Frank Lawrence “Laurie” Wood

Frank Wood and Sons, Inc.
8897 Conn Creek Road

Interview by Diana H. Stockton

Laurie Wood has always been progressive. He says he'll "try anything once," and he has had plenty of practice: he turned 90 in June. Laurie has lived all his life in Napa Valley, except for his hitch in the US Army during World War II, and been part of many innovations in farming. For instance, prior to the 1950's and the development of the return stack smudge pot, farmers burned tires, hay, anything for heat in their vineyards and orchards on freezing nights. Smudge pots burned diesel oil, however, and people soon began to complain of black air. It got so bad on frosty mornings, Laurie says, you couldn't see Mount St. Helena. So, in the early 1960's when Rain Bird Irrigation came up from Los Angeles to talk to him about their solid-set sprinklers providing a brand new kind of frost protection, Laurie thought he'd give them a try. On freezing nights, water is pumped under pressure from a reservoir to sprinklers that mist each grapevine, continuously jacketing them in layers of ice until the air temperaturerises above 33°. Ice melt then seeps back to recharge the reservoir. Laurie got his goodfriends and fellow farmers Chuck Carpy and Roy Raymond to go in with him in a company to sell sprinklers throughout the valley. They soon had the custom of 30 or 40 ranches. Laurie says plastic (PVC) pipe was just coming into use and gave a good break on price.

Coincidentally, Elliott "Windy" Nelson of Bear River Wind Machine Company came to talk to Laurie about his wind machines that brought warmer air 12 to 15 feet above the ground down to displace cold air on freezing nights. In combination with smudge pots their protection was just about as effective as water. Laurie became an agent for the company and still recalls the roar of the machines during an April in 1970 when there was freezing weather 24 nights in a row. Today, both mist and wind are the common foils of frost in the vineyard.

In the mid-1960's, North Coast Helicopter, originally a spraying and dusting company out of Stockton, hired Laurie to oversee sulfuring vineyards in Napa and Sonoma Counties. Its helicopter crew would start at 4:30 a.m. and spray anywhere from 200 to 2,000, even 4,000 acres. Laurie developed color-coded aerial maps of all the vineyards, which made the process much more efficient and meant he wouldn't have to fly so much.

In 1917, Laurie's father, Frank, had left his father's farm in Tulare County to come to Napa as Assistant Farm Advisor, a position he was offered after graduating from the University of California in agriculture. (Frank's younger brother, the late Dr. George J. Wood, followed him to St. Helena in the 1920's, to retire from his practice in 1987 at the age of 91.) Frank settled into his new job assisting Herman Baade, the farm advisor for Napa County, and went to work advising farmers five or six days aweek on what they should plant and how, selling life insurance at night, and farming a prune orchard weekends. When a ranch appointment took him to William E. Cole's ranch on the Rutherford Crossroad, he fell in love with the rancher's niece, Betty. As their wedding present,Betty's father bought 30 acres of his brother William's ranch, and Frank gave up the Farm Bureau to be foreman of this new ranch and the neighboring ranches belonging to Betty's uncles. Her Uncle William's ranch is now part of Frog's Leap Winery and Uncle Nathaniel's has become Usibelli Ranch. The wedding present is part of Laurie's expanded Wood Ranch. (Another Cole ranch, belonging to Uncle Charlie in Heath Creek Canyon, St. Helena was planted to walnuts and olives. It is now Van Asperen Vineyards and Corbett Vineyards.)

Frank and Betty Wood raised three boys. Laurie and his brothers worked and played alongside one another on the Wood Ranch from the time they were born until they finished St. Helena High School. Besides helping with a variety fruit crops, as a 4-H project Laurie had a breeding flock of 3,000 Rhode Island Reds, 500 of them happy roosters (his pals Mel Eisan and Clifton Mee also kept chickens). Twice a week Laurie delivered fertile eggs in boxes of twelve dozen to a hatchery in Napa. He and his brother Bob also killed and plucked turkey swith Albert Taplin for the farmers' market in San Francisco .Six days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor Laurie joined the U.S. Army on December 1,1941. After training, he was shipped to Canada to work on the ALCAN (Alaskan) Highway. He says it sure helped that he already knew how to handle a D8 Caterpillar tractor. From Alaska, Laurie went on to England, France (he was part of the Allied invasion, hitting Utah Beach June 9,1944), Luxembourg, and Germany as a combat engineer, assisting with roads, bridges and demolition. Laurie says access to roads in France was especially needed and the French he learned in high school came in handy.

