University of California • Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series
John A. Parducci
SIX DECADES OF MAKING WINE IN MENDOCINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
With an Introduction by
John J . Golden
Interviews Conducted by
Carole Hicke
in 1990
Copyright ® 1992 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity
and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed
in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and John A.
Parducci dated April 4, 1992. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with John A. Parducci requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
John A. Parducci, "Six Decades of Making
Wine in Mendocino County, California," an
oral history conducted in 1990 by Carole
Hicke, Regional Oral History Office, The
Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, 1992.
Copy no
.1
John A. Parducci, circa 1991
Cataloging Information
PARDUCCI, John A. (b. 1918) , Winemaker, winery executive
Six Decades of Making Wine in Mendocino County. California . 1992, xiii,
108 pp.
Family of winemakers; winery founded by father and uncle; learning to make
wine in the 1930s; assuming responsibilities as winemaker; styles of making
wine; emphasizing varietals; expansion of winery; acquiring vineyards;
purchase of winery by Teachers Management & Investment Corp.; experimenting
with French-American blends; marketing.
Introduction by Judge John J. Golden.
Interviewed in 1990 by Carole Hicke for the Wine Spectator California
Winemen Oral History Series, The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
TABLE OF CONTENTS- -John A. Parducci
PREFACE 1
INTRODUCTION vi
INTERVIEW HISTORY vii
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY ^ - ' viii
I BACKGROUND 1
Early Life in Cloverdale 1
Adolph Parducci 3
Adolph Begins Making Wine, 1918 9
Establishing the Vineyard in Mendocino County, 1928 8
John Goes to New Jersey in 1924 to Sell Grapes 9
Family Traditions 12
II MAKING WINE IN THE '1930s 15
The Wine Industry After Prohibition 15
Parducci Winery in the Thirties 16
More About Selling Grapes in New Jersey 18
School and Work in the Winery: 1930s 20
Working with Dr. Edmond H. Twight 23
Winemaking Then and Now 25
More on the 1930s 25
Parducci Tasting Room 27
Gift Shop in the Tasting Room 28
Bottles, Corks, and Labels 30
Growth of the Business 34
Marketing in the Early Days 36
III JOHN PARDUCCI AS WINEMAKER: THE 1940s AND 1950s 38
Appointment as Official Wineraaker: 1944 38
New Equipment 39
Grape Varieties and Wine Varieties 42
Distribution 44
IV NEW DIRECTIONS AND GROWTH 47
John and George Assume Ownership of the Business: 1964 47
Role of Banks in the Wine Industry 49
Planting Premium Varieties 51
Grape Growing in Mendocino County 53
State Legislation 56
Educating the Consumer 57
V PARDUCCI WINES AND WINEMAKING 62
Making Wine in the Early Days 62
Changes Starting in 1948 63
Ports and Sherries 64
Developing New Products 65
Primavera and Flora 67
Jug Wines 69
Special Tawny Port 70
Pink Fume: 1973 71
Effects of State Legislation on Alcohol Percentages 71
Yeasts 72
Winemaking Styles 74
Petite Sirah 77
Frank Schoonmaker 78
VI NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE 1970s AND 1980s 80
Sale of Parducci to Teachers Management & Investment
Corporation 80
The Third and Fourth Generation of Parduccis 83
Expansion 85
Viticulture 87
Competitions 88
Harvesting 90
Industry Trends: More White Wines 91
Marketing and Product Decisions 93
Konocti Winery 94
Impact of Corporate Ownership of Wineries 97
Appellations 98
Andre Tchelistcheff 99
Winemaking: Present and Future 100
TAPE GUIDE 104
INDEX 105
PREFACE
The California wine industry oral history series, a project of the
Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1969 through the action
and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing
order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was
reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series
with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The
selection of those to be interviewed is made by a committee consisting of
the director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley;
John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery
organization; Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and
Enology, University of California, Davis; the current chairman of the
board of directors of the Wine Institute; Ruth Teiser, series project
director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator
Scholarship Foundation.
The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on
California grape growing and winemaking that has existed only in the
memories of wine men. In some cases their recollections go back to the
early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are
of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of
not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and
preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about
the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real
paucity of information on. the Prohibition years (1920-1933), although
some commercial winemaking did continue under supervision of the
Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as
well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry
in subsequent years (as yet treated analytically in few writings) will be
of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently
several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or
expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his own point of view.
Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in
the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State
Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its
collection of in many cases unique materials readily available for the
purpose .
ii
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record
autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed
significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by
Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft
Library.
Ruth Teiser
Project Director
The Wine Spectator California Winemen
Oral History Series
July 1992
Regional Oral History Office
486 The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
iii
CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS
Interviews Completed July 1992
Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industry . 1974
Leon D. Adams, California Wine Industry Affairs: Recollections and Opinions .
1990
Maynard A. Amerine, The University of California and the State's Wine
Industry . 1971
Maynard A. Amerine, Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies .
1988
Philo Biane, Wine Making in Southern California and Recollections of Fruit
Industries . Inc . . 1972
John B. Cella, The Cella Family in the California Wine Industry . 1986
Charles Crawford, Recollections of a Career with the Gallo Winery and the
Development of the California Wine Industry. 1942-1989 . 1990
Burke H. Critchfield, Carl F. Wente , and Andrew G. Frericks, The California
Wine Industry During the Depression . 1972
William V. Cruess, A Half Century of Food and Wine Technology . 1967
Jack and Jamie Peterman Davies , Rebuilding Schramsberg: The Creation of a
California Champagne House . 1990
William A. Dieppe, Almaden is My Life . 1985
Making California Port Wine: Ficklin Vineyards from 1948 to 1992 . interviews
with David, Jean, Peter, and Steven Ficklin, 1992
Alfred Fromm, Marketing California Wine and Brandy . 1984
Louis Gomberg, Analytical Perspectives on the California Wine Industry. 1935-
1990, 1990
Miljenko Grgich, A Croatian- American Winemaker in the Napa Valley . 1992
Joseph E. Heitz, Creating a Winery in the Napa Valley . 1986
Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry .
1974
Amandus N. Kasimatis, A Career in California Viticulture . 1988
Morris Katz , Paul Masson Winery Operations and Management. 1944-1988 . 1990
Legh F. Knowles, Jr., Beaulieu Vineyards from Family to Corporate Ownership .
1990
IV
Horace 0. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi , California Grape Products and Other
Wine Enterprises . 1971
Zelma R. Long, The Past is the Beginning of the Future: Simi Winery in its
Second Century . 1992
Richard Maher, California Winery Management and Marketing . 1992
Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, Wine Making in the Napa Valley .
1973
Louis P. Martini, A Family Winery and the California Wine Industry . 1984
Eleanor McCrea, Stony Hill Vineyards: The Creation of a Napa Valley Estate
Winery . 1990
Otto E. Meyer, California Premium Wines and Brandy . 1973
Norbert C. Mirassou and Edmund A. Mirassou, The Evolution of a Santa Clara
Valley Winery . 1986
Peter Mondavi, Advances in Technology and Production at Charles Krug Winery.
1946-1988 . 1990
Robert Mondavi, Creativity in the Wine Industry . 1985
Michael Moone , Management and Marketing at Beringer Vineyards and Wine World.
Inc. . 1990
Myron S. Nightingale, Making Wine in California. 1944-1987 . 1988
Harold P. Olmo, Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties . 1976
Cornelius Ough, Researches of an Enologist. University of California. Davis.
1950-1990 . 1990
John A. Parducci, Six Decades of Making Wine in Mendocino County. California .
1992
Antonio Perelli-Minetti , A Life in Wine Making . 1975
Louis A. Petri, The Petri Family in the Wine Industry . 1971
Jefferson E. Peyser, The Law and the California Wine Industry . 1974
Lucius Powers, The Fresno Area and the California Wine Industry . 1974
Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, Perspectives on California Wines . 1976
Edmund A. Rossi, Italian Swiss Colony and the Wine Industry . 1971
Edmund A. Rossi, Jr., Italian Swiss Colony. 1949-1989: Recollections of a
Third-Generation California Winemaker . 1990
Arpaxat Setrakian, A. Setrakian. a Leader of the Sa n Joaauin Valley Grape
Industry . 1977
Elie Skofis, California Wine and Brandy Maker . 1988
Andre Tchelistchef f , Grapes. Wine, and Ecology . 1983
Brother Timothy, The Christian Brothers as Wine Makers . 1974
I Louis (Bob) Trinchero, California Zinfandels. a Success Story . 1992
The Wente Family and the California Wine Industry , interviews with Jean,
Carolyn, Philip, and Eric Wente, 1992.
Ernest A. Wente, Wine Making in the Livermore Valley . 1971
Albert J. Winkler, Viticultural Research at UC Davis (1921-1971) . 1973
John H. Wright, Domaine Chandon: The First French-owned California Sparkling
Wine Cellar , includes an interview with Edmond Maudiere, 1992
vi
INTRODUCTION- -by John J. Golden
John Parducci is knovm to his closest friends as a man passionately
devoted to the outdoors: hunting, fishing, picking abalones , digging
clams, shooting birds, and gathering mushrooms.
It isn't surprising that a man with that affection for the product
of nature would follow a vocation dedicated to the cultivation and
perfection of one of nature's finest products.
In that vocation is seen manifested the same passion which his
friends have observed in the pursuit of his avocations.
In winemaking he is an intense perfectionist. His unique palate
enables him to judge every characteristic of a wine by taste and, having
tasted, he is not reluctant to be judgmental, regardless whether the wine
be one of his or someone else's. At the same time, John takes criticism
of his own wines in a constructive way, constantly seeking a course
towards excellence through experimentation and innovation.
His intense commitment to perfection is accompanied by a good sense
of humor, a ready laugh, and a deep concern for those who have shared his
life with him.
When consideration was being given to the sale of the Parducci
Winery to TMI a couple of decades ago, John's uppermost concern was that
provision be made to assure a continued residence for his parents who
resided at the winery. When recent developments with TMI suggested the
possibility of a sale of the winery by TMI, his uppermost concern was
over continued employment for the loyal ranch and winery employees who
had been faithful to the Parducci Winery for so long.
Recently, John has acquired a fox terrier, Trixie, who is now his
constant companion. She watches TV with him, goes to work at the winery
with him every day, rides with him in his Camaro everywhere and waits
patiently in the cab for him while he meets or lunches with friends.
John is a perfectionist, whose life is marked with passionate
affection and loyalty toward family, friends, his winery, his heritage,
and his Trixie.
John L. Golden
Judge of the Superior Court
January 1, 1992
Lakeport, California
vii
INTERVIEW HISTORY- -John A. Parducci
John A. Parducci, general manager and winemaster of the
family-operated Parducci Wine Cellars, was interviewed as part of the
Wine Spectator's California Winemen Oral History Series to record the
history and development of the oldest operating winery in Mendocino
County, California. Parducci 's father and uncle established the winery
in 1932, and by the end of that decade, John was learning winemaking from
his uncle. Assuming full responsibilities for winemaking in the 1940s,
then taking over the winery with his brother in the 1960s, he built it
into a highly respected business, being one of the first to emphasize the
making of varietal wines. Growth and expansion took place in the 1960s,
'70s, and '80s, and by 1991, five generations of Parduccis had
contributed to its operations.
Parducci is a vigorous promoter of wine, and his enthusiasm for the
product and the industry comes across clearly in his oral history
interviews. These took place on July 30 and 31, 1990, in his office in
the winery in Ukiah.
Parducci reviewed his transcript and made some revisions. His
assistant, Kathy Pomelia, was helpful in furnishing photographs to
illustrate the volume. The Honorable John Golden graciously agreed to
write the introduction. Mr. William Heintz, an historian of the wine
industry, has studied Mendocino County wineries and furnished some
background information for the interviews.
This series is part of the ongoing documenting of California history
by the Regional Oral History Office, which is under the direction of
Willa Baum, Division Head, and under the administrative direction of The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Carole Hicke
Interviewer -Editor
May 1992
Regional Oral History Office
Berkeley, California
I BACKGROUND
[Interview 1: July 30. 1990 ]##^
Early Life in Cloverdale
Hicke: I'd like to start by asking you where and when you were
born and grew up ,
Parducci: January 22, 1918,
Hicke: And where?
Parducci: Cloverdale, in that house right there [points to picture on
the wall] .
Hicke: Is that house still standing?
Parducci: No. Brown- Forman [Beverage Company] wanted to take
pictures of the house and do a little write-up about it.
I was absolutely shocked when we went down to Cloverdale to
find the house was gone . What happened was that the new
freeway had gone through the property. So the house was
gone, and no one ever told me. The orange trees are still
there, the lemon tree's still there, and a lot of the roses
are there .
^ This symbol, //#, indicates a tape interruption or the beginning
or end of a tape side. For a guide to the tapes, see page 104.
^ Parducci Wine Cellars and Brown- Forman Beverage Company entered
into a joint marketing and national distribution contract in 1986; the
agreement was terminated by Parducci in 1990.
Hicke: How did the trees and roses escape?
Parducci: Well, at that time they just removed the house.
Hicke: And they might eventually tear the trees down, too?
Parducci: Yes, it'll all be gone. I would have liked to have the
pictures of the house. My cousins lived in it after my
family left Cloverdale. This is the mountain [points to
picture] that's been causing some controversy now. Some
city people have come to Cloverdale and decided to put a
subdivision alongside that mountain, and they've taken down
all the oak trees. There's a big controversial battle
going on in Cloverdale right now, objecting to the removal
of more trees. And that's the old Preston estate, which
was a commune when I was a boy. You've seen the big clock
on the tower?
Hicke: Oh, yes.
Parducci: They had their own church and their own little winery, and
a beautiful home which burned down two or three years ago.
I used to spend half of my childhood there.
Hicke: What were you doing?
Parducci: The grammar school I went to was- -you could throw a rock
across the river to it. As kids we used to do a lot of
hiking. It was very close, not even four hundred yards
away from the school. As a matter of fact, after Dr. Lee
bought the estate, I took some of the barrels from their
little winery. They had about seventy puncheons that were
still filled full of wine.
Hicke: From their little winery?
Parducci: Yes. But it was flavored wine. What they did, they had
purchased sweet wine and added seaweed cut like salami in
it,, and big, long cinnamon bark, and pomegranates. They
had dozens of large bottles labeled "extractum" that was
produced in New York. Some of the extractum was also added
to the barrels. I have one of the bottles in my cellar at
the present time.
Hicke:
What's extractum?
Parducci: It looks like Geritol, dark and syrupy. It made the wine
taste medicinal. [laughter] I suppose it's a concoction
of some herbs .
Hicke: Is extractum alcohol?
Parducci: No, it was a flavored root of some kind. It was very dark
and licorice-like. They dumped that into the wine and made
something like Geritol, or whatever it was that they
believed in. It was very interesting.
Hicke: What happened to the wine that you found there?
Parducci: We dumped it. It wasn't wine anymore. I was hoping it
would have been port and sherries and muscatels in their
original state, you know. It would have been nearly a
hundred years old, and it would have been fun to taste.
But it had all been flavored with some other things , so we
dumped it out here. You could smell it all over the
country. It had a beautiful smell; it smelled like
Vermouth almost. The sheepherders were drinking it, but I
wouldn't drink it.
Hicke: It didn't taste as good as it smelled?
Parducci: Oh, it tasted pretty good. But what were you going to do
with that much of it, not knowing what was in it? I didn't
want them to fool with it.
Adolph Parducci
Hicke: Let's go back a little bit and get the story of your father
starting the winery. I know that he lived in San Jose very
early.
Parducci: My father was born in Santa Clara [1896].
Hicke: This is Adolph we're talking about?
Parducci: Yes. When he was six years old, the family went back to
Italy [1902] . I know why they went back to Italy; it was
because the Santa Clara Valley was all truck gardens, and
there were no mountains. They were used to the mountains.
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke:
Parducci
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Parducci
How did they get to Santa Clara?
That I've never been able to find out. I imagine they had
to arrive in San Francisco by boat and then went to Santa
Clara by rail or wagon.
But were they winegrowers?
Yes, they grew grapes. Because the ranch we have in
Italy-
Did they grow grapes in Santa Clara?
No. I don't know what they did in Santa Clara. I've never
been able to find that out.
I've interrupted you in your story,
Italy- -
They went back to
Hicke :
Parducci
I don't know what my grandparents did in Santa Clara, My
mother might know, but I doubt it. Anyway, from Santa
Clara to Ukiah or Clover dale was a long way away in those
days. I guess they didn't realize there were any mountains
in California or any properties around that reminded them
of their homeland, so they went back. When my father was
sixteen, ten years later, he stowed away on a boat with his
two brothers and a sister and landed in San Francisco again
[1912],
When they were back in Italy they worked in vineyards,
right?
Dad worked in the vineyards .
And your grandfather?
As a matter of fact, he was killed by lightning working the
vineyards with a team of horses. I never knew him or met
him. Then my grandmother died. Let's see, I don't
remember when Dad went back, but all there was left was his
sister. I don't know when Grandma died; she died a long
time ago .
What part of Italy did they go back to?
Near Lucca- -Tuscany. My father was Toscano.
4a
1990 spring wine offering
Wine Descriptions
/l988
•-^ frultv
rJttCcU
l^SCaiTUiy BeauH>Uls: Light ruby red and brilliantly dear. Fresh,
fruity with an app>eallng berry character.
1968 Ptnot Noln Brilliant garnet colored wine with a delicate
fragrance. Serve as an accompaniment to beef, lamb or veal.
1 987 ZInfandel: Deep ruby color, fresh and fr^jity to both nose and
palate. Typical berry-like flavor.
1968 VlnUge Red: Fresh, simple and likeable, with a light berry
aroma.
1967 Cabernet Sauvlgnons Ruby rich In color, delightful Caberrtet
character. An intense wine with lots of fruit 4^ tremendous balance.
1980 Charbono: Very Complex. Very enjoyable now or cellar
arvather 5 years.
1 966 Petite Slrah: Intense spicy aromas. Youthful berry flavors. Very
good structure, long, rich finish.
1980 CelUrmaster Petite Slrah: Deep ruby red. robust aromas,
drink now or cellar for up to 10 years.
1968 Chardonnay: A full bodied wine with an abundance of fruit
and varietal character. The first 400 cases is 1987 oak-aged
Chardonnay just released from John Parducci's library.
1 988 French Colombard: Good, dean crisp fcxxl wine. The tartness
rrwikes it an ideal aperitif and seafood complement.
1988 Sauvtgnon BUna Off-dry. rich varietal character, blended
with Semlllion grapes for added complexity.
1988 VlnUge White: Superb quality, distinctive off-dry style.
1968 Chenin BUnc; Well balanced, soft and silky with a hint of
honeydew.
1989 Mendocino Riesling: Lively tartness, medium sweetness.
1969 White ZInfandei: A fruity, lightly blushed wine with a berry-
like aroma. A great beverage wine, easy to drink.
1988 GewurztramlneR An off-dry, very spicy, fragrant fresh wine.
"A sweeter wine with charm ..." Dan Berger, L.A. Times.
1969 Muscat Canelli: Rich, sweet, flavorful dessert wine specially
made from North Coast grapes.
1984 Late Harvest ZInfandei: Excellent dessert wine, similar In
style to a port.
Marlon Brut Champagne: A one-time-only bottle-fermented
sparkJing white wine served at John's 70th Birthday Party and
uolden Wedding Anniversary.
.J^/ioctl
1968 Alegre-Red: Festive off-dry red made from Camay and
ZInfandei; refreshing ripe-grape flavors.
1966 Cabernet Sauvtgnon: Bordeaux-styie dry red with mellow
briary-berry iuid toasty-vanilla flavors.
1966 Merlot Full-bodied dry red with rich cherry and black<urrant
aromas and flavors.
1967 Chardonnav: RJch dry white with crisp lemon, tropical fruit
arKJ oaky-vanilla flavors.
