Around 10:00 p.m. in the middle of a hot August night in 1958, a Greyhound bus pulled into the sleepy hamlet of St. Helena, California. Its sole passenger was a diminuitive Croatian named Miljenko Grgic. His journey to St. Helena began some four years earlier when he left communist run Croatia to follow his dream of coming to California to make wine. First, he went to Germany, and then to Canada, where he came out to the west coast to work in Vancouver as a waiter and at a paper mill. Then, he finally made it to Napa Valley. Miljenko was a hard worker and dedicated to the winemaking process. Napa Valley was the perfect place to be at that time for individuals that were serious about wine. The area had got back some of the steam that it had in the pre-prohibition days and was attracting serious individuals with serious money. Wine had always been a seminal part of Miljenko's life. From the days as a boy in his village of Desne, in Croatia: through his adult life, to the present day, where he is ensuring his legacy of love for the land, Miljenko has been, and like Robert Mondavi before him, will always be remembered as a Napa Valley pioneer.

 

The crystallizing year for Miljenko was 1976. As winemaker for Chateau Montelena, he helped to produce the Chardonnay that would eventually travel all the way back to Europe and to a tasting salon in France, where it, along with other California wines were to be blind tasted against the best of the French wine industry, a tasting that has now been immortalized in celluloid as well as print. Miljenko Grgic, nee, Mike Grgich, never forgot the peasant roots that tied him to the land. He came from a world where wisdom was found in the places that one encountered on a daily basis: vineyards, trees and mountains. These were all not just inanimate objects there for human consumption, but were known to hold properties that heal and are inextricably linked to a religious life that saw them as crucial to the concept of god and universe. And so, three years prior to the tasting, on September 6th, 1973, when the chardonnay grapes that would eventually go into the Montelena wine arrived at the winery, they were blessed by a Catholic Priest who also said a prayer for a successful harvest and sprinkled holy water on the grapes. Perhaps it was the holy water, perhaps it was the vintage, perhaps the hard work of the Montelena team, but the wine was selected as the best of the field of ten, beating out the second place winner, the Roulot Meursault Charmes, which had garnered 126.5 points to the Montelena's 132. The result of this tasting was a major coup in the wine world.  California wines beating the best of France, and with French judges, nonetheless! 

 

But success was not garnered overnight for Miljenko, while he enjoyed making wine, he still had not reached his goal of owning his own winery and growing his own grapes: he was determined to re-connect with land in a way that was imprinted in his subconscious. On Independence Day, 1977 Miljenko broke ground on his winery with his partner, Austin Hills, of Hills brothers coffee. The rest is history. Today, one may go to Grgich Hills in Napa Valley and get a sense of the history there.  Unlike other wineries that architecturallywant to bowl people over with their presence, Grgich Hills, like Miljenko, has grown with dignity and with a sense of place.

 

Their website has a wealth of information on Biodynamic farming, but I feel that the following quote really puts their perspective into context and gives one a sense of the intention behind Biodynamics:

  

 

If one were to compare this quote from a quote that is posted in an entry on this site entitled "On Biodynamics" by Monty Waldin, whose book on Biodynamics is an invaluable source of information for anyone interested in the subject, there is a similar theme regarding the responsibility of farmers to be stewards of the land that they are farming.  Government subsidies and the bottom line have pushed America's farmlands to the brink.  As I've said elsewhere on this site, collectively we are at the tipping point with the environment.  It is our responsibility as inhabitants of this one and only planet Earth to pass its beauty and splendor onto future generations, even so far as the seven generations into the future that was the commonly held viewpoint in America as recently as 300 years ago.

 

Allright, off the soapbox I go and into the wine...

 

My tasting notes on the wine.  First though, a word on the vineyard...  planted in 1889,  this old-vine vineyard has soil of reddish, gravelly loam with excellent drainage.  The clones, however are of an unknown origin, but most likely planted by Italian immigrants.