88/74 Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou THE EVOLUTION OF A SANTA CLARA VALLEY WINERY With an Introduction by Maynard A. Amerine An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser in 1984 Copyright (T) 1986 by The Regents of the University of California All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the University of California and Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou dated July 29, 1986. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the. Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou requires that they be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows : Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou, "The Evolution of a Santa Clara Valley Winery," an oral history conducted in 1985 by Ruth Teiser, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1986. Copy No. NORBERT C. and EDMUND A. MIRASSOU 1986 Photograph by Ruth Teiser SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER May 3, 1992 Norbert C. Mirassou Winemaker EXAMINER NEWS SERVICES SAN JOSE — Norbert C. Mir assou, a fourth-generation wine- maker known for his down-to- earth management style, died Thursday of congestive heart fail ure. He was 77. Mr. Mirassou and his brother, Edmund, ran the Mirassou winery for more than 30 years before handing the business over to three nephews, the family's fifth genera tion of winemakers. A colorful character known as "Mr. Norb" or simply "Norb," Mr. Mirassou favored Hawaiian shirts and made a point of greeting sever al dozen employees each day. "He was very precious to me and my brothers," said Dan Miras sou, one of the nephews who now run the winery. Edmund Mirassou credited his brother for bringing sprinklers into the grape fields. . "Sprinkler systems had been used on alfalfa and in pastures, but Norbert adopted it" for their vine yards, he said. Soon afterward, wineries across the state began us ing similar methods, he said. Mr. Mirassou also rigged a fork- lift that could run on the fields' muddy terrain in order to bring boxed grapes rather than having them carried by hand. Mr. Mirassou was a founding member and former chairman of the California Wine Advisory Board, member of the Wine Insti tute and member of the Santa Cla ra County Winegrowers Associa tion. Besides his brother, Mr. Miras sou is survived by his wife, Ruth; a sister; a son; a daughter; four grandchildren; and two great grandchildren. E2 San 3tanci5co <£tyromdf OBITUARIES • Edmund Mirassou Edmund Mirassou, patriarch of the oldest winemaking family in the United States, died Wednesday in San Jose. He was 78. Mr. Mirassou was born in San Jose, hi the fourth generation of the viticultural family descended from Louis Pellier, who came to California with grape cuttings hi 1848, and his brother Pierre, who arrived in 1850. Mr. Mirassou attended San Jose State College. In 1937, he took over the Mirassou vineyard, which dates from 1854. He ran it for 30 years with his brother Norbert, who died in 1992. Mr. Mirassou became president of the winery in 1960. Until the 1960s, most of Mirassou's business was in bulk, with wine transported in barrels and casks, by ship and tram, to other wineries which sold the product under their own la bels. The business was centered in a major Santa Clara valley holding of 400 acres until 1961, when the family acquired the 300-acre Mis sion Ranch at Soledad, followed by the nearby 650-acre San Vicente Ranch. The Mirassou brothers intro duced various innovations, includ ing an overhead sprinkling system that made it possible to grow vines in Monterey County. The county was attractive for wine grapes be cause, unlike Sonoma and Napa, it had no history of Phylloxera, the dreaded louse that has devastated vines of European origin. The company's success contrib uted to the rise of the Central v Coast as a major winemaking re-3Pf ' »• -. &%^>T In 1977, Mr. Mirassou comment ed on winery history in California: "People do not realize how much the image and economics of fine winemaking have changed. Until 1950 winemakers were viewed as bootleggers, not artists. Fine wine- making was also not profitable. You have to have a rich uncle or outside money." Mr. Mirassou was also known as a critic of how expanding subdivi sions transformed the central coast. He is survived by sons James Peter and Daniel, and a daughter Colleen, all of San Jose. A funeral will be held at 10 a.m. today at the Carmelite Monastery 12455 Clayton Road, San Jose, fol lowed by a wake at noon at the Mirassou Winery in San Jose. — Stephen Schwartz Wine Institute July 31, 1996 FH H M' < Edmund Mirassou, a former WI chairman of the board and key figure tarnuna Mirassou in tne California wine industry, passed away July 24 in San Jose after Passes Away at 78 a short illness. After taking over the family's enterprise in 1937, Mirassou and his brother Norbert built it into one of the state's most successful wineries. Their families' contributions to the wine indus try include developing the first permanent vineyard irrigation sys tem, testing and advancing mechanized grape harvesting and pio neering commercial winegrowing in Monterey County. Mirassou was also chairman for 20 years of the Wine Advisory Board and an advisor to the Governor for the State Board of Food and Agriculture. He was instrumental in founding the American Vineyard Foundation and the Winegrowers of California and was the Winegrower's first chairman. He was named "Man of the Year" in 1979 by "Wines and Vines" magazine. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to the Carmelite Monastery in San Jose or the American Vineyard Foundation, P.O. Box 414, Oakviiie, CA 94562. Wines and Vines September 1996 EDMUND A. MIRASSOU DIES AT 78 Edmund A. Mirassou, a leader of the Cal ifornia wine industry and wine family patri arch, died July 24 at San Jose. He had had heart surgery and surgeons later discovered he had acute leukemia. Ed Mirassou was a longtime leader of the California wine industry. He and his late brother, Norbert, turned the winery, in San Jose's Evergreen district near Mt. Hamilton, from a bulk producer to a producer of case- goods. Ed Mirassou was known for his dedication to the industry, and was a former chairman of Wine Institute and for 20 years was chairman of the-then Wine Advisory Board. He was a founder of the American Vineyard Founda tion and in 1979 was named "Man of the Year" by Wines & Vines magazine. He and his brother, Norbert, who died in 1992 and was known for his garish sport shirts, operated the winery since 1937. The founder of the winery was Pierre Pellier, Ed's great-grandfather, who brought vine cuttings from his native France in the 1850s. Edmund Mirassou believed in giving something back to society; in that regard, he was a board member of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, the Evergreen Soil Conserva tion District and Alexian Brothers Hospital. He also was a marketing advisor for Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco. He was preceded in death by his wife of 56 years, Millie, last September. Survivors in clude sons Daniel, Peter and James, daughter Colleen, 12 grandchildren and 18 great-grand children. The family requested donations be made to the Carmelite Monastery in San Jose (12445 Clayton Road) or the American Vineyard Foundation, (P.O. Box 414, Oakville, Calif. 94562). (Ed Mirassou personified what is special about the wine industry. He was a special man who achieved much in his all-too-short lifespan. Those who knew him are privileged; he shall be missed — Ed.) TABLE OF CONTENTS — Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou PREFACE i INTRODUCTION, by Maynard A. Amerine v INTERVIEW HISTORY vi BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES vii INTERVIEW WITH NORBERT C. MIRASSOU I EARLY YEARS, 1914-1937 1 Peter L. Mirassou and His Family 1 Growing, Packing, and Selling Grapes 5 The Two Brothers Take Over 12 II MIRASSOU VINEYARDS, 1937-1966 15 Going Into the Bulk Wine Business 15 Pioneering Plantings in Monterey County 19 Adding Land in Santa Clara County 25 III EXPANSION, 1966 TO THE PRESENT 30 Mechanizing Harvesting 30 Field Crushing and Pressing 35 From Bulk to Bottling 41 The Mirassou Sales Company and San Vicente Vineyards 46 The Mirassou Nursery 51 Urbanization in the Santa Clara Valley 55 INTERVIEW WITH EDMUND A. MIRASSOU I "GETTING STARTED OVER AGAIN," 1936-1941 58 Prohibition and Repeal 58 The Brothers Divide Responsibilities 65 The Bulk Wine Business 68 II EXPANSION, 1941-1966 70 Land Purchases 70 Wine Pioneers in Monterey County 73 Mechanical Harvesting and Field Crushing 79 Bottling the Mirassou Wines 80 The Fifth Generation Takes Charge 84 Ill GROWTH OF THE CALIFORNIA WINE ORGANIZATIONS The Wine Advisory Board Creation, 1938 92 Early Work 97 Trade Barriers Public Education Staff Members Activities, 1951-1970s Dissent and Discontinuation, 1975 12° The Winegrowers of California and The California Association of Winegrape Growers The Wine Institute IV EDMUND MIRASSOU'S OTHER BOARD ACTIVITIES 132 TAPE GUIDE 136 APPENDIX A - "Mirassou Vineyards First in Vineyard Crushing," speech by E. A. Mirassou, August 1971 137 APPENDIX B - Letter from The Fifth Generation Mirassou Vineyards to Ruth Teiser, January 12, 1984 139 INDEX 141 PREFACE The California wine industry oral history series, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1969 through the action and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The selection of those to be interviewed is made by a committee consisting of James D. Hart, director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery organization; Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis; Jack L. Davies, the 1985 chairman of the board of directors of the Wine Institute; Ruth Teiser, series project director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on California grape growing and wine making that has existed only in the memories of wine men. In some cases their recollections go back to the early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real paucity of information on the Prohibition years (1920-1933) , although some commercial wine making did continue under supervision of the Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry in subsequent years (as yet treated analytically in few writings) will be of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his own point of view. Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its collection of in many cases unique materials readily available for the purpose. Three master indices for the entire series are being prepared, one of general subjects, one of wines, one of grapes by variety. These will be available to researchers at the conclusion of the series in the Regional Oral History Office and at the library of the Wine Institute, 11 The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, the director of The Bancroft Library. Ruth Teiser Project Director The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series 10 September 1984 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Ill CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS Interviews Completed by 1986 Leon D. Adams, REVITALIZING THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1974 Maynard A. Amerine, THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND THE STATE'S WINE INDUSTRY 1971 Philo Biane, WINE MAKING IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND RECOLLECTIONS OF FRUIT INDUSTRIES, INC. 1972 John B. Cella, THE CELLA FAMILY IN THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1986 Burke H. Critchf ield, Carl F. Wente, and Andrew G. Frericks, THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY DURING THE DEPRESSION 1972 William V. Cruess, A HALF CENTURY OF FOOD AND WINE TECHNOLOGY 1967 William A. Dieppe, ALMADEN IS MY LIFE 1985 Alfred Fromm, MARKETING CALIFORNIA WINE AND BRANDY 1984 Joseph E. Heitz, CREATING A WINERY IN THE NAPA VALLEY 1986 Maynard A. Joslyn, A TECHNOLOGIST VIEWS THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1974 Horace 0. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi, CALIFORNIA GRAPE PRODUCTS AND OTHER WINE ENTERPRISES 1971 Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, WINEMAKERS OF THE NAPA VALLEY 1973 Louis P. Martini, A FAMILY WINERY AND THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1984 Otto E. Meyer, CALIFORNIA PREMIUM WINES AND BRANDY 1973 Herbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou, THE EVOLUTION OF A SANTA CLARA VALLEY WINERY 1986 Robert Mondavi, CREATIVITY IN THE WINE INDUSTRY 1985 Harold P. Olmo, PLANT GENETICS AND NEW GRAPE VARIETIES 1976 Antonio Perelli-Minetti, A LIFE IN WINE MAKING 1975 Louis A. Petri, THE PETRI FAMILY IN THE WINE INDUSTRY 1971 Jefferson E. Peyser, THE LAW AND THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1974 Lucius Powers, THE FRESNO AREA AND THE CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY 1974 Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, PERSPECTIVES ON CALIFORNIA WINES 1976 Edmund A. Rossi, ITALIAN SWISS COLONY AND THE WINE INDUSTRY 1971 iv A. Setrakian, A LEADER OF THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY GRAPE INDUSTRY 1977 Andre'Tcheliatcheff, GRAPES, WINE, AND ECOLOGY 1983 Brother Timothy, THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS AS WINEMAKERS 1974 Ernest A. Wente, WINE MAKING IN THE LIVERMORE VALLEY 1971 Albert J. Winkler, VITICULTURAL RESEARCH AT UC DAVIS (1921-1971) 1973 INTRODUCTION This is a transcript of the oral biographies of Norbert C. Mirassou and his brother Edmund A. Mirassou. It includes their accounts of their youth, the family vineyards, orchards and wineries, and their joint ventures in grape growing and winemaking since repeal of Prohibition. Their strong work ethic and support of younger family members reflect the philosophy of their father. Generally their careers seem to have proceeded by a process of trial and error; they appear to have accepted opportunities to make money where they could find them, e.g., the nursery business. Both brothers are justifiably proud of their early experiments with and use of new and innovative technology in growing and harvesting grapes and in winery operations. Although they were quite certainly among the first, the exact dates of the initial uses of such advances are not always easy to establish, The two brothers obviously worked closely and effectively together. Their leadership in developing the grape and wine industry in the Salinas Valley is a ma j o r ach ievemen t . Edmund also played a constructive role in the politics of the wine industry, first at the Wine Institute, later on the Wine Advisory Board, and more recently with the Winegrowers of California. He is proud of his role in these organiza tions as conciliator of diverse points of view. He is most generous in his praise of many other alcoholic beverage industry leaders, even of some whose point of view he may not have always agreed with. Finally expressed in the interviews with these two California winemen is the pragmatic philosophy which is so typical of this country. If the wine types now being produced do not satisfy the public, then develop some new types which will. Pure pragmatism. Maynard A. Amerine September 1, 1986 St. Helena, California vi INTERVIEW HISTORY — Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou The Mirassous have played an important part in the agricultural history of the Santa Clara Valley for a number of generations. The Pellier family, their maternal ancestors, came from France in the 1850s and are credited with bringing not only the variety of prune that once made the valley famous but also a number of grape varieties to this excellent vine-growing area. Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou, who have continued the tradition of their father, Peter L. Mirassou, as both growers and winemakers , have seen the valley land's remarkable transition to industrialization and urbanization. Their accounts of that change and their responses to it form an important part of these interviews. Thus they make a valuable addition to the history of the Santa Clara Valley itself as well as to that of the California grape and wine industries . Of significance are the accounts of the progress of the Mirassou enterprise from growers to bulk winemakers to bottlers, and of their pioneering plantings in the Salinas Valley. Edmund A. Mirassou 's recollections of the two marketing order organizations, the Wine Advisory Board, of which he was chairman for many years, and the Winegrowers of California, of which he was first chairman, are of special interest. The interviews were held in the comfortable office on the winery grounds which the brothers share. Each of them reviewed his interview transcript and made minor corrections . Ruth Teiser Interviewer /Editor 18 September 1986 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley Regional Oral History Office Room 486 The Bancroft Library vii University of California Berkeley, California 94720 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION (Please print or write clearly) Your full name NDRRFRT Date of birth JUNE 25. 1914 Place of birth SAN .qp. ra. Father's full name PETER LOUIS MIRASSOO Birthplace SAN JOSE, CA. Occupation GROWER/VINTNER Mother's full name JUSTIN c. SCHRIEBER Birthplace PARIS, FRANCE Occupation HOME MAKER Where did you grow up ? SAN JOSE, CA. Present community EVERGREEN Education GRAMMAR; HIGH Occupation (s) GROWER/VINTNER Special interests or activities HUNTING.- GUN cnr.T.RrTTNr: • Vlll NORBERT C. MIRASSOU Partner: Mirassou Vineyards Born: June 25, 1914 Both Norb and Ed -took over operation of the winery in 1937. Norb was in charge of all operations while Ed was more involved with winemaking and the financial operation of the company. Norb is the husband of Ruth and the father of Steve Mirassou and Francene Mertins. He is the father-in-law of Don Alexander. He has four grandchildren. He is a senior member of America's oldest winemaking family (our moto) with the youngest ideas. Member of the Wine Institute since 1937 and a member of Monterey County Winegrowers Association. Charter member of Santa Clara Valley Winegrowers Association since 1946 . Charter member of Evergreen Senior Service Club since 1948. Advisory committee of American Society of Enologists, 1968 Professional Member, 1972. Lay Board of Directors of the Marianist's, 1980. Past member of the Wine Advisory Board. Served in the past on the local Board of Directors of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Past member of the Santa Clara County Planning Commission from 1967 to 1975. Norb was a member of the first group of California Vintners to tour Australia and New Zealand in 1965 and Russia in 1968. Past member of the Sportman's Chef Club. An organization that claimed to cook any type of wild game. Norb's hobbies include traveling and collecting antique guns and cars. Mirassou was first to: • Use sprinklers in vineyards, 1947 • Use forklift and bins to bring grapes to winery, 1950 • Use automatic dumper and washer at winery, 1950 • Build four wheel drive and four wheel steering forklift, 1951 ' • Planting large acreage in Monterey County, 1961. Regional Oral History Office University of California Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley ,' California 94720 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION (Please print or write clearly) Your full name EDMUND A. MIRASSQU Date of birth May 18, 1918 Place of birth SAN JOSE. CA. Father's full name PETER LOUIS MIRASSOU Birthplace SAN JOSE, CA. Occupation GROWER VINTNER Mother's full name JUSTINE c. SCHREIBER Birthplace PARIS, FRANCE Occupation HOME MAKER Where did you grow up ? SAN .TOST? ra Present community EVERGREEN Education HIGH SCHOOL / ONE (1) Occupations ) GROWER VINTNER Special interests or activities WINE INDSUTRY TRADE ASSOCIATIONS EDMUND A. MIRASSOU Partner, Mirassou Vineyards Born: May 18, 1918 1930 's - Made shook into grape boxes for shipping during Prohibition. 1937 - Built present winery. 1940 's - Planted Johannisberg Riesling, Pinot Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sylvaner Riesling and French Colombard. Ed and his brother Norb were among the first to plant these finer varietals in Santa Clara Valley and encouraged others to do so. 1947 - A portable sprinkler irrigation system was developed. It was the first sprinkler irrigation system to be used on California vineyards. 1950 's - The bin-forklift process was developed in handling grapes .during harvest. 1960 - The Mirassous worked with Valley Foundry to develop the idea of stainless steel jacketed (temperature- controlled) fermenters. 1961 - Ed and Norb were among the first pioneers in Monterey County grapegrowing. In 1961 they bought the land and started planting in 1962. 1962 - Mirassou was the first to use permanent sprinkler irrigation on vineyards of large acreage. Eleven different sprinkler companies worked on the design along with the University of California. 1969 - 1970 - Pioneered mechanical harvesting and field crushing of vineyards. The Mirassous worked with mechanical harvester manufacturers and insisted especially on the development of the field crusher so that the grapes would not come into the winery in bad condition. It took several stages of development before the harvester/field crusher became as efficient as it is today. (Photographic evolution of harvester available) . Ed was also instrumental in encouraging University of California to develop certified virus-free (heat-treated) grape vines that could be distributed in quantity through the Foundation Plant Material Service. Ed is the father of 4 (3 sons and 1 daughter) and the grandfather of 11. His 3 -sons are now part of the 5th generation of winemakers at Mirassou Vineyards. As a father, Ed believed strongly in passing on duties and developing a strong sense of responsibility in his children. E.A. MIRASSOU General Partner of Mirassou Vineyards and other Business Activities and Civic Service FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD - 1985 - appointed member of Advisory Council WINEGROWERS OF CALIFORNIA - 1984 - Chairman of newly appointed Marketing Order. WINE INDUSTRY TASK FORCE - 1982 to Present - Appointment of Lieutenant Governor of California Mike Curb. UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO - 1982 to Present - Advisor Council to Wine marketing program. AMERICAN WESTERN BANKER - 1982 to Present - Vice Chairman and member of Board of Directors. AMERICAN VINEYARD FOUNDATION - Board of Directors of Foundation and Chairman, Fund Raising Committee. KNIGHTS OF THE VINE - Awarded Supreme Knight of the Universal Knights of the Vine, December 5, 1979. U.C. SANTA CRUZ - Advisory Committee, 1980. WINES AND VINES - Man of the Year Award, 1979. WINE INSTITUTE - Board member 1940 to 1984 and Chairman of the Board for fiscal year 1979 - Member of Executive Committee. AMERICAN SOCIETY OF ENOLOGISTS - Merit Award Winner, 1979. STATE BOARD OF FOOD AND AGRICULTURE - Appointed June of 1972 and reappointed in 1978 for another 4 year term. Advisor to the Director of Agriculture and the Governor. Member of Grape Inspection Adivsory Committee. SANTA CLARA VALLEY WATER DISTRICT - Board member from May 16, 1955 to 1976. President, 1966 - 1968. Chairman of Bond Drive, 1957, successfully passed General Obligation Bond of $3,000,000. CALIFORNIA STATE WINE ADVISORY BOARD - (until its dissolution in 1975) Board member from 1938 to 1975; Chairman of the Board from 1953 to 1973. AGRICULTURAL BLUE RIBBON COMMITTEE - 1974 (helped develop agricultural land use policies) . WINE AND FOOD SOCIETY OF LONDON - San Francisco Chapter Member since 1956. EXECUTUVE BULLS - Member since 1974. Executives of agricultural associations. ALEXIAN BROTHERS HOSPITAL - Member of Board from 1968 to 1975. EVERGREEN SOIL CONSERVATION DISTRICT - Member from 1942 to 1955. xii Page Two E.A. Mirassou Business Activities and Civic Service EVERGREEN YOUTH CENTER - Chapter member since 1948; member of Board from 1948 to 1955. SERRA CENTER - Dominican Sister Home for Girls from Broken Homes. Member of Board from 1960 to 1965. SAINT JOHN VIANNEY PARISH - Chairman of fund raising campaign. Raised $150,000 in 1950. SAINT JOHN VIANNEY GRADE SCHOOL - Chairman of fund raising campaign. Raised $150,000 in 1955. Member of three-man delegation to discuss wine industry problems with President Johnson in the Oval Room at the White House in April, 1967. 05 Q) C csl cn 1-1 a QJ (3 •H > 0) 4J U-l O 4-1 O CO Ou 00 00 C 3 cfl 3 O cn CO cfl (j C O Cfl 0) 4J OJ O S5 to Cn O -|3 I I EARLY YEARS, 1914-1937 [Interview 1: February 19, 1985 ]## Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: When and where were you born? I was born on June 25, in 1914, right where this house is here. The house right behind us, behind your office at the winery? No, the old house. The new house that is here now was built in 1924. I think I can consider myself a native. Peter L. Mirassou and His Family Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: [laughs] More or less. Let me start by asking you, then, about your father, Peter L. Mirassou. That's a good question. As far as a father was concerned, I think he was the best father a person could have. We had a lot of freedom, but if we got out of line, we got put back in line pretty quick. He was very fair. We were raised, I guess you would say, part of the time during the Depression, and there really wasn't anything that we wanted that we didn't have, that we needed. If we didn't need it, why then, we didn't get it. ##This symbol indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes see page 136, N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: But we went on trips when other people weren't going. We had everything else that we needed. Trips to where? In those days, if you went to Yosemite, or Tahoe, or Los Angeles, or San Diego, that was a big trip. Nowadays, if you don't go to the moon, why, you're out of luck. Your father was ranching, and he had vineyards, during your childhood? Is that right? Well, we'll go back a step further. There were three boys, my dad and his two brothers, and they went in business in — oh, I don't know, sometime around 1911, 1912. Maybe a little before that. They ran the ranch for their stepfather, Thomas Caselagno. They were in partners, the three of them, and they gradually spread out and bought property on their own. The original winery was up on the hill. The second winery, which is that one in that picture — that one was on the corner of White and Quimby Road, which is now a shopping center. That was built, I'm thinking, around 1908. I can't remember that far back, because I wasn't there. But anyhow, they had that winery and three other pieces of property that they had bought. This present ranch was one of them, and there were two other pieces of property. They were all about the same size. One of them had grapes and prunes and apricots on it; I think the other was mostly prunes. They stayed together until one of my uncles, John, went to war, the first World War. When he came back, the boys decided that they were going to change their mode of operation. For some reason or other, they didn't see eye to eye, so they decided, "Then the best thing for us to do is to split up." Dad says to his two brothers [John and Herman] , "You boys pick out what you want, and I'll take what's left." This is around 1918, now, and there was talk of Prohibition, so they naturally took the other ranches and left Dad with the vineyard. o .-I ON 0) M O M r- tfl ro >> ON <1> .-I C •H C > -H 4-1 4-1 •H -H S CO • CD /-> -H •H S 3 3 n) O S co CO >,. n) n (-J 0) 0) 4-1 4J C CD CD P-i CD CU T3 VJ 0) c£ 0) cc C o N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: That part was all right, Dad was satisfied. Prohibition did come in. Then all the people that were buying wine in New York, Chicago, and Boston, and all that area no longer had the wine available. So the only next best thing for them to do was to buy grapes and make wine. So then Dad started shipping grapes back East. That went on probably up until '25, '26, when there was talk that Prohibition was going to be kicked out, and there was more and more wine being made for medicinal purposes. Some of the big wineries around here, like Cribaris' and a few of those, they started in buying grapes and making wine, and storing it for the time when Prohibition did end. Which happened that way, and was fine.* So he sold mainly in the state, then, after about 1926? From that time on, most of it was sold here. We still had some customers back East. There were a couple of brokers back there that were evidently pretty big back there, and they still wanted their grapes. So the grapes were more or less handled that way until 1937, when we decided that instead of letting somebody else make all the money in making wine , we were going to help them out. Let me take you back from that point, then. May I? Okay. In 1920 your father took out a bond, and held it for about two years. He petitioned to surrender it in 1922. The only specific thing I know about his activity is that in 1920 he sold some wine to the California Wine Association. Shipped it in a tank car, and there was some loss of gallonage. The government had to check it, and they found that it was okay. Anyway, it got in the records because of this discrepancy in gallonage. I don't recall that at all. You were just a kid. I was a little older than that, talking about it after. I don't remember Dad ever *See also p. Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: It's in the federal records. Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: If it's in there, it should be right. In 1919, when Prohibition came in, Dad's stepfather [Thomas Caselagno] took over the winery from the boys — that was about the time they split up. I think he tried to help them along because he said that he didn't want any of his children getting in trouble. So he dismantled the winery. The dates I'm not sure of. It's possible that the winery wasn't completely dismantled, and he did use it for a year or so then. That must be it, because when he filed notice of intention for establishing a winery, on July 29, 1920, his description of his facilities included a hundred by 175 foot building, and a fair amount of cooperage, fermentation and storage cooperage. Not on Aborn Road, it wasn't. It can't be. Because there wasn't any facilities here. It must have been on Quimby and White Road. It could have been his intentions to do it, and he never followed through on it. That was in July, 1920. He was doing something because in November there was this letter about , "tank car , red wine , shipped from," his winery. I'm just wondering if that wasn't some of the wine that was left over in the original winery that wasn't dismantled yet. At that time, 1920, yes, it's very possible that it was still from the old winery. Because we have a picture around here someplace of Dad and I on a truck with a tank in the back of it — we hauled wine from the winery to the depot. I'm pretty sure that that's probably where it was. Probably there wasn't any house on the place down there, so he had this home address, on Aborn Road, and the winery was down there. And he probably used that before it was completely dismantled. Because I don't know exactly when it was completely dismantled. The address was Route B, Box 358, Aborn Road. Yes, that was our old address, way back then. CO s H 0) CO O Ss "•3 a 3 M oo C 0) T3 D O CO CO cfl kl cu cd u-i CO -H .C •O B cd i- o to c/2 s M CO O O 4J u c Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: He asked to surrender his bond in 1922 because he said he didn't have any more wine on hand, and the next year his attorney wrote that he was no longer the owner of the winery. I think that was probably cleaning up what was in the winery down there at that time. Thank you. That clears that up. I think that's the best we can do. Ed may remember a little bit more about that,* but I don't remember it at all. Growing, Packing, and Selling Grapes Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Fairly early, you started working in the vineyards with your father, I gather. I guess I was out in the field with Dad as soon as I could walk, practically. What did you do, besides tag along? Get in the way. [laughter] I guess you should say I started working in the vineyards when I was probably in the seventh or eighth grade. I would work after school, or on Saturdays, or something like that. During the harvest season I would drive the truck when they were loading from one stack of boxes to the other, because in those days everything was in little boxes. How many pounds to a box? The ones that we used to ship back to the East were twenty-four pounds. Later on, when we sold grapes to Cribari, they were what they call fifty-pound boxes. I think that the first four or five years that we sold grapes to Cribari, their truck would come by and pick them up. Later on we had our own truck. As I got older, when I got out of high school, we had a little two-and-a-half-ton truck with a little trailer behind it. We used to haul all our grapes up to Madrone. *See also pp. 59-61. Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Madrone was where the Cribaris had their — That's where they had their winery at the time. I used to haul the grapes up, and then, when we got through with the grape season I went to Heald's College over a period of three years, just taking up bookkeeping and stuff like that. During the wintertime, when it was raining, there wasn't too much work on the ranch. So you kept busy, one way or another. Well, I don't think it hurt too much. There are stories about you and your brother nailing boxes. Shook came in bundles, did it? Yes, shook came in bundles. That was when we were still shipping. In the summertime, when we were out of school, Dad would get the shook in early, and we'd make boxes and put them in the barn. We would make about half the boxes that it took to ship the crop, in the summertime. Were you pretty fast workers? It's a knack of how it's done. It's the same thing as if you're doing the same thing day after day, hour after hour, you get in a rhythm. It's not that hard to do. We used to have some professionals come in. Of course, they were making a living at it, so they were a little bit faster than we were. I would say that probably they were twice as fast as we were. But we made an awful lot of boxes, boxes for about three or four years. I guess we made Did you get paid when you worked on the ranch? No, not as far as pay is concerned. We got our clothes, we got our food, we got our lodging, and if we wanted to go some place, we'd ask Dad or Mom for some money, and then we'd go. But as far as getting pay, no, we didn't. At that time, no. Teiser: Did you feel yourself to be part of the whole operation? N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: Oh, yes, I think so. I think it was bred into us, really. Because, in those days, you didn't go running around as much as what people do today, and it was more home life and so forth. We had our own chickens, and our own pigeons. My grandmother used to raise pigs, but Mom never did. She said she didn't like pigs. We had a cow with fresh milk all the time. When it would come time for her to have her calf, why, the butcher down in Evergreen would take it when it was big enough and butcher it. That's the way it went. You had a kind of a subsistence farm. Yes. They were the good old days. What varieties of grapes were you shipping? We had Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Mataro , and Carignane. Petite Sirah and Zinfandel are still popular. The rest of them have gone by the wayside today, so to speak. You didn't grow Alicante Bouschet? No. We didn't have any of that. Were your grapes the varieties of grapes that had been grown in the area before, or were they planted particularly because they shipped well? No, I think that when they were planted, in 1912, they were still planning on making wine out of them, so they were strictly for wine grapes. They were on their own roots, I suppose? No, they were all on resistant roots. After they had the problem with phylloxera, when everything was replanted over again, everything was always put on a resistant root. They'd been planted by your family, then? Yes. You said that in 1926 you started selling locally. That was about the time that the market for grapes broke, wasn't it? 8 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Just about, yes. Did that have anything to do with — ? It was kind of interesting, because when the market broke, naturally the people back East didn't want to handle them. The market was there, but the people that were handling the grapes didn't want to take a chance on it. There wasn't enough money in it to — there wasn't that much money to play around with, and if the market went down further, then you were going to lose money. So everybody was afraid to take a chance on anything. It just kind of fell apart . If it wasn't for some of the larger wineries that decided to make the wine and put it away for when Prohibition was going to be gone, I think there would have been a lot more grape growers that would have gone broke than what did go broke. I see. I didn't realize that Cribari had been so far sighted. The Cribari boys, Fiore, Anthony, and Angelo , you see, they had a big winery in New York. They would give parties for the governor and the mayor and all the big shots; probably all the bootleggers and everybody else. They managed to get rid of their wine without any problem. During Prohibition? Yes. They just hit the market right, that's all. They were lucky, and I guess that's all you can say. And they were farsighted enough to see that things were going to change. Where did you take the shipping grapes? We used to haul the grapes from here down right next to where the Bayshore Highway goes by Santa Clara Street now, there was a spur track there. There was also a spur track right off of First and Alma Street. One was on Southern Pacific, and one near where the Bayshore is on Western Pacific. Western Pacific, they put up a platform, and they enclosed part of it so we could keep our equipment in there. Naturally we shipped more grapes through them than what we did on Southern Pacific. N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Way down towards the end of the time we were shipping, Southern Pacific finally put up a platform, and so forth, so we kind of divided it up between the two of them. What kind of equipment did you need? You needed kind of a dolly to carry the boxes in. We used to load the truck here in the field, and if I remember right, the boxes were stacked eight high and there was a space in between, and then there were cleats on the box so that the air could go through them in their own refrigerated cars. These little dollies were made so that they would clamp the bottom box right on the truck, and if the car was there, we'd wheel them right into the car. If the car wasn't there at the time, we'd put them in the shed for three or four hours until the cars did come in. There was a shortage of refrigeration cars at that time because they weren't shipping that much back, so there was a shortage of cars. Especially when the lettuce came in. And it was a matter of who was going to get the car. So you had to kind of treat everybody right, otherwise you wouldn't get the cars when you wanted them. They did top icing then? Yes. The ends were open, and every so often along the way the train would stop, and they would re-ice them. I never did go back to find out, but from what I could understand, and what I found out later, the grapes arrived back there in pretty good condition. I guess your brokers would have objected if they hadn't. Oh, yes. Every once in a while, there 'd be a goof -up someplace where a car would not get refrigerated when it was supposed to, and they would get back there, and half of them were spoiled. And whose fault is it, you know? If you could prove that the railroad was at fault, then they'd pay it; otherwise, you just lost it, that's all. Did you have to pay the freight and icing, and all that? Or did the brokers? , I think that we paid the icing and the freight. Then, at the other end, it was charged off so that we'd get compensated for it. 10 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Do you remember who your brokers were? No, I don't have the least idea who they were. When you sold the grapes here, you just took them down to Madrone? Right, yes. Yes, as a matter of fact we took them down to Madrone and dumped them in the crusher. That was a pretty good arrangement. It was, and, of course, we were lucky in that we were the largest grower that Cribari bought from, and we had the largest crop, naturally. We would get a little preference of treatment down there. The first load was always down there on the scale waiting for them to open up in the morning. After they opened up, why, then naturally we were the first ones in. We'd make about four loads a day of probably ten, twelve tons at a crack. As we got going a little bit, we got a little bigger truck so we could haul a little bit more. It was nice work. It was interesting. We sold to Cribari for quite a few years , and then one year, another company, Bisceglia Brothers, opened up down here in San Jose, and they were going to run everybody else out of business. They came in and they bought a bunch of old equipment . Of course, I'd had a little experience with watching Dad when I was a little kid, when they had their pumps down here to pump the must from the crusher to the tanks. Then, when I was down at Cribari' s, why, the machinery was always down, it seemed like. I would watch them work on it, and sometimes I'd help them out. When we sold to Bisceglia Brothers one year, and they put in a pump, for some reason or other the balls in the pump weren't right. They had more problems. I was telling Dad about it because the trucks would stand in line waiting when the crusher wasn't working. So Dad says, "What kind of balls do they have in there?" They had a steel ball that was covered with rubber. Dad says, "We tried those years ago," he says, "and they didn't work. Tell them to get some steel balls." So, the next time I went down, they had problems, and it just happened that one of the Bisceglia Brothers was there. 11 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; I told him, "If you would put some steel balls in there, it will work better." He says, "Where can I get them," and I told him there was a place in San Franisco. So this was about ten o'clock in the morning. At three o'clock that afternoon, they had some steel balls in there, and they worked fine for I guess about a year and a half. And then the ball gets worn a little bit because they never took care of their equipment properly. So they started having problems again, and in the meantime, why, we went back to Cribari. So I don't know whether they ever changed them back again or not. All this time, both you and your brother Edmund, then, were working with your father. What did your brother do, and what did you do? How did it work out? When we first started, we were working out in the field together. He was younger than I was , so therefore I naturally had more experience than he did. We would work out in the fields together. We were still selling to Cribari at the time, but Dad had bought another little ranch. It had apricots and walnuts on it. He leased out this piece of property to some fellows that were working for us. They started out coming out every day, working, from town, pruning, and so forth. Dad decided, "If we lease the place to them, and they pay us so much a year," then he could take care of the little ranch, between him and I and my brother, and the other ranch, this one on Aborn Road, he would just have to watch and see that they were doing right. Which we did, and I guess that lasted for about five years. H That lasted, I would say, from 1925 to 1931, '32, someplace in that area. Did you still have command of the grapes from this ranch, though? Yes, yes. Dad would take care of selling the grapes, but they would take care of harvesting them, and the tractor work, and all that kind of stuff. That was the period then, that you were selling to — To Cribari and the Bisceglia Brothers. 12 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: So we would work together on the little ranch up there. It was fifteen acres. It was a little different than working in the vineyard, because we had apricots and walnuts, and they had to be pruned different, and irrigated different, and watered different, and so forth. [Phone rings. Interruption in tape.] So all three of you worked up there? Yes , and then as Dad got older , why , he would come to work later and later, and quit earlier and earlier. Did you have some other people helping you? At times we did. At harvest time we did, and a few other periods of heavy labor, yes, we did. But tractor work, and I would say about half the pruning was done by Dad and I and my brother. You both did the same kind of work there? At that time, yes. We both worked together, more or less, in the field so to speak, until we started the winery. Then, when we started the winery, why, you might say Ed took care of everything from the crusher on in. And I would take care of everything on the outside, bringing it and dumping it in the crusher. When your father applied for a bond in 1937, he said that he was going to operate the winery with you and your brother, who had been helping him manage his ranches and vineyards. So I gathered by that time, he felt you were part of the organization. The Two Brothers Take Over N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: At that time was when my brother and I kind of started our partnership. It wasn't until a little later that it was formally— 13 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: When it was formally formed, it was a little later, but I means we started in then. The name of it was P.L. Mirassou and Sons Company, or corporation, or whatever you wanted to call it. That went on for a number of years. I was doing most of the purchasing. When we were building the winery , every time you went down and bought a nut or a nail: P.L. Mirassou and Sons Company. P.L. Mirassou and Sons Company. I got to the point where I got tired of spelling it out and signing it. One day we came home, and we were at the dinner table, and I says, "You know, we ought to change this name deal here. We ought to call it Mirassou Vineyards. It's easier and simpler." I said, "We can use the initials and get away with a lot less writing." So we discussed that for a while, and then Dad said, "I think that maybe what we ought to do is to make a clean cut of this." He said, "You guys take over and run it. I will help you financially, but," he said, "I don't want to work any more. I want to retire." When my brother and I took over as partners, Dad was our advisor, so to speak. As long as he was loaning us the money, we did what he said. [laughter] But we had a pretty free rein; he would let us make a few mistakes, and as long as we didn't go in the direction of making the same mistake twice, why, he said, "Well, you're learning something anyhow. " It was just a gradual takeover, you might say. It was Peter L. Mirassou first, and then it became P.L. Mirassou and Sons, and then it became Mirassou Vineyards? Yes. Was he good at grapes and wine? I don't know whether he was as good on wine as what he was at grapes. Because when they had the winery when those boys [he and his brothers] were together, he was the one that would go around and buy the grapes from the growers, and decide when they had to be picked, and when they should be picked, and so forth. And see to it that they got the boxes, and everything like that. 14 N.C. Mirassou: One of my other uncles was the one that really made the wine. That was Herman. I'm sure that he knew more about the process of making wine than what Dad did, although all three, they worked there twenty-four hours a day practically. So, I mean, it was pretty close, but from what I can gather, what they used- to talk about, I think that Uncle Herman had a little better taste as far as being able to taste wines, and so forth, than what the other two boys did. 15 II MIRASSOU VINEYARDS, 1937-1966 Going Into the Bulk Wine Business Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: When you built the winery in 1937, you had plenty of experience in your end of the business, but how in the world did your brother learn to be a winemaker? In those days it wasn't that hard. The year before we decided that we were going to put the winery up , he got in touch with a lab in Berkeley. Berkeley Yeast Laboratory? Berkeley Yeast Lab. He worked up there for one season, analyzing the wines and so forth. He had taken a little chemistry at school, and college, and that's where he got his experience from. So he was ready to take charge there , and you were all equipped to take charge in the field. That's right, yes. And then, of course, the next year when we made wine, why, Mr. [Julius] Fessler, who was the head of the Berkeley Yeast Lab, he'd come down about once a week and made sure that we were doing things right. We got help that way the first year, and then gradually, as we went into business , other wineries who were in the business would help us out. It was in 1940, some place in there, when we started the Santa Clara Valley Wine Growers Association. We decided that the object of it was that if anybody found a better way of 16 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: doing something, they told everybody in the association, so that everybody could make a better wine. The public was getting a better wine. It was very interesting because we'd go to Wine Institute meetings, and we talked freely about wheat we had learned, or what we were doing, or something like that. Some of the other wineries, especially some of them from up in Napa, Sonoma, they wouldn't tell you the time of day. When the younger generation came in , that kind of changed a little bit, too. But it was very interesting, somebody had a secret they weren't going to tell anybody about. When you decided to build the winery, what did you do first? The first thing we did was — well, we had traveled around. We went to the San Joaquin Valley, we went to Napa and Sonoma, and all our friends, and looked at all the latest equipment and everything else. Then we sat down with a piece of paper and drew what we wanted our winery to be. With the help of Julius Fessler from Berkeley Yeast Lab and some of our other friends, we decided that this was the latest way of doing it, and so we wanted to put the latest equipment in. And then we got working with the Valley Foundry in Fresno; they were practically just getting started in making winery equipment. We'd get an idea, and we'd call up, and they'd come down and we'd talk about it, and they'd go back home and make it, and if it worked, we'd pay for it . I would daresay that 80 percent of what we tried to make work, worked. We didn't do too bad. Did any of the professors at the University of California come around ? I don't remember if they did or not. If they did, I wouldn't see them because I was busy hauling the grapes in at that time. I'm sure that some of them came down, because I mean they were interested in what was happening. Did your father advise you on what you needed? He helped us, yes. He helped us quite a bit. Anyhow, with the expertise that we had from the wine people themselves, we didn't run into any problems; being that it was a new winery, we didn't run into that many problems for several years. 17 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.N. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: We first started running into the boys from Davis when we started getting different diseases in the vineyard. They would come down, and "Yes, this is that, and this is the other thing." Through our Santa Clara County Wine Growers Association, we'd have them come down and show us some of these vineyards that were real old, that had these diseases, and what to look for, and how to prevent it from coming in, how to prevent it from spreading and so forth. Who came, Albert J. Winkler? Yes, Winkler came down, and mostly the younger fellows that were just getting started in the professorship. There was [A.N.] Kasimatis, and Lloyd Lider, and Dr. [H.P.] Olmo. I can't think of the other fellows' names that used to come down. You had lots of high powered — Hod [Harold W. ] Berg. Then, as they got into fertilizers, and so forth, there was [James A.] Cook. One of the boys came to France with us a couple of years ago, George Marsh. Anyway, you took advantage of what there was. Oh, yes, we took advantage of what there was. And with the help of the Wine Advisory Board at the time, there was money that was donated to the university for specific things for them to study. We would have meetings with the boys from the university at least once a year , sometimes two or three times a year. You know, we were all working together. And it succeeded. Well, we're still in business. Then when you had a winery you had a whole new set of customers, Yes. Who dealt with them? From 1937, '38, when we made our first wine, until 1966, we made wine and sold it to other wineries in bulk. With the contacts that we had through the Wine Institute. After we started our Grape Growers' Association, each county, really, started theirs. We would get together on grape day, and a few days like that. 18 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: Everybody would have their problems , and we ' d meet other people, and you'd talk about, "I've got some extra this kind of wine," or, "some extra that kind of wine," and the other guy says, "Gee, I need some of that." You'd make friends that way, and you'd do business that way. Someone told me that you shipped a lot of champagne stock. We made an awful lot of champagne stock for Paul Masson and Almaden. After my brother and I took over the partnership of the running of the ranch, we decided, "This isn't going to be big enough to raise three families on." So we expanded, we bought other property around here. And that's when we started planting into more varietals, like Johannisberg Riesling and Pinot blanc. What else did we have? We had Semillon and Sylvaner, and French Colombard. French Colombard was one grape that wasn't grown in this area that Almaden and Paul Masson both liked for their champagne. They would buy it and blend it with their grapes, and it went from there. What were the main wines you made then, as bulk winemakers? We would make each variety separate, and it would be kept separate. Then the samples would be sent out separate, and then the wineries would buy a certain amount of gallons of this, and a certain amount of gallons of that one. You didn't blend? No, we didn't do any blending at all. They did all their blendings themselves. We kept our wines strictly separate. In that way, they could decide what blend they wanted with the wines that they had, and it worked out good. What red wines did you make? In those days, really, the only red wine that we had was still the old Petite Sirah and Zinfandel, and the Carignane and Mataro that was around here. Did they go well? They had to take the red wine. They did? [laughs] Tie-in sales. 19 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: We didn't have too much of it, so it didn't bother them that much because they could blend it in with theirs so it would disappear. Those are good blending wines? Yes, they were good blending wines. Did you really tell them they had to take red with white? To a certain extent, yes. Naturally, they would take the red for a price, and then they'd say, "If we have to take the red, we'll give you a cent or two cents a gallon less for the white." Of course, you'd always put the price up so that it would come out right anyhow. [laughs] Who were your other customers then? Did you ship East in bulk? We did some shipping East when we first started the winery, I would say in the mid- '40s. We did some shipping back East. We had two or three customers. Ed remembers more about that than what I did because he was taking care of it. But I think we had three or four customers that we would send maybe three or four carloads to. That grew to a pretty good size for a while. Then some laws were changed some place along the line, and they decided it was easier to buy it in bottles than it was to bring it back there and bottle it. That's about the time when the younger generation, our children, were getting out of high school and college and so forth, and they decided that maybe they should go out and sell it in bottles and make some money. So that's when they started. That was that transition to the Mirassou label. I see. That was 1966. P ioneering Plantings in Monterey County N.C. Mirassou: In 1961 we decided that this area was not going to be left here for grape growing; it was going to be for houses. I guess about, I would say, 1958, we started looking around the 20 N.C. Mirassou: state. We would go on a vacation for a couple of days and look at different areas. Find out about it from the county agriculture man, what the rainfall was, the temperatures, and so forth. In 1959 I bought a new car. I told my wife, I said, "Call your mother up and tell her we're going for a ride down to San Luis Obispo." Because every time I got a new car, I'd like to take it on a long trip and get it broke in properly. So we left here, and we got down as far as Soledad, and the ladies had to go to the bathroom. So we stopped the car. And I always take a camera with me. While the ladies were in the restroom, I walked around the gas station that we had stopped in, and, looking out towards the hills, I saw this beautiful, level land .that was raised on an old buff above the river bed so to speak. So I took a picture of it. I finished that roll of film and had that particular one blown up to a five by eight or something like that , and brought it in and threw it on my brother's desk. I says, "Here's where we're going to plant our next vineyard," just kidding with him. He says, "It looks like a nice spot, where it it?" "Not going to tell you. I got to find out more about it first." So I called Winkler and told him I'd like to have him come down, I wanted to show him some property around here, that we were interested in. Of course, then he wanted to know where it was, so I told him where it was. He said, "Off the top of my head, I think it's as good as any place in the state," and he said, "Let's go down and take a look at it." I said, "Why don't we wait until we see if we can find some property down there," because I didn't know whether there was any for sale or not. "So why don't we wait until we find some property that's for sale, and then we'll take a look at it." So he says, "That's fine with me. " Then in the meantime I told my brother where it was. So we had a friend of ours that was in the real estate business. He sold nothing else but big ranches. And he had shown us some up in Redding, and all over. So he said, "Well, I'll see what I can find out." So he goes down there, and he made a few inquiries, and he found out that there was only one man down there that these people would trust to sell their property, if they were going to sell it. 21 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: So we got in touch with him, and he showed this real estate friend of ours a couple of pieces of property. We went down and we looked at them, and they looked like they were what we wanted; the soil was nice, the water was nice. We were drilling wells here; we'd have to go down six, seven hundred feet to 'get three hundred gallons a minute. We thought we had a lot of water, but down there they had one well on one piece of property that was two hundred feet deep and was pumping eighteen hundred gallons a minute. What are you going to do with that much water? We wouldn't know what to do with it! So we looked around and then we made some tests of the soil and so forth. Winkler came down, and some of the other fellows from up there. They said that they couldn't see any reason why we couldn't grow grapes down there. Wouldn't have to worry about frost. The only thing that we had to worry about was wind. So they all went back to Davis and talked to some of the other fellows up there, the other professors that had studied winds and so forth on different crops. They said, "Yes, it will bother a little bit, and you might get some burn on the end of the leaves, but that's not going to bother the production or anything like that. And if you plant your grapes in the right direction, the wind will blow through, and it won't hurt the vines." Which we did. The wind, the only thing that it bothers down there is the people; it doesn't bother the grapes. Was that property around Soledad that you were looking at? That was around Soledad, yes. Then, at the same time that we went down there, the bosses of Paul Masson decided that they had run their winery long enough without a vineyard. They were getting big enough, that people wanted to know, "Where's your vineyard?" and they just didn't have one, so they decided that they were going to buy one. They asked us, as long as we were looking for a piece of property , to look for something down there for them. We found a piece that was too big for us to handle, eight hundred acres, so we asked them if they wanted it, and they went down and looked at it, and they decided, "Go ahead, you 22 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: plant it; here's the varieties we want." So, between their field man, myself, and I don't know who else we could blame it on to, we designed it. It was about eight hundred acres. Leo Berti was their field man at the time. And Leo and I worked together on figuring out how many acres they wanted in each crop, and so forth, and so on. I got an outline of the map, and we set it up, and they were satisfied with the drawing of it. In the meantime, we bought 270 acres down there, so I had to design that also. My nephew, Peter, was working for a while with Almaden — Ed and he were helping Almaden out. So we decided that Peter would go down on the ranch and take care of the every-day work [of both Salinas Valley properties] , so to speak, and we would go down once or twice a week, whenever we needed to, and help him out. We got enough cuttings to put a nursery in, to take care of five hundred acres. We figured we'd plant half the vineyards one year, and then plant the other half the next year. Was the nursery on your property or Masson's? Ours. Things were going along so smooth, and Dr. [H.P.] Olmo, in Davis, says, "Why don't you just plant the whole thing and treat the whole thing as a nursery, instead of having a nursery, then replanting it the next year?" So, we planted half of the thousand acres. We planted on its own root because we figured this was virgin territory and nothing was going to bother it for at least fifteen or twenty years. When we ran out of the vines with the roots on, in the meantime, we went back to the vineyards up north where we got our grapes, and got cuttings, and planted the cuttings in the vineyard, on their own root. The only thing that we had to worry about now was that we had a thousand-acre nursery that we had to take care of, so to speak, because you had to treat it all like one nursery. The only thing that we could do that we had to worry about, was water. We put a sprinkler system on our place. It was the first one that went up. We were about two months ahead of Paul Masson. We put in permanent sprinklers on 270 acres, and Paul Masson didn't put all theirs on permanent; they moved some of theirs. They couldn't get enough pickets, so they figured if they didn't have the pickets, they could move the 23 N.C. Mirassou: pipe because the vines weren't that tall. They put part of the sprinklers in, and the other part they moved every day, or whatever it was that they had to move. But I think that we were one of the first vineyards in California — there may have been some table grapes that had a solid set of sprinklers on the whole ranch — but we were the first ones to try a sprinkler system in the wine grape vineyard. Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: You put your sprinklers in in 19 — Nineteen forty-seven. A portable sprinkler system in this ranch here. But in 1962 the permanent one down there in the Salinas Valley? Yes. That was in 1962, when we put it down there. That was before all the speculative planting down in Monterey County. We were the first one down there, yes.* That was a very big planting, wasn't it? There were some vineyards down in the San Joaquin Valley and the Bakersfield area that were just as big, if not bigger, at that time. But were they planted all at once that way? I don't know whether they were planted all at once or not. I think it was one of the largest plantings of a single — well, it wasn't really single, it was two different, separate vineyards — but it was planted by one family in one year. Have you ever found out what happened to the piece of land you took a picture of? It's still down there. It was a little further north from where we planted. From Soledad it looks pretty level, but when you drive up to it, it rises. Let's see, that was two thousand acres, if I remember correctly, and that rose something like 125 feet across the ranch. It was a little too steep to plant vineyard on and do it properly. *With the exception of Chalone . See page 24. 24 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: It gave you the idea. It was just the idea that the valley looked so nice, and it was in the springtime, and of course everything was nice and green and everything. It was just one of those things that looked nice. [chuckles] You can thank your wife and your mother-in-law. Yes. So you were still making bulk wine at that time, working a good deal with Masson and Almaden. Yes. You three worked pretty well together, didn't you? Yes. We used to do a lot of work together, lot of experimenting. Like I say, everybody was helping everybody else out, and it was just a lot of fun. Do you remember Oliver — Ollie — Goulet? Oh , very well , very well . What was he like? He was a lot of fun to be with. We used to have parties together at least once a month. There was about six or seven couples , and once a month at somebody ' s house , throughout the year, we would have parties. Of course, when we first started, why, Ollie would furnish some champagne — really, when we first started, everybody was drinking hard liquor. Within a couple of years, why, Ollie would bring over a couple of bottles of champagne. We'd have champagne, and then we'd have wine with a barbeque, or whatever. I'm interested in F . W. Silvear's Chalone vineyard champagne. The reason why I remember it so well is that Ollie Goulet bought the grapes off of his ranch , and made champagne out of it, for Mr. Silvear I guess it was. He wanted it for some reason or another, and he was going to sell it. Something happened along the line; he got sick, or something. He wasn't able to sell it all, and Ollie gave my wife and I a case of it for our wedding anniversary. That's how I can remember that well. [chuckles] 25 Teiser: Was it good? N.C. Mirassou: It was very good. Anything that Ollie made was good. He was a good champagne maker. But Ollie Goulet, and a fellow by the name of Kurt Opper, from Paul Masson, are the ones that taught Max Huebner how to make champagne. Teiser: Those were very good men, weren't they? N.C. Mirassou: We think they were the best in the state. Kurt was a wonderful fellow. Adding Land in Santa Clara County N.C. Mirassou: Our winemaker at the time was a German fellow, Max Huebner. He was running another ranch up here in Evergreen, for another boss, so to speak, who lost the ranch to the University of California. They had loaned him money on it. It was one of those deals. And he couldn't pay it off, so the university took over and put one of their men on the place to run it. This fellow was a kind of a scatterbrained fellow. He'd come down and ask us for all kinds of advice , and we helped him out. And out of the clear blue sky one day, he says, "Say, we've got a piece of property over here, and we want to get rid of it." He says, "Make me an offer." We knew the guy quite well, and out of a clear blue sky we said, "Well, we'll give you," — I don't remember now. Ed probably would remember the figures, but let's take a figure out of the air. "We'll give you $300 an acre, plus all the tanks that you have in the little wine cellar up there." They were all ovals, and things like that, that weren't being used. He says, "Let me ask the regents and see if they'll accept it." The regents wanted to get rid of the property. They weren't in the business of having property. They just got it through a fluke. So they accepted it.* *See also pp. 28-29, and 70. 26 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: When was this? Nineteen forty-one. So we got this piece of property. It had twenty-five acres of walnuts and apricots and prunes, and seventy-five acres of bare land. Of course, my brother and I were figuring we'd get that seventy-five acres and put grapes in it, which we did. That's one piece of property we got. There was another piece right up above us here that was all vacant . We had asked the fellow that was leasing the ranch — all he did was put hay on it — if it was for sale. He says, "Funny you should ask. My boss decided that she was going to sell." She lived in San Francisco, and she was getting along in years, and she wanted to get her estate all in cash, so that when she passed sway , she gave cash to the children , and that was it. Or the grandchildren, whatever. So we bought that piece right after we bought this other one. So that was another seventy-five acres, and this one over here was a hundred, so that gave us 175, plus this one here, which was a hundred, so that was 275. In the meantime, we had bought this one from Mom and Dad, and then there was another ranch that we bought up here that was twenty-five acres (I guess it was twenty-five acres) from some old gentleman that was in the same boat. He wanted to get rid of it; he didn't want to fool around with it anymore. So we bought it from him. Then we bought another seventy- five-acre piece on Quimby Road. The fellow who had it, Vicari* had planted it in vineyard. He had a little winery, and he was making wine and selling it, and he got along in years, and his boys were all interested in another business. He come down here one day and he said, "I want to sell my property. I want so much for it, but I don't want it in cash, because I'm going to go." He said, "I'm going to pass away very shortly. I don't want my wife to have all the money at once." He said, "You boys are honest, I trust you. I want her to have so much a year." The premium, the principal, and the interest, and everything was figured out; he had it figured out pretty close. ^Nicholas Vicari. 27 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser : We said, "We'll have to think that one over." His price was up a little bit higher than what it should have been, and the interest was higher than it should have been. Anyhow, he came back a couple of days later, and we made him a counter offer, with no interest, and stretched it out a couple of years over the payments, and left the price the same. That didn't suit him. He didn't like that. He wanted some interest, because he was a little Italian fellow, and he figured that he had to get interest, otherwise he wasn't going to make a deal. He and my brother, they were discussing this back and forth, and back and forth. They were both a little stubborn. Neither one was going to give in. I said, "You know, I got an idea. Why don't we raise the down payment another $10,000, and don't charge any interest for six years, and then the last six years — " It was supposed to run for twelve years, we'll pay interest on what's left." They both sat there for a minute. He said, "That's okay. I'll do that." So, anyhow, we made the deal with him. So then we had almost four hundred acres. That was 1943. I guess you might say that we kind of stopped there because we could see that subdivision was beginning to come in, and we figured, "It's no use buying any more property here, because we'll never get production out of it any more." So then that ' s when we started looking around the state , so to speak. Well, you had bought property here, though, at a good time, hadn't you, just by chance? N.C. Mirassou: Yes, it was mostly all by chance. They wanted to get rid of it, and we were in a position where we could borrow the money and get it, and paid it off. And in the meantime, people were coming out here, so then they had to have more property for schools. So the school district come along, and the first piece of property we sold, we sold that McArley piece. We sold that to the school district, and they were glad to get it. We sold it for a good price, we thought, and they thought they bought it for a good price. At today's prices, it was a good price. Teiser: You had Mr. Huebner for a winemaker. beginning, in 1937? Did he come at the 28 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: We inherited him when we bought this piece of property from the University of California. Two years after we bought this piece of property, the University of California said that they would make the deal if we would run their ranch for them, because the fellow that was up there wanted to quit. So we said, "We'll take a chance on it." We ran it for a couple of years. In the meantime, Cribari had bought the property on the other side of the creek from it and decided they might just as well buy this one. Of course, we were running it, so the university officer that was taking care of it came down and he saw it , and he talked to us. He said, "I have a check from Tony Cribari to take up to the regents for the piece of property that you guys are running. But you have first crack. I'll tell you what it is. If you can meet it, it's yours." It wasn't that much money today. In those days, it was quite a bit of money. We just thought that, "It's an awful big chunk to be biting off," when we had just bought the seventy-five acres up here. We were in the process of planting that, and we figured, "It's not that we couldn't handle it, but it might be a little bit too much for us." So we decided, "No, if Mr. Cribari wants it, we'll let him have it." Was Huebner sort of attached to that property? Huebner was working for the fellow that was running the ranch. There were two ranches up there, and one, the piece that Huebner was on, belonged to the guy that had the rest of this ranch down here. When we bought that, what we call Ranch #2, from the university, Max stayed up there. When Cribari bought the ranch, he asked Huebner if he wanted to work for him, and Max said, "No, I think I'm going to stay with the boys." So he came down and stayed with us. [Edmund A. Mirassou enters] This is my brother. How do you do. Hi. How's your interview? Are you working at it? We certainly are working at it. 29 E.A. Mirassou: Okay. Fine. You go ahead then, and I'll be talking to you later. N.C. Mirassou: So Max came down and worked for us, and with Ed's help became our winemaker. Although he was taking care of the wine that was up there at the time. Teiser: Who had been making wine here before? N.C. Mirassou: He was. [indicating Edmund Mirassou] 30 III EXPANSION, 1966 TO THE PRESENT [Interview 2: February 26, 1985 ]## Mechanizing Harvesting Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Professor A.M. Kasimatis mentioned at Wine Grape Day at Davis last week your pioneering work in field crushing as one of the landmarks in the recent history of viticulture.