1968 Fum£ BUnc: Our most famous wine: Sauvlgnon Blanc and
Semillon yield herbal dtrus ix^<^ melon flavors.
1969 Alegre - White: Zesty off-dry white made from Chenin BIjmc;
crisp apple and melon flavors.
1969 Alegre • Blush: Fresh new blush nrtade from Camay: delightful
strawberry fruit flavors.
1968 White Riesling: OflF-dry white with flne flowery aronws and
brisk apricot and apple flavors.
Late Harvest White Riesling: Very rare dessert wine: lusdous
flavors of dried apricots, honey and cream.
Hicke :
Parduccl
Hicke:
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke:
Parducci
That's a beautiful little town.
Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I have a picture of it in my
office that somebody who's from there just mailed me. It's
a walled- in city. They lived in a little town called
Guamo, I think it was. We still own the property there.
When Dad left, he willed the property over to his sister,
and then her children inherited it, which would be my
cousins .
And they're still there?
Yes. Angelo died two years ago, but Maria still lives
there. She lives in Montecatini, just a little way west of
Florence.
Aren't there some famous baths there?
Yes. It's kind of a retirement city. It's a beautiful
city. I was there about five years ago.
So you get to go back there occasionally and find your
roots?
I've only been back there one time; I went back there for
business reasons, to have some bottling equipment designed
for me, and met my cousins for the first time --very, very
charming people and well to do . I understand that the
freeway is going through our property now, which is up in
the mountains, you know.
The same story over again.
Yes. Well, it's that way everywhere in the world.
We left your father stowed away on a ship.
They landed in San Franc
fact, my father almost d
eating hot peppers. I c
that. Then, inasmuch as
he knew the best was gra
the home winemakers , and
California looking for g
grandfather, who was a t
married Mom and had the
married.
isco, very ill. As a matter of
ied. He attributes his recovery to
an remember him always telling me
he worked in the fields, the thing
pes. He was looking for grapes for
on his journeys to Northern
rapes he met my [maternal]
ruck gardener, and my mom. He
first winery there after they were
Hicke: She was from Cloverdale?
Parducci: Yes. We were both born in that house!
Adolph Begins Making Wine. 1918
Hicke: So your father moved in with your mother's family?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: And began doing what?
Parducci: He started making wine, which was during Prohibition. They
made altar wines and they bootlegged, like everybody in the
world did. The vineyard that they had in Cloverdale was
really small, and Dad was looking for a larger vineyard.
So he came north to Ukiah and found that it reminded him of
Italy. He found this ranch, and the person who owned it
had put it up for sale and had gone to Italy. Dad put a
$5,000 deposit on it. When the man came back, he changed
his mind and didn't want to sell it. But he had taken the
deposit, so my father wound up buying the ranch.
Hicke: Did the ranch or the land have a name?
Parducci: I don't remember the name of the ranch, but I imagine we
could find that out if we went back into the deeds and all
that. But I am told it was one of the first vineyards in
Mendocino County.
Hicke: And it was here when your father bought it?
Parducci: Yes, there was about forty acres here in vineyards.
Hicke: Planted in what?
Parducci: Oh, they were old; they were probably planted in the late
1800s. I remember the varieties were Alicantes, Burgers,
Beclan, Colombard, and there was some Sauvignon blanc here.
That's about all the varieties I can remember; oh, and
there was some Charbono. Those are the varieties that were
planted. I can remember the University [of California,
Davis] used to come up here and pick some of these grapes
for experimental purposes.
Hicke: When was this?
Parducci: This was in the early or late thirties.
Hicke: Who came up from the university?
Parducci: Dr. [Albert J.] Winkler, and I don't know who else. But I
would suppose they'd have records of that. They used to
come up here and pick these grapes just for experimental
purposes, to make wine out of them.
Hicke: How did they know about these grapes?
Parducci: I guess they had records of all the varieties that were
planted in each county. They still keep records of the
acreages and the tonnages of every county.
Hicke: I read about a winery of your father's that burned down.
Parducci: That one right there.
Hicke: That was the one in Cloverdale?
Parducci: Yes. Wineries in those days were very small; they were
mostly barns with a press and a couple of tanks and a
couple of jack pumps, and that was the winery. There were
no big, elaborate wineries, except for Italian Swiss
[Colony] in Sonoma County. That's the only one that comes
to mind that was huge. Also our own Garrett Winery in
Mendocino County, capacity about two million gallons.
Hicke: You said your father made altar wine?
Parducci: Yes, he made sweet wines- -dessert wines.
Hicke: Do you remember where he sold any of this wine?
Parducci: No. I would think that most of it was bootlegged locally
and within the range of San Francisco and Eureka.
Hicke: Grape juice for home consumption?
Parducci: Everybody was allowed to make wine for home consumption.
This was one reason he started buying grapes. That's why
Hicke
he sent me to New York; I was selling grapes on Hoboken
markets for the home winemakers.
I want to get that story, but let's go back first and get
the story of establishing this winery. Your father came up
here and started buying property- -
Establishing the Vineyard in Mendocino County. 1928
Parducci: He came up here and bought this ranch in 1921. We moved up
here in 1927 or '28 --the family did. Prior to that we were
commuting every weekend, because Dad was running the ranch
and had people working here. We commuted for six or seven
years and finally moved the full family up here to the old
farmhouse on the ranch.
Hicke: How did you commute? By horses?
Parducci: No, we had a car! My dad had the first Cadillac ever in
Mendocino County. Then we had a Chevrolet touring car. I
can remember both of these. I'll never forget the commute,
because I used to get ill every time we came up the
highway. The old Hopland Grade was just nothing but turns.
All four boys were just erping their hearts out every
weekend. We just hated coming up to Ukiah- - hated it.
Finally we moved up here permanently.
Hicke: Was that in '28?
Parducci: About then.
Hicke: Did he build a house?
Parducci: No, there was a house here, and we lived in it for a long
time, and then he remodeled it.
Hicke: That's the one that's right across the way here?
Parducci: That one right there. Then we remodeled it again after I
moved into it. So it's been remodeled two or three times.
In 1933 that picture [of four boys] was taken because my
father brought me to San Francisco and had this suit made
for me- -a blue serge suit- -which my oldest boy used on his
wedding day. It was a nice suit, all virgin wool. My
father had a camel-hair overcoat with a silk lining that he
had refitted for me. That picture was taken with the suit;
all four boys' picture was taken. I had graduated from
grammar school, and Dad had enrolled me in high school in a
college preparatory course. I took all my books with me
for my freshman year.
John Goes to New Jersey in 1934 to Sell Grapes
Hicke: Where did you go?
Parducci: Union City, New Jersey. I arrived at Grand Central
Station, and from there I commuted over to Union City, New
Jersey, and lived with this family that were complete
strangers to all of us, except the lady who ran the home
was the sister of one of my father's and my aunt's close
friends who ran the Alder Glen Springs in Cloverdale, very
famous springs and resort. My aunt was a waitress there,
and she had worked there for many, many years. Her boss's
sister was the one that I stayed with. It was a family of
two girls and a boy. One of the girls was the same age as
I was, and one of them was a legal secretary. The boy
worked in a delicatessen. The girl who was my age went to
school, and the others all went to work, and the mother was
a homemaker. The father worked in the mines.
Hicke: Did your father send you to school there?
Parducci: No, I did my own studying.
Hicke: How did you happen to go to the East Coast?
Parducci: Well, because my father was building the winery here. We
all knew that Prohibition was going to be repealed, so he
started building the winery one year before it actually
happened. So we had our grapes that we had to sell. Prior
to that time, he was always having a broker here ship them
to the East Coast, and most of the time we lost money. In
order to ship grapes back East, you had to ship them to a
consignee, and that cost fifty dollars a car. So he
decided, "Why don't I send John over there, and he can meet
potential customers and get an education along with it?"
10
Hicke: This explains why you were so young when you went East to
sell grapes; you were also going to school at the same
time.
Parducci: I was just as big as I am now, more or less a grownup.
Hicke: You must have been about sixteen?
Parducci: In 1933 I was fourteen, just going on fifteen. I commuted
from Union City, New Jersey, to Hoboken every day, and
opened up the car- -or cars; whatever there were there- -and
then went to the auction market and either sold it or kept
it. I used to call my father up every evening and tell him
what we were offered for the car. If we didn't get $2.25 a
box, I would hold it for another day, and maybe I'd hold it
for two days, and then on the third day I'd sell it,
regardless of price. Grapes deteriorated very fast after
the long trip, and we did not dare keep them too long.
Hicke: No refrigeration.
Parducci: No, only while in transit, cooled with blocks of ice .
Hicke: That was a lot of responsibility for a fourteen-year old.
Parducci: Yes, but it didn't bother me any, because I didn't know any
better. I was around grownups all my life, so I was more
mature than my brothers. I will always remember a lot of
things: thousands of redcaps, and in those days you tipped
them a nickel for packing your suitcases. I would never
let them pack my suitcases, because I was stronger than
they were. So I'd always have to be wrestling my suitcase
with the redcaps. When I arrived in Grand Central Station,
it was just like going into another world. I'd never seen
anything like it in my life, and I never saw so many people
in my life. I was lost for an hour or two because they
couldn't find me. They finally found me, and then we went
to their home.
A lot of impressions I had really stayed with me to
this very day. When I first met the family, I said to
myself, "I'm with a bunch of gangsters!" You know, the
Mafia and all that, because they would say, "What kind of
'woik' do you do?" "You got 'boids' in California?"
Eastern dialect unknown to me . I said, "I've got to be
with a bunch of gangsters!" Then when I walked into the
house I smelled this real foul odor, and I said, "Boy,
11
these people are really terrible housekeepers. This house
smells terrible." Well, I found out that the homes were
heated with coal, and if you never smelled coal in a house
before, it smells awful. I wound up helping them stoke.
It was a two-story house, and they had a trap door on the
lower floor or cellar which the coal was thrown into. We
had to stoke the furnace frequently each day.
Anyway, I had a very nice experience with them. I
found that they were very, very nice people. They loved
the opera; I learned to enjoy going to the opera with them.
I went to a Snelling-Carnero fight with them. I think
that's who it was; I know it was Primo Carnero, because he
knocked this fighter clean out of the ring.
Then I learned how to ice skate and how to toboggan
and all kinds of things. Union City, New Jersey, where I
stayed, was just one block off of Burgerline Avenue, and
Burger line Avenue was the longest avenue in the world (San
Pablo is the second longest) . It had a kind of a slope to
it, and of course in the wintertime all the kids would do
was toboggan and go to people's houses and have hot
chocolate, refreshments, and all kinds of things.
On the East Coast, ball diamonds have a curb around
them, and in the wintertime they are filled with water,
which freezes, and that's where everybody ice skates. So I
had an interesting and enjoyable experience while I was in
New Jersey.
Hicke: Were you going to school, too?
Parducci: No. I just studied on my own with the books that were
given to me, and then when I got back I just turned all my
work in and went on as a sophomore .
Hicke: My word! So you were out there a year?
Parducci: No, I left here in July and came back here I think on the
28th day of February, something like that. So I was there
four or five months .
Hicke: By February the grape shipments had ceased?
Parducci: Oh, yes, by October, and then I stayed there a little
longer. After the grapes were sold each day, I would go
and spend the rest of the day in the Bronx Zoo. It was the
12
largest zoo in the world, and I never did get to see all of
it. All of my free time I would spend there.
Hicke: What did you feel like when you saw all that snow?
Parducci: Oh, I'd seen snow around here lots of times; we have snow
occasionally. I can remember while on a train, at the one-
mile [elevation] marker in Denver, we started getting snow.
And then, of course, it was snow all the way into New
York- -solid snow. I'll never forget that ride. It took us
four days and five nights to get there. Then for weeks and
weeks at a time I'd go to bed and I'd hear "clickety-clop ,
clickety-clop, " the sound of the train on the tracks.
Also, we slept on chairs that reclined back. Heat would
come on one side of the train during half of the night, and
the rest of the night the heat would come on the other
side. You'd have to get up and move over to where the heat
was so you could stay warm. It was a very interesting
experience.
There was no train that went through Chicago, so you
had to take a taxi to get from one side of Chicago to the
other side to get on the train again. We went through the
dirtiest part of Chicago; I'll never forget the papers and
the filth that were knee -deep all along. I guess we went
through the commercial part of Chicago.
Hicke: Were you doing this by yourself?
Parducci: Yes.
Family Traditions
Hicke: Tell me a little bit about some of the things you learned
from your father .
Parducci: Well, as far as the wine business is concerned, technically
very little. I learned from ray father to be a very
meticulous person; he and my mother both were very
meticulous. I learned to be a good housekeeper. I learned
to be honest. One thing he never would stand for was to
lie to him or to lie to anybody else. His handshake was
his bond, and he never, never went back on his word. I
learned that. And I learned to love my family. I didn't
13
Hicke
Parducci:
Hicke
Parducci
learn a lot from him as far as winemaking is concerned,
because they made wine haphazardly, and the way it came was
the way it came out. But he did teach me one thing: you
can't make good wine without good grapes.
I think one reason that I'm more or less successful is
that I had a good teacher in being a man, and whatever I
did I had to do near perfect or perfect. He wouldn't
compromise; if you were going to do something, you did it
right. So that's the way I've always been. I'm a very
meticulous person. As a matter of fact, I think you can
ask anybody in this office or out in the field, or even the
growers- -I try to make good wine. I try to keep our
gardens and our facility immaculate and a joy to see, I've
never compromised. I've found that by compromising there's
no end to compromising. However, all my people have worked
for me for many years- -many years- -and they all understand
that that's the way we want it, and that's the way it is.
That's what I learned from my father.
You see, there were four boys in our family. We went
to work before school, we went to work after school, and it
was the Depression. But my father always had ample food
for us to eat; and four boys can eat you out of house and
home, as you know. We used to take French bread like this
[demonstrates one foot long] --one loaf apiece, slice it
down the middle, put salami and cheese on it, and go out in
the fields and work. We came home and we helped Mom do the
dishes, and we kept our rooms. We didn't just throw our
clothes here and there; we were taught to put our shoes in
order, our clothes in order, and we were taught to take
care of everything.
I was just going to ask you about the influence of your
mother; perhaps that's one of the things --
Well, my mother is still alive and well. She has to use a
walker now, but she still wants and keeps a nice home. She
is very meticulous and taught us well.
Your three brothers are the same way? [George, Vernon,
Adolph Jr. ]
Well, I've lost one of my brothers; he had a heart attack.
But my other two brothers are well and both very
successful. We were born and raised on ranches, so we know
how to do most everything. We try to keep our facility
14
Hicke:
immaculate. I try to teach my employees to be proud of the
place they work. They know if there is something I don't
like, I'm going to raise the devil. They appreciate that.
I try not to be unreasonable about it; they just have to
understand that's the way it I want it. I don't think you
can be sloppy at work in a sloppy environment and make good
wine.
I was just going
wine.
to
say that that's how you produce a good
Parducci: We'll probably receive 120 or 130 awards again this year.
Mother Nature hasn't been very good to us the last three
years, either, but we just do the best we can. My
employees in the lab are meticulous and hardworking. They
take great pride in what they do. To take pride and to do
the best you can I learned from my father and my mother. I
didn't learn too much as far as winemaking is today.
Technology has changed so fast that even I'm not with it
every day. However, I guess that's progress, and we are
all making better wines.
Hicke: But your parents gave you the tools to handle that?
Parducci: They gave me my health, they gave me my brains to use. My
father left the winery in 1948 because he felt he wasn't
qualified to cope with the modern and changing technology
that was taking place in our wine industry.
John Parducci as a young man.
15
II MAKING WINE IN THE 1930S
The Wine Industry After Prohibition
Hicke: Let's go back to 1934, when you came back from New Jersey.
Did your father see the end of Prohibition coming all
along? Was he pretty determined?
Parducci: I could not answer that. I would think so, inasmuch as he
was involved in the industry very deeply- -because he knew
everybody in California, and they all believed that it was
definitely going to be repealed in '33. I don't know prior
to that time if they had any inkling of it or not.
Hicke: It seems as if he was a determined man all through the
twenties- -
y/y/
Parducci: I think if you look at most of the people in this book
[looking through Wine Pioneers ] . every one of them was very
determined [laughs], and in a lot bigger way than my
father. [Horace 0.] Lanza- -I knew him real well. I didn't
know Louis Martini very well. But all of these people here
were pretty determined. Antonio [Perelli-Minetti] had the
largest winery in Mendocino County. They were all very
determined. They had their lives in it.
Hicke: Did your father communicate with these other people?
Parducci: Oh, my father knew lots of these people.
Hicke: Even during the twenties?
16
Parducci: I'm not sure about the twenties; I was too young then to
remember. We knew Perelli-Minetti and Lanza because they
were in Mendocino County.
Hicke: He probably knew everybody in this county.
Parducci: Yes, he knew everybody up here in this county. I don't
know when he met Leon [D. Adams] , but we knew Leon when he
started Wine Institute. I couldn't really go back that far
and be very accurate; I was two years old in the twenties.
Parducci Winery In the Thirties
Hicke: In 1932, say, did he plant a crop with the realization
that--
Parducci: We had vineyards before 1932, as I stated before.
Hicke: I mean, did he try to increase the production?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: What steps did he take to approach the end of Prohibition?
Parducci: Lots of our home ranch had forest, and that was all cleared
off and vineyards were planted. He was increasing his
acreage considerably with the funds he had. Don't forget,
that was the Depression, so it was all done with blood and
guts and no money. Like this winery was all built by--
Hicke: I'd like to hear about the building of the winery.
Parducci: The winery was built by a father and four sons. There
wasn't even any electricity; everything was done by hand.
Concrete was poured by hand. As a matter of fact, you can
take a look at one of those walls , and you can see where we
stopped pouring every day. The building was all done by
hand, by a father and four sons. The land was all cleared
by us; all these rock walls were built by us. We used to
hire all Indians, because that's all the labor there was--
the Pomo Indians .
Hicke: You hired the Pomo Indians?
17
Parducci: Yes. Mostly all the grape pickers we had were Indians.
The Indians used to be around here to pick all the hops,
too, and the pears and the prunes. There were no Mexicans,
just white people and Indians.
Hicke: Where did they all live?
Parducci: On the reservation, and then a lot of them lived off the
reservation. They had families; I went to school with a
lot of the Indians.
Hicke: What did they do the rest of the year, when they weren't
picking?
Parducci: I don't know what they did. Some were basket weavers. I
guess a lot of them lived on the reservation and they
didn't have to do anything; they were supported by the
government. A lot of those Indians were my friends. Our
grammar school baseball team used to play against the
Indian team.
Hicke: Baseball?
Parducci: Yes, baseball. As a matter of fact, in my home I have
Indian paintings that were painted by a distant relative of
my wife's family, a very famous Indian artist. Some of her
paintings are now worth $150,000 to $200,000, and the
subjects are all people I went to school with.
Hicke: What was her name?
Parducci: Grace Hudson.
Hicke: Oh, she's the one whose work is in the museum in Ukiah.
She's your wife's relative?
Parducci: Margarett would know her family connection. She died the
year we were married. We have five of her paintings.
They're very beautiful.
Hicke: Do you know when the winery was bonded? Was it 1932 or
'33?
Parducci: We have just confirmed the date. Mr. [William F. ] Heinz
has researched all of the history, and he found the date in
the records .
18
Hicke:
I'll get the date [August 1, 1933].
a lot of people applying for--
There probably weren't
Parducci
There were only 70 wineries left in California out of the
370 or 350. He tried to find our original bonded winery
number in Cloverdale, and I think he found it. I'd never
been able to find it. He went to Sacramento and researched
the records there. I always wanted to know what the
license number was in Cloverdale. I think it's all in that
transcript that Mr. Heinz has.
More About Selling Grapes in New Jersey
Hicke: Let me ask you a little more about your work on the East
Coast, Who was buying the grapes?
