Gertrude Stein never wrote that a rosé is a rosé is a rosé, and with good reason. Unlike yams and mustard greens, unlike gazpacho and applesauce and even the exalted rose, the fruit of the vineyard is not just an agricultural product.

Wine plays a role in religion and mythology. To some, it signifies romance and sophistication. It is connected with hospitality and success and even something of magic.

Author Clifton Fadiman wrote that to sip wine is "to savor a droplet of the river of human history," and Philippe de Rothschild noted that "wine generates enthusiasm, and whatever you do with enthusiasm is generally successful." Even reformer Martin Luther had his say; he was quoted by Thackeray as having launched the couplet, "Who does not love wine, women and song/remains a fool his whole life long."

That particular form of foolishness evaded Henry "Tom" Mudd Jr. ’60, David Stare ’58 and William "Phil" Woodward ’58. Each was educated through the graduate level in another discipline, but

fell under wine’s enchantment and made a sharp midcareer turn toward the vineyards of Northern California. Recently, the Andover Bulletin visited the three vintners to see what the enchantment was about. Their stories follow

A Hands-on Sort of Guy:
Tom Mudd ’60

Tom Mudd’s Cinnabar Vineyards and Winery sit at the end of three miles of compacted dirt that start at Saratoga’s Congress Springs Road and seem to go straight up. Our ears pop as we proceed past dire warning signs while the winding road, with dizzying drops beyond its narrow shoulders, threatens insufficiency for our small rental car. But we reach the winery’s 1,650-foot elevation safely and find it dotted with huge earth-moving machines. We decide not to think about how they got here.

In a room with a spectacular view of southern San Francisco Bay, Mudd tells us he first saw this vista from a helicopter in 1982, when he was shopping for land to start his vineyard.

A member of a prominent California family—his great-grandfather was the famed mining engineer Seeley Mudd, and Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., was named for his industrialist grandfather—Tom fell in love with science at Andover. He earned a B.S. and master’s and doctoral degrees in civil engineering, all at Stanford University, where he conducted research in applied physics. At various points in his career, he worked for the Sierra Club Foundation, the National Resources Defense Council and other conservation-related ventures before joining the Stanford Research Institute. There he investigated the laser spectroscopy of aerosols, doing work that was of interest to NASA, to the military and to government agencies concerned with air pollution.

He was passionately committed to improving air quality, he recalls, but when Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 spelled a demise to funding for Mudd’s research projects, he decided to hit the bottle—as a vintner, of course.

"I had started bottling wine as a hobby, planting Cabernet grapes behind my home in Woodside," says Mudd. He tended his vines whenever he could, distilled wines in half a dozen 60-gallon barrels and studied viticulture (grape-growing) and oenology (wine-

making) at the University of California in Davis while he was still a working scientist. The one-acre vineyard, he says, yielded about 250 cases of 12 bottles each.

What gave Mudd the courage to jump from a garage-scale avocational winery to a full-time 30-acre operation producing 12,000 cases annually?

"I was an engineer," he explains, "and, with the self-confidence engineers gain from solving problems and my success as a backyard vintner, building a winery seemed like a reasonable thing to do. After all, I’m a hands-on sort of guy."

Poring over temperature and precipitation data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Mudd targeted his real estate hunt in the South Coastal region of Northern California, near Silicon Valley. After considering an abandoned Christmas tree farm and an apple orchard, he chose the previously undeveloped Saratoga hilltop for its ideal climate. One special feature of his mountain greenery, Mudd says, is that its soil holds water so well irrigation is unneeded, allowing Cinnabar to "dry farm" the vineyard for a purer, rainwater-derived product. Another is his hand-dug caves, which provide a cooling system for the wines.

