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For immediate release
Contact: Julie Ann Kodmur for Smith-Madrone, 707/963-9632, corking@julieannkodmur.com, www.smithmadrone.com or Errin Hartman for Alfred A. Knopf, 212/572-2035, ehartman@randomhouse.com, www.randomhouse.com
HEDONIST IN THE CELLAR
NEW WINE BOOK FROM JAY MCINERNEY
SMITH-MADRONE WINERY ONLY NAPA WINERY TO BE PROFILED
New York October 2006 --- A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf. This is a compilation of Jay McInerney’s wine reporting over the past several years for Conde Nast House & Garden Magazine. Known for his ground-breaking book Bright Lights, Big City, McInerney has published seven works of fiction as well as an earlier book about wine, Bacchus & Me.
The book profiles many winemakers and wineries from around the world; the only Napa Valley winery profiled at length is Smith-Madrone Winery, in a section of the book called “Lovers, Fighters and Other Obsessives.” The chapter about Smith-Madrone (“Mountain Men: The Smith Brothers of Smith-Madrone”) appeared originally as McInerney’s House & Garden wine column in June, 2005. This section includes profiles of Michel Chapoutier, Greg Brewer and Steve Clifton, Remirez de Ganuza, Willy Frank and Randall Grahm.
The column was entitled The Throw Backs: They aren’t well-known, but the Smith Brothers of Smith-Madrone have been producing outstanding Rieslings (and Cabernets and Chardonnays) at old-fashioned prices since the 1970s.
Here is an excerpt:
By the time I reach the top of the Mayacamas Range and follow a rutted road down to the Smith-Madrone property, I feel I’ve traveled back in time to a prelapsarian Napa, a wild paradise with islands of vines…..Standing at the top of Spring Mountain in early October…I feel the Riesling concept (it’s a cool climate grape) beginning to make sense. I’d learned that the estate also makes cabernet and chardonnay at prices that hadn’t been seen in Napa since the Reagan era. ….When I woke up the next morning…I actually wondered if I had dreamed the whole Smith-Madrone experience—the grizzly brothers, the wild mountaintop, the unreal prices, the anomalous and ambrosial Riesling. I have since confirmed that it was all real, and wrestled with the question of whether or not to share this information with my readers.
Currently available from Smith-Madrone are the 2005 Chardonnay (820 cases were made; the price is $25) and the 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon (1,135 cases were made, $40). The 2005 Riesling is sold out but the 2006 vintage will be released in the spring of 2007. Smith-Madrone Winery is celebrating its 35th anniversary virtually with a new website---www.SmithMadroneis35.com. It details the winery’s achievements, the background of the two brothers who established the winery and the unusual history of the property.
Each page of the website includes reminiscences, such as Stu’s musing that “my brother Charlie and I not only drove all of the stakes around the winery but all of the stakes in the vineyard---a total of 19,000. We endured smashed thumbs, months of ongoing poison oak and heat exhaustion from picking up rocks. Fortunately for us, we loved it. I feel enormously fortunate to be able to do what it is that I love. It was a wonderful time, in essence the renaissance of the modern California wine business.”
In May, 1971, Stuart Smith bought the ‘terroir’ which today is Smith-Madrone Winery. He was 22 years old and had just received his B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley and was taking classes towards his Master’s in Viticulture at UC Davis. In looking for land to plant vineyard in the Napa Valley, he explored a forest on the remotest and highest part of Spring Mountain and discovered a property which had been a vineyard in the 1880s.
Smith-Madrone produces less than 5,000 cases a year of three types of wine---all of which are entirely estate-vineyard-wines (i.e. grown in the vineyards surrounding the winery): Chardonnay, Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon. At elevations between 1,300 and 2,000 feet, with vineyards which range in steepness up to 35%, Smith-Madrone is located at the highest point in the Spring Mountain District appellation. There are numerous intriguing historical traces on the property: Chinese workers had cleared the land in the mid-nineteenth century and left behind meticulous rock piles, stone walls and underground caves. A striking historical and visual note is the dramatic corridor of 22 Picholine olive trees---more than a hundred years old--which descend the slope beneath the winery into the vineyards.
Smith-Madrone pioneered a number of ‘firsts:’ these include being one of the first wineries to dry-farm in Napa Valley, being a leader in the move to clarify varietal labeling by becoming the first American winery to use only ‘Riesling’ on its labels as of 1983 (preceding all other U.S. wineries by 15 years), winning ‘Best Riesling In The World’ at the Gault-Millau International Wine Championships in Europe in 1979 and being the first American winery to re-release winery-cellared Rieslings many years later (e.g. the 1997 vintage in 2004).
Brothers Stuart and Charles Smith are the vineyard managers and winemakers of Smith-Madrone Winery. Their family lineage includes David Hume, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher and historian. Also in the family attic is the Fetherolf family, German farmers from the Palatinate region, who came to America on The Good Ship Thistle in 1730. The name for the winery came as a tribute to the Smith brothers who pursued their dream and to the madrone trees which distinguish the property.
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Jay McInerney