Parducci: This is very interesting. I got a big kick out of this.
Every city block had a buyer.
Hicke: Every block? The homeowners?
Parducci: Just about every city block. That's the way it appeared to
me, anyway. They would go to the auction market and buy a
car of grapes. They would take it back to their little
community, whether it was one block or two blocks or
whatever, and they would sell five boxes or ten boxes or
whatever to the home winemaker. The interesting part about
it was that every one of these brokers- -which is what you
might call them- -would have a gimmick. For instance, "If
you buy the grapes from me, I'll take them and deliver them
to your house, and I'll crush them for you," Then another
person down the block would say, "If you buy them from me,
I'll crush them and I'll press them for you." They all had
gimmicks that would make people buy their grapes. As a
young boy, it was very interesting to me that they all had
a sales pitch.
They made their own wine, and of course they drank a
lot of it. Those were first generation Europeans, and they
drank something like forty gallons per capita. That was a
lot of wine. They used it as a food; at every meal they
drank wine. So there were lots and lots of grapes sold in
New York and in New Jersey. I mean thousands of cars. A
19
car held about 1,250 boxes, which is the equivalent of
about 25 tons of grapes. A carload of grapes sounds like a
lot, but actually it wasn't very much. Twenty-five tons of
grapes equated to about four hundred gallons, or wine for
twenty families.
people walked down this
of a mile long with cars on
these grapes and take down
the auction market, and
bid on it. If it brought a
didn't bring a profit, we'd
We ' d open the cars up , and
ramp, which was about a quarter
both sides. They would look at
the number of the car and go to
when the car came up they would
profit to us, we sold it; if it
hold it over for a day or two.
Hicke: What kind of grapes were they?
Parducci: All Zinfandels. Everything that came off this ranch was
Zinfandel. However, there were a lot of other varieties.
There were Muscatels, Alicantes, and all kinds of other
varieties, but from our ranch it was all Zinfandels.
Hicke: Did your father have any trouble getting railroad car
space?
Parducci: No. That's the only way grapes were shipped in those days
Cars were a dime a dozen. And they were all iced. They
had different stops; there were bunkers in each end, and
they would stop maybe every 500 miles and a lot of ice
would be dumped into the bunkers. That's how they kept
them cool .
Hicke: You said sometimes they would even last two or three days
after they got there.
Parducci: I think it took two weeks for them to get there. The
Zinfandels shipped well, because they were very ripe, you
know, and that's why the winemakers liked them. The
winemakers also liked them because they had a lot of sugar.
The family winemakers wanted good, ripe grapes, and those
are the ones they bid the most on in the market. Then some
of them would buy a carload of Muscats. As you know,
Europeans like a little bit of white grapes in with their
red grapes . So they would buy Muscats or some other
varieties that they would mix.
Hicke
How did your father get the grapes to the railroad?
20
Parducci: They were picked in the field, and we just hauled them by
truck and stacked them in the cars. We had a Chevrolet
truck and a Reo truck. You don't see the Reos anymore, but
you do see the Chevys .
Hicke: Is there anything more about that period that we should
cover?
Parducci: Yes. On that trip some other things impressed me. I said
it was during the Depression, and on the way to Hoboken
from Union City, New Jersey, we had to go through Fifth
Avenue or Grand Avenue (I can't remember which), and I'll
never forget the bread lines. The bread lines were as far
as you could see, and they'd have a little hut where they
were giving a cup of coffee and a sandwich to all the poor
people in line. That was also the year that some balloon
got away from some child or grownup, and it went up to the
top of the Empire State Building and got hung up on the top
of the building.
I used to have my suit cleaned and pressed every day
for nineteen cents. I wore it every day to the yards, so I
had it cleaned every day!
Hicke: This is the same suit that your son got married in?
Parducci: Yes. Oh, it was a nice suit. It wasn't worn much after I
came home. When I got back home there weren't many
occasions to wear a suit. We were farmers, you know. I
wore it when we went to church on Sundays, but it never did
get a lot of wear.
Hicke: Anything else about New Jersey?
Parducci: No, I think I've covered New Jersey pretty well. I told
you I learned to ice skate there, and toboggan, and met a
lot of nice people.
School and Work in the Winery : 1930s
Hicke: When you came back, what did you start in on?
21
Parducci: When I came back I turned all my work in to the high school
and went on as a sophomore and worked in the fields and
winery before and after school.
Hicke: We're looking at a picture of you in the lab, and you're
studying something through a microscope.
Parducci: Yes, I'm looking at yeast cells under a microscope.
Hicke: Did you work in the lab? Or did you do everything?
Parducci: When I came home I was fifteen and a sophomore. This
photograph was taken a lot later than that, I think; yes,
because that microscope is what I had in 1948. I don't
know how old I was there; it looks like I was about
nineteen or twenty. I know that bottling machine is a '48
vintage .
Hicke: We're still in the 1930s. What kind of technology did you
have in the vineyard?
Parducci: We learned how to plant grapes, raise grapes- -everything
there was to do with a vineyard.
Hicke : Everything was done by hand?
Parducci: Yes, Dusting by hand, picking by hand, pruning- -
everything was done by hand.
Hicke: Weeding?
Parducci: All done by hand. As a matter of fact, in the thirties we
were still doing some of our work with horses. Like this
hill here was all worked with horses --this hill that you
see over here with the sign on it. It had grapes on it.
When we moved from Cloverdale up here, we brought our
horses with us. That's when the old Fordson tractor came
into being- -you know, with the big spikes in the wheels?
My dad had two of those wheel tractors.
Hicke: What were they used for?
Parducci: Plowing and disking and cultivating. In those days they
were awkward, and I can remember spending half of our time
getting them unstuck, because they were underpowered. They
were just the first tractors ever made.
22
Hicke: They were primarily for clearing the land and starting the
vineyard?
Parducci: No, they were for cultivating the soil; they didn't have
enough power for clearing. They were mainly for working
the ground.
Hicke: Would your dad plant some new vines every year? Or how
often did he expand?
Parducci: Well, not every year, because when this ranch was all
planted he didn't plant any more. I can't remember how
many years it took us to plant this ranch- -probably three
or four years.
Hicke: How many acres is this ranch?
Parducci: This was 120' acres. This is the original property; this is
what we call the home ranch.
Hicke: Then did you work in the lab or with any of the chemistry
of it?
Parducci: Yes, I started making wine in 1933 with my father. I did
all the lab work, because he didn't know anything about
chemistry; he didn't even know a yeast cell from a jack
rabbit. He didn't know anything about the chemistry of it
at all. So I started doing this- -making the yeast cultures
and making wine more scientifically than in the past. Then
we started making wine for Petri [Wine Company] .
Hicke: You sold it to them in bulk?
Parducci: Yes. Then from Petri we went to- -we made wine for
Christian Brothers for many years, and then we made wine
for other wineries. We sold wine to Roma. Everything was
bulk wir .n those days; very little was bottled here--
just scire for our tasting room. We started bottling more
probably in the early forties. It was for our tasting
room, for people who dropped in here, and some sold in
northern California. The rest of it was all gone out in
bulk. This is one reason why he sent me to New York- -to
make customers. It so happened that some of the people I
met there became our customers in later years, because we
sold a lot of wine in barrels and in gallons to the East
Coast after Prohibition. Also, people like Bartholomeo Pio
came out here to Southern California and purchased a
23
winery. I think they still own that winery. That's one of
the people I met. I met four different families that
became customers of ours.
Hicke: You graduated from high school?
Parducci: Yes, and I met my wife in my last year of high school. She
was one year ahead of me , born and raised here .
Hicke: Her name is--
Parducci: Margarett Romer- -English, German, and French. We went to
Santa Rosa J.C. [Junior College], and I majored in
languages and in chemistry.
Vorking With Dr. Edmond H. Twieht
Parducci: I might add that during the late thirties or forties- -I
think it was in the thirties- -a man named Harold Bolla, who
lived in Geyserville and was a promoter, decided to form a
group of small wineries to promote their wines under one
identity. They hired Dr. [Edmond H.] Twight, a professor
of enology from the university, to be the head enologist.^
For about five years I accompanied Dr. Twight and got a lot
of my training from him.
Hicke: You accompanied him where?
Parducci: Well, we were going from winery to winery, and we were
making wine at all these different wineries; he was the
head enologist and I the helper.
Hicke: How did you happen to become acquainted with him?
Parducci: I think this Mr. Bolla was acquainted with him.
Hicke: And your winery was one of the ones?
Parducci: Yes.
^ See Maynard A. Amerine, "Edmund Henry Twight, 1874-1957,"
Wines & Vines 38 (5):29-30.
24
Hicke: So you just started going around with him?
Parducci: Yes. I got a lot of my training from him. Later on
[Louis] Petri hired him, and he was the head enologist over
at Escalon for Petri. I used to go over every summer and
work with him in the lab because we were making wine for
Petri. His oldest son was the head winemaker for Spice
Islands, or the Muscat Cooperative. His name was Walter
Twight.
His youngest son, Benny Twight, was the man who was my
age. The university wanted to send him to France to wine
enology school and to later on come back and take his
father's place. My father was going to send me with Benny;
that's why I majored in French. Then the war broke out,
and my three brothers went into the service. I was the
oldest son, so they didn't take me. I was 4-F anyway.
Benny became a ranger in the Packwood Forest in the state
of Washington, and that's where he retired from. So I
didn't get to go to France, and Benny didn't get to go to
France either.
Hicke: What kinds of things do you recall about Dr. Twight?
were you learning from him?
What
Parducci: Very meticulous winemaker. A very small man. A very
likeable person. I enjoyed Dr. Twight very much, and I
learned a lot from him.
Hicke: Do you think he was more interested in theory and didn't
quite understand or care about the practical aspects of
winemaking?
Parducci: Well, I don't know if he was ever in charge of winemaking
on a huge scale at all, even when he was over at Petri. He
was in complete control of the lab. I don't know if he was
actually the winemaker. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from
him.
Hicke: About the chemistry?
Parducci: About the chemistry of the wine, yes. I learned how to do
my lab work really well, which later became obsolete
anyway, you know. We were doing it the old-fashioned way,
making our own solutions and everything. Nowadays you
don't do anything like that; most everything is done with
scientific apparatus. Reagents and all your chemicals in
25
ampules are prepared for you and are more accurate . Lab
work has changed dramatically for the better, and I guess
we will see many more changes.
Winemaking Then and Nov
Hicke: Is it a lot less fun this way?
Parducci: Well, it was much more fun the old way. Wines were simple,
production methods were simple; we had fewer varieties to
think about. Consumers drank more and were less critical
of what they drank. I don't know if I like the world of
computers. In the old days we did everything hands on. We
improvised and worked with what we had. Most of us on
farms learned. to do everything. We learned the hard way.
I learned to be a carpenter, an electrician, and a welder.
That's what I did during the war in my hometown, along with
working in the winery.
Hicke: Where did you do all this?
Parducci: We helped build my dad's house, I built two- thirds of my
house and a couple of apartments in town. I've done a lot
of carpenter work.
Hicke: How did you learn to do it?
Parducci: I worked as an apprentice for a while and then as a
journeyman. All of us boys have talent when it comes to
doing things around the house or farm. Lamps around here,
this big chandelier you see here --that's one of my hobbies.
But it's just fun for me. I've done a lot of the rock
walls also that you see around the winery.
Mor^ on the 1930s
Hicke: Let's go back to the thirties. In 1938 was the great
prorate. Did you have anything to do with that?
Parducci: No, I didn't have anything to do with it, but almost every
winery was involved in that.
26
Hicke: I think it was optional for the North Coast wine grapes.
Parducci: That was one of the things that was very serious for us in
the wine industry in those days, I remember, but I didn't
get involved in it at all. My father was involved in it.
My father was very much involved in it, going to many
meetings. It was a hot issue.
Hicke: I also wanted to ask if you know anything about what the
other wineries in the area were doing. Your father knew
all of them, but I don't know if you know much about it.
Parducci: There was only one winery here that amounted to anything in
size, and that was California Grape Products, which later
became Garrett 6e Co., the Virginia Dare people.
Hicke: Who were the other seven wineries that you said your father
was involved in with Dr. Twight? They weren't necessarily
in this county?
Parducci: No. I think there were a few from this county. I can't
remember who they were. I can name the seven wineries that
were here in Mendocino County at that time. I know Pacific
Vineyards, Geyserville, was one of the members, and it's no
longer there; its winery is gone. There were others, but
I'd have a hard time telling you who the other ones were.
I don't know the exact number, but the group was around
seven wineries.
Hicke: Was there quite a bit of interaction? You said your father
went to a lot of meetings.
Parducci: Yes, there were always a lot of meetings. We were members
of the Sonoma County Wine Growers Association. ■'• My dad
helped with the association. I don't remember when it was
founded. I think Louis Foppiano was the first president.
The association was quite involved in the prorate fight. I
remember going down there to all their meetings with my
father .
Hicke
Do you remember any of the issues?
•'■ In 1942 Louis Foppiano began the Sonoma County Wine Growers
Association.
27
Parducci: No, I was too young to get involved in it
remember .
I don't
Parducci Tasting Room
Hicke: Do you remember your father having a tasting room in the
cellar? You told me that was when you first started to
bottle your own wines. Can you tell me how that came
about?
Parducci: We started selling wine in 1933, in the tasting room
underneath the house .
Hicke: Who came?
Parducci: Oh, tourists, because we were only four hundred yards off
the road. We had a big sign down there, and people came
in. That's why we're very well known in Canada, Oregon,
and Washington, because we were the first tasting room in
California, and the last one going out. Everyone stopped
here. We sold tons of wine here [to people] from Oregon,
Washington, and Canada.
Hicke: That was really early for any tourists to be tasting wine,
wasn't it?
Parducci: Yes, but there were lots of people. Remember, those were
dry states; you couldn't get wine into Oregon and
Washington. I can remember many cases going out of our
cellar. We used to put some in little barrels- -five- ,
ten-, fifteen-gallon barrels. Lots of people used to stop
in and buy our wine. So many people in Washington, Oregon,
and Canada know Parducci very well. We still sell a lot of
wine to our friends in the Northwest.
Hicke: How did your father, or whoever it was, happen to start
this?
Parducci: The tasting room? It was another source of money
28
Gift Shop in the Tasting Room
Hicke: You used that little cellar underneath the house?
Parducci: Yes, and then I remodeled that a half a dozen times, put
shelves in there and glass counters. I built two tasting
counters because one counter wasn't big enough to handle
the people. Then my wife got involved in it and we started
handling glassware --different kinds of bottles and things.
We had the first gift shop in the whole [wine] country. We
sold tons of gift items.
Hicke: When did you start that?
Parducci: About 1938, '39.
Hicke: It's a beautiful place, and Larry was telling me it was a
very nice atmosphere for tasting.
Parducci: She worked in it for a long time. Oh, we had lots and lots
of people.
Hicke: No other wineries around here were doing anything like
that?
Parducci: No. We were the first ones to bottle wines, we were the
first ones to have the gift shop, we were the first ones to
plant all the premium varieties and make the first varietal
wines.
Hicke: What did you have in your gift shop in the early days?
Parducci: The first things I had in the gift shop were the four-way
bottles. Remember the four-way bottles?
Hicke: With the different spouts? Oh, yes.
Parducci: Okay, that's the first thing I put in there, and also the
carafes. You remember the bottles that had a bowl and were
wrapped, and they had a hole in the side of them that you
could put ice into? I was the first one to bring those in
here. And I was the first one to bring the Madeira baskets
in here --wicker baskets from the island of Madeira.
Hicke:
Oh, yes
29
Parducci: Well, I brought those in by the carload. Then House
Beautiful and other magazines bought some of the baskets.
Then we began to see ads with our baskets, advertising
towels, glassware, etc. My wife and I used to pack the
baskets with wine. A lot of the lumber companies ordered
them for gifts. We used to get the ones that held a whole
case of wine, and we used to get ones that held two bottles
of wine. All were packed with wine and glassware, and we
sold hundreds of them. We worked very hard to make
attractive gift packs.
Hicke : How did you find those , or where did you find them?
Parducci: I don't remember how I got the first one; I think it was
when I was in San Francisco or someplace. I saw the
baskets and made an inquiry. I found out we could order
them directly from the island of Madeira, and we did. It
got to the point where we were ordering a whole carload of
them. That's a lot of baskets. We used to subcontract a
lot of them, too. We used to sell them to people who
packed other items in them. I always used demonstrate to
our baskets when the tourists came in; I used to get up on
top of the baskets and jump up and down on them to show how
well-made and strong they were.
Hicke: Were they really that strong?
Parducci: Yes. They were all made out of willow and very strong.
Beautiful!
Hicke: Are there any still around?
Parducci: Yes, I think Margarett has some. You can still buy them,
but they're expensive. We used to pay something like two
dollars a basket for the large ones. Then we used to get
wicker bottle pourers. Remember the cradle, where you laid
the bottle into it and it had a handle?
Hicke: Yes. Where did you find all these different kinds of
bot-tles and bottle holders?
Parducci: San Francisco, in one of the Italian shops that brought
them in from Italy. Then I found a way to bring them in
myself. Then Margarett got involved in the gift shop, and
she started going to the gift shows and buying items that
were related to wine. Now the gift shop has an assortment
of very nice merchandise, much of it related to wine.
30
Ue had a good business in our tasting room. My wife
and I took care of all the billing, and 1 always used to
write a note to every one of our customers who received a
bill- -a hand-written, thank-you note. We did that for
years and years. I still do that. You know, I travel once
a month- -a week a monCh--and I'll write anywhere from
fifty, sixty, or more letters a month to every one of the
people I meet or come in contact with.
We were the first that I know of to have a gift shop
combined with a tasting room in northern California. I
don't know anybody else who had gift shop and a tasting
room. It was successful for us.
Hicke:
What about corkscrews?
Parducci: Oh, yes. We used to get our corkscrews until a couple of
years ago from a man in New Jersey named Eli Barry. He
still sells corkscrews. He's one of the people I met in
Hoboken. I used to buy all the corkscrews from him.
Hicke
What kind of corkscrews?
Parducci: The one with the lever, you know? They all came from
Italy, and we used to buy them by the gross- -144 at a time.
Eli is still in the business. As a matter of fact, he
became a wine distributor of ours. The freight yards where
we used to sell grapes were in Hoboken, New Jersey.
They're no longer there; it's all warehouses now. I was
shocked when I went to Hoboken last time to see all
warehouses and no freight yards. Eli has his distribution
warehouse there. We had a change in distribution, and I'm
sorry to say that we are not associated anymore. He is a
nice man.
Bottles. Corks, and Labels
Hicke: When you started bottling, you had to have corks, too.
Parducci: Yes, and you know how we bottled? We bottled with a hose
and by hand. We used to pound the corks in with a rubber
mallet. [laughter] Yes, it's funny. As a matter of fact,
my wife found these bottles at my mother-in-law's; I gave
31
them to her many years ago. She didn't drink wine at the
time, so she just stowed away the bottles and forgot about
them. My wife found them recently and then gave them to me
for my library.
Hicke: These Angelica bottles?
Parducci: Yes. The wine is very old. This was one of our first
labels, year 1930 or thereabouts.
Hicke: That's a beautiful label.
Parducci: See these corks? I put those corks in.
Hicke: With the rubber hammer?
Parducci: Yes. That wine is about seventy- five years old. The wine
came from A. Mattel, and it was fifteen to twenty years old
at the time of bottling.
Hicke: VTho designed the label?
Parducci: In the early years wineries or bottlers could buy stock
labels which were selected from albums of samples. The
trade name or mandatory was printed on the label by a
printer.
Hicke: Tell me about the shape of the bottle.
Parducci: Shapes of wine bottles are traditional. These are German
hand-blown bottles. Riesling bottles were available in
different colors.
Hicke: They're very long and narrow, with the neck just barely
sloping up to the cork.
Parducci: See the colors?
