-case facility, and Vérité, a new Jackson brand that was turning out very-high-end Cabernet Sauvignons. We couldn’t imagine that he would be interested in talking to us.
We were wrong.
We met over a glass of wine toward the end of 2002. Mike, at 35 years of age, had a boyish round face and freckles that made him appear even younger. He hardly looked like the person who could be running all those big businesses or who had all that high-level experience behind him. But the instant we sat down with him, we knew that he was a very smart guy who also happened to speak our language. Not only did he seem to have a great value system and great integrity, he was absolutely straightforward. With Mike, what you see is what you get. We all got along great from day one.
We had been working on a design for months, but now we could benefit from Mike’s expertise. We knew we wanted to create something that was uniquely ours with a connection to our past. But how? Mike quickly shored up our learning curve, which was sorely needed since we didn’t even know how much we didn’t know.
The winery would be a small facility adjacent to our home and would be located over a cave that we would build. But before we could even break ground, we faced a battle over whether we could build a winery in Rutherford at all. One of our neighbors hired lawyers to stop us from putting in the winery. Extensive legal wrangling ensued. Oddly enough, as soon as we got our final approval, that neighbor put in for his own winery. He’s since sold that property to our new neighbor—whom we love. Karma.
Next we had to deal with the location of the septic system for the Sacrashe vineyard. Our search for a revised site adequate for septic disposal would end up creating a conflict with a neighboring winery, which was located down the mountain from us. They were concerned that the water from our winery septic system would travel down the hill and end up in their wine caves. Septic systems exist all over the world, and engineers will tell you that the water delivered to a septic system is clean within 3 to 4 feet of its delivery point. This is due to natural filtration through the soils. Unfortunately, the neighboring winery did not agree with that premise. Thankfully, our septic system was ultimately approved and we were again allowed to go forward with the construction of the HALL Rutherford winery.
“Sometimes there are advantages to not knowing because you might be dumb enough to try doing things that otherwise you might never have been able to pull off,” Craig often says. That’s the long way of saying that ignorance can be bliss, especially in new entrepreneurial ventures. But you don’t want to push that too far. So it’s always good to find somebody on the team who really knows what he or she is doing, and in those early days that person was clearly all Mike. With his help, we managed to finalize the plans for our Rutherford winery, plans which had originally taken shape in Vienna.
When we met with Herr Gruber in Napa in 2002, we showed him plans for the cave we had envisioned.
“You want there to be drama,” the cave maker said. “You need to double the size of the tasting room.”
We listened.
Then he said he would bring limestone and bricks over from Austria, which would turn the center tunnel into a unique, beautiful space.
“How much will this cost?” we asked again and again.
“Look, I really want to do this,” he replied. “Let’s just agree that I won’t make money and I won’t lose money. It’ll be nice and everybody will be happy with everybody afterward.”