For a brief moment after buying St. Helena, we had actually wondered whether it made sense to go ahead and build HALL Rutherford since we would be making the same wines in both places. In the end, we decided to go ahead.
By 2004, we were finally building the caves and winery at Rutherford. After a couple of years of headaches getting approvals, it was fun to move forward with construction. We wanted the modern, Rutherford cellar tanks, also known as fermenters, to contrast with the historical Austrian bricks going inside the tunnel. We also wanted them to be as beautiful as they were functional. We knew that for efficiency and quality reasons, a tank should be almost full when making wine, so we designed the tank sizes to correspond to the sizes of our vineyard blocks.
“Why do tanks have to be round?” Craig asked Mike when we started to think about what those would look like.
“They don’t,” Mike replied.
Coupling the different size requirements with our space constraints, since we had to keep the winery building within a 5,000-square-foot limit due to the fire code, led us to trapezoidal tanks that fit into a semi-circle.
The uniqueness of the tanks at HALL Rutherford winery extends past their contemporary shape. The control of temperature during fermentation is one of the most effective tools a winemaker has to produce exceptional wines. Many tanks, to save money, have a heating or cooling belt that covers only the middle of the tank. However you don’t have as much control over the process that way. As a result, the grapes at the top of the tank may not be as cool as those in the middle of the tank. In contrast, our tanks have heating and cooling jackets that extend the full height of the tank, allowing for consistent temperature control throughout the tank, along with state-of-the-art controls.
While we were working on the final designs of the tanks, we were also in the midst of building our caves, which lie between the winery’s winemaking operation and its tasting room. In the late 1800s, Chinese laborers carved wine caves out of Napa’s volcanic rock using only picks and shovels. These days a wine cave drilling machine that looks like a monster Roto-Rooter bores into the hill, breaks up the stone, and pushes the rubble back out on a conveyor belt. Even with that kind of mechanized help, digging out our 14,000-square-foot cave took 10 months.
Once the drilling machine had completed its task, we reinforced the cave to make it earthquake proof. Then we sprayed gunnite on the cave’s frequently used surfaces. The rest of the cave’s interior was all finished by hand. Laying the limestone and the bricks, each of which is stamped with the Austrian emblem, would take another six months.
Herr Gruber had sent us the bricks that he had reclaimed from buildings constructed during the over 800-year Hapsburg reign. The huge trucks delivering the bricks, however, couldn’t make it up our narrow, winding road. So the containers had to be unloaded in St. Helena, and then ferried up to the winery on smaller trucks.
We were excited about the arrival of these historic, handmade bricks that would create our cellar. Mike met the first container as it arrived in St. Helena with great anticipation. He opened it only to discover a large batch of muesli, apparently sent by Herr Gruber to ensure that we would not forget where the bricks had come from. Herr Gruber need not have worried.
Over the next few months, we watched the bricks so reminiscent of our Vienna stay being placed ever-so-carefully throughout the cave with amazing craftsmanship. The arches at cross paths in the winery meet at just the perfect angle. These bricks undoubtedly could have told many stories from their former lives, but we’re sure they now feel very welcome and comfortable due to the loving care and respect with which each was placed. They are history and you feel it every time you visit the cave.
The cave turned out better than we could have imagined. Along the pathway from its entrance to the hospitality room, you pass numerous niches. These were empty for the first year; only recently have they all been filled with art. This space is special and we did not want to add art or sculpture that didn’t have meaning and that didn’t tie to the cave itself. We love all the pieces we selected, but the antique jeroboam wine holder—a gift to us from Herr Gruber—really sums up the story of our cave. Can you imagine? This man builds the cave at his cost on a handshake deal, then gives us a gift upon completion. To this day the three of us are still very good friends. We think the world of Herr Gruber, whom we now call Fritz. When he comes to the States, we see him any chance we get.
Herr Gruber had created not only a spectacular brick cave, but an equally stunning tasting room at the back of the cave. All the latter needed was a chandelier. Naturally, this couldn’t be just any chandelier. Initially, Kathryn wanted a Chihuly. Although we love his work, we jointly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a personal connection between ourselves and the artist when it came to envisioning the piece. So, we decided to look into other artists who create chandeliers.
Our close friend Virginia Shore, who has helped us find so much of our art over the years, referred us to Donald Lipski. He had created a big chandelier for New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, and Virginia thought we should talk to him. Donald presented us with a drawing of a vine’s roots. Dangling from each root were beautiful crystals reflecting light embedded in the root itself. We loved the concept. It was just magical.
The chandelier, which measures 12 feet high and 4½ feet wide, came out so much better than we ever could have imagined. And here is the serendipity of it all. Only once we received the chandelier did we find out that the artist had used Swarovski crystal from Austria. How fitting.
Anchoring our tasting room with that dramatic piece reinforced the notion that having a memorable location where you can establish relationships with guests is the best way to showcase and sell wine. The chandelier became the winery’s crown jewel. Of course, we didn’t think of it that way at the time. We just thought of the chandelier as one of any number of decisions.
These were fun times. Along with our team, who really came together despite being so young, we were on a mission to finish and open Rutherford. In December 2004 we had a Christmas party at our house for our handful of employees and their families, the youngest of whom was two-month-old Jack, the son of Mike and his wife, Jenny. Those holiday festivities marked the start of an annual tradition.
In early 2005 we were ready to launch HALL Rutherford, and the grand opening celebration assumed its place front and center in our minds. This would be the first time we welcomed the Napa wine community to our winery. In addition, we wanted to make the celebration a tribute to Austria because Vienna had played such an important part in our lives. In many ways, the experience changed us all forever. To be able to bring that home to our winery, where we could be with it all the time, meant the world to us. So during our celebration, we wanted to combine what we loved about Vienna with what we loved about Napa Valley.
For the opening—which the Austrian vice-chancellor, Hubert Gorbach, attended along with Herr Gruber—Ilonka Pusterhofer, who had worked years before at the Ambassador’s Residence, offered to come prepare echte Austrian food as a gift to us. In a tent we set up behind our house, we sat with our guests and listened to the Vienna Boys’ Choir (as luck would have it, they were touring the Western U.S. just then). Our guests also included Austin Hills of Grgich Hills Estate and his Austrian-born wife, Erika, whom we knew from our days in Vienna. After the performance we invited everyone into the cave for dinner and dessert.
Ilonka’s food was fabulous. People kept returning for more as they walked through the tunnels. No one enjoyed the food more, however, than the boys in the choir—the Sängerknaben. They had looked and sounded like angels during their performance. But when it was over, they became real boys again. They ripped off their robes and ran back and forth through the tunnels in blue jeans, stuffing themselves with Ilonka’s good Austrian food. It had been many months since they had tasted Wienerschnitzel und Kaiserschmarrn.
At the end of the evening, we sat back exhausted and just looked at each other. We had done it. We had introduced our winery to the world—or at least the world in Napa.