Hicke: One's green, one's brown- -
Parducci: I have about seven colors. I have the blues, the moss
greens, and all different shades. And there are no seams;
they're hand-blown. Margarett just brought these to me.
She found them down at her mother's.
Hicke
Why is the bottle shaped this way?
32
Parducci: It's a Riesling bottle. That's traditional for German
white wines, and mostly Rieslings.
Here's one that came out in the forties.
Hicke: "Blackberry wine, bottled by Adolph B. Parducci." I didn't
know you made any blackberry wine; I hadn't read anything
about that .
Parducci: Well, we never made sweet wines, either. These came from
A. Mattel. The blackberries came from Elk Grove.
Hicke: And you just bottled them? How many different wines did
you do that for?
Parducci: Oh, we had about twenty different kinds. We had Angelica,
White Port, Red Port, Red Muscatel, Tawny Port, Port,
Muscatel, Tokay, Dry Sherry, Sweet Sherry, plus all the
berry wines- -Loganberry , Blackberry. That's why people
used to drop in here; they loved the fortified sweet and
berry wines, especially these wines here that were fifteen
years old and older. We used to have barrels in the
basement. We'd have about thirty barrels, and they all had
spigots (I still have the spigots), and we had small
glasses. Each barrel was labeled with the variety, and
people would come in and go around and taste what they
wanted. Then we'd have empty gallon bottles, and we'd fill
the gallon jugs and charge them thirty- five or forty cents
for it, and they'd go off as happy as can be. And no lead
foils.
Hicke: It was just the cork, was it?
Parducci: Yes, and screw caps. We didn't even know what a lead foil
was in those days .
Hicke: So you were acting as a sore of negotiant?
Parducci: For these people? No, more like a wine shop. When a
customer drove up here from the highway, which took some
doing, we wanted to have something that he liked- -thus the
different varieties. Then we also had wooden steps for the
demijohns, which contained our dry wines. I had special
glass tubes made for them with a pet cock, and this is
where we had our sauterne, our burgundy, our Rhine wine,
our clarets, and whatever dry wines we had. People would
come in and want a burgundy, we'd let them taste it, fill
33
their jugs or ours, and another happy customer would leave
our shop.
Hicke: Did you happen to save the old labels?
Parducci: Yes. We've got a collection of old labels- -not very many;
several of each is about it. We just threw them away in
those days; we never thought about keeping anything for
historical reasons. We discarded lots of old bottles and
labels. It's sad, and I'm disappointed that we didn't keep
more. Many of these bottles are collectors items now and
fetch a lot of money.
Hicke: They're lovely bottles
different colors?
Why were they made in so many
Parducci: I can't answer that. I don't know why they're different
colors. But the blues are beautiful. There are light
blues, dark blues, and then there are moss greens, reds. I
have a display of an array of these bottles in my home and
enjoy looking at them.
Hicke: I guess they're smaller than a regular bottle.
Parducci: It's a half bottle- -half of a fifth.
Hicke: I wanted to ask you where you were getting your corks.
Parducci: In those days we used to buy corks from Schneir in San
Francisco, who imported corks, and also Latchford. I think
Schneir was the first one we ever bought corks from. They
go back a long, long time. Later on in years we purchased
a hand corker from them. Can you see the corker in that
picture?
Hicke: You didn't have to continue on with the rubber mallet,
[laughter]
Parducci: I thought the corker was in the picture, but maybe it
isn't. Yes, isn't that the corker right here?
34
Growth of the Business
Hicke: You told me who all you sold bulk to, didn't you? Petri,
Roma--
Parducci: Yes, we sold wine to Petri, Roma, [E & J] Gallo, the
Christian Brothers- -almost all the wineries in California
that were bulk wineries .
Hicke: Obviously your sales were increasing every year. What were
the implications of this new growth that was taking place?
Parducci: I think our business has grown slowly most of our career.
When TMI [Teachers Management and Investment Company]
bought the properties, the winery was growing. We were
underfinanced to get any larger. My brother and I
purchased our two brothers' and my father's equity in 1964.
We didn't have the additional finances to keep up with our
competition; we couldn't keep up with the trend. We were
determined to do something. When TMI came along, they
offered the financial help that we needed.
Hicke: One of the questions I think is interesting to try to
establish is how long it takes to get a winery up and
going. That's a little hard, maybe, because your father
began early and had a head start.
Parducci: There would be no parallel to what it is today. This is
why we can produce the wine that we're producing today. In
a way, it's really a detriment in marketing, because when
the consumers see the inexpensive prices, they don't think
our wines have quality because they're too inexpensive. We
purchased the land when it was very cheap; it was only a
couple of hundred dollars an acre. We cleared the land
with blood and guts and, like I said, we built the winery
with blood and guts. We just improvised everything and
bought used equipment; we never bought any new equipment.
As a matter of fact, all the tanks we had in the winery
wer« used tanks from the Petri Winery. The tanks were
installed in our winery in order for us to make the amount
of wine that we needed. So that helped us grow
considerably because of the added cooperage.
As we kept making more money, we kept putting another
addition onto the winery, or putting a new roof over the
top of it, or buying a new piece of equipment, and kept
35
growing and kept growing- -planting more vineyards. It was
a slow, hard process.
Hicke: Do you have any sense of when it became profitable?
Parducci: I think it became profitable when my father ran it.
Hicke: So maybe ten years, or by the 1940s?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: Or even earlier?
Parducci: Earlier than the 1940s.
Hicke: If you don't count all of the labor that you put in by
hand.
Parducci: Well, it had to be profitable because it kept getting
larger. The profit had to come from somewhere, plus he had
four boys who were working very hard, too.
Hicke: He didn't have to pay somebody to do that kind of work, so
he probably turned a so-called profit much earlier than--
Parducci: I think you can go back to almost any first-generation
family, whether it's in the wine business or the grocery
business or anything else, and the harder they worked, the
more they could make. Today that's not the way it is.
Today they won't let you do chat. See those arms
[indicates his arm muscles in a photograph]? I lived in
town, and after I went home I built another apartment; I
worked until eleven or twelve o'clock at night, pounding
nails. Well, you try to do chat today, they'll have you in
jail. No permits, and if I wanted to work all night long,
I could work all night long and nobody would bother me. I
did all kinds of things Co make extra money. Today it is
much more difficult.
When we were building chis winery and wanted to build
a wall, we went in there and built a wall. We didn't have
fourteen inspectors telling us how to do it. It's an
altogether different ballgame today. If you want to build
a winery today, you've goc everything against you, as you
know. To build a winery coday would be very difficult and
almost unaffordable .
36
Hicke: You mean if you wanted to build it yourself?
Parducci: Well, you couldn't build it by yourself, to begin with.
Everything must be engineered today. You have
environmental laws, etc., to cope with. You have many
obstacles. That's not the way it was when we were boys.
If we wanted to work hard, we could make more money by
working hard. If we wanted to take on a project, we just
went ahead and did it. You can't do that [today]. I feel
sorry for the young generation today that wants to start a
business .
Hicke: I don't know how many people have as much ambition as you
have had.
Parducci: There are a lot of ambitious people in this world today.
However, a lot of them will never have the opportunity that
I had when I grew up . We worked on a farm and had a
practical education. We learned to survive. Today it's
easy come , easy go .
Marketing in the Early Days
Hicke: Speaking of numbers, back in, say, 1940, what would be the
percentage of bulk wine you sold as compared to what you
sold in your tasting room?
Parducci: Ninety-nine percent of it was bulk wine. The tasting room
sales were very small in comparison.
Hicke: But your tasting room kept growing, obviously.
Parducci: Yes. We used to crush four thousand tons of grapes or
more, which equated to about six to seven hundred thousand
gallons of wine. We probably sold ten thousand cases of
wine in the tasting room each year. So you can see that in
comparison our sales were very small in the tasting room.
Hicke: Why did you think it was worthwhile to keep up the tasting
room?
Parducci: Because there was much more profit selling wine retail
rather than in bulk. In bulk we would get eleven or twelve
cents a gallon, some years thirty cents a gallon.
37
Hicke: That makes sense. There was clearly a lot of effort you
put into that tasting room and gift shop.
Parducci: Yes, and it paid the bills, too. And inasmuch as we were
going to go into the marketplace with our label, it brought
our name in front of a lot of people who knew the Parducci
family. So it helped. There are many tasting rooms in
California today. Why do they have them? Because they are
profitable; the wines are sold direct to the consumer. A
lot of little wineries are selling everything they produce
in the tasting room. I think now there are getting to be
too many of them. However, I do believe tasting rooms help
educate the consumer and give them an opportunity to taste
many wines and to see the operations of most wineries.
Hicke: See what you started? [laughter]
Parducci: Yes. I'm happy to be a part of it
John Parducci during interview, 1990
38
III JOHN PARDUCCI AS WINEMAKER: THE 1940S AND 1950S
Appointment as Official Wlnemaker: 1948
Hicke: I have the date that you started in 1944 as winemaker, but
obviously you were doing it much before that.
Parducci: Oh, I started in 1933 with my father. It was in 1948 that
I had it by myself.
Hicke: How did that happen?
Parducci: Well, Dad always wanted to retire when he was a certain
age. This particular year he just said he didn't like the
amount of wine we were making; he didn't feel like he had
the education to get into making a big volume of wine , and
he decided he would just retire. And that's what he did.
My father didn't know the chemistry of winemaking. He felt
that I had the education to carry on and wanted me to take
the responsibility of winemaking. I felt confident that I
could handle the winemaking because I had the help of
Dr. Twight and Mr. Angelo Petri, the owner of a very large
winery, and his chief enologist. Dad liked to fish, he
liked to bowl, and he liked to play golf, so that what's he
decided to do.
However, we always kept my dad as the chairman of the
board. I always looked up to him. Whenever we had a major
decision, he was always involved in it. As a matter of
fact, see that label over there? That dates that picture.
That label was in the forties.
Hicke: What had happened during the war-
effect of the war on your winery?
41- '45? What was the
39
Parducci
Hicke :
Parducci
Hicke:
Parducci
That's when we started making wine for Petri. My father
didn't make wine after the war. Angelo was making a lot of
wine during the war, and that's why we were crushing a lot
of grapes. We made good wines. Actually, it made my
father and family a lot of money. We crushed more grapes
than we ever had in our history. The war helped my dad
make more money.
You were making it for the military?
No. I think Petri made alcohol. They also had a big
market for their wine, too. But I think all the press wine
and all the lees wine and everything like that --they
distilled it all. I don't know what the government used it
for--gasohol or whatever, I don't know.
Were you still selling the bottles from time to time?
Yes, the tasting room went on.
New Equipment
Hicke: When you took over the winemaking in '48, what changes did
you make, or what were your major problems? Did you plant
any different grapes? I know you did in the fifties.
Parducci: We started buying equipment like this [points], a filter
press; we started getting more modern. The old filters
were nothing but asbestos -filled bowls, and you had to run
the wine through these presses. When they got plugged up,
you had do take all of the material out and wash it in a
big pot. Then new filters came along, and we purchased
them.
Hicke: What do you call these?
Parducci: That's a filter. As a matter of fact, that one there is
owned by one of my friends in Texas right now.
Hicke: That's pretty small.
Parducci: That was big enough for us at that time. That's a filling
machine [points]. I still have that filling machine.
40
Little Willy, my little Mexican, and I used that for years
and years and years. That [points] is a bottling tank.
That's another improvement. That's a stainless steel tank,
Hicke: What kind of tanks did you have before?
Parducci: They were all wooden tanks.
Hicke: Were they redwood?
Parducci: Mostly redwood, and we had some oak casks. We had twenty-
two 5, 500 -gal Ion redwood open tops, and we had eleven
11, 000 's that were open tops for fermenting. We used to
crush a lot of grapes, and it was all done by hand; every
bit of it was shoveled by hand.
Hicke: Did you have to stamp down the cap?
Parducci: Yes. We had a man who did that, all by hand. We had a
wooden punch about this big- -about 6x6.
Hicke: And you plunged that in--
Parducci: Yes.
Parducci: Then later on we would start using a pump. That was
another change for the best, and one we greatly
appreciated. We'd take a pump and circulate the wine. We
would stand on a board that was on top of the tank and
slowly circulate the must.
Hicke: You mean you pumped it by hand?
Parducci: No, this was an electric pump. That was about the time we
had electricity.
Hicke: When did electricity arrive?
Parducci: Oh, I don't know exactly.
Hicke: While your father was still--?
Parducci: Oh, yes. I'd say in the early thirties- -' 34 or '35 or
something like that.
41
Hlcke: So It was early on.
Parducci: Yes.
We started adding better things. We purchased an
automatic corker instead of a hand corker. In 1948 big
things happened for us as far as improving our facility.
Hicke: What happened?
Parducci: It was in 1948 when we removed all of the old wooden
fermenters and replaced them with stainless steel.
Hicke: How did you decide on or learn about new equipment? Did
you go to equipment shows or talk to UC Davis people?
Parducci: We just kept up to date about new things. At that time we
were also having some consulting done by Berkeley Yeast
Laboratory, owned by Julius [H.] Fessler. We got in on the
sterile filtration, yeast cultures, and a lot of new
bottling techniques and new equipment. Julius is still
alive, too. He doesn't have the Berkeley Yeast
Laboratories, but he's still doing a lot of research on
wine. I'm a very close friend of his.
Hicke: Joe Monostori?
Parducci: Yes. That's quite a story, because I used to know Julius
many, many years before. Joe Monostori got to know him
because he was the winemaker at New York Brotherhood
Winery #1. That's how he met Julius.
Hicke: Is that the name of it- -New York Winery #1?
Parducci: No, it's called [pauses to think] Brotherhood Winery.
Hicke: You meant it was the first winery in New York.
Parducci: Yes. By its Bonded Winery Number, I presume it was the
first.
42
Grape Varieties and Wine Varietals
Hicke: The premium grape varieties that you were growing in '48--
do you recall those?
Parducci: Yes. I wouldn't classify them all as premium varietals.
We didn't have very many. We had French Colombard, Petite
Sirah, Zinfandel, Alicante, and Carignane.
Hicke: That's all I've got listed for you.
Parducci: That's all there was. We used to sell claret, Rhine wine,
and a lot of wines that you do not see today.
Hicke: At that point you weren't making fine varietals, were you?
Parducci: Well, Colombard is a varietal, Zinfandel 's a varietal. A
varietal is a wine made from the grape . But they were not
the "Big Five" varietals. The "Big Five" varietals are
Cabernet, Pinot noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, and Sauvignon
Blanc .
Hicke: I also have that you were very early making Petite Sirah as
a varietal.
Parducci: Oh, yes. Concannon and the Parduccis I believe bottled the
first Petite Sirahs in California. We sold Petite Sirahs
in our tasting room in 1933.
Hicke: Made as a varietal?
Parducci: Yes, in demijohns and jugs.
Hicke: Was it a good seller?
Parducci: No, most consumers preferred lighter red wines. Some liked
a heavy, big wine, and we'd sell them that. If they liked
claret, we'd have a Zinfandel or some other blend.
During those years a lot of fortified wines were
consumed. The first generation Europeans drank red wine
mostly.
I didn't tell you this (and it should probably be off
the record) - -remember I told you we met the Scotto brothers
and the Pios, who were our customers on the East Coast and
43
sold wine in gallons to their trade? We used to fill all
the gallons by hand here, put them in four-gallon boxes,
put them in a boxcar, and ship them. Well, they always
wanted to furnish the labels. 1 just wish 1 had kept some
of those labels. We would get labels from them called
"Claret , " "Barberone , " "Barbaresco , " "Barbera , " "Burgundy , "
and other names , and we always used to use the same wine to
fill all the bottles. [laughter] Finally one day the
Scotto brothers called up and said, "You know, our
customers are complaining. They say these wines all taste
pretty much alike." [laughs] But most wineries used to do
that.
Hicke: I've heard stories that wineries used to have a tube coming
out, one going to a bottle saying "claret," and the other
tube going to--
Parducci: Exactly. And I think you'll find that same thing today:
if you put it in a brown bag, two -thirds of the customers
don't know what they're drinking. [laughs] Anyway, those
were the varietals that we had.
Hicke: Somebody apparently noticed.
Parducci: But they weren't sure, though! [laughter] It never came
down to their telling us to stop doing it.
Hicke: In the 1950s you began planting some new varieties, right?
Parducci: No, we didn't do it until 1964.
Hicke: Okay. The '58 wines I have that you made are table,
Burgundy, chablis, rose, and sauterne. Then for varietals
you had Barbera, Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Riesling, French
Colombard, and Zinfandel.
Parducci: Those are some of the old varieties. No, we didn't make
the Barbera until '75.
Hicke: Then you also made all these ports and muscatels and
sherries?
Parducci: No, we never made any of those
Hicke: Oh, you bottled those.
44
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: What else happened in the fifties? That was after you
became the winemaker on your own.
Parducci: We started making wine for Christian Brothers then. That
was in the late fifties, I believe it was; I'd have to go
back in my records and take a look at when we first started
with Christian Brothers. But there was an interim there
where we made wine and just bulked it out; we weren't
making anything particular. After our stint with Petri we
were in limbo for three or four years, and then we started
making wines for the Christian Brothers. When we started
making wine for the Christian Brothers, we started making
roses. All the varietals that we had, which were small
amounts, we kept for our account and used some for our
tasting room.
Distribution
Parducci: And we had a distribution going then in the Pacific
Northwest. One of my brothers had a route; he was
delivering all of our wines up to the Oregon border and
down to Cloverdale.
Hicke: How did this get established?
Parducci: Well, my dad actually started it. He bought a van and
started delivering. As tourists started coming in here and
people were asking for our wines, he started a route.
Every week he went in a different direction, and we had a
big business going. We were selling thousands of cases of
wine .
Hicke: To--
Parducci: Markets- -all the markets, grocery stores, and liquor
stores.
Hicke: Your father actually packed the wine in the van?
Parducci: Yes, we had a van that held 150 or 200 cases of wine.
45
Hicke: Would he take orders on the first round and then bring them
the second time?
Parducci: Yes, and he took a lot of telephone orders. He delivered
wine as far as Areata, all the way to Hopland and
Cloverdale , and all up and down the coast- -Mendocino, Fort
Bragg. We had lots of customers up in the Garberville and
Laytonville areas and Eureka.
Hicke: When did your brother take this over? Also in '48?
Parducci: Let's see, it was in '64 that we bought him out, so I'd say
it was from '48 to about 1960.
Hicke: Which brother was this?
Parducci: That's Vernon, my third brother --the next to the youngest.
Hicke: What part of the month would he spend on the road?
Parducci: He was delivering every day.
Hicke: Every day?
Parducci: Well, yes. If he went to Eureka he'd be gone for two or
three days. Then he'd come back, fill the truck up, and go
in another direction. He'd be delivering all the time.
Then in 1971 (I think it was), when we started our
distribution- -Vintage Wine Merchants- -they started
distributing everything.
Hicke: I was just going to ask you- -were there not any
distributors, or did you just think you did better to do it
yourself?
Parducci: I don't think there were any distributors. Everything was
shipped by freight- -by truck; we shipped a lot of it by
truck .
Hicke: But for some reason you thought it was better that he
deliver a lot of it personally?
Parducci: Again, it's like it's getting back to the present--the one-
to-one sales promotion You meet the people, and that's
the way you create your business.
Hicke
Establish a bond?
46
Parducci: That's right. So we did a lot of that.
Hicke: What was Adolph, Jr. , doing?
Parducci: Adolph, Jr. , was the farmer of the family. I was the
winemaker, George was a very brilliant c.p.a. [certified
public accountant] , Vernon was a good salesperson, and
Adolph was a good farmer. As all families go, they just
didn't have patience long enough to want to stay together.
We'd have been winners if we had stayed together.
I was the one who did most of the work in the winery.
They were too young, and George was going to school- -
getting his schooling in accounting. The other two worked
in the fields, etc., and didn't care for it that much.