Mudd’s first release, 250 cases of a 1986 cabernet, hit the market in 1989 to favorable reviews. Today the vineyard, though small by wider California standards, is among the largest producing under the Santa Cruz Mountain appellation. It bottles estate chardonnay, estate pinot noir and estate cabernet—"estate" meaning that the wine is made from Cinnabar’s own grapes. Mudd also buys fruit from other California growers for merlot and non-estate chardonnay. Product prices range from about $17 to $35 per bottle, with estate cabernet at the top of the scale.

Why "Cinnabar?"

"Cinnabar is another word for mercury sulfide," Mudd explains. "It was the material most inspiring to 13th-century alchemists, who were seeking the magic elixir, the elusive philosopher’s stone, that would allow them to turn lead and other base materials into gold. Metaphorically speaking, I think there is a bit of alchemy—a spiritual and mystic component—to making wine."

"Besides," he quips, "It did not take a lot of wine-making knowledge to realize that, having a name like Mudd, it might be a mistake to put my own name on the label."

Not Working on the Railroad:
David Stare ’58

Like many little boys who played with trains, David Stare told his folks he wanted to be an engineer. But instead of driving one locomotive, he aimed to be in charge of many as president of a major railroad line.

So after graduating from PA, the Massachusetts resident and son of famed Harvard University nutritionist Frederick Stare went to MIT, where, like Mudd, he majored in civil engineering. After receiving the B.S. degree, he earned an M.B.A. degree at Northwestern University, worked a summer with the Pennsylvania Railroad, then took a job as assistant industrial engineer with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.

It was in Maryland that the engineer switched tracks.

"I got to know a Baltimore Sun editor who owned a small winery and vineyard. I would go to his place on Saturday afternoons and taste wines out of barrels. Soon I was hooked on the subject, and I ended up planting 40 grapevines in my backyard," he says.

After three years with the railroad, Stare took a job with a German steel company and moved his family to Koblenz. He spent his weekends "driving up and down the Rhine River tasting Rhine and Moselle wines," he says. Next came a job in the Boston area, where Stare enrolled in a wine appreciation course. He had just spent two vacation weeks in France’s wine country, and was nurturing a fantasy about moving there to grow Bordeaux, when he saw a rosy projection in The Wall Street Journal about the California wine industry.

Stare moved to California in 1971 and became a graduate student in oenology at U.C. Davis. In 1972, he purchased a 70-acre prune farm in Dry Creek Valley, north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, for $2,500 an acre.

Prior to Prohibition, the valley had been home to 34 wineries and thousands of acres of grapes. By the time Stare came along, Dry Creek Valley was virtually–well, dry. Only three vineyards survived from the old days, and no new ones had been planted in half a century. But Stare and a following of like-minded

"competitors"–"really my best friends," he translates–built the local wine trade up again to its former level.

At 210 acres, his own operation, Dry Creek Vineyard in Healdsburg, is what Stare calls "a large small winery."

Its top-seller is a chardonnay, but Stare also bottles dry sauvignon blanc ("my own favorite," he says), chenin blanc, cabernet, merlot and zinfandel. His products are available in all 50 states.

Dry Creek’s headquarters is an attractive mission-style building that seems the very vision of a California winery. Approaching it by road, one half expects to see Broadway’s fictional vintner, Tony Esposito, come around the corner with his chorus, singing the title song from The Most Happy Fella.

And the show biz doesn’t stop there. Besides growing the business from a defunct prunery into a 150,000-case-a-year vineyard, Stare has, like other winemakers in the area, set up a fancy wine-tasting room to delight entertainment-seekers. Tourists come to Dry Creek Vineyard 362 days a year not only to sip free samples and purchase wines that range from $8.50 to about $23 a bottle, but also to pick up t-shirts, golf balls, aprons, corkscrews, cookbooks, wine books and cat miscellanea. ("My shop manager is a cat lover," Stare explains with a shrug.)

If you think vineyard life sounds like a continuous party, you’re partly right.

"The wine business is very people-oriented," Stare admits. "Today I spend most of my time traveling around to meet with distributors and attending wine tastings and winemaker dinners. I just put in 10 days on a cruise from Acapulco to Puerto Rico, lecturing about wine. I’ve been talking to people about wine for 29 years now, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else."