* He mentioned the date that you began as 1970. But you also pioneered mechanical harvesting. I think 1970 was probably the first time that we had a commercial vehicle [harvester] in the field that really worked, so to speak. Before that 1970 time, Ed and I were always together when we were riding back and forth from here down to Soledad. We were talking about, naturally, what we were going to do, and how things were going to work out; what we needed, and so forth. We had talked about it before, about a mechanical grape harvester , and we were thinking originally about — You're talking about a harvester — Yes. We were thinking originally of using a vacuum of some kind to mostly take the berries off the bunch. But, being that the bunches vary so much in sizes , we found out that that was impractical. But we went down to Food Machinery [Corporation] and talked to some of the engineers down there. Of course, before they would do anything they checked all the *See pp. 35-39. 31 N.C. Mirassou: patents that were available in Washington, and they found out that in — oh, I guess it was some time in the 1880s — some Frenchman had the same idea and had put a patent on it . As far as what they could tell, there never was a working model, but there was a patent on the idea. So they worked on it a little bit, but they were working on a different principle of cutting the bunch off of the vine, and having a tube there that it would fall into, and suck it into a tub. It would come in fast enough to hit a baffle and kind of break the berry, so that it was kind of crushing at the same time. We tried that, and they worked on it for, I guess, about three months. We got some grapes out of South America to try it. We found out that it just wasn't going to be practical, because you have to have too big a piece of equipment to have the vacuum. So they kind of fooled around with it, and we gave them some other ideas , and they actually made a machine . They brought it down to Soledad, and we tried it in a vineyard, and I would say, yes, it picked grapes, but. It didn't do a clean job, it dropped an awful lot of juice on the ground, and a few other things. But they thought that it was perfect, and they wouldn't go any further; they wouldn't experiment any more, or anything else. In the meantime, we had this company that was called the Up-Right*, in Berkeley. They came down and started experimenting, They had some ideas. The owner of the place thought that our Chenin blanc — was it the Chenin blanc, or the Johannisberg Riesling? one or the other — was so far superior to any other wine that he'd ever tasted, that he bought a piece of property in Napa some place, and he planted to that variety. He got the cuttings from us, and we got started talking to him about this harvester. Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Wallace Johnson? Yes, Johnson. His original business was scaffolding. So they got some young engineers , and they got started working on it. I still think that their machine is the best today. One of the best, anyhow. But we experimented. They brought machines down. They had a plane that was on a little runway *Up-Right Inc., which then created a division Up-Right Harvesters 32 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: there someplace around Salinas, and they would fly up to Berkeley and get parts, and fly them down, so we could change this machine while it was out in the field. They had real equipment in Berkeley, and they did a beautiful job. So, anyhow, that's where we really got started, that way. Johnson was really the one that worked with us. I guess it was just about the same time (and I don't know whether there was somebody that was working for Johnson who went over to Chisholm-Ryder or not) — but Chisholm-Ryder got pretty near the same idea. So it was a success. I think it took us about four years, really, before it got down to one where we could say Johnson can put this on the market and it will work. There were still a few little quirks about it that some of the wineries didn't particularly like. I remember Julio Gallo saying that they tried one and they didn't like it because there were too many leaves in the must. We were complaining about the same thing. But we had an agreement with Up-Right that any improvements they made for the next four or five years, they would put it on our machine. So they just put bigger motors on, with more volume, so that we got rid of 99 percent more leaves. Blower motors, were they? Larger blower motors, yes. So there would be more air at a certain spot where the grapes were falling, and blow the leaves away. I remember that Gallo developed a harvester of its own, and gave it to the university, finally. Yes, I think he did. I think he did. They worked on one, and they come to the conclusion that they didn't like the way it was handling the must, and so forth. I don't know whether they're using any of the newer ones today. I have never talked to Julio about it. It is very interesting in that , naturally , we had a little problem at the beginning with Chavez's union.* We told them, "Let us run it for a couple of years. We'll get some information on how much it costs, how much we save, and so forth, and so on, and we'll give you the figures, so then you draw your own conclusions." *Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers. 33 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: They agreed to that, and they didn't bother us for two years. I guess it was after the third season they came back and they wanted the information, which we gave to them. They never came back- again. We don't know whether they were satisfied with our figures or what. But our figures came out almost the same as if you hand picked. It wasn't any cheaper, in one sense of the word, when you figured the price of the machine and the repair, the upkeep, and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot of vibration in it then that we don't have in the new ones today, and we figured that five years would be as long as it would stand up. With the change that we made after that, we found out that we can keep the machines — we got one now that's, I think, twelve years old. It's kind of retired, works in a pinch, but it still works. What about the manning , though , which was what Chavez ' s people would have been interested in? Did your labor costs go down? The labor costs went down, but they didn't go down that far. This is my opinion, I think that they figured that the man that it took to run the machine almost had to be an engineer in order not to have it break down all the time. We tried with some of the men that we had on the ranch, and it worked out fine. We tried to take people off the streets, so to speak, and put them on the machine, and we run into all kinds of trouble. It's very interesting because there isn't that much savings in one sense of the word. The only difference is that you have a machine that you can go out and run twenty- four hours a day, with three crews, or, if it rains you put it in the barn and it doesn't cost you anything. And that's about the only difference there is. However, when you have to harvest by hand, somebody has to handle personnel, go out and find harvesting crews, and deal with them. Isn't there a saving in executive time somewhere along the line? I don ' t know whether it ' s really that much or not . We have a crew down in the Soledad area that has been working for us ever since we first started. They come in, and they'll work on the pruning, they'll work on the tying, they'll work on hoeing 34 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: around the vines, or whatever else we happen to be doing at the time. There are some spots in the vineyard that we can't get to with a harvester, and then they come in and they pick that. It's been a crew that's been there ever since we started. I think one of the Monterey County agriculture representatives told me that they did welcome the grapes because they had crews who worked in other crops at other times of the year. Yes, yes. That's very true. They did like the vineyards coming in because there was a period when the grapes are being harvested , not at the beginning of the harvest season but about in the middle of the harvest season, when the help is all available. They have nothing else to do. It has helped the laborers in that area quite a bit. You're very fortunate to have a steady crew. We keep them as steady as we can, and they have a couple of jobs on the outside that they work on when we're not using them. And they're perfectly happy. You don't have much acreage here now in Santa Clara County, but how do you handle that? The only problem we had here was when it come to harvest time , it would take us a good week to get a crew that would come in, and work, all through the season. #1 You said that here in Santa Clara County, the first grapes that come in are light producers? They're light producers. So the crew doesn't make — The crew doesn't make very much money. What we try to do is to get the ones off that we have to first. Then we'll put the pickers in a heavy producer. Once they get started, they tell their friends how much they're making a day. Then we don't have any problem any more; then they all come out. In the Santa Clara Valley, they used to have a lot of canneries, which were seasonal. I wondered whether the grape harvest season overlapped with canning season. 35 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: It did a little bit in the tomato end of it, but, you know, it's a funny situation in this area here, in Santa Clara Valley. I can remember some of our fellows, they were working here on the ranch, and their wives were working in the cannery. For two or three months, their wives would make more than what they were making. But it seems like the families that I knew, most of the children grew up and none of them worked in a cannery. Ninety percent of them, they didn't work in the fields like their fathers did, either. They went out and got other jobs that were, they thought, a little easier — a little cleaner, anyhow. Who took their places? I think that most of their places were taken by the Mexican population that came in from Mexico. Whether they were legal or not legal, why, it was one of those things. There was only one year that I know of that we had so-called "wetbacks" in here. All the rest of the time, they were legitimate, so to speak. Field Crushing and Pressing Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: When did you go into field crushing? When we built the first harvester, we had crushers in holding tanks on the harvester. You did? If I remember correctly, the tanks held either 250 or 500 gallons of must. It was enough to make one round with the machine. Then the tank truck was standing there. The whole equipment was run on oil, hydraulic. They had one pump that would pump air, and air was used to force the must out of these tanks into the truck. That went along fine for about two years, and then we started having problems. As the vines got bigger and the production was heavier, the tanks would get full before we made the round. Then we'd have to stop the crusher and drive out and unload it. It got to where we found out that that wasn't going to work the way we wanted it to. 36 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: And how much did the tank trucks hold? Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: They held fifteen tons. The trucking company had a contract to haul the must from Soledad to the winery. The same truck used to haul our must is what the sugar companies used to haul their molasses and syrup. It worked out fine. The only thing the trucking company had to do was have a bigger opening on the bottom of it so that it would come faster. But we found out that the weight of the crusher (they were little special-built crushers) , the tanks on the side of the crusher, which we call saddle tanks, got to the point where the strain on the frame of the harvester was just too much for it. The metal just couldn't carry it, and it wasn't practical to make it heavier. Then we got the idea, "Why not take these crushers that we have on the harvester and put them on what we call the nurse tank and have a bigger tank so that the tractor could pull the nurse tank," and the harvester would drop the grapes into the crusher. They would be crushed and stemmed right out in the field, and when the tank was full, that one pulled away, and another one pulled underneath it. Which worked out fine, and, as a matter of fact, we're still using the same idea today. It's gotten quite a bit bigger than what we started in with, but it goes along now. It's very interesting, because the harvester can handle about eight tons an hour , if I remember correctly. It doesn't make any difference how much your vines are producing, you go along accordingly, so that you're harvesting the same amount of tons per hour. You either go fast when it's light, or you go slower when it's heavy. It works out perfectly. Then last year we crushed and field pressed a little bit. Now, this year, we've field pressed quite a bit. For making white wines out of red grapes, for the champagne material and so forth, it's working out very nice. So, we've improved a little bit. Who has worked with you building this later equipment? I don't think that we worked with anybody. They came down, and one of Peter's neighbors talked to him, when we were harvesting his grapes one year. He wanted to know why we 37 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: couldn't press out in the field at the time. I think Pete says, "There's two things. I haven't got the time, and I don't have the money to put into it." That's all that was said at the time. The next year the guy came by and asked Peter if he could get a contract with him for pressing the next number of tons of grapes and see how it worked. So Pete said, "Sure, why not? We'll compare your price with what it costs us to pick them, haul them up to San Jose, and press them and haul the pomace away, and so forth and so on." It's worked out that it's a little bit cheaper to do it down there when we haul the juice up — we've got plain juice with no must or anything in it, so it's 100 percent juice, and that's it. When we get the gallonage up here, if we get 2500 to the truck, or three thousand, or four thousand, whatever it is, when it's up here, that's how many gallons we've got. You wouldn't do that with red wine? You can't do it with red wine because you have to ferment on the skins, but what we're thinking very seriously of doing now is putting a fermenting place down in Soledad, so that we can ferment everything down there, even the whites. Because it takes about two and a half hours to get the grapes up here, or the must up here, whatever you want to call it. Especially some of the fancy white wine, if we can get it in a tank in a half hour instead of three hours , why , it ' s that much better for it. So we're thinking of putting the fermenting system down there, and then that will take care of all our problems. Because right now we have a little bit of property here where we can dump the pomace and let it dry out and then work it into the ground. But eventually there's going to be houses there, so the sooner we get a system down in Soledad the better off we're going to be. The pomace is valuable, isn't it? Yes, it is, but nobody wants to handle it. [chuckles] We've been spreading it out in the vineyard for years, and I think we've got enough to last us for a few years. 38 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: I always remember that tremendous pile of pomace at the Petri winery. [laughs] Yes, yes. I can remember when I was a little kid, when Dad had the winery down on Quimby Road, that we used to go out there and climb up on that pile and slide down it and everything else. You kind of stain the clothes a little bit, but that didn't bother us any. Mom got mad, but it didn't bother us. [laughs] It never occured to me that that would be a big sand pile. That's what it was. A big sand pile. Do you have space for a fermenting facility on the property down at Soledad now? Yes, as a matter of fact, we picked out a place. We were ready to put it in a year or so ago, and we're glad now that we didn't. We were figuring a place for pressing down there because we were going to crush them and bring them in and press them right away. Now that we're pressing in the field, we think that it's a better system. It's more versatile. You can have three or four different places that are bringing in grape juice, so to speak, at one time, in different tanks. It's a lot easier to keep track of. Wallace Johnson's winery was doing that in the Alexander Valley, the Field Stone Winery. He'd been experimenting with presses, and he had one. We brought it down here. Yes, it worked, and it works fine. For a little place like he had it's fine,* but when you get into a commercial operation, it just wasn't big enough. In order to make it big enough, then it gets too clumsy. So it has to be a continuous tight press, or even a batch press of the bladder type. In other words, it has to press as fast as what the harvester can harvest, so that there's always an empty one standing alongside that they can dump into. Because once you get your machine started, you don't like to stop here and there. We found one interesting thing, that we can get more gallons per ton, and a clearer juice, and a whiter juice, by *Wallace Johnson died in 1979. to be operated by his family. Field Stone Winery continues 39 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: picking the grapes after twelve o'clock at night and before the sun comes up. After that, it's a complete, different animal. Is that right? Yes. We found out that there was a difference. So when we're picking grapes for champagne material, after twelve o'clock we change over and go into that variety. The rest of the day we pick something else. How do you keep your guys working at night? They get used to it, they get used to it. I think I've seen an article about Rich Smith of Valley Farm Management who brought the idea to Peter Mirassou. Are you going to continue to contract with him? Under the present circumstances, we think that as long as he can handle it, we will. What he's thinking of now is getting more equipment, and actually being in the business, so to speak. I think with this white Zinfandel (and there'll be white something else in the very near future) that he'll keep going for a while. Specialized services for wineries are interesting. I know there was an attempt, and maybe still is, to send mobile bottling facilities around to small wineries. They do it all over in France. So I don't see why they can't do it here. Of course, it all depends how small the operation is, but we happened to be in France with a group. We came up to this winery, and they had hoses laying outside the winery. We couldn't figure out why they were going to have the hoses outside the winery, so we went in and we tasted some wines. We came out, and in the meantime this little trailer had come up and pulled behind a car, and they'd plugged it into the electricity, and here they were, bottling case after case. It doesn't go as fast as what Gallo's line goes, but they get their wine in the bottle, they get the label on it, and it's all done at one crack. That's the way they do it. They go from one place to the other. Teiser: For a winery this size it wouldn't be practical, would it? 39a BIGGEST SHIPMENT EVER OF STAINLESS STEEL WINE TANKS V SHOWN liere are ten stainless steel tanks, each of 22,000 gallons capacity, ready to leave Fresno (where they were manufactured by Valley Foundry) to be set up at Mirassou Vineyards tor the combined Mirassou - Paul Masson deal, announced in last month's issue. Each tank is 12' -6" in diameter and 24' tall, and it was necessary to use ten Hat cars to move them. In addition to those shown, six other fermentation tanks, also of 316 stain ess. were shipped to Mirassou from Valley. A picture of the tanks set up for oper ation in the open field will be published in the next issue. 40 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: No, this is a little bit too big for that. But, no, I think it's a good deal. Because the guy who operates the bottling line is busy all day long, so he doesn't have to charge a fabulous price to one grower when he can divide it up among four or five of them that he does during the day. The equipment doesn't cost each one; they don't have to buy it themselves, which would take them a hundred years to pay for. [chuckles] Back to Soledad; if you put in fermenting facilities down there, will you use the fermenting tanks that you have here, or will you buy new ones? We're debating that point. These fermenting tanks that are here are all jacketed, and they can be used for cooling the wines for stabilization and so forth. So I don't think that they will all go down there, no. There may be a few of them go down. You need them for stabilization for bottling? Yes, for before bottling. Are they the ones that Masson put in here in 1961? No. The ones that Masson put in — let's put it this way. We had nine fermenting tanks of 5,000 gallons each. When Masson asked us if we would crush the grapes for them and make the wine for them, we said, "Yes, but we need more fermenting tanks." It was one of those thing that came in all at once. I guess it was about this time of the year, in February, when we decided, yes, we could do it but we had to have some help with the finances. So they said, "We'll put the tanks in, whatever size you want, whatever you want, and then, over a period of years, you buy them back from us." That was fine. So they came in, and we put in nine 10,000 gallon tanks with jackets on them, and we put in eight more stainless steel tanks, uprights. That was all right for the first year, and then the next year we needed more storage space, and we found some brewery tanks in Golden, Colorado. They were in perfect condition, so we figured, well, we could use them. So we got a trucking company to haul them down here, and we put a platform in and set them up here. 41 N.C. Mirassou; Teiser : NCC. Mirassou: We haven't yet, but we're eventually going to put a building around it. Right now we have a screen over the top of them to kind of keep them cooler, but it seems like that since we first started, the weather gets hotter, summertime. Maybe you're more conscious of the need for cool weather. I think that we've changed our way of making wine. Now that we're selling it in bottles, it's got to be handled a little more delicate than we used to do it. Because, before, the wine was all out of the winery the first of June. The people that bought it were using it to blend theirs, and the sooner they could get it, the better they liked it. Then when we started bottling for ourselves we were holding it longer, and so then we had little problems with keeping it cool. From Bulk to Bottling Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Let's go on to the change to bottling, in 1966. That was a big step for a winery to take, I should think. Yes, it was a gigantic step. Why were you so courageous that you did it? Don't ask me that question; I can't answer it. [laughs] For one thing, we realized that the boys were interested in the wine business, and there wasn't enough business unless we did go into something like that . I think that ' s the main reason why we went into it. To give them a chance — Your sons and your brother's sons? Yes. To give them a chance to do something. And so far, they've done a good job. During the transition, I suppose you went on selling bulk wines for a time. We sold bulk wines for quite a few years. It was interesting, too, because about the same time that they started in and wanted to put the wine on the market , so to 42 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: speak, the wine industry kind of changed a little bit. Everybody was making more of their own wines , buying the grapes before they were crushed. They just weren't buying as much bulk wine as what they were before. They were just slowing down, so to speak. There were fewer and fewer private bottlers' labels? That's true, and it seemed like all the bottlers that were back East, they just quit. Do you think that was because more emphasis was being placed upon wine quality as related to winemakers' labels? I don't know whether it was the quality or what it was, but it just seemed like that if it was made and bottled in California, that it was easier to sell. That's why I think that it changed. Do you still sell wine in bulk? Some. It was 1966 that you began bottling, a little bit before the big increase in wine drinking, but still people were getting more sophisticated in their tastes, more analytical, and perhaps they were reading labels more carefully. I think that was part of it. That was part of it. Your younger generation, then, they were coming out of school, were they, at that point? Yes. Let's see, two of them were out of school. Peter was going to college once in a while, but he wasn't going steady. He would take certain courses and so forth. Steve was doing about the same thing. When they got the idea, they got together and figured it out and decided that that's what they wanted to do. We figured, "If we can help them out, we'll help them out." These two , or all of them? No, the whole bunch* worked together. They came to us as a group, so to speak. They had done quite a bit of studying on it before they asked my brother and I whether we were interested in it or not. We asked them to get some help from *Peter, Steve, Daniel, and James Mirassou, and Norbert C. Mirassou 's son-in-law, Don Alexander. See p. 46. 43 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser : N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: somebody that was in the business that knew, and they got Bob Mondavi to help them out, and to convince Ed and I that it was profitable. I still doubt it, but — [chuckles] Bob Mondavi mentioned that.* They went to him. They had talked to other people around here, and they thought that Bob had a little more pull or push than what the rest of them did, so they got him on their side. [laughs] It worked out; it worked out fine. They made a few mistakes on the way, but I think they're getting them straightened out. Was it their idea to take the enterprise into bottling? Was that their idea? We had a label. Ed and I and our two wives had designed a label, and we put it on our bottles. This goes back — I've got one set at home that was 1945. Our lawyer's the one that really started us. He said, "I'd like to have some bottles of wine in a box for Christmas." So we said, "How many do you want?" He said, "Oh, if I have twenty-five, that would be fine." So we got some shook, and we made some little boxes. The girls put the wine in the boxes, and I nailed the lids on and glued them. Naturally, when you start something like that, you think, "This is a one-shot deal." I guess it was between Christmas and New Year's the lawyer called up and he says, "I would like to order seventy-five boxes for next year. " We said, "We don't know whether we're going to make them or not." He said, "If you don't, you guys are nuts." So we says, "Well, okay." I think we made 125 that year. We delivered his packages. Then the rest of them, that was twenty-five or thirty, we gave to people that we were doing business with. The next year I think we had somewheres around a thousand. It just grew. Were you hand-bottling? *Robert Mondavi, Creativity in the California Wine Industry, an oral history interview conducted 1984, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, i rt o r 1985. 44 N.C. Mirassou: Hand bottling. The labels were put on by hand. The bottles were laid in the box with spaghetti paper in it , and then the lids were nailed on it. And then we'd begin to get smart. Instead of making the boxes, when they got up above five hundred, we got some people in San Francisco who were making cigar boxes yet at that time. It was a cigar box factory. We had a nice redwood box with a stamp on the front of it. All the ladies wanted the box for their sewing, or their knitting, or something. We had one particular regular company that we were doing business with. They were always giving liquor away , a bottle of whiskey , or a bottle of this , or a bottle of that. The owner and I were very good friends, and I told him, I said, "You know, try it just for once, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But," I says, "I'll bet you that you get more thank-you letters from the ladies than what you will with the whiskey." He was a young fellow at the time, and he says, "My Gosh, it's an idea, we'll try it." I said, "How many do you need?" He says, "I think we need somewheres around three hundred." He eventually got up to a thousand boxes that he gave away, and he says that they would get a bagfull of thank-you notes from the ladies because the husband would come home sober, put the gift under the tree, and they would all open it Christmas day. He says, "When we gave them a bottle of whiskey, half the time, they drank it before they got home. They get home drunk, and then the whole week-end was spoiled." So they thought it was a very good idea. We still send out quite a bit of them today, yet. The only thing is that nowadays all these companies that give gifts away, although there's not as many as there used to be, but the ones that do give them away, you've got to get your order in before May, otherwise you're too late. But it's still a good deal. To start in, we just had one package, and that was it. Then we got one company that wanted a thousand with different kinds of wine in it, so we made those, and then they came back. We said, "Nope, from now on it's what we pick out, and that's the only thing there is." 45 N.C. Mirassou: Then, in order to give them a choice, we had the artist's selection, and the gourmet selection, and a selection of champagne. They had a choice of three bottles and two bottles of wine. Now they've gotten back to where I think they've got one champagne and one wine. They found that if they keep them in the tasting room, they can sell them all year round, because people come in and say, "Oh, that's a nice gift for a birthday, or a wedding, or an anniversary." Teiser: What kind of a company buys them? N.C. Mirassou: All companies. Like, oh, some of the companies from Silicon Valley, and other companies that we do business with during the year. Teiser: When you went to bottling, however — seriously, rather than as a sideline — that was I think in 1966. N.C. Mirassou: Theoretically, in "66 Mirassou Sales [Company] took all the bottles that we had; they bought them from us. They got some cases, and, if I'm not mistaken, they used some of Almaden's or Paul Masson cases that were empty that they had extra. They blanked out the name and put the proper stamp on it, and the label. They would put the four, five, six cases in the back of their car and go out and sell them. [laughs] Then they'd come back and get four or five more. That's how they got started, by going to liquor stores, and so forth. About the same time that this was happening — H Teiser: You said you had a very good friend — N.C. Mirassou: — a very good friend that had a steelworks in town. About this same time. He was of German descent, and his father had an ironworks in Europe, and then he moved here and had it here. His son was an engineer. He was a good engineer, too. I used to go down to his office during the winter-time and just sit there and talk to him, because I figured I could learn something by talking to him. We'd get into all kinds of things, politics and everything else. One day I walked in and this other gentleman was there, and he said, "Come on in." So I walked into his office, and he introduced me to Mr. Joseph George. He liked the wine. He told Joseph George, he says, "One of these 46 N.C. Mirassou: days these boys are going to be putting their wine on the market, and you should be the distributor." So Joseph George kind of laughed, you know, and said this, that, and the other thing. So we talked there for a while and when he left he says, "When you get ready, give me a call." So he was our first distributor when we started, when we got to the point where we could have enough bottles to have a distributor. Which must have been around '68, '69, some place in there, when they got big enough that we needed a distributor. The Mirassou Sales Company and San Vicente Vineyards Teiser: Did the boys organize formally at that point? Did they have a company of their own? N.C. Mirassou: Yes, they formed a partnership at that time. Teiser: What did they call it? N.C. Miraaou: Mirassou Sales Company. Teiser: Who were the partners? N.C. Mirassou: Steve, Peter, James, and Daniel Mirassou and Don Alexander. Ed's and my philosophy was that we had enough that we could take care of ourselves in our old age, and we didn't want to have the largest inventory when we passed away. We had a chance to buy a piece of property, another piece, down in Soledad area. And so we said, "Why not put this in the boys ' name , and let them run it , and so forth and so on , and pay for it, and then it belongs to them." That's when they started the San Vicente Vineyards, d.b.a. Mirassou Sales.* That was probably a year or so before they started putting the wine out. When we first bought the [Soledad] ranch, it was under lease, and the people that were running it decided that they would keep the lease as long as we didn't want the ranch right away. And the children weren't quite old enough, so we figured, "They can go to school, and *See pp. 48-49. 47 N.C. Mirassou: this guy can run it until his lease runs out," which had another four years to go. And about that time everything would just fall right in place. It started in and was working beautifully, but the gentleman didn't listen, or something. Anyhow, he decided that he was going to leave us. He passed away. His son was just twenty-one years of age, and he wasn't old enough and didn't have enough experience to run the ranch they had in the valley [San Joaquin] and this one here, too. They were raising potatoes for Granny Goose. The father ran it one year, and then he passed away, and the son came in and tried to finish. They had already planted; all they had to do was really harvest them. The next year the bank that was helping him came to us and asked us if they could break the contract because he just couldn't handle it; he didn't have enough experience. In the meantime, Peter was out of school, so to speak, and Steve was out of school. We says, "Yes, we would gladly let the contract go , " but we needed some help because if we were going to use it, we were going to try to run it with potatoes in it for another couple of years , because Granny Goose had a contract with the ranch, so to speak. They didn't care who was running it just so they got their potatoes. So we planted potatoes two years. The second year, it was one of those things that wasn't done exactly the way it should be. Potates are an easy crop to raise in one sense of the word, and in another sense of the word they're not. All the studying the boys had done was on grapes, and they didn't know enough about potatoes, and their crop the second years wasn't what it was supposed to be. Then Granny Goose decided that they found another place, some place that had virgin land in it, and they figured they could raise more potatoes and better potatoes, so they broke the contract. In the meantime, the company that had the lease first, we said, "If you can loan us a tractor and loan us "some sprinkler line, we can get by." Which they did, and that helped us get by for the two years that we were running the place. Then, when the contract was broken by the other company, they came and got their sprinkler pipe and their tractor, and took it back over to Fresno, or Bakersfield, or wherever it was that they were planting. 