That's how it was. If we'd have stayed together, we'd have
been a real, real successful team.
Hicke: You had a lot of expertise there, between the four of you.
Parducci: Yes.
John Parducci during the crush at Parducci Wine Cellars
(above) and studying yeast cells in Parducci Wine Cellars
(below) , circa late 1940s .
47
IV NEW DIRECTIONS AND GROWTH
John and George Asstime Ownership of the Business: 1964
Hlcke : So in the sixties you and George bought out the two other
brothers .
Parducci: In '64. My two younger brothers were unhappy with the wine
business, and my brother, being an accountant, was telling
my father, "Dad, you'd better do something with this
facility, because if something happens to you, we're back
to being dirt farmers." So he gave us, the four boys, the
winery at book value, and the two boys decided they didn't
want to keep their share. So George and I decided to buy
them out some way. We didn't have enough money to buy two
lead pencils, but someone in the community from the banking
business saw that George and I had a lot of potential and
liked us. So unbeknownst to us --and we still don't know
who it was --offered to loan us the money to buy out my two
brothers and my father, and we did.
We had the winery full of wine. At that time wine was
worth nothing; that's why they got fed up with it. There
was no market for it. Then overnight the wine business
went up and we were able to sell our wine and pay off our
two brothers and our father. George and I were down to
zero. At the same time we bought the Talmage Ranch, which
was in a family estate. Someone helped us buy that, too.
We started doing a lot of expansion in the winery and
making other improvements, and then we planted the Talmage
Ranch with the help of the Christian Brothers. Then we
decided, "Now that we've got all these grapes, we're going
48
to have to find some distribution." So we started looking
for someone to market our wines. A young man dropped by
here who had been drinking my wine for a long time and had
just sold his share of the Refectory restaurants. A group
of them had bought the Refectories and then sold out and
gone into the Victoria Station [restaurants], and Fred
decided not to. He was traveling up the highway on a
vacation and stopped in at the winery here.
Hicke: His name is?
Parducci: Fred Holzknecht. We had a couple of glasses of wine, and I
asked him what he was going to be doing, you know, now that
he didn't have any obligations to the restaurants. He
said, "I don't know," I said, "Well, if you like my wine so
damn much, why don't you sell it?" He thought about it a
minute, and he said, "I'm going to think about it." A
couple days later he calls up and says, "Hey, I think I
will." So he and I started barnstorming all over
California, and then he started expanding and took on a
secretary. It was beginning to be profitable and more
profitable. His company was called Vintage Wine Merchants.
Then we decided we should try to find a distributor in
Southern California, and we interviewed the Myersons .
Myersons is known today as probably the most successful and
largest wine marketing company in the United States right
now. They became our distributor in Los Angeles. Then we
started marketing from state to state, and finally we got
over all the United States. Then Fred sold out to a
partner of his just a couple of years ago. Not satisfied
with the new ownership of Vintage Wine Merchants, we took
on Brown- Forman, and that's where we're at today.
Hicke: That's an interesting story. I want to ask you a little
bit more about the Brown- Forman relationship, but let's go
back to the sixties. Did I understand you to say that you
didn't kno'-' who guaranteed your loan in the bank?
Parducci: No. Well, we were born and raised here, so it was somebody
we grew up vith. Most of the directors are well-to-do
people, anc we know all of them.
Hicke: It was a local bank?
Parducci: Yes, the local bank--the Savings Bank [of Mendocino].
49
Role of Banks in the Wine Industry
Hicke: Maybe you could just tell me in general what you think is
the role of the banks in the wine industry.
Parducci: Well, Bank of America, I think, created a lot of problems
for the wine industry in the early years. You know, the
[Louis R. ] Gomberg report predicted that wine consumption
would go to eight gallons per capita. The banks were
advising, "Plant grapes; we'll loan you the money." Of
course this created high costs for land, and this is what
got the wine business in a lot of trouble. I think the
banking business did a lot of harm to the industry. It
created all these surpluses, created all these wineries
that are so expensive. I think there's going to be a big
shakeup in the next couple of years .
Hicke: You mean some of the wineries will go under?
Parducci: I can't see how they're going to make it. How are they
going to do it, paying $25,000 to $50,000 an acre and
building all these big wineries? How are they going to
recoup that money out of their investment? The market is
supersaturated with wine. I think it's going to be very
interesting the next two or three years.
Hicke: Do you recall anybody in particular in the Bank of America
who was really pushing this?
Parducci: No. My father and A. P. Giannini were very close friends.
My dad was a stockholder of the Bank of America. As a
matter of fact, he did all his business in San Francisco,
and everybody in the head bank there knew him.
I don't know if it was an individual- -Mr . Giannini, I
was told, was a very conservative person. To me , it's not
a people's bank anymore; it's all the Ph.D.s who are really
running the banks. It isn't a bank that's run on a one-
to-one basis anymore. They created a lot of problems for
the wine industry. I believe they created the high land
values, for instance; there was no end to what they would
loan on a piece of property, as long as you were going to
plant grapes. And now it's going to catch up with a lot of
people, and it's going to hurt everyone. It's not only
going to hurt people who don't belong in the wine business,
50
but it's going to hurt all of us who have been in the wine
business most of our lives.
Hicke
How is that?
Parducci: Oh, because we can't compete in the marketplace. Like
right now they're dumping wine on the market because many
wineries can't meet their loan payments. They're dumping
wines on the market for twelve dollars a case now. How can
we do that? We have at least twenty dollars a case in it.
It's going to be very, very difficult for us to survive
this economy. We'll do it, because we're family. We can
whittle it down to bare bones , because what we have is paid
for. However, it will still be difficult. We have people
here who are hard workers and determined.
Then we have all these restrictions, making us put
warnings on the labels about health hazards and sulfites,
making it mc. 5 difficult to market wine.
Hicke: Did your father get loans from Bank of America?
Parducci: Oh, sure.
Hicke: So in the early thirties the banks were--
Parducci: My dad always banked with Bank of America- -always , up until
the day he died. George and I didn't. All our loans were
at a local bank, because we saw the handwriting on the
wall. We saw where ray father had built a relationship at
the head bank where they knew him and he could get results
or money whenever he wanted it; they knew all his history.
But then we saw that changing very rapidly. We grew up
here, we knew everybody here, and when we needed some money
we went to the local bank, and in ten minutes we had it; we
didn't have to fill out a whole bunch of paperwork in order
to establish our credit. So we decided to go with a local
bank anc do all of our business with a local bank, and my
father did his business at the Bank of America. We had
kind of a split in the family. Some of my brothers banked
at the savings bank, and others banked at the Bank of
America. It was nothing personal; it was just the way it
was .
I've been doing business with the savings bank all my
life, and I see a big change coming there now, too, because
the people my age are gone; they're retired or they have
51
died. Charlie Mannon, St., passed away, Mr. Bronley has
passed away, Carl Dominick is not there anymore; so I'm
going in there and I'm doing business with another
generation. I'm doing the whole scenario over again.
However, we're still going to do business there, because
we're local and they're local, and they know us and we know
them, and my children know them. We like it.
Hicke: Back in the forties and fifties, would you have to get
short-term loans to cover a season, or would these be long-
term loans?
Parducci: Usually a little bit of both. When my father bought this
ranch- -he always wanted to pay everything off as soon as he
could, but I don't know if they were long term or short
term loans or what they were. Whenever he borrowed money
it was only because it was necessary for more equipment or
for another building or something like that. Today it's
pretty short term. We need it for things like buying
grapes, and then we pay it back. Because we're not
expanding anymore, and we don't have any plans to expand
any more. Two years ago we built the big addition that you
saw up there, and we were able to pay that off within two
years because of accumulated funds that we had. We don't
like to borrow a lot of money unless we can see where we
can pay it off. That's what's hurting a lot of people- -
they're up to here.
We were born in a different time, that's the problem.
I've gone through two wine depressions, and I don't want to
go through any more of them.
Hicke: Not to mention a major economic depression.
Parducci: That's what two -thirds of the young people don't
understand. They've never had a day of starvation. I can
remember when we didn't know where we were going to get our
next meal .
Planting Premium Varieties
Hicke: After you bought the winery, from what I've read I
understand that you started off in some new directions for
planting grapes.
52
Parducci: We went to all premium varieties for varietal wines; we
planted all the first varieties because we could see the
handwriting on the wall where the bulk market was going
down the tubes. Big wineries were going out of business;
as it is today, there are not large wineries you can sell
bulk wine to anymore. Who are you going to sell it to?
Almaden [Vineyards] is gone, Paul Masson [Winery] is gone,
the Petris are gone, Italian Swiss Colony is gone. They're
all gone! And every winery is taken over today- -like the
Beringers [winery] is planting its own grapes. All the
major wineries are planting their own vineyards, or they're
buying their vineyards; so they're not a source of wine
anymore. So where are you going to sell this wine? The
whole thing is changing so fast that you can hardly keep up
with it.
Hicke : You saw that coming?
Parducci: Sure, we saw it coming. We saw it coming where you weren't
going to be able to sell the bulk red wine that we had; you
were going to have to put it in a bottle. That's what we
decided to do and why we planted all these varietals.
There were no premium varieties in Mendocino County, so we
had to play it by ear- -plant these varieties and make wine
out of them and see if the wine turned out good, and go
from there. And we're still playing around with planting
different varieties and trying to find the right places to
plant them, as most California wineries are doing. We're
always playing around with different varieties. Now we're
getting into the Italian varieties and the Rhone varieties;
we're getting into all kinds of things- -hybrids , etc.
I'm still interested in the wine business; I'm still about
as young as I was fifty years ago. Otherwise I'd be bored
with it, you know. There are so many things I want to do,
I can't even begin to do them.
Hicke: That's wonderful
plant?
How did you decide what varieties to
Parducci: In 1964? Well, with the help of the Christian Brothers- -
we were making wine for them at the time- -they looked at
the soil, and we decided these were the varieties we were
going to plant, make the wine, and see the results. That's
what we did, with the help of the Christian Brothers, and
we thank them for it!
53
Hicke: How long did that take?
Parducci: Two years. We planted the whole 100 acres in two years.
Hicke: What did you plant?
Parducci: We planted Pinot noir, Beaujolais, Chenin blanc, Franken
Riesling, Semillon, Flora, Chardonnay, and Cabernet.
That's what we planted. Now that whole ranch, in one more
year, will be completely replanted, and it will be all in
Cabernet and all in Merlot. There won't be a white grape
on it.
Hicke: Why is that?
Parducci: Well, because we find that that soil is more adapted for
quality Merlot and Cabernet. We're going to use the Largo
Ranch for whites, and the home ranch here for reds and
whites. It's a matter of making the wine for a number of
years, and also the market demand. I felt, and I'm
advising all of my growers, that it's come to the time
where we can't compete in California raising the white
varieties, with the exception of the Chardonnay and the
Sauvignon- -
Grape Growing in Mendocino Countv y/y/
Parducci: Most of our properties in Mendocino County are excellent
and suited for red grapes. I think the North Coast
counties produce the best red varieties. Why raise Chenin
blanc here, when, say, the San Joaquin [Valley] or Fresno
or Lodi can raise just as good grapes as we can with a lot
more tonnage and less money? Why should we compete with
any white varieties? We can raise the best red grapes.
The Valley doesn't have the climate or the soil. So why
compete with them? We don't have enough land up here to
even- -they could take Mendocino County and wipe it
completely off the map, and nobody would even miss us,
because we only produce about 30,000 tons. So why not
raise the best red grapes we can?
The other advantage to red wines is that the way this
market is, you can put red wine in a tank, and if you can't
54
sell it this year you can sell it next year; it'll get
better and better the third and fourth year. At least
you've got some leeway. With these whites, you can't do
that. Furthermore, you're competing in a very tough
market. For my money, my recommendation is to plant all
reds, as much as we can.
Hicke: What is it about the soil at the Talmage Ranch that makes
it so much better for red grapes?
Parducci: It's deep, and it's got a lot of rock in it. It's got a
very slight slope and gets good sun exposure. It produces
excellent red grapes. It's just the right type of soil.
It's a deep soil, it's a light soil. We get good sugars.
The whole Talmage area is a good area for red grapes. It's
been proven the best for the last eighty years. The finest
red grapes have come out from that area. So that's what
we're going to do. Plus Cabernet and Merlot, wines that I
think are going to be around for a long time. Although we
make good Chardonnays , I wouldn't advise a grower to plant
this variety. Statistically there are too many acres
planted in areas that can out-produce us in quality and
quantity.
You take a hill like this up here, and it's a shame to
plant it with white grapes. It's number one bench, it's
high up on a plateau, it's very marginal soil and a light
producer. It'll produce most red grapes with good quality.
We've been making excellent Zinfandels off that hill for
years and years and years.
Hicke: Are you saying that the appropriate soil and climate is
harder to find for reds than whites?
Parducci: Yes. I think it's a combination of the soils. Also, don't
forget that Mendocino County produces the lowest ton per
acre in California; we're only 3.5 tons to the acre. With
these yields our reds have a lot of flavor, aromas and
complexity. However, it's difficult to make a living
producing these kinds of yields. We've decided to pay a
premium for those grapes and have the grower raise them,
rather than buy grapes chat are raised in the lowlands and
produce 7 or 8 tons to the acre.
I don't think you're going to see the small farmers
and marginal vineyards around very much longer. It will be
difficult for them to survive. Besides the high taxes and
55
urban development, land prices are becoming too expensive
to produce grapes. How can we survive? I'll bet you that
in ten years we won't be able to operate this winery. Look
what they're doing- -building houses, and they're
complaining about the smell already. They're complaining
about the tourists; they're complaining about everything.
Sebastiani [Vineyards] is a good example; they were forced
to leave their winery in Sonoma.
Hicke: I guess what you're saying is that Mendocino County has a
special niche for wines, but it also has a special
challenge.
Parducci: The challenge is urbanization. That's what's going to be
our problem. Our acreage in Mendocino County is about the
same as when I first moved here- -number of acres. What's
happened is that because of the rise in grape prices, pear
and prune orchards were pulled out and grapes were planted.
But I wouldn't buy a lot of grapes from those vineyards.
Hicke: What did they plant?
Parducci: They planted Chardonnays , Sauvignon blancs. White
Zinfandels (Zinfandels for White Zinfandel) .
Hicke: Did you get any help from UC Davis when you started this?
Parducci: Oh, sure, they've always been helpful. Oh, yes. I've
disagreed with UC Davis, sometimes up to the point where
they established a test plot in Hopland. I said to them,
"You know, you're making your recommendations from Davis,
and that doesn't mean a hill of beans for what's going to
happen in Mendocino County," So they established a test
plot down in Hopland, which was a big help, but then they
couldn't afford to keep it up any longer and they pulled it
out.
We get a lot of help from the University at Davis
regarding right rootstocks, control of diseases, and help
in the winery when we have problems with fermentations and
things like that. And they're doing research every day,
developing new rootstocks that are resistant to phylloxera,
trellising techniques, and many, many other things. We
also have Fresno State [California State University,
Fresno] , a tremendous help to the wine industry and the
grape growing industry.
56
Hicke: Can you remember any particular incidents where they were
of special help to you?
Parducci: No, I can't recall any at this moment. We planted all AXRl
with their recommendation, and now it's becoming a--
Hicke: You haven't got phylloxera here, have you?
Parducci: We have it in Lake County. I don't know if we have it here
or not; I'm not qualified to answer that. I've seen some
vineyards around that I would be very suspicious of, but I
don't know of anybody who has really had it checked out.
We have it in Lake County on our AXRl rootstock.
Have they been helpful with me? [long pause] I can't
remember anything in particular, but I've never asked them
for a lot, either. I know a lot of people have.
State Legislation
Hicke: In 1965 there was something called the Williamson Act- -the
1
land conservation act.-^ Did that impact your farm here?
Parducci: We put part of our ranch which is rangeland under the
Williamson Act, but we haven't really done a lot with it.
Hicke: So that's just set aside? It's taxed at--
Parducci: Yes, for range. We don't have livestock on it, and we're
supposed to have some livestock on it. As a matter of
fact, we do have livestock, but it's not our own livestock;
we rent it out for livestock. It's not suitable for
vineyards, and no income, so you more or less have to put
it under that act. It would be difficult to pay taxes on
it; there isn't much money in livestock at this time.
Hicke: So that act was somewhat helpful to you?
Parducci: Yes, I think it was. It helped a lot of people.
^ California Land Conservation Act. 1965 Reg. Sess., Cal .
Stat. , ch 1443. A. B. 2117.
57
Hicke: Do you have any kind of relationship with your legislator?
Parducci: Well, [we do] if one stays in office long enough so that we
get to know him! I know most of them. I know the
governor; I've met the governor. President Reagan I know.
Hicke: I saw your picture taken with him.
Parducci: Yes. But I don't get involved in politics, because I found
that you can't please everyone. I've never run for a
political job, and I never would, for that reason. I've
had many close friends who were in that rat race, and they
finally give it up. People that you want in the courthouse
or to listen to what you have to say are too busy making a
living. It's the people who are agitators and have all the
time in the world that are always the ones sitting there
lobbying for everything, you know. With my temperament, I
couldn't take. that.
Hicke: I think you're doing very well where you are.
Parducci: Environmentalists are something else. I can't agree with a
lot of their arguments.
Educating the Constimers
Hicke: Let's see- -you told me about your distribution growth and
how that all came about.
Parducci: You know, distribution is a very interesting part of my
life, because I've traveled now since 1971. People all
over the United States and, as a matter of fact, outside
the United States, know me. I find that there's not enough
of an educational process in regards to wine in the United
States that educates the consumer. We, as Europeans, had
wine with every meal. I sometimes blame the young
winemakers , and I was a young winemaker one time, for
making wines that the consumers are not enjoying. In other
words, those of us who go into a store to buy a bottle of
Chardonnay can't find two bottles that are anything alike.
Or two red wines. I think that's wrong. Winemakers are
trying to make something out of a grape that doesn't taste
like wine. They're putting it in this barrel and that
58
barrel, malolactic fermentation, barrel fermentation, etc.
People don't know what the hell they're drinking anymore.
Whereas we were brought up with a bottle of wine on
the table with every meal, and it was all red wine. We
never had a bottle of white wine in this household until
1964. The wines that we used were made out of Zinfandel,
Carignane--a combination of four different varieties of
grapes- -and it was nice and fruity. It went with Mom's
pasta and her fish and her salad. My dad would put it on
his strawberries and his peaches. Now here we are, we're
snorting and we're sniffing and we're smelling fifteen
kinds of things in a glass of wine, and people are
wondering what's going on. We need to educate the
consumer, not intimidate him.
Most of our vendors need educating also; they don't
know what they're selling. I walked into a famous liquor
store recently and saw eighty- some Chardonnays in a row,
and that many Cabernets. They were priced from $1.99 up to
$50. Now, the consumer walks in the store, and can anybody
tell her why one is $1.99 and some up to $50? She doesn't
know why. She doesn't know why one of them is sweet, and
why another one is high acid, and another one is butter -
like or oakey. She doesn't understand why they are
different. They're all Chardonnays; they all say
Chardonnay on the label.
Then we have the same variety of wine labeled either
Fume Blanc or Sauvignon Blanc. I was taught that when you
make a Sauvignon Blanc in stainless steel and it's off-
dry, it should be labeled Sauvignon Blanc. If you put it
in a barrel, where it gets a smokiness, and is relatively
dry and wood- aged, it's supposed to be labeled Fume Blanc.
Well, now all the Fume Blanc producers are going back to
labeling it Sauvignon Blanc. So now when the consumer
walks in and picks up a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc off the
shelf, she doesn't know if it's sweet, if it's barrel-
aged, or whatever. And the consumer just says, "The hell
with it; I'll bring home a cooler or flavored water or
something else." That's what's happening in our business
today .
Drinking and driving is another problem that we have.
