SBR: "The Winemaker" by RichardPeterson

This just arrived in the mail & I spent about an hour skipping around thru it reading snippets here & there. It promises to be a fascinating read. It recounts Dick Peterson's winemaking career from his making ho-made Concord wine in Iowa as a 17-yr old thru the present day as maker of Wrotham-clone Pinot (another very interesting story). Lots of insider insights on the various places Dick has worked over the yrs (Gallo/Bealieu/MontereyVnyd/AtlasPeak). Ordering information:
PetersonBook

I first met Dick back in the late '70's when he was the founding winemaker at TheMontereyVnyd in Gonzales. The MontereyVnyd was a large operation whose focus was capitalizing on grapes from the up&coming SalinasVlly and I was sorta interested by what all the buzz was about. I was quite charmed by Dick and we sat out on the deck tasting thru a bunch of his wines. I was also staggered by the size of that operation. Given the size, Dick made some pretty good wines there.
I again reconnected w/ Dick in the late '90's when he & ScottHarvey took over Folie a Deux wnry in StHelena, on one of my frequent visits there w/ Scott. He & Scott were there for some 4-5 yrs until they sold it to SutterHome. I found it interesting that, in his book, there is no reference to his sojourn at FaD. That I can find. At FaD, the original owners (two psyciatrists) created a blended wine called Menage a Trois, now a separate SutterHome brand. It was actually a pretty good/cheap red blend. Of course, SutterHome has managed to run that name into the ground. I just noticed that they've come out w/ a "soft & seductive" blend called Silk. At a TA=0.53 and a RS=1.35, I'm pretty ascared to try it. But iit must appeal to somebody.
Anyway...Dick's book promises to be a very interesting read & I'm eager to get started on it.
Tom

Thanks for the heads up, Tom.

I have not met Dick in person, but he gave me extensive email interviews for my book about Taylor, NY. He's in the sections that cover his work under Coke's Wine Spectrum and Seagram's ownership, which followed.

Dick's wine world trajectory certainly is interesting, first at Gallo and then the replacement for Andre T. at Bealieu. How Dick established the Taylor California Cellars wines for Coca Cola in Gonzalez is a fascinating story, followed up by his work under Seagram to create their Golden Wine Cooler.

Now about 2/3'rd thru the book (The Monterey Vnyd is collapsing).
Though the book is occasionally a bit on the tedious side when Dick recounts some of the incidents in considerable detail, it is, over all, a pretty fascinating read of the inside of some of the places he's worked.
At Beaulieu, it is clear that Madame de Pins is on the arrogant side and cared nothing about BV other than using it to support her grandoise lifestyle. Andre & Dick were holding the wnry together w/ "baling wire and duct tape" and it's remarkable they were able to make the quality of Cab they did. And the reason was of the extraordinary quality of the (ToKalon) BV vnyds. But Andre & Dick were always able to put on a good face of the dreadful winemaking conditions.
But when the Hublein people took over BV, it was clear to Dick that their focus on the bottom-line would soon run BV into the ground.
Dick's retelling of the demise of the once-glorious BV
certainly reinforces my picture of AndyBeckstoffer as the slime-ball I thought him to be. He managed to convince the Hublein bean-counters that the BV vnyds were expensive part of BV and that they should shed the vnyd operation. They went along w/ his advice and Andy walked in and bought ToKalon for a song...well below the market price for NapaVlly vnyd land.
But I gotta admit...Andy is a very prosperous slime-ball...which is, of course, the important thing in the long run.

Anyway...a highly-recommended read about Dick's PoV.
Tom

Just finished reading the book ystrday.
WilliamHill, who started the vnyd up on AtlasPeak, doesn't come off looking very good either. He apparently did a pretty haffast job of scoping the property out. And TerryClancey comes off as a real slime-ball as well in his role of managing the wine division of Allied-Lyons,
The big take-away from the book is how clueless some of these large companies that go from the hard likker biz and segue into the wine business are. Hublein, Constellation, Diageo, Allied-Lyons, etc. OTOH, Coca-Cola looks pretty good. They realized that the wine biz didn't offer up the obscene profits that the soft-drink biz does and made a graceful exit.
The book finishes rather abruptly with only the last chapter, a short one at that, focusing on his work after the collapse of the Allied-Lyons/AtlasPeak debacle. Not a single mention of the the 4-5 yrs in which he worked w/ ScottHarvey to drive Folie a Deux to success. Interesting discussion of his WrothamPinotNoir clone effort.
I expected the book to be a bit on the self-aggrandizing/self-promotional side. But I don't get that from reading it at all. It seems to be an unbiased retelling of those events thru Dick's eyes from behind the scenes of a period of the Calif wine biz that I lived thru but didn't know the rest of the story. Now I do.
Tom

Was Andy a slimeball or just a clever operator? Should one feel sorry for multinational liquor conglomerates whose managers lack common sense?

Just finished reading the book ystrday.
Hublein, Constellation, Diageo, Allied-Lyons, etc. OTOH, Coca-Cola looks pretty good. They realized that the wine biz didn't offer up the obscene profits that the soft-drink biz does and made a graceful exit.

In the early '70s, while contemplating in a speech the direction of the Taylor Wine Company its president laid out plainly that the then wildly successful company (largest Northeastern wine company, and for a time the sixth largest US wine company, until the '70s the largest sparkling wine producer in the US, and among the most successful foritified wine producer in the world) should never sell to a Liquor or Food industry giant, because they had no idea how to operate in the wine business. He said that if the company were to continue to expand it either had to buy its own large California company or sell to a major company of international power--Coca Cola was that company.

Before it pulled out, and with the help of Dick Peterson's winemaking, Coke developed one of the fastest successful brands ever, Taylor California Cellars, from zero to 8 million cases within about three years. But they could not make enough money in the wine business, certainly unlike the profits they could make from carbonted water and sugar.

Dick had nothing bad to say to me about Coca Cola. He had little good to say about Seagram, who took over Taylor from Coke, and he was not alone.

Yes, Brian: the conglomerates generally had no idea what they were doing in the wine business.