He came home in 1945 to join Frank Wood & Sons, the farm management company his father had started earlier that year. By the early 1950's, 800 to 900 acres were under management, in addition to the adjoining Cole and Wood Ranches. These were planted to walnuts, cherries, prunes, apples, peaches, plums, and pears, even tomatoes and cucumbers for six or eight years, and ten acres of vines all watered by furrow irrigation. Laurie recalls Dean Turner, of Turner Produce in St. Helena, coming to the ranch five nights a week in season to load his Los Angeles lugs (open wooden boxes that held fifty pounds) full of fruit onto his truck for the farmers' market in San Francisco, to return with meat and other provisions for local restaurants.

Eventually Wood Ranch, which had grown by 54 acres, planted thirty acres of vines to such varietals as Early Burgundy, Burger, Carignane, Chardonnay, French Columbard, Petite Sirah, Johannesburg Riesling, and Zinfandel. In 1960, Bob Mondavi, a close friend of Laurie's, suggested he plant Sauvignon Blanc. He did, and sold the fruit to Bob's new Robert Mondavi Winery. Laurie was also a director of the Napa Valley Cooperative Winery when his friend Charlie Forni was winemaker. Laurie remembers a line of 20 or 30 trucks at the end of the day, when he'd bring in the Wood Ranch grapes to sell. Trucks having to wait overnight to unload were jacked up in front on two by fours; five-gallon buckets caught free-run juice out the back. In the morning the trucks would pull around to the scale and the fruit and juice were weighed. As the driver dumped out the lugs, an assistant would reload the empties: 240 boxes took 15 to 20 minutes to unload.

Frank Wood & Sons' first two hundred acres under management were for four clients: Ahern (next to Freemark Abbey), Moorhead (opposite the Jaegers on Inglewood Avenue, St. Helena), Wheeler Farms (on Zinfandel Lane, St. Helena), and Belle and Barney Rhodes, whose vineyards it managed for 45 years. The Rhodes’ original vineyard became Martha's Vineyard when the Mays bought it. Laurie says it was planted with budwood from the Federal Government Station in Oakville after two years of flagging selected vines in the station’ sCabernet block for growth, yield, and color. The Rhodes also invested with a few friends in Spring Lane Vineyard on Llewelling Lane, St. Helena (managed by Frank Wood & Sons), and acquired land for vineyard on Bella Oaks Lane, Rutherford. Barney also introduced Laurie to Narsai David, and Laurie farmed three successive vineyards for Narsai. Bosché Vineyard next to Inglenook was another key client. Laurie believes its light gravelly volcanic soil is the very best kind for Cabernet. Frank Wood & Sons also cared for York Creek Vineyards for 20 to 25 years and Chabot Vineyard for ten; it developed and managed vineyards for Cain, El Molino, Gargiulo, Grace Family, J.J. Cohn, Long Meadow Ranch, Pride Mountain, and Snowden, among others, and for forty years looked after the Olsons’ walnut orchard in St. Helena–twenty-nine different ranches, in all. Laurie's father retired in 1960 as farming practices began to change dramatically in the valley. The prunes had all left for Yuba City, Laurie says, where it was warmer and there was more water. Furrow irrigation gave way to buried perforated clay pipes (tiles) which in turn were replaced by the now ubiquitous plastic (PVC) pipe.

When the place next door to Wood Ranch came up for sale in 1961, Laurie succeeded in talking his great friend Chuck Carpy into buying it. In 1965 Laurie and Chuck with John Bryant, Jim French, Dick Heggie, Bill Jaeger, and Jim Warren bought and revitalized Freemark Abbey Winery. Its first crush was in 1967 with fruit from the Carpy-Connolly, Wood, and Bosché vineyards plus its own estate Red Barn Ranch with Brad Webb, winemaker (as well as fellow shareholder). By 1973, York Creek Petite Sirah and Zinfandel were made at Freemark. That was also the year a torrential rain dumped three or four inches in September. On Wood Ranch, eight acres of Johannesburg Riesling turned purple in just four days. Joe Heitz had to tell everyone what had happened: a bloom of the mold Botrytis cinerea. The fruit was picked at 31° Brix and Freemark’s first dessert wine, Edelwein Gold, was bottled in 375ml bottles, to sell out in only three or four months. Laurie is justly proud of the Freemark Abbey venture. It was the only California winery to have both its Chardonnay and Cabernet chosen for the Paris Tasting of 1976, thus playing a major role in establishing California wines in general and Napa Valley wines in particular as worthy of international regard. Laurie had managed its vineyards for over forty years when the winery was sold to Kendall Jackson in 2006.