Restrictions and such being as they are, we are all afraid
to drink a half a glass of wine or any other beverage
because of the liabilities. It's getting ridiculous.
59
Another problem that we have- -I just came back from
North Carolina, Kentucky, Washington (Seattle) and
Portland, Oregon, and I saw so many wines in the
marketplace that were over the hill. Whoever buys those
wines is never going to drink wine again. They're all
standing up, many are oxidized or maderized, White
Zinfandels are brown and off color; they're gone. I walked
into Cost Plus and Liquor Barn in North Carolina, and it
was one city block square, wines from all over the world.
Now, you tell me- -are they going to turn over all of those
wines in a year's time? I don't think so. However,
somebody's going to buy it sooner or later. That's why
when I travel and I see a bottle of my white wine on the
shelf that's four years old, it upsets me, and my marketing
people know it.
Hicke: What do you see as a possible solution? Or do you see any
solution?
Parducci: You've got to educate people- -wholesalers and retailers.
(This is off the record, because I'll get in up to my
ears.) Most vendors, when you walk into the store, will
say to you, "What's the deal today?" They want to know how
deep they're going to get into your pocket. So you give
them a big discount, they put the money in their pocket,
put the wine up on the shelf, and don't do one damn thing
to sell it. They couldn't care less! These are the kinds
of people who need to be educated. Like this salesman
running around with samples in the back of his car in 120-
degree weather- -I'm going to be calling a wine writer and
let him taste my wine, and the salesman has had this wine
rattling around in the back of his car for a week. They
treat it like a rock; there's no educational process that
tells him how to handle wine.
When the Wine Institute got rid of the Wine Advisory
Board, I think they made the biggest mistake they've ever
made in this wine business. I belong to a lot of civic and
fraternal organizations, and I used to put on programs with
educational videos and materials the Wine Advisory Board
furnished us. We would have wine tastings, and county and
state fairs were furnished with a wine travelogue, posters,
and wine information pamphlets, etc.
60
Hicke: People seem to be very interested. I don't know why they
aren't getting educated. But you're talking about the
distributors?
Parducci: I'm talking about wholesalers, distributors, anybody who
relates to wine. In all of my presentations I try to
inform my audience. I take a bottle and pull the cork out
and ask, "Do you feel that little hump there? Know what it
is?" Here's a person selling my wine who doesn't even know
that these bottles all have a little ridge in the middle of
them so the wine will go up so far, and that's where it's
supposed to stop. I ask, "Do you know how old a cork has
to be?" "No." I say, "You look at a cork; it should have
seven rings." They don't know that. I ask them, "Do you
know that some dry, white wines have a lot of CO [carbon
monoxide] and can't be subjected to extreme temperature
changes? You know what happens to it? It's just like soda
water; as it warms up, pressure starts to wet that cork,
and once the cork's wet it doesn't have a seal anymore."
I ask, "Do you know how long it takes to buy dead-
leaf green bottles for our market? We bottle most
varieties once each year because some of these bottles are
manufactured only once a year." "Oh, I didn't know that."
How about labels? "Did you know it takes us six or eight
months to get labels?" "Oh, we didn't know that." They
think it's like pushing a button and out it comes. They
don't know that wine is a living thing, and that it all
takes time. We have to age Cabernet two to three years;
they don't know that. They don't know a damn thing about
the wine business.
Hicke: That seems to explain why you do a lot of traveling. This
is part of your own effort to talk to people and have
personal contact?
Parducci: I try. Sure, today you sell wine on a one-to-one basis.
There are so many millions of bottles out there that if you
didn't get out there and make yourself known, they'll
forget you the day after you leave. That's the way it is.
But you've got to get that first bottle off the shelf.
That's what I keep telling Brown- Forman: "You're spending
your money in the wrong direction. You've got to spend it
to educate the consumer," You know that when those bottles
are gone off that shelf, Mr. Storeowner is going to work
his butt off to get those bottles back there, because
they're moving off the shelf.
61
It's just like the health benefits of wine. How many
places do you see the health benefits of wine advertised?
You don't see it very much. Those of us in the industry
are aware of it, but the consumer's not seeing it.
The Italians drink forty gallons per capita, the
French drink forty gallons per capita. Do you see them all
dying? Yes, they're dying- -ninety to a hundred years old.
And the French and Italian wine industries have no
tolerances for sulphur; they can legally go up to 300, 450
parts per million. It doesn't seem to hurt them. Look at
me, I've been in and out of tanks when I could hardly
breathe because of the sulphur gas. See all that stuff [on
my hands?]? That's tallow; I used to crawl in and out of
tanks when I had to rinse them down. The odor of sulphur
was so strong that I had to run out the manhole and put my
head out. I'm seventy- three years old and it didn't hurt
me .
But the consumer listens to all this propaganda, and
that's what I mean by an educational process. I couldn't
hazard a guess as to what the final outcome of our wine
business will be in the future, with all the warning labels
and restrictions that we now have.
62
V PARDDCCI WINES AND WINEMAKING
[Interview 2: July 31, 1990 ]#//
Making Wines in the Early Days : Red Wine
Hicke: I thought we might start this morning by talking about the
different wines and winemaking, and your methods and how
they've changed over the years. For instance, in the 1960s
you made wines without any fining or filtration.
Parducci: Yes. In the old days we had open tank f ermentors , and our
equipment was very primitive. Most wineries, I believe,
had the same procedure . We crushed our grapes in tanks
through a de-stemmer crusher. What this piece of equipment
did was to remove the stems and crush the berries. You
have to remember that it was all red wine; we made very
little white wine, if any.
Hicke: Now we're back in the forties?
Parducci: The forties was all red wine. We made our first white wine
in 1946 or '47, which was a French Colombard. The rest of
the time it was all red wine. Red wines were very simple
to make in those days, because we made it for the bulk
market. You didn't have to worry about tannins or
finishing the wines or anything else; they just went out in
the bulk market. The ones that we sold in the tasting room
were aged in our old tanks for a long time- -at least three
years- -before we bottled them and put them in the
marketplace .
Hicke: What kind of tanks were these?
63
Parducci: They were 1,200 -gallon ovals, 4,000- and 6, 000 -gallon
redwood tanks. In three years most of the deposits were
naturally precipitated, so we were able to bottle the wines
without a lot of sedimentation, primarily because they were
consumed right away. They didn't sit on the shelf for
years; people bought them in gallons, took them home, and
drank them. Very few of our wines in the early years were
even found in markets or on the shelf. Everything was very
simple, and wines were consumed as soon as they left the
winery.
Changes Starting in 1948
Parducci: Then in 194-8 we started making some of the white wines. We
controlled the temperature by putting coils into the tanks
and running cold water through them.
Hicke: You put the coils inside of the tanks?
Parducci: Yes. They were plates, or they were just coils, and we ran
cold water through them to keep the must cool. In later
years, when George and I bought the two brothers and Father
out, we went into commercial refrigeration. So the
technology changed a lot, from redwood to stainless steel,
to filtration and fining, and all those kinds of things,
because we were going into the marketplace with our wines,
which was in 1968. We planted the vineyard in '64, so it
was in '68 that we made the first wines, and marketed them
in '69.
Then the whole world changed and we got into bottling
equipment. From that, right there behind you- -the hand
bottling equipment- - to the semi-automatic, and then to the
automatic, where we're at today. Technology not only
changed as far as the equipment is concerned, but in
winemaking, too. We had to make the wines lighter in
style. We started doing a lot of varietal production,
label changes; all kinds of things were changed.
As far as the wine technology was concerned, it was
pretty much the same up until, oh, a few years ago, when I
started making wines a lot lighter, wines that were
drinkable earlier and full of fruit. That's what we're
64
still doing today. When you buy a bottle of our wine off
the shelf, you can take it home and drink it. Also, it'll
last a long time because it's not overly processed; it's
very natural when it goes in the bottle, and we use good
grapes from Mendocino County or Lake County. This is where
we ' re at today .
Ports and Sherries
Hicke
Parducci
Hicke:
Parducci
To go way back, I've read the story about how your father
baked the ports and sherries.
I didn't know what was going on in those days because I was
too young, but I remember the way he used to make port.
He'd put it in barrels, and then he'd roll the barrels out
on a concrete pad and cover them with straw. What would
happen with the straw was that it maintained the heat at a
constant temperature, and it helped bake the sherries and
facilitated the aging process of the ports.
I still have some of those ports from 1949, and
they're delicious. And, of course, in those days it was
all done with illegal brandy. They made their own brandy
and fortified their wines. I've tasted some of the
brandies made in those days, and they were delicious. They
were very good, so they knew what they were doing. Of
course, they were done in such small quantities also.
How long did you continue to make ports and sherries?
That was the only one we ever made. Then we made another
one in '66. I've wanted to make ports the last three
years , but we have been so involved in our crush and bad
weather that we just couldn't find time to do it. And we
had excellent grapes to make fantastic ports the last three
years, because they were very high in sugar and good acids
and everything. We just couldn't find the time to do it.
But we're going to make another one, and I hope it will be
soon. We're doing many experiments right now with new
varieties. We've got so many new varieties planted and so
many new blends of red wines that I just can hardly wait to
see the results.
65
Developing New Products
Hicke: When you decide to do a new wine, what's the motivation for
developing a new product?
Parducci: I have always been interested in new products. That's why
we experiment with different varieties. For one thing,
it's a challenge. However, I think you have to make new
wines from your own area on your own soils and in your own
style before any final decision can be made about the
quality of the wine or the area. I remember when
Dr. Winkler said that Mendocino County would never be a
famous producing county, and here we are. So you just
can't make a judgment until you do it. We decided to plant
the right varieties, and our research and experiments
proved that we can produce fine wines .
Hicke: What did he base that on?
Parducci: Probably the climatic conditions and the soils. I don't
really know what the basis was, but I know that the
university never did recommend Mendocino County for a
premium grape -growing area. It's just like- -I have a lot
of hybrids planted. Why do I have hybrids planted? I
helped start a winery in Texas, La Buena Vida, with
Dr. Bobby Smith, who has hybrids, and he now also has
viniferas . I've made wine from Chambourcin, Chancellor,
Landot, Seyval blanc, Rayon d'Or, and I was impressed with
a lot of those varieties. I want to use them in many trial
blends .
When the fad started here in California- -you know, the
low-alcohol wines- -winemakers were coming up with the de-
alcoholization process and the vacuum process and
everything, and I said, "You can't do that. You can't take
a green grape and wind up with a good product. You've got
to have a product that has good balance with low sugars to
produce a product with low alcohol." The hybrids will
ripen between 14.5 and 15, a lot of them. So that's when I
decided I was going to plant hybrids and make wine from a
hybrid. I found that what happens in Texas is no way going
to happen in California. So I've got an acre of them
planted, and they are now producing experimental wines for
me.
Hicke
These are the French hybrids that you planted?
66
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: Where did you get those?
Parducci: I got them from Bobby Smith from Texas. I've made blends
with those wines and brought them back to Texas, and
everyone was impressed with the quality, I blended them
with Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, and Cabernet, and they were
outstanding bottles of wine. Well, I want to pursue this a
little further. I want to take hybrid wines and make
blends with vinifera wines . I hope that the experiment is
successful. We have to try it out to determine the
potential of the product. I have four different clones of
Pinot noir planted, and I will have five different
appellations with Pinot noirs. Two of the appellations
have not had any grapes in them at all, and they're all in
Mendocino County, and some are Region I ' s . •^ There was not
one wine grapevine planted there previously, and now we've
got an acre planted in two different areas.
Hicke: You mean there wasn't a grapevine planted there until you
planted them?
Parducci: That's right. Because no one's tried it. Being classified
as Region I, it may raise great Pinot noirs. We've got
Chardonnay and Gewurztraminer planted there, about thirty
or forty vines of each, and we're going to make wine from
them, look at the numbers, and see what we come up with.
I have four different clones of Nebbiolos planted, we have
four different port varieties planted, we've got some
Sangiovese planted, we've got some Mourvedre planted. All
these are varieties that have never been grown here, and
we're going to see what potential they have. We're going
to look at the numbers --the pH's, sugars, when they ripen,
etc. --and then make some wine of different blends.
But, you see, that cakes a long time. So what I'm
doing right now, I'll probably never see the results. I
just hope someone will carry on with the experiments, and
if I know the new breed of wineraakers, they will! We
haven't even scratched the surface regarding the planting
^ Grape-growing areas are classified into five regions of heat
summation. In Region I, the coldest, the growing season is short,
temperature is low, and only early- ripening varieties will mature.
67
of new varieties and blends of the new and old. Maybe
coming up with something, a new variety, will create more
interest in wine and we'll have more people drinking it.
Right now it appears to me that we're stagnated.
Primavera and Flora
Hicke: I think in the seventies you had something called Flora,
and then Primavera. Where did those come in?
Parducci: Primavera was the name of a May wine that I made [1972].
We had a contest, and we offered the lady (we had it at a
women's organization) who came up with a name that we liked
a case of wine every month for a year. Primavera was the
name that we selected, and after we marketed the wine we
found out that it was a name that was copyrighted several
times. We found that it was a world-famous artist's
painting and used by several other companies. We didn't
realize it. Primavera means "spring" in Italian.
Hicke: Is that often a problem? Do you now investigate names?
Parducci: Yes. Now we research all names through the Bureau of
Copyrights and have them checked out. We just changed
Primavera to May Wine .
Hicke: Why did you make this wine?
Parducci: Because we found that the women liked a sweet wine. We
developed this recipe while Joe Monostori was here. In
Europe the May wine is a very, very popular beverage for
the holidays. They take Moselle and steep woodruff, which
reminds me of tea leaves, and then they float strawberries
on top of it. We did the same thing. We steeped a blend
of our white wines in with woodruff, and then instead of
using strawberries we used strawberry juice and made a
blend of that. It was delicious, and everybody loved it.
But it's so expensive to produce that it was difficult to
market.
Hicke: How long did that last?
Parducci: Oh, we produced the wine for six or eight years, I guess.
A lot of women's organizations were using it as an aperitif
67a
February 6, 1991
San 3FrannKo (T^roiiiclr
THE WINE PAGE
WIME OF THE WEEK
Parducci C^llcR-mofter S*rtM 1987 Pinof Noir
Wnery ond >^neyards; AAendocino County
John Porducci ^ows hwe why He ihouid be declored a living iiUtor*
k treasure. He has biended
with great finesse and sktii to
fKoduce a deiightfui wine^
^ght in color like a very deep
rose or those wines coiled
dante in the Rioja region of
Spain. The wine opens wltf> a
tmjA\ of block cherry bouquet
on the nose, followed on tt>e
palate by more cherry cwd a
lig^t blackberry <ossis combi-
nation. A champion wine In a
Pinot Noir style that should
win a lot of friends for this va*
rletal.
lAMYWAlKER
CELLARMASTER
1987
MENDOCJNO COUNTnr
PINOT NOIR
•!£ KJ^rrimi.
68
for their bridge afternoons. They loved it. We're getting
a lot of calls for it right now.
Hicke: How about Flora?
Parducci: Flora was one of the varieties we planted on the Talmage
Ranch on the recommendation of the Christian Brothers. Do
you know the history of the Flora?
Hicke : No .
Parducci: The Flora was developed by the University of California at
Davis by Dr. [Harold Paul] Olmo for the [San Joaquin]
Valley. They wanted to replace the French Colombard in the
Valley with another variety that would upgrade their
quality. The Flora is a cross between a Gewiirztraminer and
a Semillon, so some years it's pink and some years it's not
pink, and some years it leans towards the Semillon
character and other years to the Gewurztraminer .
We planted eight or ten acres of Flora. We made a
dessert wine out of it because it gets very high in sugar
and produces a lot of grapes. We ran across a couple of
cases of it the other day in the library- -1974- -and there
were some leakers, so we opened one and tasted it, and it's
delicious. Here it is, sixteen years old, and it's still
enjoyable to drink. The tonnage and the acreage in
California is steadily going down because the market
doesn't seem to like it, and the quality is not the best
for white wine production.
Hicke: Why?
Parducci: It doesn't blend well.
Hicke: Too specialized?
Parducci: No one specializes in Flora, that I know of. There used to
be. It's spicy and it's coarse; it doesn't have any
delicacy at all to it. It's a very coarse grape. It's
very difficult to use because it doesn't blend well with
Sauvignon blanc or Chenin blanc or anything like that
because it has a spiciness and a lot of tannin. So it just
hasn' t made it.
Hicke: How long do you do something like that before you decide
it's going to go or it isn't going to go?
69
Parducci: Oh, within a period of ten years you can pretty much tell
whether it's going to be around or not. Our Flora is now
twenty-six years old, and it just breaks my heart to pull
it out. But I think next year it's going to go out.
Hicke: Oh, you still have some?
Parducci: Oh, yes, we've got the original vineyard.
Hicke: What are you doing with it?
Parducci: We're putting in a vintage white. Our vintage white has
some Gewurztraminer in it to give it a little floral
[taste], so it fits there. But there again, it's a no-
profit item. There's very little profit in the generic
wines .
Jug Vines
Hicke: That's one of the questions I wanted to ask you.
the jug wines compare with the premium wines for
profitability?
How do
Parducci: There's very little profit in jug wines. You're better off
selling in bulk, if you can sell in bulk. There's just no
money in jug wines. That's why large wineries have gone
out of the jug business. You've got to pump it out there
by the trillions of gallons to make a nickel.
Hicke: Why are you making it?
Parducci: There are a lot of reasons why we make it. If you can get
it in a restaurant as a house pour, then maybe they will
put on some of your varietals on the wine list. Also
people can better afford to have a glass of wine. Also
maybe you can educate people to drink wine. There are a
lot of reasons for it. A lot of people can't afford to
drink premium varietals every day; they can't go out and
drink a fourteen- dollar bottle of Chardonnay every day,
whereas these wines can fit their needs.
Hicke: So you might consider it something of a loss leader?
70
Parducci: That's exactly what it is, and also it's a home for press
wines and nonvarietal wines. Suppose you have a Sauvignon
Blanc that is in excess or you don't want to put in a
fifth. Maybe it's too herbaceous or nondescriptive , or
just not good enough to put in a bottle. Well, you've got
a good place to put it. Most of the so-called jug wines
were produced down in the Valley, the warmer regions that
were producing Thompson Seedless [grapes], Malagas, and
other varieties . Some of the grapes that were left over
from the raisin harvest were also made into wine. All of
this plus high yields produced surplus of their wines.
We can't compete completely with these grapes, because
of the different markets they have and tonnages they
produce. So we're out here competing in the jug wine
market with wines produced from low-yield vineyards and
varietals. Our red wine is blended with some Cabernet in
it and our white wine with some Chardonnay. That's why
they consistently win medals!
Hicke : Yes, your jug wines are pretty well received, aren't they?
Parducci: But try to impress the consumer. The consumer doesn't know
the difference in the quality, so it still becomes a very
difficult sell.
Special Tavnv Port
Hicke: You made something called Special Tawny Port.
Parducci: It was a port that we had in a tank. We had three ovals
that were my grandfather's, numbers 31, 32, and 33. When
we had the flood in '66, one whole side of the winery's
concrete wall collapsed, and a big chunk fell on top of the
oval that was filled with port and crushed it. So we had
to bottle the wine and empty the tank. This wine had been
in this tank for many years ,
Tawny port comes from ruby port. When a port's new,
it's called ruby port, and if it's a vintage port, it's
bottled within a year and a half and put in the bottle
immediately. A red port is just when it's first made. If
you leave port in a barrel for a long time, it becomes
71
tawny in color, so that's where you get the tawny. I don't
particularly like tawny port. I have a lot of ports in my
wine collection, and I don't have one bottle of tawny. I
like the vintage ports; I like them when they're on the
sediment, and they're big and rich. Tawny is very smooth,
but it's very light. You can actually drink more of them,
I guess, but I don't drink many sweet wines anyway. But
that was the only tank of port that we had.