48 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: That was a little experience that we had in something else. What happened, in the end, with that land? In the meantime, the kids down there weren't sitting around doing nothing. The equipment that was down there was a great big D8 [tractor] with a great big sub-soiler, and so all they had to do was to buy the fuel, because the tractor was rent- free, and everything else. They took this equipment and they started ripping up the ground. They ripped up the ground, and they decided that they were going to plant fifty acres of vines. Because the sprinkler system and everything was in for the potatoes, the pipeline, so all they had to do was to put in the sprinkling system over this particular fifty acres that they were going to plant. So they did. They planted it, and they did a beautiful job of planting it. They knew what they were doing when it come to grapes. They planted the fifty acres, and I daresay that there wasn't a hundred vines that had to be re-planted. You might say that it was a 100 percent take right off the bat. The boys from the university didn't believe it. Where did they get their stock? We took it off of the vines that were on the [Paul Masson and Mirassou] ranch that were down there. That's when they first came out with the heat-treated vines, and so we put in a few acres of them and really got a nursery started for heat-treated vines. We've been improving it ever since. Eventually, they got the whole thing planted. In effect, the land that had all been in potatoes is now all in grapes. It's all in grapes. What is Mirassou Sales Company? Mirassou Sales Company is the part of San Vicente Vineyards that is selling the wine. In other words, they divided it up. The ranch is one operation, the sales department is another operation, and then if they get anything else, they got another operation. 49 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Who owns the bottling facility that is here? The bottling facility theoretically belongs to Mirassou Sales. And you helped them with that, too? Yes, we helped. By that time they were making money, and so they could buy their own equipment and pay for it, and it was theirs. It's wonderful that you gave them a chance — We gave them a chance, and at the same time we weren't building up our estate; they were building up their estate. It gave them that much more incentive to work for it. It's always a problem in a family to pass on assets. Yes, yes. We figured that it was a lot easier that way than for us to have it, and them to inherit it. This way they're their own boss, so to speak. As long as they listen to Ed and I and don't make too many mistakes, they're all right, [laughter] So they became, in effect, your customers? Yes, you might say that, yes. I don't suppose you thought of it that way. We've been buying the grapes, so to speak. We bought the grapes from their ranch, made it into wine, and turned around and sold it to them. When they first started, naturally, we weren't taking that many grapes, so we were selling it in bulk. It's gotten to the point now where they're still not taking all of it in some varieties. We made a mistake, too, we planted too much of one kind, and not enough of the other. We figured that it should be at least 60 percent white and 40 percent red. Right now, I think, it's 110 percent white and nothing red. [laughter] But in the future, it will swing back to reds. I think that our biggest mistake in the wine industry today is that we are doing exactly what the French said to do: "Your white wines should be served a little colder than the 50 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: red wines , and the red wines should be served at room temperature." But the problem is that our room temperature in California is too doggone hot. I used to take the wine out of my wine cellar and bring it in the house a day or so before I was going to serve it. Now, I wait until the last minute, and then bring it in. And I find that the people do drink more red wine when it's colder. All you have to do is say cellar temperature and not room temperature. N.C. Mirassou: Yes, but most people's cellar temperature is still too warm, too. We've been fussing with the subdividers around here ever since they came in. When they first came in, they wanted to buy a piece of the property. "That's fine. We're not ready to sell right yet." You know, it went from one to the other. Finally we got a couple of them, and they were really interested, and I says, "I'd like to see your house plans. Will you bring them around some time?" They bring them around, and we open them up here on the conference table, and I look at them, and I look and I look. One of the guys says, "What the heck are you looking for?" I says, "I'm looking for a space in this house some place that's cool enough to put a wine cellar in." I said , "None of your plans have any place for a wine cellar." And I said, "If you guys would use your head and put a wine cellar in your house, and come here to the winery and buy a couple of cases, and go some place else and get a couple of cases and put them in the house, you could sell it a lot easier." They couldn't understand; they couldn't see it. We finally got one company that built one bunch of houses in one subdivision, and underneath the stairs they had a place that was cool enough that they could put a little wine cellar, but it was only big enough for about three cases. You know, it's one of those things. Everybody is interested in wine, it seems like. And if you don't have a place where you can put some wine away and store it for four or five years, it's no fun. Teiser: You're outlining something that could alleviate the oversupply of wine, if you could get more people to buy in advance and store it. 51 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: That's what they're doing in Europe. I mean, all the so-called big wineries, or the fancy wineries that used to keep their wine and sell it for high prices, are now selling in future, so to speak. You buy it and put it in your cellar. They're making just as much off of it, because it's not cheap to keep wine on hand in a warehouse and then sell it. It's a lot easier to let somebody else keep it for you. Maybe that's one of the marketing strategies that should be set up. We're still working on it. You have to convince the building industry. Yes. The Mirassou Nursery Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: The nursery you mentioned, that's been within your own field, I suppose. Yes. Have you handled the nursery? Yes. When we bought the first piece of property, which was the 250-acre piece, which was Mission Vineyards, and belonged to Ed Knight, it was all bare ground. The first Monterey property? Yes. So we says, "We've got to have a nursery some place, so why not put it here, next to the house," because Peter was going to be down there. You hadn't had one here? No, we didn't have one here. We've had small ones here, three, four hundred vines, but that's all. In the meantime, we had got this piece of property for Paul Masson, so we were going to have a thousand acres that we were going to plant. We figured, "We can't plant it all in one year, because that's 52 N.C. Mirassou: lust too much. Why don't we figure on a nursery for five hundred acres, and then we will plant that. And then we'll put another nursery in the following year, and we plant that in the next year . " We put in a nursery, and we had enough vines for five hundred acres. We knew the varieties that everybody wanted, and how many vines we needed, and so forth. And naturally we planted some extra ones. We got started and we had, if I'm not mistaken, forty acres of vines in a nursery, three inches apart, and then we had another row over here eight or nine feet apart. We had them far enough apart so we could drive down with the tractor to keep the grass down. As we were planting them, [A.N.] Kasimatis and Lloyd Lider and a few of the other ones came down. They said, "You've got the ground all worked, and you're all ready to plant. They're all on their own roots. Why don't you, instead of putting them in a nursery three inches apart, plant the other five hundred acres eight feet apart? Plant the rest of them eight by twelve." They said, "All you'll have to do is to figure that you've got a thousand-acre nursery." Another five-hundred- acre nursery, really, is what it was, because the first year they were in the nursery, so we didn't count that. So, we says, "What would be the difference? I mean, does the vine get started better in the field, or does it get better in the nursery?" They said, they can't see any difference. They've tried them both ways, and they couldn't see that much difference. So we said, "Let's take a chance on it." We talked with Paul Masson, and they were willing to go to the extra expense, so to speak. Theoretically, it should have put the vine one year ahead in the field. So we did, and the take was, as close as we could figure it, about 95 percent. We said, "We'll say 90 percent, and make sure." So we had 10 percent that we had to plant the following year, which was very little. We figured that we would lose 25 percent, so we put in a nursery for 25 percent, and we had all the rest left over. 53 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou; Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: In the meantime, the university came in with their heat- treated vines, and so that left some more extras that we had. The heat-treated vines came in when we were planting San Vicente more, so that they were just getting started on the other one. San Vicente was planted in 1968. That must have been '70, some place in there. I forget the exact dates now. Then did you sell nursery stock to others? After we had the heat-treated vines, and they were in their special division, with the check rows and so forth in between, we could sell those through the university. The university got paid so much a vine, and we sold quite a few of the different varieties that we had. We had five or six different varieties at the time. Did you have varieties you didn't use yourself? No, all the varieties that we had were the varieties that we used. When we put them in, we put at least five or ten acres so that we had enough that we could keep separate and see what the difference was for production and sugar content and everything else. Of course, we were working with the university. We made it big enough so that it was easy to keep track of. I'm sure that they've got those figures up at Davis some place. Did you and Wente trade vines at all? Or cuttings? We may have a few, but not that many. They came down there to the Salinas Valley, what was it, two years after we did? — Nineteen sixty-three — — and bought their ranch and started planting down there. They did about the same as what we did; they went out into other vineyards. They got some cuttings from us the first year. But they didn't plant too much the first time. They put in one block of all mixed vines to see how they would grow and how they produced and so forth. But we worked very close together with anybody that would work with us. Karl Wente and us, we used to be out together all the time. 54 Teiser : N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Soledad's a little bit different from Greenfield, where the Wentes are. It's a little different but not that much. It's a little warmer. Sometimes we think we might be in a little too cold climate. The last couple of years it's been fine, but it's been a little warmer than normal, so to speak. There's grapes that are a lot further north than we are, and they don't have any more trouble than what we do, so I guess they're all right, too. From your experience now, of quite some years, what do you think Monterey County's greatest strengths are? What varieties? Definitely the whites; and I don't think it makes an awful lot of difference which white it is. The reds, I'm not so sure that we shouldn't be a little further south on the reds. In the Salinas Valley or elsewhere? Even as far south as Santa Maria. The thing that we need to study more, and I think that the university is going to have to go into this a lot deeper, is microclimates. With the little bit of traveling that I've done in Europe, they take a vineyard that's, let's say, four hundred feet long, and they'll take a hundred-foot stretch out of the middle of it, and those grapes are better than the outside. After all , when they have the experience of nine hundred years, they should know a little bit about what they're talking about. I don't know whether they have studied the microclimate, or whether they've been there long enough that they know from year to year that this particular spot makes a better wine than what this one over here does. I think that we're going to have to do a lot more studying on that. If you're lucky, and you're on the right side of the hill, and the soil is all the same, it makes a difference. But you've always known that. That's right. It hasn't been looked at scientifically yet. I don't know how much scientific looking they've done in Europe. But they sure know a heck of a lot more about it than what we do. 55 Urbanization in the Santa Clara Valley Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: May I ask you about the Santa Clara Valley — if all these houses hadn't cropped up here, and all these factories and shopping centers, what would have happened here? Santa Clara Valley has been known throughout the world for its prunes. From what I could gather when we had apricots and were selling them to the cannery, they preferred these in Santa Clara Valley to any place else. It was a richer, solider fruit. The grapes that were grown in Santa Clara Valley made very good wine; the only problem was that all the old vineyards didn't have the fancy varieties that are being used today. Why they weren't brought in originally, when they were brought into Napa and Sonoma Valley, nobody seems to know. It's just one of those things. I guess if we could sit up here and look down through history, my feeling is that in the early days, Santa Clara Valley was void of trees. They were all taken out by the Spaniards years ago. So therefore it was a hotter climate. Therefore, people that came into the Bay Area, and then looked for property, went up north, and it was evidently easier to get there than it was coming south. Why, I don't know, but that's the only thing that I can figure out.* I remember I asked Louis Martini , the senior , where in California would he prefer to grow grapes, all things being equal. He said the Santa Clara Valley around Mountain View had fine grapes. N.C. Mirassou: Yes, that's very true. You know, now that you bring it up, it is a puzzling question. In the past when we're talking about the prunes and the apricots, and the few grapes that were in Santa Clara Valley — we say a few grapes, but if I remember correctly, there were somewheres around three or four thousand acres of grapes in the northern part of Santa Clara Valley. Not counting Morgan Hill and Gilroy. There were quite a few more down there. They were known throughout the world, wherever wine was sold. When Dad and his brothers had the winery down on the corner, even before that, when they had it up on the hill — *0f course, Norbert and Edmund Mirassou 's great-grandfather, Pierre Pellier, and other French immigrants brought excellent wine grape varieties to the Santa Clara Valley as early as the gold-rush period. See Charles L. Sullivan, Like Modern Edens (Cupertino, California: California History Center, 1982), Chapter II, and Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun, Winemaking in California, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982, Chapter 6. Deforestation of the valley accelerated during the American period as the population grew. 56 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: //# You said when your father and his brothers had their winery, they would sell in puncheons through a broker. They would ship puncheons to New York. Not very much a carload, or so a year. But they'd sell it through a wholesaler, and eventually the wholesaler bought a ranch up here in a corner, and put vines in it and had a winery up there [where The Villages development is now] . Their wines won prizes wherever they were sold; of course, they were blended with other wines. But this broker's wines were always winning prizes. And they all came out of Santa Clara Valley. So Santa Clara Valley would be a beautiful place to raise grapes if we could get rid of all the houses and factories and everything in the center of the valley, and put all the houses around the hills, up on top. [laughs] That would be fine. That brings up another question. As grape land gets more valuable, which it did for a while — It still is. Here, in Santa Clara County, did anyone ever think of deciding to go ahead and make a more expensive vineyard in the hills? Let's put it this way, yes, it has been thought of, but, in the United States it won't work because it's too expensive. Still too expensive. It's still too expensive. See, originally, Dad's father had the ranch up on the hill up here. He and his two cohorts — they used to be called "the three musketeers." They were old families, the Pelliers and the Renaults and Prudhommes. Those three were up on the hill up here. There was no way of irrigating, and dry farming just did not pay. Dry farming will not pay in this area, with the rainfall that we have. In France, and in Europe, where they have them on the hills, they get a lot more rainfall. Their soil is a little more rocky there, and it doesn't slide down the hill; this will run off if it's worked too much. 57 N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: I think that hills here, that probably look at , but underneath it anything . If it is washed will grow on that is the main reason why they don't go in the Yes, there's a lot of rolling hills around here could be used for vineyards. They're nice to the soil is not that deep , and the rock that is has absolutely nothing in it that will grow the rock crop comes out , and the dirt around away, the rock stays there. Maybe a little moss it, but that's all. And the rock here does not seem to deteriorate like the granite rock does, it's a different type of rock. The roots can't even get into it? That's right, the roots can't get into it at all. No, I think it would be better to put houses up there , it ' s a lot easier. [laughs] Yes. It's too bad they can't transplant the houses. Yes, it is in a way. But I can remember, I was just a little tyke, when they started building in the Willow Glen area. I can remember Dad talking to Mom. We were riding around — we used to ride around this time of year, a little later, and look at the blossoms, and so forth and so on — and he would say, "Now, this cherry orchard is going to be gone next year," because down in the Willow Glen area it was all full of cherry orchards. "And that cherry orchard's going to be gone next year." He says, "The best land in the county, and they're putting houses on it. And a house, no matter how well you build it, is not going to change, it's going to stay like that." He just thought it was terrible, but it was one of those things. The mission fathers came in and put the mission there, and then others built around it, and [the built-up part] kept getting bigger, and that's what happened. You know, everything was fine in this area until after the war. All the boys that came here, everybody came through California to get shipped out. When they come in the winter-time, and the sun was shining, and there was four feet of snow back home, they decided, "This is where I'm going to be if I ever get back again." And that's what happened, the population of California grew, and that was it. EDMUND A. MIRASSOU 58 I "GETTING STARTED OVER AGAIN," 1936-1941 [Interview 1: March 25, 1985] Prohibition and Repeal Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Let me start with vital statistics. Okay, born on May 18, 1918, in San Jose. My schooling was Evergreen Grammar School, St. Joseph High School, then I finished my last year of high school at Belarmine College Preparatory. Then one year of San Jose State, and that was the limit of my schooling. When you were young what did you think your career would be? The family already had the vineyards here in Evergreen.* The family had been in the wine business for many , many years before and then were temporarily without a winery because of Prohibition. Even though we're speaking now of about 1935, or along in there, we did talk about getting back into the wine business, and building another winery. So actually, in 1936, my Dad spoke to my brother and I and said, "If you're interested, why, we can think about building a small winery and getting started over again." My brother and I both agreed that we would like to be in the wine business, so in 1937 we built the first stage of the present building, and we went back into the wine business. *The Evergreen district, now part of San Jose, lies to the southeast of the center of the city. 59 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: That is a correct picture of it there. At that time it was called P.L. Mirassou Winery, and then a little bit later it was called P.L. Mirassou and Sons Company, and then a little bit later we changed the name again to Mirassou Vineyards, and that's been it ever since. I have a copy of a letter of 1941. Printed on the letterhead is "Bottle Ripe California Burgundy Type Wines." That's right, that's one of the old letterheads. Then we later changed it, as I just described. Was that when you left college then, when your father said, "Let's get into the wine business?" That's right, because the year that I was in college was 1936- '37. Would you describe your father as an agriculturist and wine man? Yes. He was of course very good in the agricultural end. He himself had been in the wine business until 1922. So it was just a period there of ten, twelve years that he had been out of the wine business. He was a great guy that had a great belief in family and was willing to help his sons get started. So that's when we took over and went to work at it. He, of course, worked right with us and gave us all the advice that he could. Do you know why it was that he went in and out of the wine business between '20 and '22? He applied for a bond in 1920. He had said that he had had earlier experience. The winery before that time may have been owned by his step father, Caselagno. But it may not have had to be bonded at that time, because the purpose for bonding is to secure the tax for the government. In 1920 he listed a lot of fermentors and storage tanks; he had a lot of equipment. He said he was going to be producing about sixty thousand gallons in twelve months, estimated. •H .& B. W. No. 12SS ia.j-1 1 k'oulc 4, Boi 223 -BOTTLE RIPE California Burgundy Type Wines San Jose, California -Vine Institute "an Fro. c i sc o , Oa 1 i f . Dear ^ir; M.'e Are very olc-apei to hear of ul of our ap-licatiou for ise.'absrshin to Boards acceptance lie ".'ine Institute. Re-t assured tiiat the incident of ^aivin^ the initiation fee is sincerely apr;reoiati;ed. I can also assure yra that ?;e v;ill be vorthy ae^cer of your really successful organization, "'e are rclad to be iietabsrs so that ^e :nay' aid you in yvar good ^orlc for the industry. Since:: 1 Fj-t. !n ... ! ?--~-^JL: J'J:v '" -- 2 S 1:41 ' TANK CARS. BARRELS. BOND TO BOND OR TAX PAID 60 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I think that sixty thousand is wrong, it was probably closer to 600,000, because they had a pretty good size winery. But it may have been only sixty thousand, because that was during Prohibition. In 1921, he said he had, "no wine on hand, and doesn't contemplate making more than four thousand gallons this season. " Again, that was during Prohibition. Where did you get that information? This is from the federal records. What was the BW number? It was 997. What name was the application in? his brothers? Just my Dad alone , or with Just his name. P.L. Mirassou. That's July of 1920. It was July of 1920 that he made the original application, and it was 1923 that — He discontinued it? He discontinued it, yes. There was no activity, and he was no longer owner, he said. Winery, Route B, Box 358, Aborn Road. That was his mailing address because he lived here at that time, but the winery was down below. He shipped some wine to the California Wine Association in San Francisco, and there were fifty gallons less in the tank than its capacity. They took his explanation that it hadn't been filled all the way. Did he have a good knowledge of wine? Oh, yes, but not for the kind of wine that we're making today. In other words, he was not in the varietal wine business. In those days it was usually just red wine or white wine, and there was no such thing as rose. But of course, other than that, yes, he knew wine. Of course, they had the vineyards here at that time. So I would imagine that was one of his reasons for making the wine, was to have a home for the grapes, 61 E.A. Mirassou: You see, also, when Prohibition first started, grapes were worth something around eight or ten dollars a ton, maybe twelve dollars a ton. So anybody with a vineyard figured, with Prohibition, grapes are going to be worth nothing. I would imagine that at that time he kept the winery going, so to speak, because it was an operating winery, probably in his stepfather's name. So he probably took the license out in his own name in order to use his own grapes that he had here in this vineyard. Then, by 1922, '23, the price of grapes started going up, not for winery use but for shipping East. My dad at that time got very successful in the operation of buying grapes and shipping East. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: He both grew them and bought them? Grew them and bought them. I don't remember the number of cars that he shipped East in a year, but it could be easily fifty carloads. And the price of grapes on the Eastern shipment went from thirty, forty, up to as high as over $200 a ton. So the money then was not in trying to make wine but shipping grapes. Even though he was not following through in the wine business, suddenly the economics of it had shifted, where shipping the grapes was the big value. It also happened to be that there were large amounts of Thompson Seedless grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. But the winemaker in the East Coast was probably from the old Italian extract and therefore wanted to make red wines. It happened that the vineyards that my dad had here were very largely planted to heavy color grapes, Petite Sirah, Saint-Macaire , and varieties like that. The buyer was able to buy three boxes of Thompson Seedless and one box of my dad's red grapes and make a pretty good blend of red wine in their basement or wherever they made it. The Thompson's Seedless, of course, never got as high in value as these red grapes. You said Carignane, too? E.A. Mirassou: Carignane also, but the color's not as heavy there as it is in the Petite Sirah or Saint-Macaire. Teiser: Saint-Macaire must have been a specialty of this valley, pretty much? 62 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I don't know about that. We still have some of it. Maybe we pulled it out this year; it was planted in 1911, so it was getting to be pretty old. It ' s a heavy — A heavy colored red wine. At times, we did make it separately, and it made a pretty nice wine. I have a list of principle grapes grown in the early 1930s.* In Santa Clara County it gives Alicante, Zinfandel, Carignane, Petite Sirah, Mission, Grenache, Mataro , Sauvignon vert, Mourastel, Rio Nero — I don't know that one. Traminer, Burger, Palomino, Colombard, and Riesling. Those were said to be the main Santa Clara County grapes at that time. That Colombard is not the french Columbard that we speak of today. The other name for it was Sauvignon vert; that is the correct name for it , but it was called Colombard in those days. The Saint-Macaire is not on that list; it was never planted in great quantitites in this area, but I know that it was in our vineyards here, and it was also in the vineyards of Schilling at that time, which was later the Cribari ranch. When you and your brother then went into other varieties, later, were you ahead of, or with, or behind the University of California at Davis? It's pretty hard to be ahead of the University of California at Davis; they've always been pretty alert. Sometimes it takes them a little longer to complete their projects than we in the industry like to see, but they've always been very alert. We were just making ordinary wines in 1937 when we started, and then it was not long after that, about 1940, that we started making wines for other wineries and getting into the varietal aspect of it. If you remember, *Typewritten list in the library of the Wine Institute, source not given but probably a state agency. 63 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Frank Schoonmaker was working with Almaden at that time.* I can remember Frank Schoonmaker coming over here and visiting the winery , and tasting our wines , and recommending that we plant varietal grapes. So, actually, it was in 1942 that we bought another hundred acres of land and we started planting varietal varieties at that time. I see. seems. He had quite an influence on a lot of people, it Oh, yes. Schoonmaker was one of those who was trying to push the California industry into putting varietal names on the labels. Up until that time there was very little of that done.** There might have been at Inglenook, under the operation of John Daniel [Jr.]. Louis Martini, a little bit, and I believe Wente a little bit. Not very many others were doing any varietal labeling. At that time, then, with the influence of Schoonmaker and Ollie Goulet , the winemaker there , we planted such varieties as Pinot blanc, and Cabernet Sauvignon and Johannisberg Riesling and Semillon and many of those varieties. Within a few years we were in production, and we sold them, then, usually to such wineries as Almaden, Paul Masson, Sebastiani, and you name it, down the line. Sebastiani was in bulk business also then. But he also was getting interested in some of the varietal types. We started a label just about that time, '40, or '41, or '42, somewhere along in there. We had a label but we only sold at the winery. We did not sell to other distributors. It was really way in the future, in 1966, that we really went on the market as a bottling winery. Let me take you back a little bit. When your father put in his application for the bond for the 1937 winery, he said that he was going to be assisted by you and -your brother, who had both worked with him in the orchards and vineyards. Did you and your brother take responsibility by then, or had you just worked in the — * See also William A. Dieppe, Almaden Is My Life, an oral history interview conducted 1984, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library ,• University of California, Berkeley, 1985. ** There had been before Prohibition. 64 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou; Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Are you talking about 1937 now? Yes. We had been in the vineyards and in the operation as it was. In 1937, as you know, I was still going to school-. But I quit school at that time. In fact, I made the actual drawings for the winery, and I did that in my spare time. We designed the basic plans for the winery. How did you know how? I had taken a little bit of mechanical drawing, and then we had visited other wineries. Cherokee Winery, over in the Lodi area, was a modern winery at that time, so we went to visit Cherokee, and a lot of other wineries, to try to get ideas of what we'd like to have — The three of you? The three of us, studying which would be efficient, and which would be able to make good wine. I can remember that at that time concrete fermentors were the big thing, the most popular. (Of course, they've gone completely out now; it's all stainless steel fermenters.) So we designed the concrete fermenters, and built the concrete fermenters and the building. The first building, I think, was about ten thousand square feet or something like that. We had a capacity of somewhere around 150,000 gallons. Wines and Vines, November 1937, reported, "He will make 10,000 gallons of white, and 120,000 gallons of red." That's right. Imagine the proportion as compared to today! Today we're producing somewhere around 70 percent white. Quite a change. I was thinking, as I drove down, that there are certain parallels between your family and the Mondavi family. Up to a point, your careers are rather 'parallel. You were both in wine, the fathers were both in grape growing — E.A. Mirassou: Actually, both in grape shipping, too. 65 The Brothers Divide Responsibilities Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Yes. And you young men were given responsibility fairly early. The Mondavi brothers seem not to have as dovetailing capabilities as you and your brother have. How did it fall out between the two of you who should do what? It was talked about in the beginning, and actually started out that way, that my brother, Norb , would be the one that was taking care of the business end of it and the ranch operation, and that I would be taking care of the winemaking part of it, and selling the wine. This ties into what I was saying just a moment ago about doing the drawings on the winery itself. During 1937 I actually spent quite a bit of time with Julius Fessler in his laboratory in Berkeley in order to learn how to make the tests on wine myself, the simpler tests, and to learn from him all that I could about handling yeast and making wine. So I spent a considerable amount of time actually in Berkeley, not on a payroll or anything, but just to be able to brush shoulders with a person like Julius Fessler, and to learn all I could from him. Actually, in those days, his laboratory was in the garage behind a house that he was renting. Interesting. Was it known as the Berkeley Yeast Laboratory? I can't remember. I think it was the Berkeley Yeast Laboratory. I'm quite sure that the name was there already. Maynard Joslyn had worked with him. Did you — I didn't know that, no. But I may have met Maynard about the same time. So when we started the winery operation, I was the one who was making the wine, and Norb was taking care of the business end of it and the bookkeeping and the vineyards. It worked out over the period of a year or two, that because I was at the winery , which was near a telephone , I ended up doing more of the business than my brother Norb did, who was spending more time out on the ranch. So I think it was just circumstances that I ended up doing more of the business. Then, as time went on, I continued to do more and more of the business. 66 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Norb fell into the thing that was natural for him, which was both the agricultural end, and also maintenance and repair and designing new equipment, and making equipment work better, etc. He was just a great natural at that, and I would presume that when you were interviewing him that you got from him all of the things that I think were firsts in the industry, and actually steps forward in the industry. He did a great deal of that. I don't think that he took credit for perhaps as much as he should have. He certainly should have because, for example, grapes in those original days were handled in what we call lug boxes, which was a fifty-pound box. He, of course, designed the bins that we use, which are metal bins that hold about a ton. When we decided to go into bins, we had to have something to move these bins. Well, forklifts were the thing to use, but forklifts at that time were made for warehouses with paved surfaces, and that's not the way it is out in the vineyard. He designed and built a forklift that was four-wheel drive and could go as fast in forward as it could go in reverse. Actually, it could go up to forty, fifty miles an hour and was able to go out in the vineyard, pick up the bins, and bring them down to the winery. Then he built an automatic dumper that would take these bins and dump them, and then wash the bins and put them back right side up. He mentioned that these things had been developed. He's too mild a -person to brag about himself. He developed them himself. The same as sprinkler irrigation. It was in 1947 that we first went into sprinkler irrigation, and he was an instrumental part of that. Before that time, sprinkler irrigation was only on pastures, and was not used on deciduous fruit. We started just about the same time as Guasti vineyards, down in southern California. They started experimenting with sprinkler irrigation. In 1947 we started with portable sprinkler irrigation in vineyards. It worked out beautifully, and, as you know, today many, many, many acres of vineyards use sprinklers. 