The headquarters of Chalone Wine Group Ltd. occupies neither a steep hillside rich with grapes nor the potential site for a Frank Loesser musical. Instead, Phil Woodward holds forth in an unprepossessing office park at Napa Airport. No vats, no storage caves, not even the pungent aroma of grapes fermenting. Except for a modest wine showroom, this could be the office of an insurance salesman.

But appearances are deceptive, for in the world of PA vintners, Phil Woodward is very big time. Chalone is not a single winery, but his assemblage of nine wineries, each with its own label. Six are in California, two in Washington and one in France. The company has 200 employees and annual sales of $65 million.

Woodward was born in Illinois and grew up dreaming of owning a business. He followed relatives to Andover, studied economics and political science at the University of Colorado, then earned an M.B.A. degree at Northwestern, where he rubbed elbows with Stare. He also started a student entrepreneurs’ club in graduate school.

Knowing he didn’t want to spend his life "pushing papers," but unsure what kind of a business he wanted to have, Woodward joined a business consulting firm, hoping that by exposing himself to an array of industries he’d find one that lit his fire.

It worked. For though he’d taken a wine course and even started a wine club while working as a consultant for Touche-Ross & Co. in Detroit, it was when the company transferred him to San Francisco that he found his calling.

"I was asked to represent Rainier Ale out of Seattle, which was financing winemaker Robert Mondavi’s breakaway from his brother’s company," he says. "For the first time I saw the business side of my hobby, and I realized I could make a living having a lot of fun."

What made the world of wine so appealing?

"The study of wine," he explains, "encompasses so many things–everything from history to science to the arts to business. It covers a whole lot of different elements, and that intrigued me."

The Vintner as Entrepreneur:
Phil Woodward ’58

Woodward was moonlighting for a San Francisco wine store when he happened to taste a 1969 Pinot Blanc, the first wine made under the Chalone Vineyard label. Excitedly, he contacted the winemaker, Richard Graff, a Harvard graduate with 20 acres of grapes. Within a year, Woodward quit Touche-Ross and became Graff’s partner. Eventually he helped take Chalone from a two-man, one-wine operation to a publicly held company with 13,000 shareholders.

Chalone was the first U.S. premium winery–and, so far as Woodward knows, the first in the world–to go public. The reason is that "most wine businesses just don’t make money. It’s not a high growth business, and it’s one that has a lot of expensive assets, like inventory and land. That’s not what investors are looking for," he notes. Indeed, many of Woodward’s shareholders are in it not just for the profit, but because they share a passion for the fruit of the vine. They also hold in common a sociability that inspires them to attend shareholder gatherings several times a year and to sell out five annual shareholder-only charter trips to wine-growing countries.

A board member of the Wine Institute and the American Vintners’ Association, Woodward recently told his company’s story in a self-published book, Chalone: A Journey on the Wine Frontier. He also concentrates a lot of energy on industry concerns. Currently, for example, he’s considering how to do battle with the 25th Amendment, which allows states to make laws that severely restrict the interstate shipping of wines. It’s in conflict, he maintains, with another clause in the U.S. Constitution that says there will be no barriers to interstate commerce, and the issue will probably end up in the hands of the Supreme Court before the conflict is resolved.

Woodward’s partner, Graff, was killed in a plane crash three years ago, but Chalone is still going strong. Today, Woodward works about half time for the company they founded, and the other half time for the Chalone Wine Foundation.

"Establishing the foundation," Woodward says, "enabled me to do things I otherwise could not do. For example, we give wine to non-profit organizations for fund-raising purposes, and we started a scholarship fund in memory of Dick Graff for people who want to study viticulture and oenology. It’s a great career, for, although I don’t make tons of money, I do wake up every single morning and think, ‘I can’t wait to get to work today.’"