Pink Fum6; 1973
Hicke: Pink Fume is another one I read about.
Parducci: That was made from Sauvignon blanc with a little bit of red
wine to give it a pink color. That's why it was called
Pink Fume. That became very popular, too. But, you see,
marketing companies won't sell this kind of wine; so they
die on the vine. People come to the tasting room and they
love it, but you can't get marketing companies to sell a
new wine. Plus the fact that the retailer doesn't have any
more room on the shelf to put all these different wines.
Consumers look at a label like that, and they say, "What is
this?" Like pink Chardonnay that's coming out- -it's
ridiculous. What usually happens is that some winery makes
a mistake in blending, and the wine finds its way into a
bottle for sale under some new name. What are consumers
going to think about pink Chardonnay? They will ask, "Now,
where does that come from?"
Hicke: So much for product development! [laughter]
Parducci: Well, let's not use Chardonnay, the queen of the wine
world, for these experiments. Use something else.
Effects of State Legislation on Alcohol Percentages
Hicke: In 1971 there was an amendment to a state law that allowed
port to be made at 18 percent. Did that affect you?
Parducci
No
As a matter of fact, it helps everybody.
72
Hicke: But you weren't making port then?
Parducci: No.
Hicke: Then in '79 an amendment lowered the minimum for table
wines to 7 percent.
Parducci: That helped the industry, because lots of us were making
botrytis wines, and we weren't able to market them because
they were too low in alcohol. The government didn't have
any provisions to sell those kinds of wines until Edmeades
in Anderson Valley, I think it was, went to the government
and had that law changed so we could bottle our wines that
were low in alcohol. So now look at all the nice dessert
wines that we have. I think it helped the industry. It
cleared it up, as a matter of fact. This incident helped
create a whole new style of wines that we all now enjoy.
Hicke: How did it change your wines?
Parducci: It didn't change anything at this winery, except that when
we did make dessert wine --the botrytis wines --we were able
to do it and sell it. Before, you weren't able to do it;
if it was under 11 percent you couldn't sell it. Now we
can.
Yeasts
Hicke: I wanted to ask you about yeasts
how do you decide?
VThat do you prefer, and
Parducci: We're doing a lot of experimentation with yeasts today. I
never used any yeast in all my life, up until way late in
the fifties. We always used the natural yeast, and I see
now that a lot of people are going back to it again. I'm
in a way religious to the old style of winemaking. I
always said that every year we have a different year. I
always feel that God puts something on those grapes each
year to ferment into good wine. We're getting so sterile
in our winemaking and using yeast cultures that sometimes ]
think we defeat our purpose. The Italians have been using
the natural yeast for years and years and years, and
they're still doing it. I see now that a lot of wineries
in California are doing it again.
73
As a matter of fact, there is a lot being written
about the experiments wineries are doing with the natural
yeasts. I think that every year there are certain flora on
the skins that Mother Nature puts there to take care of
that grape, because of the different climatic conditions
each year. In my opinion, I think there is a lot of
improvement to be made in this field.
Hicke: Introduce an artificial --
Parducci: This is probably why we're getting a lot of stuck wines.
It's a very controversial thing at this point. But I'm
thinking about going back to the wild yeast. As I
mentioned before, we used to have twenty- two 5, 500 -gallon
tanks and eleven 11,000' s. I always used to watch my tanks
fermenting. The pomace cap was only about a foot thick.
I'd watch for a tank that was fermenting very slowly
and very evenly, and then I'd take that tank and use it to
start another tank, etc. Mid- season I would do away with
that as a starter tank and look for another. That's the
way I made all ray wines. I don't think any winery in
California used yeast at all until Berkeley Yeast
Laboratories came along. At this time they provided us
with an agar start in a bottle. You had to take that
sample and develop it up to enough volume to start your
first tank. Well, everything was so primitive in those
days that if you didn't carefully sterilize your juice
under sterile conditions, you were not sure whether you had
cultured yeast or wild yeast. I don't think we really had
a positive way of knowing.
We used Burgundy, Champagne, and Tokay yeast strains
in those days. Each one of these Davis recommended. We
combined the three together, because the Champagne gave you
heavy sediment, the Tokay withstood high fermenting
temperatures, and the Burgundy gave you the flavor. So we
were told, anyway. Regardless, we did make good wine.
Hicke: How long did you continue with that?
Parducci: Until the dry yeast became available to us, probably in the
seventies.
Hicke
What do you use basically now?
74
Parduccl: We use all kinds of yeasts now. In white wines we use
Champagne, Montrachet yeast, etc. I can't recall all of
the varieties, there are so many of them. We use three or
four of them at the present time. Each one has a specific
purpose and quality. We are still trying different
varieties of yeast. If we're going to ferment white wines
very slowly and very cold, we use a certain kind of yeast
that can withstand the cold temperatures. In red wines we
usually use Pasteur. They all have different
characteristics, and everyone's experimenting. We are
experimenting with one now from Holland. I've never heard
of it before, but it's like Tom said yesterday, "There are
a lot of yeasts, and it's interesting to try different ones
experimentally and see the results."
I think we should go back to fermenting red wines with
a natural yeast from our area. We're going to do some
research on that. We're going to ferment wines next year
with natural yeast, and then with the dry yeast or some of
the yeast cultures we know of. We're going to do both in
red wines. We're not going to try it in white wines, I
don't think.
Vinemaking Stvles //#
Hicke: I want to ask something about the importance of the
different styles of winemaking.
Parducci: I think, there again, we'
consumer is so intimidate
styles. I don't know wha
different styles. I gues
different kinds of wood t
wines to go through malol
enhanced by leaving them
down to some basic produc
buy, and I don't know whe
messing around with diffe
progress. I think the wi
mentality of the average
re getting back to where the
d today because of the different
t we're accomplishing by the
s we have to learn to use
o learn whether or not we want our
actio and if the quality is
on the lees. We're trying to get
t that people will recognize and
re we're going with all this
rent processes. I guess that's
neraakers are going way beyond the
consumer .
I'd like to ask consumers: What do you think about
all these different styles? Somebody's going to have to do
something just to get us back down the middle of the road
75
Hicke:
or we're going to be lost pretty soon. I ask myself why
consumption just keeps going down and down. There's got to
be a reason for it. Are consumers frustrated? Are wines
too expensive? Why can't wines be simple and enjoyed
rather than an ego trip or a mystic?
Is this an attempt on the part of different wineries to
differentiate themselves from other wineries?
Parducci: They're all looking for a hype; they're all looking for
that cloud, that rainbow up there, or something that will
get the consumer's attention. I read in the paper last
night where Fetzer was named the winery of the year at the
Los Angeles fair. Now, I don't know why they were--
probably won more awards or something. But anyway, that's
what everybody's looking for; they're always looking for
some little hype that will make people flock to the store
to buy their wines, rather than concentrating on a wine
that everybody's going to drink, enjoy, and afford. We
don't need the wine snob who'll buy it and stick it in his
cellar and talk about it and then drink nothing. I wasn't
raised that way. When I walk into a restaurant, I would
like to see wine on every table, as you do in Europe. How
many wines did you see last night? You saw three bottles.
Hicke: Yes, all furnished by you.
Parducci: And look at what we paid for those wines last night.
Hicke: And I think Californians are certainly more knowledgeable
about wines than much of the rest of the country.
Parducci: Out of state usually is a disaster. It's discouraging.
People don't know wine. I don't know if they don't like
it, or if we're not educating people enough to drink wine
with food and enjoy it.
Hicke: I think they don't know it. Having grown up in the Midwest
(of course, that was some time ago), I can say that Mogen
David was about all we came in contact with.
Parducci: Oh! (laughter] We had a young man working for us who
never drank a bottle of wine in his life. We started
giving him a tenth bottle for his lunch. Well, you know,
in two or three years he couldn't sit down and have a meal
without a glass of wine. And we didn't give him a big
76
Cabernet; we gave him what we were drinking- -ordinary red
wine .
Hicke: It just adds so much pleasure to your meals.
Parducci: Sure.
Hicke: As I said before, I think you're doing your bit to change
all this. Let me ask you about another thing: you're
making two different lines now, I think- -the Cellarmaster
and- -
Parducci: I've got an ego like every other winemaker. The
Cellarmasters are wines that come out of this winery that
will compete with any boutique in California, That's what
we're trying to do. Like I mentioned before, the
restaurants won't put our wines on the wine list because
they're too cheap. Last night we paid twelve or thirteen
dollars for those wines. You know what the winery receives
for the wines we had last night? We get two to three
dollars a bottle. So most restaurants mark them up three
to four times. That's normal. Okay, if they pay three
dollars for a bottle of wine, four times three dollars is
twelve dollars. If they put a Mondavi or something like
that on there that costs them six dollars, that's eighteen
to twenty- four dollars; look at the profit they're making.
Plus the fact is that our wines are found in
supermarkets, so all the consumers know what our wines sell
for. When they go into a restaurant and see it for
eighteen or twenty dollars, they're very upset about it.
So if you put a boutique wine in a restaurant, nobody knows
what it sells for in the store because you don't find them
everywhere. They are usually harder to drink, too; they
usually are tannic and oakey. Last night we had a
competitor's Zinfandel. Remember how tannic it was? It
was very tannic. Well, we didn't particularly like it,
either.
Hicke: We liked the Parducci Zinfandel, though.
Parducci: Well, yes, but if you put that wine on a market shelf, you
will find that most consumers will pick out the
competitor's wine almost every time because it's more
expensive .
Hicke: So your Cellarmaster is a boutique--
77
Parducci: They're all aged in French oak, very expensive wood, and
they're the best grapes we can buy. They are wines to put
in your cellar, not to put on a wine list; they're aging
wines. They're big and have lots of fruit in them.
They're wines to put away. They are my selection and must
be above average wines. We don't have Cellarmasters every
vintage .
Hicke: Are they Zinfandels, Cabernets?
Parducci: We've got Pinot Noir, Petite Sirah, Cabernet, Fum6 Blanc,
and Chardonnay.
Petite Sirah
Hicke: Speaking of Petite Sirah reminds me of one thing I never
did ask you. It was never used to make a varietal wine
before you started doing it, so how did you handle it in
order to make a varietal out of it?
Parducci: The ones I have in my cellar- -you know, most of my cellar
is full of Petite Sirahs--
Hicke: Old ones?
Parducci: Yes, going back to the sixties. Those were made the old-
fashioned way: left on their skins until dry, and they
were big and tannic, and that's why they last so long. One
of our biggest- selling red wines is a Petite Sirah. Our
technology and philosophy have changed in making Petite
Sirahs. Instead of leaving it on the skins for a long,
long time- -as you know, Petite Sirah can be a very intense
tannic wine if made in the old winemaking practice. In the
present process I crush the grapes in an ice-cold tank, and
I leave it there for three or four days before I inoculate
it with yeast culture.
What I'm doing is breaking the skins down and
extracting most of the color and the fruit that I can
without any alcohol present. Alcohol extracts the hard
tannins from the skins and the cap ends, so you have a big,
tannic wine. Well, I take it off about two days after it's
inoculated, so I don't have the hard tannins, I have a
78
rich, soft wine that I can bottle a lot younger, and it's
very delightful to drink. This is the way I'm doing most
of my red wines, except for Cellarmaster wines; the
Cellarmasters are left on the skins until dryness and
beyond.
Hicke: Why do you think nobody had been making Petite Sirah?
Parducci: Well, Concannon [Vineyard] did in the early sixties, and we
did it in the early sixties for the tasting room here. In
the early days first generation Europeans were drinking a
lot of wine, and they were not accustomed to drinking those
big wines. As you know, they drank the second wines that
were very low in alcohol and very fruity. The American
public was drinking port, sherry, muscatel, Tokay, and
those kinds of wines. There were no red wine drinkers;
very few. So bottling a Petite Sirah- -who would drink it?
It was a blending grape and too heavy for everyday
consumption.
Hicke: So it was a lack of demand, rather than anything else?
Parducci: Yes. It was a blending wine. We always used to put it in
the Carignane and the Zinfandels. We produced only one red
wine to speak of; that was all we ever bottled. We didn't
have any varietals. It was, as I mentioned before, seven
different labels on the same wine.
Frank Schoonmaker
Hicke: Were you familiar with Frank Schoonmaker ' s ideas?
Parducci: Sure. I sold Frank a lot of wine. Yes, I knew him very
well.
Hicke: Did he influence some of your decisions to make more
varietals?
Parducci: Well, he influenced me in that when he came here he found
wines that he absolutely loved, and it meant a lot to me.
I can remember the last tank of wine I sold to him. It was
a tank of Zinfandel; it was on the right-hand side, the
third 20, 000 -gallon tank, and he bought that. He died, and
79
Hicke :
Par due ci
a lot of history died with him. He used to come up here
with another individual (I can't remember his name now).
We sold a lot of wine to Paul Masson. Mr. [Kurt]
Opper was the buyer, and he just loved our wines. And they
were all made the old-fashioned way. They were big,
fruity, beautiful bottles of wine. We made some
outstanding red wines then.
You sound like you regret those days.
Yes, I do. Like I said, I think we're getting too sterile,
and we're getting too finicky with our wines. We're just
not making them the old way anymore. I made my best wines
in that old wood.
Hicke : Redwood?
Parducci: Yes. The tanks were shallow and the fermentations were
slow; they were natural- -there was no cooling or anything.
We made excellent wines.
80
VI NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE 1970S AND 1980S
Sale of Parducci to Teachers Management & Investment
Corporation
Hicke: Since we're about up to the seventies, maybe we can
get back to the story of your winery. I'd like to
hear about the sale of it to Teachers- -how you found
them and why you sold it.
Parducci: I think the way the winery was constructed- -can I
reminisce a little and tell you a story that I think
will be very interesting to you? Before we started
the winery, right where the winery now sits was an
oak grove. The creek that drained all of the
watershed from the upper ranch came through the
grove , and every year the Indians used to congregate
there and have their pow-wow. Each year I would look
forward to their arrival. They would all stand in a
circle and dance around the fire and pass bones hand
to hand- -Indian games, I would guess. When we
started to build that winery we removed the grove of
trees. The original winery was of all wood
construction, built in the center of the canyon. It
was all done by hand. In the forties we widened the
winery, constructed the concrete walls that you now
see, and made the winery a lot bigger. Then in '48
we constructed the upstairs.
All that winery was built by hand. Lots of the
materials were used materials, until in later years
when we started remodeling the whole facility. The
construction of that first winery was hard work, and
81
I am very sorry that we don't have any pictures of
it; although we do have pictures of the old winery
before we remodeled it. We did have pictures of the
old home before it was remodeled. However, we are
unable to find any of these at the present time. I
guess remodeling and moving these many years, somehow
the photos were lost.
After George and I purchased the winery from our
father and brothers, all of our money was invested.
We needed a partner to help finance our growth.
There was a man who was on the TMI board who had a
daughter going to school at the University of
Washington. His name was Fenter Angel. He stopped
by here- -TMI was always buying a lot of properties- -
and wanted to know if our winery was for sale. We
said, "No, it's net for sale." Well, he stopped here
two or three different times and he got the same
answer. Finally one day his boss, Mr. [Robert]
Fitzpatrick, called us and wanted an appointment with
us, so we gave him the opportunity to meet with us.
On our board at the time was my father; Charles
Shimmin, the vice president of the Savings Bank of
Mendocino County, whom we had done business with;
George's schoolmate, John Golden, an attorney who is
now superior court judge of Lake County; and my
brother George, my father, and myself. There were
five of us. We met with Mr. Fitzpatrick, and he gave
us this pitch about schoolteachers having no
intention of running a winery; they were only
interested in social security and tax shelter. John
Golden suggested that he look into this company and
see how legitimate they were, and he said it might be
a good thing for us, being that we were strapped for
money and wanted to expand the property. That would
be one way of doing it and still retain an ownership
in it.
So he investigated and found that they were an
outstanding company, and that it would be a financial
asset for Parducci because we would have
approximately 1,800 salespeople, and they'd all be
stockholders and would ask for and use our wines.
They had no intentions of running a winery and knew
nothing about a winery, and we would run it like we
wanted- -like a family. We decided to go with them.
81a
A Mendocino County
dedication to wine
A TWO-DAY open house and dedication of
a new wine tasting room, retail room and gift
shop at Parducci Wine Cellars in California
drew almost 1,500 persons including a dele-
gation from W'mci ir Vines.
Founded 60 years ago by Adolph Parducci,
the Mendocino county winery has grown — in
the words of Adolph 's son John, who is gen-
eral manager and winemaker — "from a Mom
and Pop business until now there are 44
people on the pnyroU."
Adolph and his wife, Isabel (she operated
the tasting and.retail room in the early days)
were on the speakers' platform for the dedi-
cation. So was the chief executive officer of
the present majority owner of the winery,
Teachers Nfanagement and Investment
(TMI) of Newport Beach, CA. The CEO is
Robert Fitzpatrick and his TMI has been in-
volved with Parducci since the early 1970s.
Enthusiastically, too, to judRe from the
CEO's remarks.
Parducci wines are now selling in 33 states,
he said, and he predicted a 100% marketing
gain in 1976. Tlie l-mi!hon gallon storage
capacity winery has almost reached the
lOO.OOO-case level in case goods (fifths and
smaller) and expects to hold there. About
150,000 gallons are sold in jugs annually and
the remainmg production is bulked out.
Marketing is done by Vintage Wine Mer-
chants, opKrated by Fred Holzknecht and
Gary Topper.
In 1975 Parducci took nine awards off 13
entries in the Los Anccles Fair wine judging,
including four gold medals. Oni of the latter
was on a 1973 Chardonnay ii.ide with no
oak -aging.
In A special laboratory tasting, Parducci
Cellarmaster John Monostori presented two
1973 Cabernet Sauvignons, both 100% of the
variety, vintage and origin (Mendocino) and
both free-run. One had no wood aging and
the other about five months in redwood and
American oak. Tell us, asked Monostori,
which one to enter in the 1976 Los Angeles
Fair? Both were big and complex and we
hedged. So did the winery. Their decision: to
enter a 1972 this year and save the "73 no-
wood Cabernet for the 1978 competition.
Wines and Vines
October 1976
Normally, Parducci holds its reds two to
three years and gives them some redwood
aging. As little filtration as possible is done.
A 1975 Chardonnay was fruity and fresh,
as a young wine should be; it was cold-fer-
mented at 50 degrees six weeks or more. We
tasted it out of the cask and it showed it; a
Chardonnay needs a year or more in glass to
develop complexity. A special treat was a
premium Chablis for the restaurant trade;
10,000 gallons of it were made with a Char-
donnay content of 53%.
Monostori, trained in Europe, has devel-
oped a Continental style May wine made with
woodniff soaked as it is in Europe but not
cooked nor extracted. It is used with frozen
strawberry concentrate and a white base
wine. The end product has a lovely orange-
pink hue and a piquant taste.
Parducci was the first to so label French
Coloml)ard varietal wine in California (it
won State Fair medals in the 1940s) and
among the first to so label Petite Sirah and
Zinfandel. No press wine goes into the bottled
wine; first pressings are used for jug wines
and later pressings are sold for distilling
material.
The winery, a handsome white stucco and
stone .stnicture with brick trim is one mile
nortii of Ukinh just off U.S. 101. John Par-
ducci h.is a stainless steel tank farm installed
by Santa Rosa Stunless Steel. Tliere are 19
tanks of 9,930 gallons each, all jacketed. At
least 1,200 tons a day can be cnished. At
dedication time Monostori was cold-stabiliz-
ing jug Burgundy; it stays in the refrigerated
tanks two weeks. A redwood tank installation
is the work of Frank Stefanich, whom Par-
ducci acclaimed for his craftsmanship. An
additional bank of redwood was to be added
in late 1976 for a total of 23 redwood tanks
of 4,300 g.illons each. "Tliere are no leakers,"
beamed John Parducci. "Frank Stefanich has
been installing tanks here since 1931; he
knows his business. .Notice that there are no
bungholes. There are valves in the tank bot-
toms with a patented gooseneck."
