Richard Grant Peterson

Owner and Winemaker
Richard Grant Wines
1120 Darms Lane, Napa
richardgrantwine.com
500 case production

Interview by Diana H. Stockton

At the start of his freshman year in 1948 at Iowa State, Dick Peterson decided to make some home wine. His family had a few Concord vines nearby and his mother no longer canned its grape juice to make into jelly the rest of the year. The empty Champagne bottles she once used were hanging around, Dick’s father had made wine from grape bricks during Prohibition, and Dick had read the only two books in the whole Des Moines public library on winemaking. The grapes were ripe and he felt ready. Dick vividly recalls two mistakes he made: the wine was bottled before it was dry, so an unplanned second fermentation provided a Concord ”Champagne” Dick called gushy and a little sweet, but that the Peterson family certainly all liked; and he left a bottle of it in the sun on the back seat of his secondhand 1937 Ford. The bottle exploded, totally, leaving only pieces of glass and a spot on the seat, but then it was so good smelling and pleasant inside the Ford, Dick was happy every time he got in.

He made wine for a couple more years, graduated in 1952 on an NROTC scholarship with a degree in Chemical Technology, and went off to learn to fly in the Marines. But the Marine Corps assigned Dick to an artillery battalion and sent him to Korea. Truces were signed en route and Dick took part in moppingup. He was mustered out in 1954 in San Francisco, where he took a friend’s advice and went back to college, choosing nearby UC Berkeley to study chemical engineering, biochemistry and food technology. Dick says biochemistry was a terrific field then (his favorite professor was Linus Pauling), as was food technology—salting, freezing, dehydration, canning—with which Dick was already familiar. His mother had preserved far more than grape juice each year.

All the food the family needed had come from 3.34 acres of orchard, vegetable garden, pigpen, and even a cow in pasture alongside the house Dick’s Swedish grandfather had built, his father was born and raised in, and Dick and his three siblings grew up in. Dick’s father was a coal miner, mining Iowa coal thirty feet underground on his hands and knees, working seams just three feet high. The kids all had regular farm chores, but Dick remembers the taste of fresh buttermilk best.

He got a Masters degree in Food Technology in 1956 and a PhD in Agricultural Chemistry in 1958 under Maynard Joslyn, studying wine but writing his thesis on the chemistry of red pigments in garden beets. Dick and Maynard also studied and wrote on copper cloud (casse) in white wines. Their work led to the replacement of brass [also bronze] fittings with stainless steel throughout the wine industry.

E & J Gallo first hired Dick to head up new product development and gave him the chance to make some terrific wines. After ten years, however, Dick was ready for a change and got it: Beaulieu Vineyards. Beaulieu’s winemaker, André Tchelistcheff, told him it had taken a year to decide, but, “Dick, I put my finger on you.” They worked closely throughout André’s retirement year, 19681969. Each day began at six o’clock sharp with a visit to each of Beaulieu’s five major vineyards and its crew. André left at Noon and Dick would get on with the winemaking for André to taste the next day (the two remained collegial until André’s death in 1994). Dick also found time to teach classes for Napa Valley Wine Library and even serve as a vice president. In 1969, Heublein bought Beaulieu. It already had a stake in Inglenook and Lancers through its majority position in United Vintners. Dick was put in charge of new product development and, in a joint venture with the Portuguese, created Lancers White Wine that went to the top of the charts. Then Lancers wanted a carbonated red, which is very tricky to do. Dick says you have to make this kind of wine sweet to cover its natural bitterness. The red was never as popular as Lancers White but Dick loved working with the Portuguese and his trips to Portugal.

Although Heublein wanted Dick to oversee all their winemaking operations from their headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, Dick knew he needed to be making wine in a more direct and handson manner. In 1973 he left to head up The Monterey Vineyard in a pioneering project, especially with late harvest wines. As he helped fellow vinesmen take advantage of southrather than northfacing slopes he saw the 1,000 acres then planted to vines in Monterey County increase to 24,000 by 1974. That same year Seagram’s bought the winery and Dick introduced his laborsaving invention, the steel barrel pallet that allows pairs of barrels to be moved and stacked by forklift, rather than by hand. Because a barrel nestles down in the pallet, it is also more stable in an earthquake. Dick presented his design at the annual Wine Industry Technology Symposium as a gift to the industry. His steel rack simplified and improved moving barrels— exhausting work at Beaulieu, and the pallet or versions of it are now in use throughout the winegrowing world.