67 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou; Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Did your brother work out the mechanics of that? He did, he worked out the mechanics of it, and the horsepower, and the size pumps, and everything else necessary. He designed in 1960 our first stainless steel fermenting tanks that were jacketed and therefore could be temperature- controlled. He was very instrumental in working on those tanks, in the design of them and the layout. Which again was a first in the industry. Let me go back to the transition from your father's ownership to you and your brother. Did your father actually retire in 1942? Yes, he did retire, although he was still very important in advising us, and he spent some time in the winery. I think about 1942 we transferred the license into our names. In 1943 the name was changed to Peter L. Mirassou and Sons, with you and your brother as owners, according to the federal records. Your father had been sole owner before that, it seems . In 1942 is probably when we were doing the design of how we would make the changes, and I guess in 1943 it officially happened. You had started, however, signing papers earlier. You had your father's power of attorney in 1939. It might have even been earlier than that, but '39, I guess, yes. Nineteen thirty-nine according to the records. Was that because you were just taking over more responsibility, or because he was ill or something? Because I was doing most of the office work. So he just gradually withdrew and gave more and more responsiblity to the two of you? E. Mirassou: That's correct. 68 The Bulk Wine Business Teiser : E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: When you went into your own winery, who were your first customers for your bulk wines? You say the first customers. Are you talking about 1937, '38? Nineteen thirty-eight was the prorate year, if you remember. Yes, of course. You just got in in time for that! [laughs] Right. That wasn't good, you know. Do you remember I told you earlier that the price of grapes before Prohibition was about ten, twelve dollars a ton. The price of grapes in 1937 was eight dollars a ton. So, during that period, grape prices reached a peak of $200 a ton for shipping, and then back down again to eight dollars a ton when Prohibition was over. E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: In 1938 we sold the vintage of 1937, and if I remember right, we sold that to Cribari winery. The whole vintage? The whole vintage. I think we sold it at ten cents a gallon. Cribari at that time was not much better off financially than anybody else was, and we had to wait three years for our money. I can remember that. So it was rather a precarious way of starting out a new venture in the wine business. In 1938 there was the prorate, and so in 1938, in order to crush all of your grapes, you had to buy certificates from somebody that didn't crush them. We did want to crush all our own grapes, so we bought certificates from other growers that did not crush all their own grapes, or the wineries, I don't remember how that worked. That second year we sold the vintage to K. Arakelian. I think that was another vintage that was sold at about ten or twelve cents a gallon. But then he put it into the prorate? No, I think we had to buy the certificates in order to get the wine released. 69 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: But you didn't have to put wine aside to be made into brandy? No. Because that was the certificates we were buying, they were from somebody who did put their wine into brandy. So that brings us up to '38, which was really sold in '39. By that time we were figuring we'd have to do something different. There was no way of making a living at that rate. In 1940 I took my first trip to New York to try to sell wine to bottlers in the East. So at that time I made stops all the way from Chicago, Sandusky, Ohio, all the way into New York City. We had a few contacts, and I stopped and visited people who would buy wine. We would make the wine and do what we called "finishing it" in those days. We'd prepare it for bottling, but we did not bottle. We would ship the wine in tank cars to our customers in the East Coast, and they would bottle and sell, etc. And selling it finished wine, we therefore started to get prices somewhere around thirty and forty cents a gallon, so it started picking up a little bit. 70 II EXPANSION, 1941-1966 Land Purchases E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: In 1941 we also enlarged our operation to a degree. We leased the winery that was owned by the University of California, that was formerly the Albert Haentze winery. We leased not only the winery, but we leased all of their ranch, which was apricots, prunes, walnuts, and grapes. Nineteen forty-one, if you remember, was during the war. We were at that time operating, between that ranch and here, close to 1,500 or 2,000 acres of apricots, prunes, grapes, walnuts, and the winery. We had at that time, then, a smaller winery of Albert Haentze, which had some very nice old cooperage in it. When we made the lease with them, we leased with an option to buy. In, I think it was about 1942 or '43, we actually bought a part of their ranch, and we bought the winery cooperage. That was when Max Huebner came to work for us because Max Huebner had been an employee of theirs. So then we expanded the winery building down here , and we moved the cooperage from the Haentze winery down here. We had additional grapes, and we had these other commodities. We raised as high as 500 tons a year of apricots , plus prunes (I don't remember the exact amount on prunes), plus the rest of the grape operation and the winery operation. We bought 100 acres from that ranch and planted that in '42, '43. Then in 1946 we bought another hundred acres of land adjoining our property, the old original ranch. Where was that? 0> on (0 2 0) c O. M en 3 O cn en T3 C 3 T3 3 C X CO n) OJ jz !-J O 0) C X3 0) 3 X Cft e, 71 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Directly up the road from here, adjoining this property. We planted that in 1946. We ended up — at one time we had about 500 acres here in the Santa Clara Valley that we owned and operated. Then, of course, in the 1960s we started buying land down in Monterey County. Urbanization here must have given you some capital to expand . It did give us some capital, but not until many years later. I told you about buying this hundred acres from the old Haentze operation of the University of California. Then we bought this other hundred acres, in 1946, that was adjoining. Just about that same time we bought another twenty-five acres that we called the Jones Ranch, and another forty acres that was the Vicar i Ranch. We bought all those pieces, and really, out of all the land that we've bought, we've only sold about 100 acres up to date. The balance of it we still have. So even though some of the land we sold was much. higher than we bought it for, we still haven't sold too much of it. Was it hard to cultivate acreage that scattered? It really wasn't scattered too much because, in total, the parcels that we bought were not more than one mile from the original home base here. You didn't have highways to cross? No. We could drive tractors through neighbors' properties. Norb developed deep wells. Water was very difficult to find in this area, but we tried and tried putting down wells until we found a fairly adequate water supply. Between ourselves and neighbors we got together on cooperative ventures as to where we put pipelines, and we had pipelines that were connecting for three or four miles in this Evergreen area. Different people's wells were attached to these pipelines. It was about that time that I got involved on the board of directors of the Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District. We were able to get the Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District to bring a canal into the Evergreen area from the Anderson Dam, which was nineteen miles away. To bring a small canal into the Evergreen area for two purposes, 72 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: both percolation into the underground, and also for surface irrigation. So that again was a deal where we worked very diligently to get the cooperation of neighbors to bring in this irrigation system, and did get a more adequate supply of water in the area. Very good. I remember in the early fifties there were plans for green belt zones. They have what they call green belts nowadays. There was a law that finally passed in the state legislature where you can green belt your land. But it's not a thing that we ever went in for. That's the Williamson Act? The Williamson Act is a kind of green belting. We never did sign up on the Williamson Act for the reason that we figured that with land increasing in value, that it also increased the value of your estate. So if somebody passed away you had to pay the tax on that regardless of whether you sold the property or you didn't. We always figured, and it was a fact, that during that period of time the value that the inheritance tax people would put on the property was highest and best use. If you were in the Williamson Act, you were stuck with only being able to use it for farming. So we wanted to be able to be flexible, to be able to sell land if we had to, to cover any such eventuality. It's been proven since that if you did go into the Williamson Act, you could not get out of it without the permission of the board of supervisors or without waiting out your ten-year period. It's been proven since that in some areas the board of supervisors has not let people get out. So we think we still did it right by not ever getting in the Williamson Act. Yes, you were moving southward. Your sprinkler irrigation system began as a portable system, didn't it? Right.* Then you developed permanent installation? *See pp. 66-67. 73 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Right. When we went into the operations in Monterey County, we then went into the permanent sprinkler system. I'm going to go back, for the record. From the 1940s to 1968, there was the Lone Hill Winery, which was I think operated by relatives of yours. Right, they were cousins. Who were they? They were the children of Herman Mirassou, who was a partner of my dad up until about 1919. Then they split off and were in farming over on the west side of the valley. They had vineyards there. They built a winery over there, and they got into the wine business there also. Were they in the bulk wine business? They were in bulk wine, but they also got into case goods. In fact, at one time I believe they might have been even larger than us in case goods business. Wine Pioneers in Monterey County Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: In the fifties you began your search for new vineyard land. We had to face the situation that either we would stay here and continue to grow grapes to supply the winery, or that we would be willing to call this land expendable and that we would look some place else. So we started looking in the various parts of California. We explored the western foothills of the Sierras. We explored Lodi, we looked into Napa and Sonoma, and we looked into southern California, for an area to plant new vineyards and expand our operation. We were pioneers in going into the Monterey area, because we were the first to plant there. Paul Masson planted about the same time as we did, in a kind of joint venture with us. We found the land for them and we planted the vineyards for them, and we planted our own. That was in 1961 that we bought the land. 74 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: May I read you what Otto Meyer told me recently? Sure. He said Paul Masson didn't want to expand their crushing on Saratoga Avenue because of the residential nature of the area. He had known you, he said, on the Wine Advisory Board, so he knew that you were looking around. He talked to Martini & Prati and Karl Wente and others. Then, when the Winkler report came out, they decided (and you'd been looking before, I gathered — Right.) — to get together with you, to pay you something and help finance your first plantings, because they needed your expertise and supervision. Then, after a while, you decided to go into business for yourself , so then they started hiring people to do the work for them directly. [Norbert Mirassou enters] You remember Norb , of course. Hi, how are you this morning? Hi. Fine. Yes, his story is correct. We were looking, and we had found some land in Monterey. They were interested in also expanding their operation, so we went ahead and used our expertise in the vineyard part of it. And entered into a deal with them where we would plant their vineyard for them and take care of it until four or five years, and get them appropriate vineyard management. In the meantime, we would take their grapes and crush them here, at this winery. Later they built a winery in Soledad, so then we were able to each go our own way. And your experience in San Benito County helped you in that? Actually, Peter and I worked for Almaden Vineyards in San Benito, just for this purpose of learning about growing grapes in an area other than Santa Clara County. Teiser: Why didn't you go into San Benito County yourselves? 75 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: We've always figured, all during our lifetime, that we didn't want to get into an area where there's frost. One of our reasons for not buying and expanding our vineyards into Napa or Sonoma was the same reason. They do get frost. And San Benito County gets frost. We figured, from all the statistics that in Monterey County they wouldn't. - All you get is wind. That's right, we get wind. It's proven, now that the vineyards are twenty-five years old, that there has never been a frost. In the twenty-five years we've never been frozen. We did guess that one right. So that's why we decided to go into Monterey County. Also, San Benito County, the area that we could have planted vineyard was a limited amount of acreage where there was good soil and good water supply and the type of conditions that we wanted. In Monterey County there was a lot of good soil, there was a lot of land that could be bought that would satisfy the need. And that's why we went into Monterey County instead. The announcements at the time said somebody had been making tests of soil for five or six years. I don't think we made tests of soil there for five or six years, but we did go back into records of soil conditions there, and weather conditions. Soil doesn't change much in five or six years, but the weather is what took time to really analyze. I remember there were no statistics on weather between King City and Salinas. That's correct. That's correct. Anyhow, we did do a lot of digging there, and talking to growers that had been down there a long time, and every kind of a statistic we could get. There were temperature records in Salinas and in King City, but not much in between. There were some, but not official records. So it was kind of a gamble. Your brother had a story about going down there and happening to stop at Gonzales, and taking a picture that he brought and showed you. E.A. Mirassou: Oh, you mean of Grapevine? 76 N.C. Mirassou: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: No, that one when I went down there and we had the new car. We stopped in Soledad and I took a picture of the hills and then brought it back, and said, "This is where we're going to build our next winery." Yes, and it turned out right. It was a -beautiful area. That was your brother's first awareness of the area. What about yours first-hand? When we had done some of our research on the temperatures and the soil conditions and everything, then the next thing we did was to get ahold of a real estate man and say, "Start showing us some pieces of property that might be for sale." What made you decide — I don't think it was a decision of mine alone. We talked about these things together. It was a matter of good soil, the prices were right on the land, the water supply was adequate, and we figured the weather was adequate. And it wasn't too far from here. And it wasn't too far from here, so we figured it would be a good deal. At that time, did you have an idea of moving your winery down there? We still have the idea. It's smart to keep the aging and the bottling and the selling here, because there's a better supply of labor here for the bottling, caliber of salespeople, etc. So it was better to keep that part here. But still, eventually, we will probably end up having fermenting and temporary storage down on the vineyards, in that area. Have you found the vineyard labor supply down there to be adequate? Yes, it's adequate. In fact, in many ways more adequate than it is here. There's a lot of farming going on there, and there's therefore a lot of labor for farming. If the person you're employing knows something about agriculture, you can easily teach him how to do the work in a vineyard. Most of our employees that we have there now have been long-time employees, from when we went down there and originally went into the area. 77 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: This is Wines and Vines in August, 1961. It announced your joint venture with Paul Masson and said studies indicate that the area would be in climactic region two. Has it worked out? It's right between two and three. And, "cuttings to be selected," included Chardonnay , Pinot blanc, Chenin blanc, Johannisburg Riesling, Emerald Riesling, Sylvaner, French Colombard, and Traminer. Do you want to comment on those? Those are the correct varieties. And have they succeeded? On the whites, I would say yes, all the way down the line. Have you much Emerald Riesling? Emerald Riesling was put on the Paul Masson property, and they had a label Emerald Dry. We never did put any of that on our own property. And the reds, Pinot noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Camay Beaujolais, Petite Sirah, and Zinfandel. That's correct. On the reds, as you know, the Cabernet has not proven itself as well in Monterey County as some of the others. Pinot noir, yes. There's been some great Pinot noirs come out of the area. The Petite Sirah is beautiful from that area. The Camay Beaujolais is great. But again, as you know, the red wine market is going away, and the fickle consumer is changing its mind about what they want to drink, so therefore we are replanting some of those original vineyards into white varieties. Replanting, not grafting over? No, replanting. Because if you remember, there's been a lot happened since 1961 on the kind of vines that we can get. In other words, we selected at first. We went out and we looked in vineyards for vines that might be virus-free, or that might be good producers or good stock. There was no such thing as certified stock at that time. [Jim Mirassou enters] Hi, Jim. Come on in and meet Ruth Teiser. This is my son, Jim Mirassou. 78 Teiser: J. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: How do you do? How are you? Having an interesting talk here. You wanted something? [interruption] #1 You know, we weren't the first in Monterey. The mission fathers planted some grapes there. That's right. [laughs] And also there was a little vineyard there. What was his name, Norb , Mantes,* or something like that. And he had a little winery. It was almost in a barn, but it was a little winery, and he had about twenty acres of vineyard. And then the Chalone Vineyard, up on the bench, was there. There was no winery there, but Chalone Vineyard was there before we bought land. But Chalone Vineyard we couldn't compare with our operation, because it was completely different. It was in the same county, but that's all you could say. And the little Mantes vineyard was non-irrigated, the vines were half dead, and that was no comparison, either. Could you tell from it though that it had potential , that if it had been handled right it would have been — Not from those grapes, no. A better indicator was a few of the old farmers. There was a lot of Swiss farmers, and they all had a few grapes planted around their little gardens. We could tell more by looking at those grapes because they were better taken care of than any of the existing vineyards down there. The rainfall in Monterey ' s Salinas valley is too short for a vine to grow healthy without some supplemental irrigation. Going through dry years and wet years, the best way we could tell was the people that had ten or twelve vines on their garden fence. So we went by that to a great degree. We asked those people, "Can we pick some bunches and test the sugar at different dates?" So we judged accordingly. *William J. Mantes, near Soledad. 79 Mechanical Harvesting amd Field Crushing Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: An article in Wines and Vines , August 1961, mentioned, "a new concept in wine production" with the equipment: "200,000 gallons of stainless steel storage tanks, and 55,000 gallons of stainless ferment ors, all portable. This will make possible the fermentation and initial storage of the fermented wine outside the actual winery building and will make possible the movement of the equipment, along with portable presses, to the new vineyard when it starts producing, so that winemaking operation can start right at the vineyard, without the need of transporting the grapes." [Before we built a winery in Monterey County] we developed mechanical harvesting. The mechanical harvesting changed the picture because now you were not moving grapes to the winery, per se, we are moving juice to the winery that is already protected by both C02 and S02- Mechanical harvesting combined with the field crushing — Yes. With the field crushing because as soon as we went into mechanical harvesting, we went into the field crushing. Now, this last year we've gone into field pressing. Did you know that? A portable press. Yes. You'd want to talk more with Peter about that because he ' s handling that part , and I haven't been too involved in it. But on the red grapes that we are making into white wine, or some of the white grapes, like Chardonnay , that we want to handle very delicately , we are field pressing with a portable press right at the vineyard. We mechanical harvest and then field press. This is a paper, and I don't know what it was prepared for. It's in the Wine Institute files. It's your description of your mechanical harvesting development. It's a good paper, and I thought that if we could include that with the interview, it would explain a lot of things. Do you want me to read it over? [interruption in All right, tape] It'll stand? Yes. It lookes like it's very correct. 80 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Do you remember how you happened to prepare it? I don't know. It was dated April, 1971. We'll just add it here.* Do you have anything to add to it, especially? E.A. Mirassou: Not particularly, it covers it pretty well. Teiser: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: W.A. Mirassou: Good. Bottling the Mirassou Wines The whole sixties were busy for you, weren't they? Yes. You were increasing your acreage down in Monterey County, and the younger members of the family then were coming into it. The fifth generation,** yes, How was that worked out? on interests? How did you ever decide how to pass It's really a part of the teaching of our father. He allowed Norb and I to get interested in the business at a young age, and to get into it in such a way that we could be a part of the family operation, and yet have an individual operation. So we did the same thing when the fifth generation was coming along. For example, we have two vineyards in Monterey County. One is called Mission Ranch, and one is San Vicente. San Vicente we bought in 1962, Mission Ranch we bought in 1961. San Vicente is the larger; it's one section, 640 acres. But when we started San Vicente, we told the fifth generation, "Now, if you're interested, this will be in your name. You pay the bills, you buy it, and we'll just help you along." They said, "Yes," so they did it. *See appendix. **The term is based upon the arrival in California in the 1850s of maternal ancestors of the Mirassou family, the Pellier brothers, who are considered the first generation. MM**» This vineyard harvester-crusher was developed by Mirassou Vineyards under the direction of Peter Mirassou in the Salinas Valley. Photographed in 1970, 81 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: That was in 1962. The first couple of vears they were not able financially to plant it; they raised potatoes and they raised other crops. Then in 1964, 1965, they started planting vines, and in 1967 they finished planting their vineyard. In 1966 is when the fifth generation said, "We think that Mirassou should get in the case goods business. So Norb and I said, "Okay, if you want it to-be your business, we'll help you get started." So the case goods business is really their business. I know from Robert Mondavi that you helped him get started. How? Co-signing a note. How did you happen to do that? We in the wine business are a little different from people in other businesses. He was always a friend of ours, he needed a little backing temporarily, and we said, "Fine," so we did. Did he, in turn, help your younger men? He came here and did some consulting with our boys in '66, '67, and helped them in trying to properly market the wine. He helped us in tasting the product , to make sure we were putting a good product on the market. So Bob was very helpful; he spent quite a bit of time here in advising the boys and getting going on the bottling business. You think of competition in the wine industry, but there's also a lot of cooperation. That's correct. Absolutely. Looking back over the bulk business — August Sebastiani said that when he realized that other people were winning prizes with his wines, he thought of getting out of the bulk business. And the same thing with the senior Wente, the first Carl Wente, who said that of the 1915 exposition, other people were winning prizes with his wine. Did that occur to you, or did the impetus come from your young people? 82 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Yes, I think it was more from the young people. They thought we should get into the labeled case goods at that time, and we couldn't very well disagree with them. We knew that it was a money-hungry business and would take a lot of time, but we did agree with them that it was time. So we backed them, and they went ahead , and they did it . They pounded the pavement, and they wore out their shoes, and did the job. It's not easy to establish a brand — No, it's not easy. But now it's been done. We're now in practically all of the states. Our case goods is there, monopoly states and all the rest of them. When you made the switch, did you start making different kinds of wines than you'd been making in bulk? No, not really. We've had to make the switch, of course, of going into more and more white wine. But, you know, there again we were, I think, fortunate, not smart. When we planted the vineyards in Monterey, we thought at that time that sparkling wines were going to be very important. Sparkling wines, the great preponderance of them are white wine. So we planted those vineyards with about 60 percent white grapes, in the original planting in the early sixties. Were you going to put your Pinot noir into sparkling wine, too? We didn't think about that at that time, but of course we do that now. But anyhow, we were fortunate in planting 60 percent white. It's turned out that, even though sparkling wine is picking up now, it didn't pick up in the last twenty years that much. But the switch did come, within the last five, six years, to white wines. It turned out that we were pretty fortunate. I know that you have a long history of making sparkling wines , I guess beginning with Max Huebner. E.A. Mirassou: Right Teiser: Has this been more of a hobby interest for all of you, or actually a commercial interest? 83 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: It started out as being almost a hobby. We used to play with making a small quantity of champagne. There again, you talk about people in the industry helping people in the industry — Kurt Opper and Hans Hyba are two of the people , along with Ollie Goulet, that gave us most of the knowledge of what we have about champagne making. Hans Hyba and Kurt Opper were with Masson, and Ollie Goulet, of course, was with Almaden. They all gave us a lot of advice. If we had a problem we'd call them, and they'd tell us what they thought we had done wrong. So it started out on a very, very small quantity, and then we just kept increasing it and increasing it. Two years ago I think we were selling about ten thousand cases a year, and we're intending now to get up to about thirty, thirty-five thousand cases a year on champagne. We have the champagne now on hand , it ' s made and ready for sale. Different vintages, of course, but we have right now over 100,000 cases in inventory. So we're ready to really get out there and sell, and it is going very well, especially considering the price, because the price is quite high. Are you making several different styles of champagne? Yes, we're making a Brut. We're making an Au Naturel , which has no dosage added. And we're making a Blanc de Noir, which is a white champagne out of Pinot noir. And we're making a new one that we're just coming out with, which is what we call a blush champagne, or a pink champagne. We had a pink champagne years ago, but pink champagne was not popular then. But right now pink champagne is becoming popular again. What are you making it with? I don't know what they're using in that right now. I remember pink champagne was quite popular in the late thirties. Do you remember Paul Masson 's Eye of the Partridge? Oeil de Pedrix? Yes, yes, that's right. Nothing's lost forever, is it? That's right. 84 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Have you found making champagne to be more technically demanding than other wine? No, I think once you get the knack of it, it's just the same as other wines. What it really takes is that tender loving care. In other words, you've got to do the same process, the same time, the same way. Yes, we're using the bottle process. Not transfer? No, no. It's the hard way. Winemaking is very much like that whether it's still wines or champagne. You've just got to get your formula of how you do it, and then keep on doing it, and of course watch the quality and the type of wine that's going into the product. If you move your operation to Monterey County, would the champagne cellar go there? It could very well be. One of the ranches down there has got a hill on it. We're going to just dig into the hill and build some caves there. That could very well be. That would be interesting. Now we're getting up into the recent history of the company. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: The Fifth Generation Takes Charge When was the Mirassou Sales Company established? The fifth generation established their partnership in about 1962, or '63, with the vineyard, San Vicente. And then they actually got into the case goods business in '66, as Mirassou Sales Company. Now no longer are Steve Mirassou or Don Alexander in that partnership.* They have been bought out by the other partners, and the partners are now Jim and Peter and Daniel [Mirassou]. And actually, Daniel is the president of that company right now. *The change was announced in January 1984. 85 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: N.C. Mirassou: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Each of them has his field of expertise? Right. And Daniel is really still mostly in sales and marketing. Jim is dealing with the bankers and the government, and accounting and bookkeeping. Peter, who was just in charge of the agricultural operation, is now in charge of production in the winery also. How did the two young men happen to get out? Norb and I are only two people. So if we had differences of opinion we would debate the matter, and one of us would win, and we'd go forward. But when you've got five young men that are all energetic and intelligent and able-bodied, you've got five opinions. So it isn't always easy to convince one or the other that this is the route that the company should take. Therefore, they finally decided that it might be better if they went on their own, and the other three would remain in the company. That doesn't mean that you won't have Steve or Don in another wine business in the next few years, it's just a matter of them deciding exactly what they want to do. They may not get back in the wine business, but I think Steve is really getting back into it already, isn't he, Norb? To some degree. To some degree. So you just can't tell how it will work out. As you can see, Norb is still very intimate in the business, even though the active part of this business is still carried on by my three boys. But we're still working together just like it was before. Have the two of you gradually shifted more responsibility to the boys? Yes, I would certainly say that. They are taking care of more and more of the details; we're still involved in the — we're really two separate companies. Would you explain it? 86 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Yes. Mirassou Vineyards is a separate company from Mirassou Sales Company. Mirassou Vineyards owns some of the vineyards, and Sales Company owns some of the vineyards, and they're all dovetailed together. Who owns the production facility? Norb and I. The fourth generation owns the winery facility. And who owns the bottling facility? The bottling facility is the fifth generation. It's all in the same building. Their wine is stored in our winery, etc., back and forth. They own the wine? They own the wine. Actually, we usually own it until December 31, and about December 31 we sell the wine to them. We buy the grapes, and we crush them, make them into wine, and then sell to them. It must have taken a lot of figuring out, how to do this. Yes. And they have kids, I assume. Oh, yes, there's — what — fifteen in the sixth generation. So we're trying to convince a few of them to become doctors or lawyers or shoemakers or something else. When you and your brother were coming into the wine business, it didn't seem so glamorous as it does now. No, in fact it was absolutely a different story. If you remember, in those days, in 1937, the Internal Revenue Service considered wineries legalized bootleggers. I mean that's really what they considered them. We had to pay the tax on wine before we could ship it. We had to go down and buy the stamps in advance and put them on the containers before we could ship. Finally we convinced them that we were legal and we were able to pay the tax every two weeks. Really, the way the inspectors came out here and inspected the wineries, it was just like the inspectors that took care of bootleggers three years before. It was really quite a different business. 87 E.A. Mirassou: When you went to a restaurant it was almost difficult to buy a bottle of wine in those days. To get a martini or a highball was no problem, but to get a bottle of wine was difficult. To get a good bottle of wine was very, very difficult. To get a bottle of beer was not too difficult, but wine was just unheard of. You never walked into a restaurant , even of the best caliber restaurant , and had a wine glass sitting on the table, waiting for you to order. It's really changed around now. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: You were saying that Prohibition didn't necessarily hurt the grape growers , but it surely hurt the wine market . It certainly did, and it also brought up a generation of people that didn't know how to drink wine. So we're just beginning now to get back to the point where people again can appreciate wine; I mean the consumer. We have lived through that age that you just brought up. Prohibition itself was only fifteen years,* but the effect that it had on the American people is still lingering. You know we've got state laws all over the country; you've heard us talk about that. The reason for our trade barriers, and the problems that we have in this industry, is primarily a hangover from Prohibition. There's just no question about it. It's amazing the degree of improvement that California has made on the quality of its wine in this last fifty years. Considering that other countries have been making wine for four hundred, five hundred years or longer, the amount of improvement that California has been able to make on its quality is amazing. I remember the wines that were out immediately after Prohibition, and they weren't an awful lot to brag about. I should ask you a little about the nursery business. I know that you were in the nursery business by the seventies; had you always sold vines? There again you go clear back into our history. Before Prohibition, right back to 1856, when Pierre Pellier, my great grandfather, went to Europe to bring back cuttings of both the prune and grape vine. Then again, when phylloxera hit this country, we actually really went into the growing of resistant root stock. At that time it was Rupestrls St. George. Actually it was my dad's stepfather [Caselagno] that went to Europe at that time and brought cuttings back. *July 1, 1919 to December 5, 1933. 