One night in May 1976, the loudest explosion in wine history rang out at the home of Warren and Barbara Winiarski, owners of Stags Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley, but it barely made a ripple.
The day before, her 1973 Stags Leap Cabernet Sauvignon had won a tasting in Paris that pitted France's finest wines against up-and-coming California wines. But when a friend in France called to tell her she'd won, Winiarski had only a vague idea of what he was talking about. So she called her husband, who was on a business trip. He also didn't remember the wines they'd tasted, or understand their significance.
“That's nice,” he said.
The tasting itself might not have been as significant as the Winiarskis thought it would have been had Time magazine reporter George M. Taber not been there. His article, “The Judgment of Paris,” trumpeted David's stunning victory over Goliath and gave instant international credibility to the budding California wine industry.
“The unthinkable happened: California defeated all of Gaul,” Taber wrote.
Nearly 50 years later, marketers still recreate that tasting over and over to sell California wines around the world.
The tasting was certainly a milestone for the Winiarskis and Stags Leap Wine Cellars, a relatively unknown startup before the tasting. There had been little demand for the winery's second vintage of '73 Cabernet, but that was about to change.
“The phones started ringing immediately,” Winiarski recalled in 1983. And they continued to ring for years to come.
According to his representative, he died on June 7 at his home in Napa, California. He was 95 years old.
The Paris victory was an abrupt reversal of fortune for Winiarski, who began working in wine at age 35. In 1964, he was a wine-enthusiast and humanities lecturer at the University of Chicago when he and his wife decided to leave academia and try their hand at the wine business.
They packed their belongings into a U-Haul trailer, loaded their two young children into a Chevy station wagon and headed for Napa Valley, a quiet, isolated farming community where walnuts and prunes were more prevalent than wine grapes at the time.
Invited to work the harvest at Chateau Souverän, a winery on Howell Mountain, they arrived in August 1964 with few funds and built a home, including a wood-burning stove, in a nearby cabin.
As the second of Souvéran's two-man operation, Winiarski learned the basics of viticulture and winemaking, mastering menial tasks like stacking crates and meticulously cleaning the winery. But his academic training never lagged behind. He studied every aspect of farming and winemaking, and over time developed a wine philosophy that emphasizes balance, harmony, finesse and elegance over weight and power.
Within ten years, he was running his own winery and making wines that were astonishing the world.
After the tasting, Stags Leap became one of Napa Valley's leading wineries, attracting tourists and enthusiasts as the region transformed into a wine haven. Winiarski expanded the operation by acquiring more vineyards, growing from about 1,800 cases of wine in 1973 to 150,000 cases in 2006.
In 2007, at age 78 and with no children willing to take over Stags Leap, Mr. Winiarski sold the winery for $185 million. Current vintages of his tasting-winning $6 bottles now sell for about $250.
Warren Paul Winiarski was born on October 22, 1928, in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood to Stephen and Lottie (Lacki) Winiarski, who ran a carriage business in a predominantly Polish neighborhood. The Winiarskis (Polish for “from winemakers”) didn't drink wine, but Warren's father made his own wine from honey, fruit and dandelions, which the family drank on special occasions. Winiarski later recalled listening to the sounds of wine fermenting in his father's basement.
As a young man, Warren was more interested in books and philosophy than wine, and he studied humanities at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he met Barbara Dvorak, whom he would later marry.
She is survived by her three children, Kasia, Steven and Julia, and six grandchildren. Winiarski passed away in 2021.
After graduating from St. John's University, Winiarski studied political science at the University of Chicago and spent a year in Italy studying Machiavelli and other figures of the Italian Renaissance, while also becoming part of a close-knit group where food and wine played a central role.
He returned to Chicago, but his interest in wine and food persisted, and it wasn't until a friend brought him a bottle of American wine that he began to dream of making wine and living a more agrarian life.
The move to Napa Valley wasn't easy for the Winiarskis: their first attempt to plant a three-acre vineyard on their 15-acre property high in Howell Mountain failed, so they sold the property to cut their losses.
After absorbing all he could at Souverän, Winiarski took a job at Robert Mondavi Winery in 1966. This new project was the most ambitious winery built in California since Prohibition and would set the tone for Napa Valley for the foreseeable future.
Winiarski was hired as an assistant winemaker, but since Robert's eldest son, Michael Mondavi, who is also the winemaker, was serving in the military, Winiarski was actually in charge of winemaking.
Moving from the artisanal, almost primitively run Souverän to the large, futuristic Mondavi winery was a big change, but with Michael Mondavi's return after two vintages, Winiarski felt ready to run his own operation.
He spent his free time wandering the valley looking for suitable sites for vineyards. Unlike many of his colleagues, who thought that grape selection and winemaking were the most important thing, Winiarski was convinced that choosing the right site was essential and that the right site could give the wine its special character. In this sense, he was an early advocate in Napa of the French concept of terroir.
He found what he was looking for in an area called Stags Leap in the southern valley, where he was impressed with the wines made by farmer and home winemaker Nathan Fay. After putting together a group of investors, Winiarski purchased 50 acres adjacent to Fay's farm. He also became friends with Fay and bought the grapes that would become one of the top three wines Stags Leap produces. Two are single-vineyard wines, Fay and SLV, the labels given to wines originally made in Stags Leap vineyards, and the third, Cask 23, is a blend made only in special vintages.
After selling the winery, Winiarski continued to grow grapes and became a philanthropist, donating large sums to the Smithsonian Institution, where he was honored in 2019 for his contributions to American winemaking, and to St. Michael's College, where, as a former humanities scholar, he taught in the summer classics program for many years.
“I always had dreams of doing what I wanted to do,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “In retrospect, it was very reckless. But we rode the crest of a wave. Yes, I had it all planned out, but I couldn't really foresee what was going to happen.”