A number of skilled Napa Valley vineyardists have started out with Laurie. Rafael Rios was foreman at Frank Wood & Sons for forty five years; Rafael’s nephew, Salvador Gutierrez has assisted for forty, and Laurie’s own son Jim for thirty five years. Elias Fernandez, winemaker for Shafer Vineyards, grew up on Wood Ranch. Ron Wicker, Jim Barbour and Mike Shuey all started out with Laurie learning vineyard management from top to bottom. Ron, who was just voted 2010 Grower of the Year by Napa Valley Grapegrowers, was with Laurie for most of the 1970’s before starting his own vineyard management company, Wicker Vineyards. The late Mike Shuey spent several years with Laurie before joining Sterling in 1980 and then Louis M. Martini Winery in 1982, where he was its beloved vineyard manager until his death in 1998. Jim Barbour was with Laurie for fifteen years before leaving to start his own vineyard management company in 1990. He began releasing a small production Barbour Vineyards Cabernet in 1995. (An interview with Jim is also in this REPORT.)

Laurie prefers red wine to white, which these days he mostly has with spaghetti and meatballs. Viticulturally, he also prefers red to white. “Cabs, Zins and Pets” are his favorites and he has noticed a trend back to the Petite Sirahs and Zinfandels; people seem to be enjoying them more. The budwood, much of it from nameless original sources and gathered from vineyards every few years, used to be grafted onto clients' vines by a select number of grafters at Frank Wood & Sons. Now, grapevine nurseries do much of this work. Budwood for Wood Ranch Petite Verdot was researched by Lucy Morton of Virginia, an expert in rootstocks and varietal clones, and makes up three or four percent of the vineyard. It has been sold to Elyse, Freemark Abbey, Rutherford Hill, Silver Oak, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, and Vine Cliff. Clients for its other varietals have included Beaulieu, Caymus, Corison, Orin Swift, Quintessa, and ZD. The gravelly soil of Wood Ranch is common to Marin, Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, and Napa Counties; water comes from wells on the property. Laurie is relieved there has always been enough water for frost protection. Bud break may take until the end of May and he has seen a frost as late as June.

Overall, Laurie finds vineyard management practices pretty sophisticated today. Rootstock is just as important as varietal budwood, so the first big challenge is soil analysis: how much gravel, clay or rock, since soil dictates rootstock choice. St. George, 420A, 101-14, or 3309? The list goes on and on. And, which is the best varietal clone? What row orientation? Today, new vine rows go up and down the valley, rather than across, exposing the morningside of vines to sun for just three to four hours. With trellising, more sunlight evenly reaches more leaves the whole length of a row, and plants grow at a faster pace. To control vigor, vines are de-leafed above the grape clusters on the sunny side, but not the shady side. With no logjam of leaves, normal breezes from the north and west blow unhampered down the vine rows. Laurie is happy to say, "Mildew has been reduced 200 to 300 percent." And he judges sprinkler irrigation –as many as ten trace minerals–to assess vine fertility and monitor nutrition.

Laurie started farming when there were small vineyards throughout Valley. Despite the advent of large-scale enterprises, what really opened Laurie up to civilization, as he puts it, were his irrigation, frost protection and aerial mapping enterprises. These enabled him to really enjoy the whole valley, find new parts he didn't even know existed. In recent years he has explored many of these territories as a water dowser. Long before solid set sprinklers and dispatching helicopters, as a teenager in the 1930's, Laurie watched Bill Wheeler and Harold Smith dowsing for water when Harold Smith was the dean of dowsers in Napa County. Laurie was fascinated, so Harold gave him the willow sticks to try. Laurie has been dowsing ever since. He has located sites for wells all over Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Solano, and Sonoma Counties, and for over forty years has donated the dowsing fees to support his alma mater, St. Helena High School, through the Wood Family Scholarship Fund, begun in honor of his mother, Betty. It is she who gave him his watchwords: "Never take more than you give." As Laurie said at the Napa County Farm Bureau in 2003 when he was honored as its Agriculturalist of the Year, "For all that I've received, I hope that I have given back in equal measure."