88 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: They rooted those cuttings, and then sold vines to people that had a problem with phylloxera, which was almost all over the coast of California. Then again, we were in on the early stages of the certified vines, because we had been working very close with the University of California and Dr. [Austin C.] Goheen. So actually when we planted the San Vicente Vineyards, we planted five acres of each variety that we were growing at that time, of certified root stock. That was all we could get. It was a very large planting at that time of certified root stock. So we were some of the first that had certified root stock growing that we could then sell to other growers. In the seventies, when the big splurge came for planting vineyards in California, we were selling up to several hundred thousand cuttings a year of those certified root stocks. So we were really pretty large in not so much the nursery business at that time as in selling cuttings. Do you continue that? We're still continuing that. That's primarily again an operation of the fifth generation. Peter takes care of that. But that is part of the operation, yes. Something also that I should ask you about — the events that you have here at the winery. You have quite a vigorous program. I can't tell you much about that. Maybe Norb can tell you more about that than I can. That is one thing that I don't spend much time at. I know that we have over 100,000 visitors a year that come to the tasting room. That's not business people that come to visit the winery, but just for the tasting room. And they're having events here all the time. How did this get started? I don't know how it got started; it just grew, like Topsy. Who decided to cook dinner for guests here, for instance? Oh, I would probably blame that on Daniel. I think that Daniel is the one that got the idea someplace along the line. Whether it was his idea directly, or whether one of the staff in the tasting room thought about it, I don't know. We had to get somebody to cook here for lunch because we were so far from any place to eat. From there it just grew, and that's it. 89 Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: N.C. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: And you have tasting classes, and all kinds of things. They've got everything. They've got big chefs from San Francisco come down. They keep doing things that are just to bring people in. Is it also an additional source of income or is it just publicity? Let's put it this way: up until very recently, 90 percent of it was publicity. Suddenly, I think we're going to change. I understand that there is a new cook coming in , and she is being hired by us, instead of hiring a caterer to come in, and so all of the profit that the caterer's been making, theoretically we should make. That's the theory. [laughs] We'll find out if it works. I think you've mentioned them a little, but would you summarize the future plans for the organization? Future? We're going to expand champagne, we probably will be, one day in the future, building the fermenting and temporary storage down at the vineyards in Monterey. Which vineyards? Either San Vicente or Mission, probably San Vicente. And continue the business as it is with some expansion. fi You are now going into white Zinfandel? Yes, the white Zinfandel. Even though some wineries were into it from the '83 crush, we were into it for the '84 crush. Wasn't Sutter Home in it earlier? Yes. It's going along beautifully. That's what we call a blush wine, and there may be other blush wines in the future. If you remember the book Future Shock, there's probably more changes that take place in this world now in five years than there used to be in fifty or a hundred years. In a business like this, even though it is a business that's traditional, even though we've been in the business for a long time, in order to stay in the business you have to 90 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: swing with the times. So we have to be flexible, we have to change as changes are required. We have to satisfy our customers, and I'm sure that we'll make every effort to do that. Do you think that the trend toward lighter, fresher, younger wines would have been so strong if it hadn't been so much to the winemaker's advantage to foster it? Oh, I think so. I think this public nowadays — if you notice even on a toothpaste, or on a package of Wheaties, the way they sell them is every once in a while they put the word new on there. Probably the changes are so minor that nobody can even detect it. But the modern consumer likes something new, a change. I think also that it's a real blessing to the industry that white wines became popular and these blush wines are becoming popular, for the reason that they've allowed wineries to notice, "We want something different." I'm not saying that the old customer that likes the red wine isn't completely right in the fact that it is a great wine, but the young public doesn't want that kind of a wine. They want the kind of a wine that is pleasant right now, particularly during the social hour. The cocktail hour is out, and the social hour is in. And the social hour is a pleasant, light wine, and I think it's here to stay, no question about it. I don't think it's the efforts of the producer, even though it is more economical because you don't have to hold it so long. I think it's really the wineries being viable enough, and flexible enough, to produce what the consumer wants. Wineries have been, in general, pretty good about passing on lower costs, haven't they, so that their white wines and blush wines have tended to be lower priced? I'm not sure that they're just generous in that. It's a matter of the economic circumstances, and it is a competitive business. You've had so many changes. For example, the increase in acreage planted of vineyard, the increase in the number of wineries. Ten years ago there were 250 wineries, in round numbers, in California, and maybe twenty wineries in the rest of the country. Today there are over five hundred 91 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: in California, and over a thousand in the United States, and every one of those wineries is trying to get shelf space, and that's a little bit difficult. So the wine business is competitive nowadays. But maybe it's good for us; maybe we'll develop some new customers out there that will be very helpful to us in the long term. Next time may I go into the marketing orders? Okay. I know you've given much of your time to them. 92 III GROWTH OF THE CALIFORNIA WINE ORGANIZATION [Interview 2: April 19, 1985 ]## The Wine Advisory Board Creation, 1938 Teiser: Today we are to discuss marketing orders. I've given you some notes based on my research. I tried to find in Sacramento a transcript of your testimony at the hearing before the first wine marketing order in 1938, the one that created the Wine Advisory Board. E.A. Mirassou: You were asking me [before the taping began] why the transcript didn't show my testimony. I was not a scheduled speaker of the day, or a witness. I was merely in the audience. At that time I was nineteen years old, and I had never been to a formal hearing before, so I didn't know exactly the procedures. But I did have some ideas that I wanted to express. I was trying to express those ideas by asking questions of the witnesses that were on the stand, and at the same time expressing my opinion. Of course, I suddenly found out that that's not the legal way to do it. You can only ask questions of the witnesses that are on the stand, but you can't make statements for them. So finally somebody suggested that I take the stand and be a witness, and so I did. I took the stand, and I was a witness, and I therefore expressed my viewpoints: that I thought the industry did need such a thing as the marketing order, and I was certainly in favor of it, and I gave all my reasons why. So I ended up being a proponent for the program. 93 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: In short, what were your reasons why? The reasons were that — we reviewed in our last session that prices on grapes, although they were very high during Prohibition, here, now in 1938, Prohibition was over for five years, and the prices of grapes were still depressed. And the prices of wine were still depressed. The industry at that time, I think, was selling something less than 60,000,000 gallons a year, and I thought that a program that we might raise a few millions dollars, and advertise, and promote wine would do some good. I felt that it was necessary, and I thought that the only way it could be done was in a cooperative effort that the marketing order could accomplish. Were there some people testifying against it? There were some , but it was really a limited number that were against it. I don't remember exactly how many were against the program, but the majority that were there were testifying in favor of the program. What was there against it? I think it was kind of the idea that people were almost naturally suspect of a government program, and this was a government program; it was a state marketing order. State marketing orders — if you remember, the Marketing Order Act was in 1937 — were not very old at that time. There had been federal programs before, but for a state program, it was something very new, and so people were wondering if it would work, if it would function properly, and if it would accomplish the mission. Did you have any knowledge of anyone like the tomato growers or pear growers who were using state marketing orders? Again, because I was so young, and so unaquainted with the matter — I don't remember which ones they were, but I think there were some other agricultural commodities that were already in effect. You had a pretty good idea of the wine industry as a young man , then . 94 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I think maybe it's because my attitude usually is positive. So I think it was working the same direction that day, too. So the order was passed. It was passed. In that initial order, all through the minutes there were mentions of assents to the program by volume and by winery. In the first one was it both by volume and by winery? I think the marketing order has not changed in that respect. It still requires a majority — I think it's either by volume or by number of wineries. You were not yet active in the Wine Institute, but as I understood it, the Wine Institute was, in general, for such an order. The Wine Institute was not only for such an order , but the Wine Institute was really the primary proponent, and the members of the Wine Institute. The Wine Institute, if you remember, was organized in 1935, and so they were a few years old, and they recognized the need for additional dollars to do the promoting work that the Wine Institute in itself was not able to raise. So the marketing order was the vehicle that was perfect for the requirement. The hearing we were speaking of was said to have been to discuss industry advertising funds and adjusting the supply of wines to market demands through an aging program. Now, you're sure you're not mixed up with one of the other programs? No, that's what it was supposed to be, but I don't think they ever got on to an aging program. No, and I know there was a lot of controversy, and it even could have been some of my testimony at that time. We did not want a program that was restricting quantity, and that certainly was my thinking. In marketing order programs there are two real schools of thought: one is to limit production in some artificial way; the other is not limiting producting, allow production 95 E.A. Mirassou: to go on freely, but to promote the product and increase sales. Either one of those things can cause a better economic situation, but I have never in my lifetime been in favor of curtailing production. Unless it would be very temporary because of some false, outside influence, and not just the natural, usual economy. I don't know whether it was even allowed in the marketing order to have curtailment of quantity. It was only a matter of promoting to increase sales. Teiser: I think that's what it developed into, anyway. E.A. Mirassou: Right. Teiser: The next year Harry A. Caddow, manager of the Wine Institute- who then became active in the Wine Advisory Board — E.A. Mirassou: Right. At one time, he was manager of both. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: He reported in 1939 that several million pieces of advertising and publicity material had been put out. He didn't report on any other programs. I can remember other years , later , because generally we renewed the marketing order every three years. There was once during the life of the Wine Advisory Board where we only renewed it for one year. But otherwise we renewed it usually for three years. Many times during those years we did go out and have to pound the pavement, so to speak, and speak to people, and recommend that they vote in favor of the program. There was a twofold purpose there; not necessarily that the marketing order would have failed without that extra effort , but we always wanted the marketing order to not only pass by volume, but to also pass by numbers of wineries. We felt that it was good, politically speaking, to show the Department of Agriculture that it was wanted by the majority of people, not just the major volume. In those days , we did do an awful lot of talking to people to convince them that they should vote in favor of the program. On this first time around, in 1938, again I was so young, and so unaquainted with the situation, I did not do an awful lot of contacting other people. There were other people that did contact me, and I did recommend a yes vote. 96 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: * Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Were the large wineries against it? Roma, for instance, and Petri? Gallo was against it, Arakelian was against it, and there was at least one other — • Louis Martini. That's right, the older Louis Martini was against it. Those three at least were against it among the larger operations. The Roma people and the Petris and the rest of them were in favor of it. Gallo wasn't so large then. Gallo was not that large then, that's true. Petri and Roma and Fruit Industries too, I suppose, large ones. were the Right. They were the large entities, growing pretty fast in those years. Although Gallo was There was actually a lawsuit brought against Gallo by the marketing order. They withheld their assessment? And they withheld their assessment, that's right. So that was a couple of years in court before the final decision was made. Of course, that's all changed around because in the ensuing years those people became some of the greatest backers of the Wine Advisory Board. I was not on the board until 1941. I do remember that they kind of picked out the representatives on the board to represent different districts in the state; they didn't want everybody from one location. And a little bit with respect to the volume of business that was done in the various areas. If you remember the name Albert Haentze . Albert Haentze had a winery in this area; he owned the winery that at a later date became operated by the University of California, and then at a later date was bought by Cribari. Excuse me, the Cribaris bought the land, but we bought the winery and the equipment, which was of course not too much later. Actually in 1942. 97 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Albert Haentze, in these early days, in '38, was the member, on the advisory board from this district. How were they chosen? Who chose them? A's I remember, it was more or less of just a group of the industry sitting down and talking it over and mutally agreeing. What did the director of agriculture have to do with it? It was just a recommendation to the director, and then the director made the final appointments. But, generally speaking, the director went along with the recommendation of the industry unless there was some conflict or there was somebody else that was fighting for the position also. Then he had to weigh both sides of it and would make the decision. But generally speaking it was a recommendation from the industry . Were there often disagreements about who should be — In all the years that I was involved with the Wine Advisory Board, I don't remember that. Even on the new marketing order that's in effect now, the Winegrowers of California, among the vintners that are on that group, they vote by districts for their members. But the vintners, it's by a committee recommendation to the director. It's not by actual voting. If it works — Yes. Early Work Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Then, really beginning with 1941, you had an intimate view of the matter. Right . At the September 12, 1941, meeting, you were introduced by Mr. Herman Wente as a new member of the board, along with Mr. John Daniel, Jr. What did they talk about in the meetings in that period? 98 E.A. Mirassou: Again, you're taxing my memory. One of the things was the Thompson Seedless. It was what we called a three-way grape; it could go into the wineries, or it could be dried, or it could be shipped fresh. It was always the grape that was called the bad boy, because it could be the one that overloaded wineries, or it could be the one that shorted the wineries if the raisin market was good or the fresh shipping market was good. The fresh shipping market did not vary that much from year to year, but when the Thompsons were made into raisins because there was a big demand for raisins, that would really short the wine industry. Of course, now, if we're talking about the forties, with World War II starting there was a government demand for raisins as a food product , and the market went sky high on raisins, which therefore shorted the wineries. The wineries were very, very short then. So there was always a lot of discussion at these meetings about how you handled the raisins, and what could be done about them, or whether they were going to be short or long. That was one of the subjects that was talked about frequently. The other, of course, was, "How do you promote wine?" Now, I'm talking not of a particular year, but over a period of years. We started out doing a lot of advertising in Wine Advisory Board, and promotion. At a later date the wineries felt that the brands could do the advertising and let the industry do the generic promotion: the general pushing educating people to enjoy wine. Advertising was then discontinued by the marketing order and was allowed to be in the hands of private brands. We then, [the Wine Advisory Board] got into promotion of different kinds of wines. For example, the competitive types of wines were the least promoted, and it was felt that if the more expensive wines, or the premium wines, were promoted, it would do the total industry some good. That, of course you can understand, was not necessarily the feelings of everybody, but that was the feelings of some. There was a premium wine program that was started on a promotional basis: tasting; TV, not as advertising, but TV as a PR program. In other words, industry members [representing premium wineries] would be invited into TV interviews, et cetera, and it certainly did do good. So then, of course, the rest of the industry wanted to get on the bandwagon. 99 E.A. Mirassou: You refer here, in your notes, to some of the discussions that were had at the board meetings by various members of the industry, including the Gallos and some of the rest of them. One of the points of contention, so to speak, was we were dividing the industry by promoting different calibers of wine. By that I mean different price brackets. Of course, you have to understand that wine was a product on the market, on the shelf of the grocery store or the liquor store where there were many different price categories. When you came to canned peaches or peas or bananas, there was very little difference in the price of the best, or of the least expensive. There might have been a two or three cents a can difference, where in wine you had variations all the way from eighty cents a bottle up to five dollars a bottle, even in those days. And perhaps it's even more variation today. Those things were some of the problems that we had to overcome. There were diverse interests of the industry. You had some people that were raising grapes in the San Joaquin Valley as compared to grapes being raised along the coast counties. Cost of production was much higher along the coast counties, and they had to bring a better return per ton or the people couldn't stay in business. It was the same with a bottle of wine. Generally speaking, the more expensive wines came from along the coast. So we had very diverse interests, and it's amazing that we were able to get along as well as we did, and it did work out. There was another division in the industry that we haven't mentioned yet, but it's a good time to mention it, and that is some of the wineries produced the spirits, brandy and high-proof concentrate, and other wineries didn't; they just produced wine. Of course in those days, you have to remember, too, the largest sale in the industry was on dessert wine and not table wines. Table wines were, I believe, less than 25 percent of the sales at that time. As time went on, and as promotion educated consumers to enjoy table wines, table wines increased in their sales, and dessert wines started to lose their market. So, there again, that was another different kind of thinking within the industry. But again it did all work out. 100 Trade Barriers Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: What about trade barriers? Trade barriers, of course, were common to everybody, so a trade barrier that hurt one person hurt another. If you remember, there were quite a few states that were monopoly states, and I think there's only seven left today. But at that time there were a lot of states that were what we call monopoly states , which meant that all the alcoholic beverages were sold through the state stores. If a winery had a particular state that it was signed up with, and the state was accepting their wine, they didn't want that opened up for everybody else; they wanted to keep it that way, with a limited number of wineries being able to sell in that state. So I can remember some of the arguments about that. At that time, we were not in the case goods business, and so my viewpoints could be much more tempered, and much broader than some of the other people who were involved with it. But those kind of arguments did come along. Was there any feeling, early on, that the industry organization should not be in trade barrier work or lobbying? Now, there's a difference. When you're talking about trade barrier, you've got all these different states and foreign countries with either a tarrif or some kind of an artificial barrier that curtailed the sale of wine. It could have been an abusive tax, or it could have been limitation of quantity, limitation of brands. They're all trade barriers. Lobbying is a word that semantics can give a different meaning. If you were talking to a particular legislator, and trying to convince him that our viewpoint was correct on knocking down the trade barrier, I don't know whether that's really called lobbying or not. Perhaps it is lobbying. The word lobbying, I think, over the years, has perhaps changed its meaning to some degree also. If you're paying a legislator some dollars to be convinced of your way of thinking, then I'm not calling that lobbying — No, I wouldn't either. 101 E.A. Mirassou: But it may still be knocking down trade barriers. You can be sure that over the years much of that had to be done. That kind of an action could not be done by the marketing order dollar. From my knowledge, I maintain that it was not done with marketing order dollars. That would have to have been done with private dollars , but not with market order dollars. But because of the fact that the whole industry was working on knocking down these trade barriers, then sometimes a contribution to a particular legislator was construed to be Wine Advisory Board funded. As long as we're talking about it, we might just as well bring up the problems that we had with the state in the early days with the Department of Agriculture, as well as in the late days, to separate those two activities. And to be sure that any dollars that were spent from the Wine Advisory fund were dollars that were appropriately spent. We really did have to spend great efforts on our bookkeeping to make sure that these accounts were kept separate. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: What was valid trade barrier work, then? the legislators? Just talking to Teiser: Talking to the legislators and educating them as to the values of wine. Again, we have to go back and remind ourselves that we still have some hangovers from Prohibition today. There are still some parts of the country that are not necessarily accepting wine as the drink of moderation and a drink that should be used with food, as it is accepted in foreign countries. Europe, for example, figures that wine is a part of the daily diet; in this country, there are still people who do not feel that way. Certainly in those early days there were parts of the United States that had never consumed wine and didn't intend to ever consume wine, at least individuals. So there was a real education program to try to convince people that it was the pleasant and normal way of life, and it was a good way of life, and it was the drink of moderation. So those were the efforts we were trying to make. Was there also legal effort — Mr. Jefferson Peyser's office — challenging restrictive laws? 102 ' E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Absolutely. That was one of the big works of our trade barrier work, to challenge the laws that would be hurdles and obstacles to our selling of wine. For example, when the twenty-first amendment came along, which ended Prohibition, the twenty-first amendment was brought to court and there was what they call the Brandeis decision. The Brandeis decision was an interpretation of the twenty-first amendment, which said that each — ## — the Brandeis decision. The Brandeis decision said that each state had its own ability to regulate alcoholic beverages the way it wanted to. Of course, our industry, and the distilled spirits industry, and the beer industry, has never agreed with that decision. I heard a very interesting talk just recently by an attorney who has spent his life in constitutional law. He said that, from history, about every thirty years decisions that are made concerning the Constitution change because people's thinking changes. The Constitution really should be an instrument that depicts and validates the opinions of people, and the feelings of people. So he was saying that pejrhaps now, or at some time in the near future, would be the right time to change the Brandeis decision, or get that decision changed. So we're all still hopeful that some day that will happen. And that would simplify, because that would be one fail-proof action that would solve our problem of having to work against trade barriers in each individual state. Did the Wine Advisory Board, from the beginning of your service on the board, engage in trade barrier work? As long as I can remember, they did. You may say this, that the Wine Institute was doing trade barrier even before the Wine Advisory Board. It was a matter, really, as Wine Advisory Board became a vehicle, then it was really a matter of how much of this work could be done by Wine Advisory Baord funds. So, certainly, trade barrier work was done right from the time the Twenty-First Amendment was passed until the present day. 103 Public Education Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: There was also a dealer service program. I think we had at one time up to twenty-one dealer service men throughout the United States that were hired, directed by the Wine Advisory Board. They were to contact individuals, retail stores, grocery stores, if they were handling wine, and they were to contact consumers of wine whenever they had an opportunity to. We even developed several movies that a service man would take around to clubs or other groups that would get together and have meetings, and they would play this twenty- or thirty-minute film. A lot of wineries did do a great degree of that also. At the same time, we were producing a lot of point-of-sale material and posters and other display material, and these dealer service men would take this material around and make sure that it was placed, and it wasn't ending up in some wholesaler's back room. We had little hand-out leaflets that would describe the various kinds of wine. And in the late forties we got into the varietal wine and started describing the different varieties. Of course, dessert wines were always an important part of those little leaflets, because dessert wine was one of the best sellers in those days. And we got into a great deal of wine cooking. If you remember, we came out with, I think it was six or seven cook books that were put out by the Wine Advisory Board. The interesting thing is this, that when the Wine Advisory Board discontinued, we sold the rights to those books to some private company , with royalties that would come into the Wine Advisory Board. Those royalties are still coming in. In looking over those pamphlets, I was impressed by their information on wine with ordinary foods. I keep wondering whether the big push now for wine with fine foods is as useful as it might be to the whole industry, contrasted with wine with just plain food. 104 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: We went through different stages , and there were some stages where we were pushing wine with the fanciest of dinners , and then there were other stages where we pushed the use of wine with just ordinary hamburgers or hot dogs, or whatever. Also, we got into wine coolers at one stage of the game, I don't remember exactly what year, but we promoted the use of wine over ice with a soft drink poured in with it. It didn't make too much of a splash, but it might have introduced a few more people to drinking wine. That was particularly true of the dessert wines, and it was used to a great extent. There's another point that I think was very important in the history of the Wine Advisory Board , and that ' s what we call the Wine Study Course. The Wine Study Course was a series of little booklets. It was a correspondence course. It was very simple. It was basics about wine. It talked about the alcohol content, and how wine was made from grapes, and that it was a natural product of the grape , and it was to educate the consumer, let him know something about wine. The people would sign up for the course — I think it would cost them a dollar , or something like that , which was not even covering our expenses at all , but it was a promotional item. And then the people would read the booklet , answer a questionnaire, and send it back to Wine Advisory Board. We'd correct it and give it a scoring. Then when they had finished the three or four books, whatever it was, and they had passed the course, we'd send them a certificate that they had passed the Wine Study Course. I still have mine. There was one for consumers, and there was another course for retailers, I believe. I'm not sure that we had one for restauranteurs . I not only got a certificate, but I got a little pocket-size card. That's right, a little pocket-sized card for your wallet. There were hundreds of thousands of people that signed up for that Wine Study Course. In fact we're talking about getting it started again with the Winegrowers of California. 105 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Amazingly, some people know so little about wine; although that's greatly improved in 1985 as compared to forty, fifty years ago, it still is something that people are interested in. I gave you a clipping from Wines and Vines in 1944, about a meeting to consider renewing the order. There was a high- powered group of people there. Was there anything special about that hearing in July, 1944, which preceded the next three-year extension? I don't remember anything that was particular about the 1944 extension from 1938, three years would be 1941, and this would be the second extension. There was a letter from Mr. W.J. Cecil, the director of agriculture, giving everybody hell, in effect.* When you've got a director of agriculture that did not under stand wine, and did not understand the problems of the trade barriers of wine — . Again, they were always suspecting that we were using Wine Advisory Board funds in such a way that they should not be used. We always had to continually convince them that we were using the funds appropriately. So that was a constant problem with the Department of Agriculture. They were doing their job to make sure that we were expending the funds appropriately, and we were doing our job to do the best job we could to knock down barriers. In his letter, Mr. Cecil objected to certain practices, as you say, suspecting that gifts were being given, and so forth, but also indicating some dissatisfaction with the contract between the Wine Advisory Board and the Wine Institute. I gather that was always a point of some little suspicion, too. Staff Members E.A. Mirassou: I think one of the problems there that developed was at the early stages of the operation of the Wine Advisory Board. The industry was trying to be efficient, and save money. *The letter is in the minutes of the Wine Advisory Board. Addressed to Harry A. Caddow, manager; it was dated March 14, 1944. 106 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: We thought that since the Wine Institute was such a large contractor of the dollars that Wine Advisory Board was spending, that: rather than having a manager for Wine Advisory Board and a manager for Institute, that if we had one staff to a great degree, it would simplify life and save us some money . So we did that. Harry Caddow was the manager of both. The state felt that that was a conflict of interest, and that it was a matter of the two organizations being too close, and that it was not appropriate. So somewhere along the line there we had to split the staffs. I can't remember who it was that came in as the first manager of Wine Advisory Board, but I think it was Eugene Jackson. He had previously been an employee of Wine Institute, but we made him the first manager of Wine Advisory Baord. Then, at a later date, we brought in Ed [Edmund A.] Rossi, and Ed Rossi was there for many years as the manager.* Then after Ed Rossi it was Dan [D.C.] Turrentine and then Werner Almendinger. Was Leon Adams much of a factor behind the scenes, or anywhere? There was no question about it; Leon Adams had creative thinking. Leon Adams was probably the mastermind of Wine Institute, and Leon Adams no doubt was the mastermind of Wine Advisory Baord. Leon Adams, in the early days, was very much the instigator, the creative thinker, of many of the programs — I'm sure the Wine Study Course, and the dealer service men and many of those programs were the creative thinking of Leon Adams. There's no doubt about it that the industry owes Leon much.** Probably one of the reasons why Leon Adams was not involved in Institute or Advisory Board for many years even after he retired from those services was because he was just too *Edmund A. Rossi, Italian- Swiss Colony and the Wine Industry, an oral history interview conducted 1969, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1971. **Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industry, an oral history interview conducted 1972, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1974. 