While still at Beaulieu, flying to Lisbon via London for Lancers, Dick had gotten to know Anton Massel, the founder of the annual International Wine and Spirit Competition held in England. Anton invited Dick to help judge the competition which he did as a board member for ten years. It was at Anton’s suggestion in 1980 that Dick went to visit a 200 yearold grapevine on a cottage wall in Wrotham, Kent. On his return, Anton served him a sparkling wine made from the Wrotham fruit. Its wine, Dick says, was pink, delicate and unusually good. Anton’s friend Ed Hyams had researched the grapevine and in the absence of any formal information determined that the vine came from a wild seedling of Pinot Noir dating back to the Romans. Pinot is the most mutating of wine grapes with more clones than any other variety. Dick got two canes of Wrotham (the English say Root’em) Pinot Noir that he packed and took back to Monterey. He budded over the canes and took examples to Harold Olmo at UC Davis for quarantine and to have the DNA identified. After two weeks of research, Carole Meredith confirmed the material as a clone of Pinot Noir. In its fuzzy appearance the Wrotham more closely resembles Pinot Meunier, but it grows differently and ripens earlier.

In 1986, Atlas Peak Vineyards hired Dick to establish vineyards and a winery and make its wines. He was with Atlas Peak until 1990, developing 450 acres of vines including the then largest planting of Sangiovese in the state. Tending a rose garden in his Napa back yard, where he had also planted the Wrotham Pinot Noir, Dick noticed that while his rosebushes got powdery mildew, the grapevines did not. No one had ever noticed this attribute in England, but Harold Olmo agreed it must have been resistance to powdery mildew that contributed to the success of the clone, a most fortuitous mutation—tasty as well as healthy. Little by little, Dick increased his stock to about half an acre accommodated at a colleague’s vineyard nursery.

In 1992, contemplating retirement, Dick bought a derelict Christmas tree farm on Darms Lane in Napa, planted to pine and fir, with a large pond reservoir. Dick pulled out the two acres of pine and doing his own budding and grafting, planted one half acre to Wrotham on SO4 rootstock in 1995. This was the firstever vineyard planting of the clone in the United States. A more careful analysis of soils suggested a change in budwood as Dick planted another half acre, and then a second and final acre. For the first couple of years he farmed with a green idea—no till, and mowed the resulting lawn between the rows. Alas, Bermuda grass harbors Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium that carries Pierce’s Disease. As mower wash blew onto the vines, it felted them with clippings that included Bermuda grass. The Wrotham Pinot Noir proved susceptible to Pierce’s Disease, which does not occur in the British Isles.

Over the next few years Dick invented a screw to carry the antibiotic Tetracycline, fatal to Xylella, into the vine. He has special screws of cast nylon made for him in the East Bay. Tiny wads of dental cotton, having absorbed the antibiotic and been packed into a slot in the screw’s tip, are selftapped into a vine, as low as possible, even below the graft, just one per grapevine. A fin on the hexagonal head facilitates lining up the slot with the direction of sap flow, so xylem carries the drug right up through the plant; any surplus antibiotic beads up on the leaves’ outer margins. (Simply injecting a vine doesn’t work; osmotic pressure squirts what’s shot in right back out.) Dick’s successful method of delivering a 20mg dosage allows bacteria time to feed and succumb, and one treatment lasts years.

The first vintage of Wrotham Pinot for Dick’s Richard Grant Blanc de Noir Méthode Champenoise was 2000. It was made at Folie à Deux, a winery Dick acquired with some fellow investors in 1995 and sold in 2004. His next wines were made at Domaine Carneros. Now Dick is intent on making a nonvintage Méthode Champenoise wine, to get the cost down for the consumer. He plans to blend his 2010 with earlier vintages, using a unique transfer process rented from Bronco Wine Company in Ceres, California where Dick regularly consults in winemaking (as well as at numerous other wineries of all sizes). The process does away with the need to riddle each individual bottle while retaining all the desirable qualities a natural fermentation in the bottle with extended yeast aging achieves.

In 2006, Dick made a still Pinot Noir from the Wrotham. The English had never made a still red wine from it because in Southeast England, where the climate is more like Champagne, it is too cold for the fruit to ripen fully. His still wine has a distinctive spice flavor. Dick certainly didn’t know what to expect and it has taken time to pin it down. He first thought his Pinot Noir had a holiday spice taste, maybe clove, but a chef in Monterey has set him straight: the taste is cardamom. Dick says the wine goes perfectly with Christmas fare–the perfect pairing on a Christmas tree farm.

A chairman of Beaulieu, Leigh Knowles, once said to Dick, “If you stick a pin in someone, you expect blood, but put a pin in you, Dick, and wine comes up.”