107 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou; influential, and some people criticized that. But what the industry owes Leon is far beyond what he ever received from the industry. No question about it. I know that he's an enthusiast and people felt that maybe he had had too strong a say; is that it? I would say too much influence. It was hard to ever expect him to be in an important position without exerting his influence. And so there were some sweeping curtailments of certain phases of the operations. Was he a factor in the curtailment? Well, only as I have described it, that some people didn't like his actions any more. Activities, 1951-1970s Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: I have a release here from the Wine Institute about a meeting in Modesto on June 25, 1952 to consider a marketing order for grapes. "Today's meeting was held under the auspices of the Grower-Vintner Committee for a Grape Quality Program," which had been organized at a similar meeting earlier that June. "Quality grading of grapes for wine will go far toward eliminating the annual average excess grape production," the proponents stated. I don't remember too much about that particular program, but 1951, if my memory serves me correct, was one of the years of depressed condition in the wine industry. So, whenever you run into an economically depressed condition in the industry, then everybody tries to think of ways of picking it up. So a grape quality control would be something that would eliminate some grapes going to wineries, and would therefore relieve some of the surpluses. I don't think that program ever got off the ground. In the Wine Advisory Board minutes of July 9, 1954, the day you became chairman, the board met in executive session and suggested a variety of reforms. And this was just after there had been a hiatus. The order had dropped in June, and was picked up again in July, 1954. 108 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Your notes here made that statement, and I've been trying to figure out what did happen. I don't know how it could have been discontinued in June, because it would have taken the sign-up of the people involved, of all the wineries, in order to discontinue it, and it probably would have been discontinued at the end of June, June 30. Maybe it was this, that there was a new sign-up for continuation, and maybe we asked for an extension of time on the amount of time to get the sign-up. It might have been one of those years where we were not cautious enough to count noses, so to speak, before the final count was done, and to try to estimate whether the marketing order would be signed up or not. Or everybody was too complacent. So probably what we had to do was to ask for an extension of time by the Department of Agriculture, and then go out and talk to a few wineries to sign that just had complacently ignored it. Not that they were against the program. I think I remember something like that happening one time, and that was probably it. So it took us nine days to get the additional signatures, or the volume, and then the marketing order was back in business again. Were there points of issue about the assessments during that period? Always, but it was not a major matter. The history of it, from the time that we first started making our collections to the time that we finally ended up with two cents a gallon on dessert wine and one cent on table wine. That was the highest rate we ever did collect. It wasn't a great deal of difference; it was not more than one cent difference. There was always discussion on it, of course. I don't think we ever went down with our rate of assessment; it was always a gradual increase, but not any major increase. So sure, there was discussion all the time, because, naturally, this money was coming out of the wineries' pockets. This July 9, 1954, memorandum from the board executive committee says, "For the first time in several years the marketing order for wine had been made effective by the department on the basis of gallonage of the wine prepared for marketing, rather than on the basis on the numbers of wineries." 109 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: That might have been just because it went that way that time. It was probably still either /or. It was reported that vintners' assents to the marketing order by July 2 , when the order was issued by the department , totalled approximately 70 percent of the total gallonage. That's like I was saying. When we found out that it wasn't sufficient, which was probably just at the last minute, the easiest way to do it in a hurry then was to get volume. So we talked to a few people that had put it over in the corner and forgotten about signing up. So that particular year we went for volume , because that was the fast way to do it.* Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I see. In this same memorandum it was suggested that "the board itself retain the function of issuing publicity releases covering its own activities." That means because they were probably issued by the Wine Institute. So somebody was objecting to that and wanted the board to do it directly. I gathered from this that there was some feeling that the board should be handling more of its own affairs, and the Wine Institute less. And the state was saying to us, "You shouldn't contract the bulk of your dollars out, you should handle them directly." The same discussions are being had today at the Winegrowers of California.** We've got an industry organization, which is Wine Institute; we've got a growers' organization, which is CAWG [California Association of Winegrape Growers] , and we did have American Vineyard Foundation. So the discussion was, "Should we contract with these existing organizations that are in the industry, or should we have programs carried out basically by the staff of Winegrowers of California?" What we are finally coming around to, just by kind of evolution, a certain amount of the work is being contracted through Wine Institute, a certain amount of the work is being *See also pp. 121-122. **Created by marketing order in 1984. Edmund A. Mirassou became chairman of the board. 110 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: contracted through CAWG, none of it is being contracted through American Vineyard Foundation, and a large amount of the work is going to be done directly by the staff of Winegrowers of California. It ' s working out , but it ' s always a debate whether you use an existing organization in the industry that ' s had some experience, or whether you do it direct. You feel you're safer in using existing organizations? E.A. Mirassou: Yes. In 1956 the same kind of questions were raised by Mr. Ernest Gallo, who suggested that the board review its objectives in order "to clearly understand what we're trying to do... review expenditures of the past three years to see in what areas we have been spending effectively and what areas we are spending money ineffectively and are not realizing our objectives. .. [and] determine how we should spend our money." Let me explain it. You're talking about 1956 now, and by that time, Gallo was paying a large portion of the total assessment that was being paid into the Wine Advisory Board. One of the things you have to admire about the Gallos is the fact that they, again, want to be efficient, and they want to know that things are done right. It's not just with Gallo but with a lot of people in large corporations. One of the things that brings about efficiency is to have a housecleaning about every five years. You kind of really analyze everything you're doing, and you don't just complacently go on and continue to do it just because there's nobody really complaining about it. I think that that was really one of the things that was happening here, at that meeting, and it was nothing greater than that, or more earthshaking than that. It was just a matter of, "Time to shake up everybody a little bit, and let's cut out the dead wood, and go on again." Running a corporation, or an industry organization like this, a marketing order, it's very much the same as Mother Nature growing a tree. When you plant a young tree, it has the kind of problems of the fact that it's inexperienced, and it's young, and it's tender, and it's easily breakable, etc. But when that tree Ill E.A. Mirassou: gets sturdy and grows up, it has a different kind of problem then, and that is the dead limbs that are in it, and the overcrowding. So a little pruning is good all the time. Then you get some new growth and some new wood , and some new ideas. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.M. Mirassou: I assume that every so often questions recurred throughout the life of the board. Yes , and not necessarily the same questions , or by the same people. But primarily it was a matter of always trying to improve and not allow the organization to go stagnant. Which I think is good. It's good to sit back and look at yourself in the mirror and say, "What can I do to improve?" It's a positive attiude, and I think it's good, and it's probably one of the things that made the Wine Advisory Board results as prolific as they were. It wasn't just Gallo that did these kind of things, or that brought them up, either. Bob Mondavi was one of the great ones for bringing up issues and saying, "We've got to change, we've got to do something different. We've got to spend more money in these directions instead of those." I still call it creative thinking. Bob [Robert M. ] Ivie was another. Bob Ivie, from Guild, had a great deal of creative thinking, again, that would change direction of where we were going, and try to do something else better. So all those things are part of the game. We haven't discussed the medical research. Medical research was one of those projects in the field of research that the Wine Advisory Board started early and did a great deal of work with Dr. [Salvatore] Lucia, Dr. [Milton] Silverman, and many others of course. There were two avenues, really, on medical research. One avenue was what you might call putting out fires. When somebody accused wine of having some toxic materials or some ill effects on people, we had to do medical research to disprove that , if it was an incorrect statement. The other was just constructive research in medicine, of what the benefits of wine could be that were not yet recognized. Maybe some of those benefits were recognized by Italy or France, or ancient people, but had been forgotten, and had just been assumed it was part of wine but never detailed or specified. So all of this work was very important. 112 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I remember a lot of the work of Dr. Lucia was merely going back and getting old documents, and re-reading them, and picking out the fine points of the goodness of wine, and what it did to the benefit of the appetite, the benefit of correcting insomnia, all these other benefits that we, who had grown up with wine, had accepted but never documented. So there was a lot of this kind of work that had to be done. There was a lot of new research that had to be done to find out more. Were there vitamins in wine? What kind? All the rest of these things. So we now have quite a library of this work that has been done over the last thirty , forty years that we are making more and more use of. There have been times that the industry felt that we should not exploit this knowledge that we have of medical research, or the results, because we were afraid that news media might pick it up and interpret it wrong, or that someone else would interpret it in some wrong way. We did allow doctors themselves to talk about the results that we had found with our research, but we didn't want to say it as a wine industry. I'm not sure today that that's the way to go. It could be very possible that today we of the wine industry should be able to say, "Our product is this good, and these are the good things that it can do. And that the alcohol in wine does not affect the human being the same as it does if it's in the form of distilled spirits of some kind." I think we ought to blow our own horn a little bit more about that, but that's my opinion, and I'm not sure that the industry feels that way about it. But I think they are coming more and more around to that. It has come up again recently. That's correct. It's before us again now. I think we will be able to convince the world again that our product is a good one, and that it is a drink of moderation, and that it is healthful. By the 1960s research. you were also putting money into viticultural Oh, yes, viticulture and enology, both. A lot of that was done through the University of California, or Fresno State University, or other universities. 113 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: It all looked as if, by the sixties, the industry was becoming more prosperous. The sixties went along nicely and prosperity reigned; the industry was gaining momentum and was selling more wine. And then 1974, '75, came along, and there were some tough economic times. At that time, funny thing is, white wine was the surplus. It was the one that you couldn't sell or give away, and now, ten years later, we're back into some rough going again, and it's really the red wines that are the surplus. But it was an advantage to the winery, because you didn't have to age white wines so long in the winery, so you didn't have to carry them so long. You could crush and sell early. The consumer didn't keep it too long, so you had the advantage, then, of turning over your product, and the consumer using it and asking for more. So that all was, I would say, a good trend for the industry, but not necessarily for the person who really appreciates good, old red wines. Throughout this period, in general, except for the mid- seventies recession in the wine industry, there was evidence of increasing affluence. I assume that that had something to do with why the wine industry, through the Wine Advisory Board, felt able to fund research, and also able to fund an oral history series, which was a very fine thing for it to do. Because we got interviews with people who — That would have been lost otherwise. Would have been lost completely. So it looks like it was very prosperous at that time, and I trust it will be again. Yes. We had a growth rate of somewhere around 10, 11 percent a year, particularly on table wine, that was increasing, which was a very, very good sign. It may have been too good a sign. I guess whenever people get too affluent, they're heading for a crash, and the industry did the same. In the seventies, if you remember, everybody was planting grapes, and it looked like the end would never come, that we would have enough grapes for wine , and particularly good varieties. So vineyards were planted. That was the day also when the limited partnership and outside investors came into the industry. Up until the end of the sixties and the seventies, this was a fairly close-knit industry . It was old timers that were in the industry. I mean, basically, fundamentally; there were newcomers, but mostly they were old-timers. The 114 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: only other outside influence that came in was in the forties, when the distilleries came in and bought wineries. Some of them bought wineries and just had them for a few years — it was five to ten, fifteen years — and got out. Some of them remained in the industry, and some of them became a real part of the industry and are still in the industry today; the distilleries I mean. But in the seventies you had a new breed coming in, which was investor money. Venture capital is what they really call it nowadays. Tax- Tax shelters, venture capital, and limited partnerships; those are the three items that were used. Limited partnerships don't have to be bad, and venture capital can be good. At the rate the industry was growing, it was almost necessary to have some outside dollars come in, and that was all good. But the point was that the type of person who came in had been accustomed the rest of his life to investments in the stock market where he watched day by day. He always got his report at the end of the year or the end of the quarter , and what he really looked at was the bottom line. Was the stock paying a dividend, was it making a profit? The history of the wine business is not that way. You have a cyclical business; the cycles give you great profits, and then you have losses, and then you have great profits, and then you have losses. It's quite different than the person who looks at the bottom line all the time and as soon as he has a loss for six months or a year, why, he sells the stock and takes his losses and gets into something else. That can't happen with a person investing in the growing of grapes; you have to be able to weather the storm; you have to be able to go through these tough times. So you had a kind of person who was really not mentally adept to this kind of a business. The wine business and grape growing is a money-hungry business; it's a business that demands a great deal of dollars and long-term investments, and it seems like even when it's growing it just demands more and more money . Then you had another fact that came along. In the late seventies, on top of the investor dollars that were at that time a great deal of the investment in the industry, you had 115 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: the interest rates start climbing. Then you had a third factor, the value of the dollar. Before, the highest interest rate that we heard of was 6 percent. I can remember the first time we talked to a bank or an insurance company and they said, "Now it's going to have to be 8 percent." We debated that for a year before we would take any 8 percent money, because we thought that was terrible and that we couldn't stand it. Now I wish we had taken a whole lot of that 8 percent money. So with the interest rates going up, even up into the double digits, 20 percent, and et cetera, that really put a strain on the industry, particularly many of those new ventures. Then you have the other factor of the high value of the dollar, which made it inexpensive, relatively speaking, for the American dollar to buy imports. The imports were making a good profit where we no longer could because of the value of the dollar and the interest rates and all these other factors we're talking about. So, again, you have the situation now where there are a lot of vineyards that aren't making it. There are a lot of vineyards that are not being financed by banks this year; although you have to remember also that ' s not only true of grapes and wineries, that is also true of agriculture in general. And it's true of agriculture all across the United States. But the value of the dollar and the high interest rates have an effect on that whole field. Over the years , did you ever compare the wine industry with tomato marketing orders , or pear marketing orders — did you ever think of it in terms of comparison with other commodities? I never did particularly, and I don't know who else might have. The marketing order was a tool that we were using in our industry, and we again felt that our industry was a little different than others. See, I've always looked at it, and I think the industry has looked at it — when our consumption of wine in the United States is two and a half gallons per person, as compared to other countries being up to fifteen, twenty, twenty-five gallons per person, we had so far to grow if we could just convince people that it was good and it was good for them and it was the drink of moderation, that if we just doubled it to five gallons per person, it would be wonderful. Wouldn't have enough land. [chuckles] 116 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Right. Well, I think we would; we'd figure it out some way or another, but I mean it would be fine. So we were working on that, and it was growing along very nicely. California's up to five gallons per person, a little over that I believe, right now. But it is not yet happening to the total United States. So really, in a way, we were not concerned about the tomato problem. I think tomato consumption in the United States is pretty high as compared to the rest of the world, or at least close to it. So there were different kinds of problems. Really, in a way, when you're analyzing this thing as we are now, it may be true that we have not yet, in this country, found the wine drink that the public really wants. You can see the way the switch has been taking place, from dessert wine, and from red table wine to white table wine, and now the new coolers on the market, and the low-alcohol wines and the no-alcohol wines. Maybe we haven't yet found what our consumers want. Maybe we're still floundering, as an industry only fifty years old, as compared to some other nations four hundred or a thousand years old. So maybe we are still trying to find the kind of grape product that our consumers want. So maybe we need a little more time. That's an interesting thought. The coolers of today, are they so different from the pop wines that went up and then down? Well, yes. Primarily lower alcohol content. I'm very encouraged by the fact that the modern consumer wants less alcohol in his drink. That's a wonderful thing to have happen, because that proves that our consumers of today are getting away from the influence of Prohibition. Because during Prohibition, everybody wanted a quick shot, a small quantity that was going to be effective. So now this is a trend completely to the opposite direction, which I think is great, and I think it will be more of moderation again , where you can drink a larger amount of it with not having an effect. You know that the studies have shown that as the human body takes in alcohol, the effects are much less if time is a factor in there. When you get the lower alcohol wine, you are naturally going to be consuming alcohol at a slower rate per hour or per day, so I think all of this is a trend in a good direction. 117 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: You know, if you go back again to Europe, the wines that were consumed every day over there were not 12 or 14 percent wines, they were 8 or 9 percent wines. And often cut with water. And often cut with water. In fact, my dad used to drink wine and put water in it. [interruption] If the public taste had stayed with dessert wines, the whole structure of the industry would have been different, wouldn't it? You make about half as much dessert wine per ton as you do table wine. There seems to be a trend toward some increased interest in dessert wines now. Not volume; volume's still going down. I don't think there'll be a resurgence. There seems to be an increase in interest in brandy. Yes, and I do expect an increased interest in champagne, sparkling wines of all kinds. It is happening, and I think there will be a continued increase in interest in dessert wines. There are some of our wines nowadays in the industry (for example our own Monterey Riesling) that is bottled with a small amount of CCU pressure, very, very small amount. We call it "spritzy," and there are quite a few wines nowadays that are being bottled in that way. There's another new one that's coming along, and that's the success of white Zinfandel. I mean, it's a phenomenal thing, I don't know whether you read the numbers on it or not. u Yes. We can't produce enough. Is that right? And it's just fantastic. It's a very, very nice wine. Again, it's the swing of the public. I like to call them the fickle public, but I don't mean that in a derogatory manner, I think it's just a matter that the public today is not afraid to tell you what they want to buy. And they tell you by buying E.A. Mirassou; Teiser : E.A. Mirassou: 118 what they want, and not buying what they're not interested in. They don't buy it just because somebody else said to buy it, but they buy it because they like it. So if they like white Zinfandel, great. If they like white wines, great. If they want coolers, great. We'll make what they want. Doesn't this more or less put the wine industry with the beer industry, which it hasn't been? I don't think so, I don't look at it that way. I'm not sure that the beer drinker, in general, is ever going to become a wine drinker. I think there's a lot of other tastes in there that are different besides just the lower alcohol content. So I think the wine drinker wants wine. But legislatively, say, or in other ways, not in an appeal to the public. Yes , I can see what you ' re talking about there , but actually the breweries and the wineries haven't gotten along that well legislatively. I don't think either one of them's trying to get along that much better with the other. Today? Yes. So I think there will still be a separation there. There are some issues that we do fight together but, generally speaking, I think wine is another product. The wine industry has an uneasy alliance with the distilled spirits industry. The beer industry has no alliance, however, with it, does it? That's correct, and they don't necessarily think like either one of the other parts of the industry. The distilled spirits people who came into the California wine industry — as I remember, when they came in in the forties, they had the same problem that the investors had later. They didn't understand the wine business either. E.A. Mirassou: Not all of them, but some of them. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou at the bottling line, 1979. Photograph courtesy of Wines and Vines 119 Teiser : E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: As they came back, or stayed in, they were not like the big California wineries, nor were they like the little California wineries; they were a group in themselves. Or were they — To express my opinion, I can't quite agree with you. They were never outside the industry, as a separate, autonomous group. They were always a part of the industry, but they maybe had some other influence on their thinking that was a little different than an old-time wine company, or just a wine company. And you could understand that because they had other investments and other incomes that were much greater than what they were receiving from the wine industry. So naturally those other investments had to influence their thinking . So I can understand a lot of their thinking, and I don't blame them for it. It's just a matter of which viewpoint you have. There are some issues that we're completely polarized on, that we can't ever think exactly alike on. But yet there are a lot of issues that we can think alike on. I think that , on those kind of issues , sometimes even within the distillers' organization, there's difference of thinking among different people. I would say that we really get a great deal of cooperation from the distilleries, generally speaking. Every once in a while there's an issue that comes up that's a real problem for us to think alike on. So we have to get over that hurdle, and we do usually. We're in the middle of one right now, but we'll live through it. I see why you're a good chairman. [Mirassou laughs] Leon Adams told me that, I think about a year ago, Seagram's had a dinner and invited many industry leaders , and that the Seagram's people indicated that they were going to go their own way. They were telling this to the wine industry leaders, and you got up and said, "We're all in this together," or words to that effect, which you're just saying now. Yes, I remember I heard some comments after about it that were favorable. But I even heard those kind of comments from the distillery that gave the party, so apparently it was acceptable. No, again, like I say, there are times when their thinking has to be different from the rest of us, and there are times when they cooperate 100 percent. 120 Dissent and Discontinuation, 1975 [Interview 3: June 6, 1985 ]## Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Let me go back to a couple of things. At the last interview you said that two people — you gave them as examples, I think, you weren't saying they were the only ones — on the old Wine Advisory Board had very creative ideas ; Bob Ivie and Bob Mondavi. I failed to ask you about the kind of creative ideas that they contributed. Bob Ivie did a lot of work on international trade and was actually appointed, I think it's by the president's staff, to a kind of a trade commission.* He spent a lot of time in Washington on international affairs concerning not just wine, but trade in general. Of course, Bob Mondavi was always very creative in his thinking, and was one of those who proposed — [ interruption] You were saying that Bob Mondavi always had creative ideas. Yes, he was one who really pushed for public relations on the premium wine, and that's what it was called at that time. In fact , there were two or three public relation programs that we had going. One was for premium wine, one was for the more competitive wines, and there was some other class in between there. I can't remember it now, exactly what it was, because that was quite a while ago. But anyhow, they were good programs that really got started. Then a few years later all the PR programs were united into one, just wine in general. But they were successful and, of course, still a great deal of that's being done today by the industry. There was some pressure to stop the special program for premium wine? There was, because you suddenly get in the industry some cross- purpose thinking, when you start dividing the industry, and so I think it was good that it all got back together and became one program. *Robert M. Ivie was appointed by President Ford to the Public Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations in 1975 and reappointed by President Carter in 1978. 121 Teiser: I recently looked again into the State Department of Agriculture records of the 1954 Wine Advisory Board renewal.* The first order was for 'three cents and one-and-one-half cents, and it was turned down. Shortly after, the assessments went back to two cents and one cent. E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: Yes, two cents and one cent. But it was passed the second time, for the first time in some years apparently, on the basis of gallonage rather than by winery . E.A. Mirassou: That's understandable, too. That doesn't necessarily mean that it couldn't have passed also by numbers of wineries. But it's always much faster to do it when you just have to get the volume, the number of gallons. So I'm sure, in that case , what was really happening was everybody was really in agreement , but rather than go out and almost pound on doors to get the number of wineries, because that's always a difficult thing — not that people were against it, it was just a matter that they put it on the corner of their desk and forget to sign it and send it in. If you didn't vote affirmatively, it was a no vote. In other words, if you didn't mail it in, it was automatically a no vote, because you had to get that number, 65 percent, or whatever it was, -in the affirmative. So if the person did not vote, it was a no vote, and if you just went and talked to them or phoned them and said, "Get that assent in," they probably would do it; it was not a matter of anybody being against it, or not any large number of people. It was probably the large wineries that were objecting to the increased amount of the assessment. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Why was the Wine Advisory Board dropped in 1975; what were the factors? Even as recently as yesterday, the board of the Winegrowers of California had a meeting, and the State Department of Agriculture was represented at the meeting by Lynn Horel. She made a slip of the tongue in making a statement, and said, "The industry raises its own funds." *See pp. 108-109. 122 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: I called her on it in a joking manner, and I said, "I agree with you, Lynn, they are industry funds, but," I said, "the state keeps telling me they're public funds. Once they're collected they're public funds, they're not industry funds any longer." She laughed, and I laughed; and that was really one of the reasons why, in 1975, that we dropped the program, because the industry always felt that we were putting up the money , we were paying the assessment , and that it was therefore industry funds. The state attorney general, some number of years earlier than 1975, had come out with a statement, and his findings were that all marketing order funds were public funds but they were to be generally earmarked for that industry that raised the funds. Now that went along fine as long as we had an administration in the state that was friendly. But the administration that was in office at that time — and we might as well say it was the Jerry Brown administration — was not necessarily as friendly as it had been in the past. So at that time the industry figured, let's raise our own funds independently and on a voluntary basis, and we won't have any complications with the state. So we did it. The idea at that time, I think, was that the Wine Institute should then take over functions. E.A. Mirassou: That would be a natural. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: How did it work out? The Wine Institute, during the life of Wine Advisory Board, was contracting with Wine Advisory Board to do a lot of the work anyhow. So it was just a matter of Wine Institute continuing to do most of the projects that it was doing for Wine Advisory Board, and do it with its own funds instead of with the Advisory Board funds. Now, because of the discontinuance of Advisory Board, there was somewhat less dollars raised on the voluntary basis than there was on the compulsory basis of the Advisory Board. Even though the rate was the same, somewhat less dollars were raised, so therefore we had to curtail some of the activities, but not too many of them. 123 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: So the work did go on during the ten years ensuing. And actually, as the industry grew in volume, in total gallons that it sold, the income became greater. So we were up to 3.2 million dollars a year on Wine Institute funds alone at the end, which was last year. Was there any feeling that the people who weren't members of the Wine Institute were getting a free ride? Naturally. Any time that somebody's paying a bill and somebody's getting the protection of the work of the industry, and were not paying into it , there has to be that feeling of getting a free ride. There weren't actually too many wineries that were not in the Wine Institute during that period of time, but the part that hurt was they were pretty large, Heublein being one of them. Then there were some other smaller wineries, but Heublein was the big one that was not in. The Winegrowers of California and The California Association of Winegrape Growers Teiser: E.A. Mirassou; This brings up something that I guess comes up in connection with the Winegrowers of California, which you are again chairman of. When they were trying to put it through, there were national companies which also had distilled spirits interest who seemed to be against it. What was the rationale there? That was Almade'n that was completely against it, Heublein was against it, and Seagrams never took a big stand against it but they were not exactly for it. So they fought against it, and they tried to align votes against the program and did a lot of letter writing and everything, to stop the sign-up of the new marketing order. But still the program won. There were lawsuits right after it was put into order, by those companies, to try to stop the marketing order, but even the lawsuits lost. There is still one that is pending today. It's a small one that's being brought on by some grower, but it's being handled by the same attorneys that handled it for the large companies, and that has not been settled yet. 124 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: I remember that United Vintners was on the fence. They were on the fence for a period of time, but we talked to them and convinced them they should vote for it, and they did vote for it, I believe. Yes, I think they did. They came out for it, anyway. They came out for it, but I don't think there's any evidence of how they voted, because that's private information. But I understand that they were for it at the end. I think their problem was the dollars. More than the idea of the marketing order, it was a matter of their pocket book. Were there others against it? Those were the major ones. When the marketing order did pass, as we were designating the members that should be on the board (the eighteen growers and the eighteen vintners) , I was one who was very positive in my attitude that those wineries, although they were against the marketing order program, should definitely be represented on the board. And they are represented on the board. Since that time, they have all come into the fold, so to speak, and are working very cooperatively with the rest of the industry. The preliminary work that went into this was done by a state committee? It was a task force appointed by the lieutenant governor.* It was a task force for the wine industry, and Walt [Walter] Minger was the chairman of that task force. That task force, again, had growers and vintners on it, and that task force worked for about a year-and-a-half to figure out what could be done for the industry in general. Then the growers were proposing a marketing order without vintners. Not necessarily without vintners, but they were proposing a marketing order for themselves. The task force took the responsibility of trying to smooth out the proposal of the marketing order, and how it was written, so that vintners would not object to it. *Edmund A. Mirassou was a member of the task force. 125 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Finally, right near the end, which was about a year ago now, it was decided that maybe the best thing to do would be to fold it in together and make it a grower and vintner marketing order. So that was agreed to by the task force. It was proposed and passed. There is a separate grower organization, is there not, still. Yes, that's the one that's called CAWG. [California Association of Winegrape Growers] Was that for it? They were for the grower alone marketing order, and they were also for the combined marketing order. So, on the whole, the industry was pretty well together? Yes, it was pretty well, except for those wineries we mentioned. I don't understand a lot about large, national companies, or multi-national companies, but I especially don't understand why they would enter a field and not back it. Well, I think that's fairly easy to understand. Sometimes something that you're doing for the wine industry is not necessarily good for the distilled spirits industry or for the importer. Because after all those same companies do have imports that they're bringing in, and so that's understandable. Sometimes probably within their own company they have different people that wear different hats, and so I would imagine that they, within their own companies, do not always agree. So it certainly is understandable that they would disagree with the wine segment of the industry. I was recalling today the price structure of wines versus distilled spirits. In the 1930s, wine was cheap, distilled spirits were comparatively expensive. Now there must not be much difference, bottle for bottle. It depends which caliber of wine you're talking about, of course. And which caliber of spirits, but I think there's more difference in the wine. For example, for six or seven dollars you can get a gallon or more of wine , if it ' s in a large enough container , and you can get , in some cases , that price or more for one bottle. That's got to be five times as 126 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: much for the same price, or maybe ten times as much wine for the same price. I don't think you have that degree of difference in the distilled spirits. Of course, one of the reasons is the taxes. They are such a large portion of what you're paying for on the distilled spirits. But the distilled spirits have not gone up in price as wines have, it seems to me. I think over the years the price of distilled spirits has gone up pretty much in comparison, or relatively equal. However, if you took your more expensive wines, then there's been a greater difference, and one of the reasons is because the American consumer has recognized the difference of quality wines, and therefore a great value. And the wine writers have written about it, I think, to a much greater degree than any writers have written about spirits. I think over the years the price of distilled spirits has gone up pretty much in comparison, or relatively equal. However, if you took your more expensive wines, then there's been a greater difference, and one of the reasons is because the American consumer has recognized the difference of quality of wines, and therefore a greater value. And the wine writers have written about spirits. The new organization, the Winegrowers of California — how did it go? It was voted in last August, but the fiscal year is July to July, and so the first year is not a full twelve months, and the first year will be complete at the end of this month. Then what? The program goes on for another two years. So it would be a total of three years. I've seen announcements that you are doing trade barrier work. A great deal of trade barrier work. There's really three parts of the program. One is market development, which is promotion along the lines of public relations or advertising or anything like that that would promote the sale of wine. The second part is reducing the problems of trade barriers within the various states and also internationally. Then the third part is research and development. Has a large portion of your funds gone into research and development? In the first budget, research and development was a half a million dollars. 127 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Out of how much altogether? Out of about four million dollars in total. It was a half a million dollars, the trade barrier work was a little over a million, and the market development was about 1.6 million, if I remember my numbers right, off the top of my head. Then there was about 300 or 400 thousand in administration of the program, and the balance was a reserve. You mentioned Mr. Walter Minger. about him? Could you tell a little Walt Minger was a very highly respected person that worked for Bank of America for many, many years, and his last position with Bank of America was vice-president in charge of agri-business internationally. So he spent a lot of his time in his last few years with B of A traveling into other countries and taking care of the business of Bank of America. And also trying to help other countries establish banking systems. Walt Minger retired. I forget exactly when that was, but I think it was about last September, or somewhere along there. We thought that he would be a great person to be our first executive director of the Winegrowers of California because he had worked so diligently on the task force and had brought growers and vintners together to work together. So he was the executive director. Now, when he took the position, he took it under the understanding that it would not be permanent, and that his time would not be full time, because he didn't want to completely give up the consulting work that he was doing for other companies, including Bank of America and other people. In fact, right now he's on a mission for the State Department. Malaysia. He's on about a three-week tour right now, and I'm sure that his services to the Winegrowers — he's already told us that at the end of June, it'd be over. The Winegrowers have appointed a committee to search for a new executive director, and yesterday I think we found one. The board has to pass on a new executive director, which will be on — June 28 is our next meeting.* *Robert E. Reynolds was named to the position. 128 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Are you doing anything specific about wine imports? You make that sound as though we're positively doing something to help the imports. No. [laughs] No, we are not doing anything at this moment. There's another organization that's called, I think American Alliance of Grapegrowers , and Frank [R.] Light is the chairman of that group. Bob [Robert P.] Hartzell is on that group. Following the results of I think it was the GAT negotiations of several years ago, also some acts of Congress, the president had to make a report concerning imports every so often. They are bringing their case to this international trade commission and trying to prove that the imports are coming in here unfairly because they are subsidized in those countries, et cetera, and all the other reasons why it's unfair competition. And that it is hurting the American grape grower. So Winegrowers of California is supporting that movement to the tune of $150,000. The Wine Institute Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: May I ask about the Wine Institute during your association with it over the years. What has been your main contributions through the Wine Institute, do you think? What has been my contribution? Yes , your own personal — I don't know. I kind of always think that maybe I'm one of the kind of people that can bring different factions together ' and have them agree. I think that might be more my contribution than any other particular activity. When there were disagreements among the different interests, I think I was one of the people who was able to bring them together and maybe bounce their heads a little bit — maybe joggling is the right word — talk them into getting along with each other and working for the common cause. 129 Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: E.A. Mirassou: Over the years, has the weight of power within the Wine Institute changed? I'm thinking, for instance, of the shift from Mr. Caddow and Leon Adams to the present system of a strong, permanent head. Who ' s the strong permanent head now? John De Luca. I don't think he's any stronger or any more permanent than Caddow or any of the others in the past. There were times when somebody might have only been in there for a year or two as the top man. And John De Luca's only been there ten years now. II I think John De Luca's done an excellent job. John De Luca's the kind of a person who does what his board of directors tells him to do. But in the meantime, it's his obligation to gather the facts and to present things to the board that should be done, regardless whether it's about trade barrier or public relations, or whatever it might be. So John De Luca has been great in gathering the facts. He's gotten a direction from either the board of directors — but you've got to remember the board of directors is ninety-five people or something like that — so it was probably directions from the executive committee, which is about twenty-five or thirty people. And he's carried out those instructions and those directions. If anybody, you might even say — and I'm sure you've heard it, because I've heard it — that the Gallos have got all the power, and that they completely control John De Luca, or that some other faction in the industry has all the power. I believe that that's not true. I mean, the Gallos have leaned over backwards to do things for the industry that are good for the small wineries and the big wineries both. The Seagrams have done the same. Other large factors in the industry have been active. I do not think that it ' s a one-way street. I think Bob Mondavi has had just as much as an influence on the direction that Wine Institute has taken as any of these other people that I've named. I think I've been able to have an influence on 130 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: the direction and the activities of the industry. I think that Bill [William A. ] Dieppe of Almaden Vineyards — I think everybody's had their input, and I think everybody's had an opportunity to get their voice heard and to be listened to. There is a communication that ' s happening in this industry, and I don't think that it's any one-sided operation. If it had been, I would never have remained as active as I am in the industry. It's always been this way? Oh, you've had, at times, where one faction may have pulled a few more strings than others, but it hasn't been for too long a period of time. Those kind of things, the industry's been accused of, but I've been pretty well in the inner workings of the industry all this period of time, and in my opinion I don't think it's so. I think it's been a pretty fair industry. And I don't think it would have stayed together this many years if it hadn't been. I think just the mere weight of super-powers would have broken it down. After all, Wine Institute is a voluntary program, and even the wine marketing order, which is compulsory once it's in, is for a limited period of time, and it could be thrown out. So I don't think there are those kinds of power plays. I mean, there are efforts along those lines, but I'm amazed at the fairness of the people that could be a big power. There's no question about it in my mind. Wine Institute's been going on for fifty years, good record. That's a pretty That's right. And I would say that fairness is particularly true of the Gallos, that could have wielded power; I think they've been particularly fair to the industry. As long as we're speaking about it, I think you have to give a great deal of credit to the Gallos for many things they've done for the industry, including research that they haven't kept necessarily a secret to themself, but they've allowed it to be used in the rest of the industry. I think they are one of the factors that have caused the increased quality of California wines. When you go back to immediately after Prohibition, California wines were not much 131 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: to brag about. But I think they were one of the factors, that if anybody wanted to compete with them, they had to have quality also. One of their standards certainly has been always to improve quality; and I think they've done it. And they forced the rest of the industry to do it. I don't say they're alone in this, but they certainly have been an outstanding example. ' Is it true that the Winegrowers haven't given as many contracts to the Wine Institute as the Wine Institute would have liked? Where did you get that idea? I think again that ' s been pretty fairly done. After all, we have to consider that we have growers as part of our roommates, and they're putting up a good portion of the dollars. Therefore, we didn't ever want it to be allowed that it was ever conceived that the wine industry was in favor of the marketing order just to be able to support Wine Institute. One of the big contracts to Wine Institute is trade barrier work. I have heard a lot of the growers in discussions of budgets of the Winegrowers group, that they want to increase the amount of dollars spent, under contract with Wine Institute on trade barrier work. Recognizing that it is so important , and there probably is no one set up in the United States that's better able to do that work than Wine Institute. So it's a matter of who can do the job the best. Now, when it comes to advertising or those kind of promotion, then they're going to outside contractors, a regular ad agency. When it comes to studying the kind of promotion we should do — [interruption] You were saying that you use an ad agency. E.A. Mirassou: Yes, the one that's most able. And the last point that I was going to say: we have a contract with Oxtoby-Smith [Inc.], that is researching what is the most effective kind of advertising and promotion we can do. So we're doing research and finding out what should we be doing? And that is not a Wine Institute contract; those portions will probably never go to Wine Institute. There's a contract with CAWG to work on international trade; that's Bob Hartzell and his group. So it isn't all a one-way street, and certainly the growers have had their say in who gets contracts; they have equal vote on the board. 132 IV EDMUND MIRASSOU'S OTHER BOARD ACTIVITIES Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Let's get back to your own activities. I have a whole list of them. You were the 1979 American Society of Enologists merit award winner. I think the best thing I can say about that is that I was very pleased, and I was very happy to receive the award; apparently the ASE members figured that I had done a few helpful things for the industry. One of the reasons might have been because I've always been very much in favor of raising dollars for research, and of course, that is one of the things that ASE wants to see done. So I think that might have been helpful. You were a member of the State Board of Food and Agriculture from 1972 until 1982. What did you do on that? The State Board of Food and Agriculture has been a board that's been in existence for I don't know how long; many, many, many years. It's supposed to be advisory to the director of agriculture, and the Department of Agriculture. It's a very good group of people representing agriculture from all over the state. Some of the universities are represented on that board. I would say the only thing that I felt frustrated about on that board was that it was never as effective as it should have been. In other words, it was supposed to be advisory to the Department of Agriculture and the director of agriculture — I was appointed on that committee first by Reagan and his administration. Then I was reappointed by Governor Brown, so I went through two administrations, which is kind of unusual, because usually you get appointed by one administration, and when the 133 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: other one gets in power you're out. Of course, you're not appointed for ten years: you're appointed I think two years or three years at a time — so that was unusual . Even though the group made decisions and they did a lot of work, and they spent a lot of time at it, I never thought that they were ever effective enough; in other words, nobody listened enough to them. Were they more effective under Reagan than Brown? E.A. Mirassou: I think they're more effective now, under Deukmejian. I haven't been on that board during the time of Deukmejian. I think they're more effective now, but I really don't know. Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: You were active in the American Vineyard Foundation, which was formed in 1981, were you not? Right. I was very active in that and very instrumental in helping it get formed, and worked very hard to get it organized. There again, that was really the first organization in the industry that was both growers and vintners. It was voluntary, and it worked pretty good. We did not raise all the dollars that we had hoped to raise. We also raised dollars from allied industries contributions. I think in total that organization raised well over a half a million dollars in two or three years of its active operation. Right now, American Vineyard Foundation is still alive. But since the Winegrowers of California are taking over most of the research and development, they are kind of being held in an inactive position. Not really inactive, they are still getting contributions from allied industries and doing some research, but not as much as they were doing before the Winegrowers. There was an Agricultural Blue Ribbon Committee that you were appointed to by the lieutenant governor in 1974. The Blue Ribbon Committee was on the use of California agricultural land, and the competition of highways and schools and home development. It was a matter of how to properly keep agriculture as important as it is, and not use all the best land for building homes and high-rises. 134 E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: Teiser: E.A. Mirassou: The committee worked diligently, and I spent a lot of time on that committee, but again I don't know — that work made many of its recommendations to the lieutenant governor, and also to the State Board of Food and Agriculture. I think we had some influence on the thinking of legislators, but I doubt whether we had too much influence. But that is a tough problem because, after all, even with vineyard land, I think throughout the world, wherever vineyard grows well is where people like to live. Have you been participating in the University of San Francisco Wine Marketing Program? Right, I'm on that advisory committee, and I have participated in that. Do you lecture there sometimes? I haven't lectured; my son Daniel has. But I've been on their advisory board and have given them my best thinking on direction of the program. Do you think that's an effective program? It still is a little bit young to get the full effects of its benefits, but yes, I think it's a necessary program, and I think it will expand and become more important in the future. There's no other, is there, like that? I don't think there is any other, no. Do you work with Davis in any special ways? I work with the Department of Viticulture and Enology in many ways, but not particularly on any of their advisory committees or anything. I am on an advisory committee at Santa Clara University which is an agri-business. Not just wine, but agri-business in general. Several of them in the agri-business department were out to see me a week or two ago , and they ' re making a proposal to the Winegrowers of California on some studies they can do on helping us to correct the international trade problem. o c cu o *o co to 0) C CU CO *O S •H CO iH CU 3 M CO o. P-i « 4-t CO >, O O cu o r-> 4J \-l rH C CX O CU -H U T3 O O -H CU S CO M 01 C M w o o< co Q 3 • u •- t-i CO CU -rl CO 0) O -W Is* O a> C Cfl -H cO E •• CU co c w CO O 3 cu to o )-i C 33 60 XI C O CU O "-3 4J .^ O 3 T3 O C CO PN CO i-J 4J 4-1 C O cu 13 CU •H O CO -H CU 4-4 •a H -l-i <35 01 CO CO O C -w M C CU C 135 Teiser: I'll ask you one final question. In 1967 you discussed industry problems with President Johnson. E.A. Mirassou: That's right. There's a picture up there on the wall. We were in the oval room at that time, and we met with him; it was very impressive, I had never been in the oval room before, and had never met a president on a one-to-one basis. It was a group. Don McColly was the president of Wine Institute at that time, and Otto Meyer was with us on the trip, and myself, and Congressman B. F. (Bernie) Sisk from California. We were not trying to make a pitch for curbing imports. We were making the pitch, as the industry always has, along the lines that we wanted to be able to export to those countries on an equal basis, fair trade. Transcriber: Michele Anderson Final Typist: Keiko Sugimoto 136 TAPE GUIDE NORBERT C. MIRASSOU Interview 1: February 19, 1985 tape 1, side A tape 1, side B tape 2, side A Interview 2: February 26, 1985 tape 2, side A [continued] tape 2, side B tape 3, side A tape 3 , side B 1 1 11 23 30 30 34 45 56 EDMUND A. MIRASSOU Interview 1: March 25, 1985 tape 4, side A tape 4, side B tape 5, side A tape 5, side B Interview 2: April 19, 1985 tape 6 side A tape 6 , side B tape 7, side A [side B not recorded] Interview 3: June 6, 1985 tape 8, side A tape 8, side B 58 58 68 78 89 92 92 101 111 120 120 129 APPENDIX A 137 MIRASSOU VINEYARDS FIRST IN VINEYARD CRUSHING By E. A. Mirassou, . A great step forward in the improvement of quality in table wines was taken at Mirassou Vineyards in 1969. This was accomplished by the use of a system of "Vineyard Crushing" of mechanically harvested grapes. In the vineyard, the bitter grape stems are left on the vine and the grapes are crushed into a must (seeds, skins and juice) . The must 'is then sterilized and placed into a closed stainless steel ' container in an atmosphere of CO2, the natural gas of fermentation. .This system per forms the first step of winemaking, formerly accomplished at the winery, within seconds from the time of picking. The result of this "Vineyard Crushing" -is a wine that has captured the fresh bouquet and aroma of the fruit and has eliminated any possible deterioration or oxidation during the initial stage of winemaking. We have compared wines made in 1969 and 1970 from both the "Vineyard Crushed and the handpicked, winery-crushed grapes with the following results: The essence of the grape is consistently more pronounced in the "Vineyard Crushed" wine and freshness and fruitiness have remained to enhance the wine and add to its ageability. We believe this step forward in the production of quality in wine is as important as that step taken many centuries ago, when the winemaker first used a glass container and cork, instead of a ceramic jar with a goat •skin cover. The glass and cork then allowed the winemaker to improve the wine by aging it in the bottle. Within the last ten years, many agricultural crops have been harvested ,- using newly-developed methods of mechanical harvesting. Most of these methods have stressed the reduction in cost per ton of harvesting with little consideration for quality. We at Mirassou Vineyards, along with other California winemakers, have insisted on also improving the quality of the product. N . • Healthy, mature fruit, whatever the variety, is at its peak of perfection the moment it is removed from the mother plant. Within minutes after be ing picked, the fruit starts to deteriorate and oxidize, which results in a loss of food value and the natural flavor. One method of arresting this deterioration of the fruit is by harvesting before maturity. This method, however, results only in added eye-appeal and does not capture the quintessence of perfection as designed by nature. We believe it is impossible to improve on nature in winemaking. Since this process is a natural one, the winemaker can only act as a guide. At Mirassou Vineyards, the grapes are harvested at their peak of ripe ness and are. kept at this peak until fermentation begins. This protec tion of the grapes aids in the retnetion of its natural flavors, acids and aroma. It also deters such factors as bitterness from stems and ox idation from air or foreign particles. Thus, the essence of the natural product is preserved by our system of "Vineyard Crushing". The development of the mechanical grape harvester began in 1959. At that time, Hirassou Vineyards started to work on a harvester using the vacuum principle. Between 1960 and 1964, Gallo Winery, also working on the vacuum principle, succeeded in assembling several working models. About the same time, Cornell University in New York State was harvest- 138 MIRASSOU VINEYARDS FIRST IN VINEYARD CRUSHING PAGE 2 ing vitis Labrusca grapes in the Eastern States with their newly de veloped harvester. Also in the early 1960 's the "Sycle Bar" method of harvesting grapes was developed by the University of California at Davis. All of these methods had undesirable features. Among the problems en countered were: breakage of the berries, damage to the vine causing an excessive number of leaves and limbs to enter into the harvester, and too many grapes left on the vine. Between 1961 and 1965,' the Wine Advisory Board financed many contracts with the University of California. The departments of Viticulture and Enology at Davis, California, began working on the development of meth ods of mechanical harvesting. They also experimented with longer stems on the grapes and stems that would break more easily to facilitate the mechanical harvesting. 'Then, about 1967, Davis came up with the idea of training grapes on the two -wire, horizontal trellis. The harvester companies developed the vertical impactor machines which did a satis factory job of harvesting these vines. During 1968 and 1969, the trans verse impactor and the pivotal striker were developed. These develop ments enable 'the machine to pick a high percentage of grapes. In many varieties, however, individual berries, rather than the total bunch, were picked, which resulted in many of the berries being broken. This "meant, of course, more rapid deterioration and oxidation of the fruit. The deductive answer, therefore, was to crush the fruit in the vineyard immediately after picking. In 1-970, Kirassou Vineyards harvested 75% of their 1000 cases in Monterey County using 'a new method of "Vineyard Crushing". To accomplish this, a mechanical harvester designed by the Up-Right Harvester Company was used. Two small crushers and two specially designed tanks with a 500 gallon capacity were mounted on the harvester like saddle bags. At the end of each vine row, the harvested and crushed grapes were emptied from the saddle bag tanks, with the pressure of CO , into an enclosed tank truck which immediately transported the juice, seeds and skins to the winery. Thus, the grapes did not come in contact with the air, from the time they were removed from the vine until safely fermenting at the winery . This system improves the efficiency of handling, reduces costs, increases productivity and, most importantly, improves the quality and concrol of the end product. In view of these results, we believe that within a few years most harvesting of wine grapes will be done with a system of "Vine yard Crushing". ' ' ' APPENDIX B — Letter to the press announcing 1984 reorganization 139 January 12, 1984 Miss Ruth Teiser 932 Vallejo St. , #2 San Francisco, CA 94133 Dear Ruth: As a valued friend of Mirassou, we want you to know firsthand of some important new developments concerning our winery and vineyards. A few days ago, a decision was reached by the five members of the fifth generation regarding the reorganization of our family business. In a mutually amenable agreement we have decided that Peter, Jim and Daniel Mirassou will assume ownership of the winery, vineyards and sales company, buying out the remaining two partners and family members, Don Alexander and Steve Mirassou. Arriving at this decision to reorganize ownership at Mirassou was a personal and very difficult matter for all of us. However, we all believe it is an extremely positive move "or all concerned. In any partnership, business partners from time to time, can make it difficult to maintain solid, unified direction. In order for the winery to continue to be successful, especially in a difficult marketplace, all partners have to be in complete agreement. In addition, obligations to others as a member of a partnership can sometimes curtail the achievement of personal goals. Both Steve and Don, intensely involved with the winery for most of their lives, have chosen this time to make a break and take the opportunity to pursue other interests. Peter Mirassou will assume responsibility for the winemaking department, as well as remaining head of viticulture. Working with him will be Peter Stern who continues as our consulting winemaker. Jim Mirassou will remain as head of finance and administration, while Daniel Mirassou continues as president, with direct responsibility for sales and marketing. more than ever before, Mirassou is united towards a single goal. We assure you that our recent efforts toward AMERICA'S OLDESTWINEMAKING FAMILY MIRASSOU 5 ALES CO .3CCC ABORN ROAD. SAN IO5E PAT '-rPv\'iA pens 4CS-:74-4C:^ 140 Page 2 improving our champagne process, winemaking and grape- growing operations will continue, along with capital improvement programs designed to upgrade and expand facilities. We thank you for your past support and interest in Mirassou and look forward to continuing our valued friendship. We know you join us in wishing both Steve and Don all the best in their future pursuits. Respectfully, The Fifth Generation Mirassou Vineyards 141 INDEX — Norbert C. and Edmund A. Mirassou Adams, Leon D. , 106-107, 119, 129 Alexander, Don, 42-43, 46, 84-85 Almaden Vineyards, 18, 22, 45, 63, 70, 74, 83, 123, 130 Almendinger, Werner, 106 American Alliance of Grapegrowers, 128 American Society of Enologists, 132 American Vineyard Foundation, 109- 110, 133 ' Anderson Dam, 71 apricots, 11, 12, 26, 55, 70 Arakelian, Krikor, 68-69, 96 Bank of America, 127 Berg, Harold W. (Hod), 17 Berkeley Yeast Laboratory, 15, 16, 65 Berti, Leo, 22 bins, grape Bisceglia Brothers, 10-11 Blue Ribbon Committee, 133 bottling, 39-40, 41, 43-44, 45-46, 63, 76, 81-82, 86. See also Mirassou Sales Company boxes, grape, 5, 6, 66 Brandeis decision, 102 Brandy , 99 Caddow, Harry A., 95, 105, 106, 129 California Association of Winegrape Growers (CAWG), 109-110, 123, 125, 131 California State Agricultural Blue Ribbon Committee, 133-134 California State Board of Food and Agriculture, 132-133, 134 California State Department of Agriculture, 95, 101, 105-106, 108, 109, 121-122, 132 California State University, Fresno, 112 California Wine Association, 3, 60 Caselagno, Thomas (stepfather of Peter L. Mirassou), 2, 4, 59, 60, 61, 87 Cecil, W. J. , 105 Chalone vineyard, 24, 78 Champagne stock, 18 Chavez, Cesar, 32-33 Cherokee Winery, 64 Chisholm-Ryder, 32 Cook, James A. , 17 Cribari, Angelo, 8 Cribari, Anthony (Tony), 8, 29 Cribari, Fiore, 8 Cribari winery, 3,5-6, 7-8, 10, 11, 28, 62, 68, 96 Daniel, John, Jr., 63, 97 dealer service program, 103, 106 De Luca, John, 129 Dieppe, William A. , 130 Emerald Dry label, 77 Eye of the Partridge (Oeil de Pedrix) label, 83 Fessler, Julius, 15, 16, 65 field crushing, 30, 35-37, 79 field pressing, 36-37, 38, 79 Field Stone Winery, 38 Food Machinery Corporation, 30-31 Fruit Industries, 96 Gallo, E. & J. Winery, 39, 96, 99, 110, 129, 130-131 Gallo, Ernest, 110, 111 Gallo, Julio, 32 George, Joseph, 45-46 142 gift boxes, 43-45 Goheen, Austin C. , 88 Goulet, Oliver (Ollie), 24-25, 63, 83 Guasti vineyards, 66 Guild Wineries and Distilleries, 111 Haentze, Albert, 70, 71, 96-97 Hartzell, Robert P., 128, 131 Heublein Inc., 123 high-proof, 99 Horel, Lynn, 121-122 Huebner, Max, 25, 27-29, 70, 82 Hyba, Hans, 83 Inglenook Winery, 63 Ivie, Robert M. (Bob), 111, 120 Jackson, Eugene, 106 Johnson, Wallace, 31-32, 38 Jones Ranch, 71 Joslyn, Maynard, 65 Kasimatis, A. N. , 17, 30, 52 Knight, Ed, 51 labor, field, 32-35, 76 Lider, Lloyd, 17, 52 Light, Frank R. , 128 Lone Hill Winery, 73 Lucia, Salvatore, 111-112 Mantes, William J. , 78 Marketing orders. See Wine Advisory Board, Winegrowers Marsh, George, 17 Martini, Louis M. , 55, 63, 96 Martini & Prati Wines, Inc., 74 Masson, Paul, Vineyards, 18, 21-25, 40-41, 45, 48, 51, 52, 63, 73- 74, 77, 83 McColly, Don, 135 mechanical harvesting, 30-36, 79-80 medical research, 111-112 Meyer, Otto, 74, 135 Minger, Walter (Walt), 124, 127 Mirassou, Daniel, 42-43, 46, 84-85, 88, 134 Mirassou, Herman (brother of Peter L.), 2, 4, 13, 55-56, 73 Mirassou, James (Jim), 42-43, 46, 77-78, 84-85 Mirassou, John (brother of Peter L.), 2, 4, 12-13, 55-56 Mirassou, P. L. & Sons Company, 13, 59 Mirassou, P. L. Winery, 59 Mirassou, Peter L. (father of Norbert C. and Edmund A), 1-14 passim 16, 26, 38, 55-56, 57, 58- 61, 63-64, 67, 73, 117 Mirassou, Peter (son of Edmund A.), 22, 36-37, 39, 42-43, 46, 47-49, 51, 74, 79, 84-85, 88 Mirassou Sales Company, 45-46, 48- 49, 84-85 Mirassou, Steve, 42-43, 46, 47-49, 84-85 Mirassou Vineyards, 13, 59, 86, and passim Mission Vineyards (Ranch), 51, 80, 89 Mondavi family, 43, 64-65, 81, 111, 120, 129 Monterey County vineyard land. See Salinas Valley night harvesting, 38-39 Olmo, Harold P., 17, 22 Opper, Kurt, 25, 83 143 Oxtoby-Smith, Inc., 131 72-73 Pellier family, 55, 56, 80, 87 Petri Wine Company, 96 Peyser, Jefferson, 101 Phylloxera, 7, 87-88 potatoes, 47, 81 Prohibition, 2-5, 58, 59-61, 68, 87, 101, 116 prorate, 68 Prudhomme family, 56 prunes, 26, 55, 70 raisins, 98 Renault family, 56 Reynolds, Robert, 127 Roma Wine Company, 96 Rossi, Edmund A. (Ed), 106 Rupestris St. -George. 87 Salinas Valley vineyards, 20-24, 30-55 passim. 73 passim San Benito County, 74-75 San Vicente Vineyards, 46-48, 53, 80-81, 84, 88, 89 Santa Clara University, 134 Santa Clara Valley, passim Santa Clara Valley Water Conservation District, 71 Santa Clara Valley Wine Growers Association, 15, 17 Schilling vineyards, 62 Schoonmaker, Frank, 63 Seagram Distillers, 119, 123, 129 Sebastiani, August, 81 Sebastiani Vineyards, 63 shipping grapes, 2-3, 5-11, 61, 98 Silvear, F. W. , 24-25 Silverman, Milton, 111 Sisk, B. F., 135 Smith, Rich, 39 Southern Pacific Railroad, 8-9 sprinklers, vineyard, 22-23, 66-67, tanks, fermentation, 40-41, 64, 67, 79 trade barriers, 87, 100-102, 105, 126, 127, 131 Turrentine, Dan C. , 106 United Farm Workers, 32-33 United Vintners, 124 University of California, 25, 28, 70, 71, 96, 112 at Davis, 17, 21, 30, 32, 48, 53, 54, 62, 88, 134 University of San Francisco, 134 Up-Right Harvesters, 31-32 Valley Farm Management, 39 Valley Foundry, 16 Vicari, Nicholas, 26-27 Vicar i Ranch, 71 walnuts, 11, 12, 26, 70 Wente Bros. , 53 , 63 Wente, Herman, 97 Wente, Karl, 53-54, 74, 81 Western Pacific Railroad, 8-9 Williamson Act, 72 Wine Advisory Board, 17, 74, 92- 112, 120 Wine Institute, 16, 17, 79, 94, 95, 102, 105, 106, 107, 109, 122- 123, 128-131, 135 wine study course, 104, 106 Wines & Vines, 77, 79 Winegrowers of California, 97, 104, 109-110, 121-128, 131, 133, 134 Winkler, Albert J. , 14, 20, 21, 74 144 Grapes mentioned in the interviews Alicante Bouschet, 7, 62 Burger, 62 Cabernet Sauvignon, 63, 77 Carignane, 7, 61, 62 Chardonnay, 77, 79 Chenin blanc, 77 Co Lombard, 62 Emerland Riesling, 77 French Colombard, 18, 62, 77 Camay Beaujolais, 77 Grenache, 62 Johannisberg Riesling, 18, 63, 77 Mataro, 7, 62 Mission, 62 Mourastel, 62 Palomino, 62 Petite Sirah, 7, 61, 62, 77 Pinot blanc, 18, 63, 77 Pinot noir, 77, 82, 83 Riesling, 62 Rio Nero, 62 Saint-Macaire, 61-62 Sauvignon vert, 62 Semillon, 18, 63 Sylvaner, 18, 77 Thompson Seedless, 61, 98 Traminer, 62, 77 Zinfandel, 7, 62, 77 Wines mentioned in the interviews Carignane, 7, 18-19 Champagne, 18, 24-25, 39, 45, 83- 84, 89, 117. See also Sparkling wine Chenin Blanc, 31 Johannisberg Riesling, 31 Mataro, 7, 18-19 Oeil de Pedrix, 83 Petite Sirah, 18-19 Pink champagne, 83 Sparkling wine, 82, 117. See also Champagne White Zinfandel, 39, 89, 117-118 Zinfandel, 18-19 Ruth Teiser Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever since. Stanford University, B.A. , M.A. in English; further graduate work in Western history. Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since 1943, writing on local history and business and social life of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, 1943-1974. Co-author of Winemaking in California, a history, 1982. An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1965. 135647