There is one He.ddsburg Machine crusher-
stemmer and one \'alley Foundry crusher-
stemmer, and a Rietz S-Press.
The new tasting room, with the look of a
Swiss Chalet, was designed by Bud Plone of
Newport, architect for TMI. In the process
of construction, Parducci said, "Bud got con-
verted from Diet Pepsi to French Colom-
baril."
The dedication was by Father Ducker of
the Holy Trinity Episcopal church in Ukiah;
his parish has a small Cabernet Sauvignon
vineyard planted by Parducci and now about
six yean old.
Another speaker was Ernest Banker, boy-
hood fricud of John Parducci and Chainuaii
of the Mendocino County Board of Super-
visors.
Philip Iliarinf
82
and we've never been sorry. We operated this
facility as a family and as our own. The
schoolteachers used to come up here to the tasting
room, and they were thrilled that they owned part of
the winery. It was a great, great marriage, and has
been ever since. We have never had anyone tell us
how to run this winery; we do what we want to. I
think all of our investors are pleased with our
operation. They have two offerings of wine a year,
like I just showed you.
Hicke: Twice a year you do a wine offering for them?
Parducci: Yes, and they come up here and visit the winery all
the time. They just love it.
Hicke: It's a pension fund for teachers?
Parducci: No.
Hicke: It's just an investment?
Parducci: Yes. Teachers Management & Investment owns stock. I
don't know how many individuals there are --there are
probably eight or ten people who own the stock of
this company- -and they manage the money for the
schoolteachers. For instance, if they want to buy,
say, the Discovery Inn, and Discovery Inn wants
$2,000,000, TMI offers a prospectus, and they offer
2,000 shares. Each share is $1,000. Every
schoolteacher in California, or anybody affiliated
with the school system, is eligible to buy one, two,
ten, or any amount of shares they want of that
particular property. Then if another piece of
property comes up, they have the same privilege.
Each piece of property is separately owned. Most of
their investments were in raw land. We were the
first commercial venture. I believe they now own
condominiums, storage places, golf courses, and all
kinds of properties.
Hicke: How did Mr. Fitzpatrick find you?
Parducci: Mr. Angel was familiar with the winery, so he just
stopped in to see if we were for sale. That's how it
started.
83
Hlcke: He had in his mind to look at wineries, then?
Parducci: Yes, he was looking at anything they could purchase
that had value .
Hicke: Did he look at others?
Parducci: Not that I know of. Of course, they'd heard about
our wines, too, because we were selling a lot of
wines in Los Angeles, and they knew we were pretty
aggressive. It's been a wonderful relationship with
TMI.
The Third and Fourth Generation Parduccls
Hicke: Right after that you did some pretty serious
expansion, so that helped- -
Parducci: Yes, and George and I put in all that stainless steel
and a lot of new equipment, more tanks. And just
three years ago, my son went on another $4,000,000
expansion, which is in the back; that's all his
project. He was an electronic engineer and worked in
aerospace for about fourteen years. He's a real good
engineer.
Hicke: When did he come into the business?
Parducci: I'd say ten years ago. He worked in Downey. He
graduated from Northrup School of Engineering and
then went to work for McDonnell -Douglas
[Corporation]. Then they moved him to Sacramento,
and from Sacramento he went to Rocketdyne for a short
while. Then he went back to Los Angeles, and then I
brought him home .
Hicke: So he didn't really grow up with the idea of going
into the winery?
Parducci: No. My other son's been with me all the time- -my
oldest son, Dick. Billy is the youngest one, and he
has two sons that are going to school now- -Billy
[Jr.] and Richie. Dick has one son who's running a
84
computer now and is working in our city, and then he
has a daughter.
Hicke: When did Dick come into the winery?
Parducci: He's always been here.
Hicke: Did he go to school to study enology?
Parducci: No. He was handicapped. We almost lost him when he
was a baby. He was nine months old and doctors
couldn't find his problem. He was just skin and
bones, almost dead. No one could find out what was
the matter with him. Finally someone said, "Why
don't you take him down to this German doctor in
Santa Rosa, Dr. Kontes?" So we did, and I'll never
forget that day.
I don't know if Margarett was holding him or if
I was holding him, but he was in a little blanket, a
shriveled up little guy. Mrs. Kontes weighed about
300 pounds, and she was sitting on the lawn with
about ten little children around her. She got up,
and we went through this little white gate. We
introduced ourselves to her, and she says, "What have
you got there?" Margarett says, "Our little son. No
one can seem to find out what's the matter with him.
He can't keep any food down."
She pulled the blanket aside and took one look
at him, and she said, "I know what's the matter with
that baby." She said, "You're breast feeding him,
aren't you?" Margarett says, "Yes." "Well, he's
allergic to your milk. You've got to put him on
goat's milk." And that was during the Depression;
goat's milk was thirty- five cents a can, and
Margarett and I didn't have- -we were going to school
and were as poor as church mice. Our druggist here
in town was a very close friend of the family, so he
got us the goat's milk at his cost.
Dickie snapped right out of it, but in the
meantime he had a shrunken stomach. He was in a full
cast for about fourteen years; he had a curvature of
the spine. And he's had nothing but problems all his
life; his teeth are bad. But he's the greatest guy
in the world. Look at him now, he's six feet-two and
85
a half, straight as an arrow, and everybody loves
him. He's a very handsome young boy. But physically
he's- -well, he's had a heart attack at forty- four.
Hicke: So he's been helping you for a long while.
Parducci: Yes. My other son is like a piano wire. He's very
brilliant, a hard worker, extremely meticulous, and
very aggressive. He runs this business when I'm not
here.
Hicke: And one of your grandsons is studying to be an
enologist?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: He already graduated in viticulture, right?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: And the other grandson, Bill's oldest?
Parducci: He's super -brain. He's a computer analyst, an KBA
[Master of Business Administration] . He also has a
degree in biochemistry. He's the one they wanted to
have stay at the university. He'd never make a
professor; he's just not that kind, [laughs] Too
aggressive.
Hicke: Well, you've got your fourth generation carrying on.
Parducci: Yes, the fourth. The fifth are age two to six, so we
don't know what they're going to do.
Hicke: They haven't developed a palate yet. [laughter]
Parducci: No.
Expansion
Hicke: Somewhere I have that around that time, the 1970s,
you bought the Merola Ranch. Is that right?
(jJlKfct 4- UiVt3 Oc1oi«r-
\^74
John Parducci was named "VVinemaker
of the Year" for 1980.
The honor was
accorded the Men-
docino County,
Cahfornia, wine-
grower by tile Los
Angeles chapter of
the Knights of the
Vine and was the
first of its kind.
Parducci, general
manager of the
familv winer\ , is a Sujireine Knight of j
the Vine. In 1980 Parducci Wine Cellars •
won 10 aw ards at tlie Los Angeles :
County fair, nine al the Mendocino
County F"air and nine more at the
Orange Couiit\ Fair. Included were five
gold medals. The national marketer is
Vintage Wine .Merchants of San Fran-
ci.sco.
John Parducci, left, with tasting room
architect Bud Plane of Newport Beach.
A Mendocino County
dedication to wine
A TWO-DAY oi^en hoti.se and dedication of
a new wine tasting room, retail room and gift
shop at Parducci Wine Cellars in California
drew almost 1,500 persons including a dele-
gation from \V'/(ici t- Vines.
Founded 60 years ago by Adolph Parducci,
the Mendocino county winery has grown — in
the words of Adolph's son John, who is gen-
eral maivager and winem;iker — "from a Mom
and Pop business until now there are 44
people on the payroll."
.\dolph and his wife, Isabel (she operated
the tasting and.retail room in the early days)
were on the speakers' platfonn for the dedi-
cation. So was the chief executive officer of
the present majority owner of the winery,
Teachers Management and Investment
(TMI) of Newport Beach, CA. The CEO is
Robert Fitzpatrick and his TMI has been in-
volved with Parducci since the early 1970s.
Enthusiastically, too, to jtidge from the
CEO's remarks.
Parducci wines arc now selling in 33 states,
he said, and he predicted a 100% marketing
gain in 1976. Tlie 1-million gallon storage
capacity winery has almost reached the
l(X\nOO-case level in case goods (fifths and
smaller) and expects to hold there. .A.bout
150,000 gallons are sold in jugs annually and
the remaining production is bulked out.
Marketing is done by Vintage Wine Mer-
chants, operated by Fred Ilolzknecht and
Gary Topper.
In 1975 Parducci took nine awards off 13
entries in the Los .Angeles Fair wine judging,
including four gold medals. Oni of the latter
was on a 1973 Chardonnay ii.nle with no
oak-aging.
lf\ a sp>ecial laboratory tasting, Pardi
Cellarmaster John Monostori presented
1973 Cabernet Sauvignons. both 100% of
variety, vintage and origin (Mendocino)
both free-run. One had no wood aging
the other about five months in redwood
.American oak. Tell us, asked Monos
which one to enter in the 1976 Los Ang
Fair? Both were big and complex and
hedged. So did the winery. Their decisior
enter a 1972 this year and save the 73
wood Cabernet for the 1978 competition
Normally, Parducci holds its reds tw-
three years and gives them some redvs
aging. As little filtration as possible is d
A 1975 Chardonnay was fruity and fi
as a young wine should be; it was cold
mented at 50 degrees six weeks or more,
tasted it out of the cask and it showed
Chardonnay needs a year or more in glai
develop complexity. A special treat wi
premium Chablis for the restaurant tr
10,000 gallons of it were made with a C
donnay content of 53%.
Monostori, trained in Europe, has de
oped a Continental style May wine made
woodniff soaked as it is in Europe but
cooked nor extracted. It is used with fn
strawberry concentrate and a white
wine. The end product has a lovely ora
pink hue and a piquant taste.
Parducci was the first to so label Fr<
Colonibard varietal wine in California
won State Fair medals in the 1940s)
among the first to so label Petite Sirah
Zinfandel. No press wine goes into the bol
wine; first pressings are used for jug w
and later pressings are sold for disti
material.
The winery, a handsome white stucco
stone structure with brick trim is one
north of Ukiah just off U.S. 101. John
diicci h.is a stainless steel tank farm instr
by Santa Rosa Stunlcss Steel. Tliere an
tanks of 9,930 gallons each, all jacketed
least 1,200 tons a day can be cnished
dedication time Monostori was cold-stab
ing jug Burgundy; it stays in the refriger
Links two weeks. A redwood tank instalkn
is the work of Frank Stefanich, whom
ducci acclaimed for his craftsmanship,
additional bank of redwood was to be ad
in late 1976 for a total of 23 redwoo<l t;
of 4,300 n.illous each. "Tliere are no Icaki
}>eamed John Parducci. "Frank Stefanich
been installing tanks here since 1931;
knows his business. Notice that there an
bungholes. There are valves in the tank
toms with a patented gooseneck."
TTiere is one Healdsburg Machine cms
stemmer and one X^illey Foundry cms
stemmer, and a Rietz S-Press.
Tlie new tasting room, with the look
Swiss Chalet, was tiesigned by Bud Plon
Newport, architect for TMI. In the pro
of constniction, Parducci said, "Bud got (
vrrted from Diet Pepsi to French Col
b.ird." .
The dedication was by Father Ducke
the Holy Trinity Episcopal church in Uk
his parish has a small Cabernet Sauvic
vineyard planted by Parducci and now al
six years old.
Another speaker was Ernest Banker, I
liood friend of John Parducci and Chain
of the Mendocino Coimty Board of Su
visors.
Philip Hia
86
Parducci: Oh, yes. We sold that. That's over in Lake County.
We were going to plant grapes there, and we decided
it was too far to transport them. So we sold the
ranch. That was a beautiful piece of property, right
at the intersection of Lower Lake and Highway 20.
It's still a beautiful piece of property, but they're
not doing anything with it. Somebody who had a lot
of money bought it and has been sitting on it all
these years, running some cattle on it.
Hicke: I just read in Wines & Vines that you're 39th in the
nation in volume.
Parducci: Yes, we're nothing in the wine world- -very small.
Hicke: Nothing? [laughs]
Parducci: No, we're just little.
Hicke: Two million gallons storage capacity?
Parducci: Yes. We're little, though. Four hundred thousand
cases is nothing. Am I correct that Mondavi is up to
2.5 million, and Fetzer is up to 2 million? We're
peanuts. I prefer not to get that big, either. I
have no interest at all. Just let those other people
build those monsters. You've seen many changes in
this industry. You've seen what has happened to some
of the large wineries. You know, what's going to get
you is what you don't see --labor, catastrophes,
markets, etc.
I could never understand- -maybe you can tell
me- -what possesses people to want to be so big. I'm
only interested in making a good living, making
better and better wines, and having some sense of
security of mind and body. At least I can back off
and operate down to the bare bones . Many wineries
can't. When you've got something big going on,
there's not much room to back away; you've got to
keep going or overhead will gobble you up. You've
got to have income coming in because your expenses go
on, such as interest, insurance, upkeep, etc. I've
got all I can handle here.
87
Hicke: It sounds like you're much more interested in
experiments and innovations than in increasing the
absolute volume .
Parducci: Yes. I'm interested, as I mentioned before, in
making a living for myself, my family, and my
employees. Also in building a chain of command after
I am gone that has some members of my family at the
helm. I don't want to leave a monster behind.
Viticulture
Hicke: Let's get into a little bit more about the grapes
here. I've read that you're particularly interested
in matching the grapes to the location.
Parducci: That's going to take a long, long time. As new
varieties come around, we will have to do more
research. What I'm trying to say is that Chardonnay
is grown all over California now, and all over the
world, as a matter of fact. We're all making wine
out of Chardonnay grapes , and what are we learning?
We're learning that different microclimates produce
different wines. It all boils right down to what
style you like, or the public likes. Chardonnay is
produced almost everywhere. The grapes from Monterey
County, etc., make the big, lush Chardonnays . Are
those the ones that are going to be selling and
preferred by consumers? Or is it going to be the one
that's a Chablis style? I guess the drinking public
will decide the style and price.
Now, when we get back to red grapes, it's a
different story. I think I mentioned to you before
that I'm telling all ray growers in Mendocino County
to plant reds, because we have the soil here that
produces outstanding reds. I think the North Coast
counties can only produce the best red wines. What
kind of red wines? Well, red grapes that make good
red wines. Are they Cabernet? I don't think it's
going to be Cabernets; people aren't drinking
Cabernets as much as they used to. Maybe it's the
Zinfandels; maybe it's a blend of the Petite Sirahs
88
Hicke
and the Zinfandels ; maybe it's a blend of other
varieties that many of us are experimenting with.
But first we've got to find the locations where
they produce the best grapes. I may plant a
Sangiovese here, and it may not bear or ripen. A
good example, the Napa Camay will not ripen in
Mendocino County, We have some clones of Nebbiolos
that are producing at the present time in Mendocino
County that we are not happy with.
And there's no way to find out except to plant them
here and wait for the results?
y/y/
Parducci: I think the only way we can find out is to plant them
and find out what kind of wines they make and what
kind of vines we have. Then we're getting into that
scenario about the rootstocks; there many rootstocks
available also. I've always believed in rootstocks
in Mendocino to be the deep-rooted ones, because the
soils here are worn out and we have clay soils; you
have to have a rootstock that penetrates the clay and
seeks its own moisture. You can't produce quality
with a lot of irrigation.
Another thing that's worrying me, too, is that
when our winery was smaller we had equipment so that
I could handle small lots of grapes. Well, now we
have equipment that takes forty tons to process, so
we're not doing it the smaller way. However, I'm
going to start doing something on a smaller scale;
I'm going to start getting smaller equipment- -some
smaller presses and some smaller tanks- -just to
handle smaller choice lots. It is difficult to
handle small lots with big equipment; it would drive
you crazy. That's where the small wineries have an
advantage over us as far as making small lots of
super premium wines.
Competitions
Hicke
Is there a lot of competition for these awards?
89
Parducct: Oh, yes. There are probably four or five hundred
wineries that participate, if not more. I'm highly
recommending to my company to not participate in
every competition- -only the more prestigious ones!
Hicke: You mean to Brown-Forman?
Parducci: Yes. I'm trying to get them not to participate in
all of these judgings, because they are not that
important anymore. There are just too many of them.
You put the same wine in fifteen competitions, and
surely in one of them you're going to win an award.
Doesn't mean too much, really.
Hicke: But doesn't that enable the seller to--
Parducci: Yes, if they take advantage of it, but many don't
take advantage of it! Look at all the awards I won
this year; I won the international award with our
Fume Blanc- -once in a lifetime award. But I failed
to find this award mentioned in any of the markets I
visited.
Hicke: Well, the Liquor Barn put out a coupon for a 10
percent discount on gold medal award winners, and
your Petite Sirah was in there. But I guess that's
one of the few times I ever had seen that, and maybe
they're one of the few companies that do that.
Parducci: Our company does princ a lot of material for the
vendors. However, a lot of it doesn't reach the
marketplace in a display. I think it's too bad,
because the consumer is looking for something to zero
in on and needs help to make his or her selection of
wine.
Hicke: Exactly- -some way to differentiate the wines. Even
if it doesn't make any difference, the consumer might
be more attracted.
Parducci: It helps if they put anything out there, but there is
not much out there- -verv little that I can see.
90
Harvesting
Hicke: Mechanical harvesting- -have you got equipment for
that?
Parducci: Yes. I was never in favor of mechanical harvesting,
but I guess when you get down to the nitty-gritty,
there are advantages to it. Because as you get into
the volume that we're getting right now- -all grape
farmers start picking early in the morning, say at
seven o'clock. We have fifty-nine growers, and by
the time a grower has a load picked for delivery to
the winery, it is ten or eleven o'clock, and it
creates a big problem because you have so many trucks
at one time that you have to take care of. Plus the
fact that we're not utilizing our equipment during
the day. Therefore we have to crush later in the
afternoon and at night to catch up.
Also, labor is not plentiful anymore. Since the
Mexicans have been allowed to stay in California they
all are going into the jobs that are paying a lot
more money- -the timber industry, restaurants and
hotels. They're not going to come out here and pick
grapes when they can get jobs at five, six, seven,
eight dollars an hour. So the labor force has gotten
to be very critical and scarce.
The other problem is that when you have as much
acreage as we have, it takes so long to harvest it
with hand labor that when we get adverse weather
conditions we have more problems. Two or three years
ago we almost lost all of our Chardonnay crop; if it
hadn't been for the harvester, we would have lost it
all.
There are many advantages to a machine,
especially the ones they have today. They're getting
down to where they're picking clean fruit. They pick
everything, of course. You're able to pick at
nighttime; the grapes are very cool. They come into
the winery at eight o'clock in the morning; so you
can start pressing immediately at eight o'clock, and
you eliminate all that congestion from all the
growers, and you make a better product because the
grapes do come in cool. It's less expensive for
91
refrigeration, and you're able to go in and harvest a
big acreage in just a few days. But if everyone
machine harvested, then we'd create the same
problems; instead of everybody getting here at eleven
o'clock, they're all going to be here at eight
o'clock.
Hicke
Par due ci
The other thing about it is that, being an
old-fashioned winemaker, I prefer to look at the
cluster of fruit when it comes into the crusher, and
when you machine harvest grapes you don't see many
clusters; it's mostly berries and a lot of juice, and
I don't like that. So there are advantages and
disadvantages, but I think that if you have to weigh
one against the other, the machine harvesting is the
best. But I still insist on buying my grapes hand
picked. On our own ranches we will machine harvest
as much as we can and hand pick the rest of it. A
lot of it we can't machine harvest because it's on
the hills and too steep for mechanical harvesting.
But all the grapes that you buy from other growers
are hand picked so you know what you're getting?
Oh, yes. So far --but there are now three new
machines in the area this year. One grower who has
always hand picked has got a machine now, and another
grower in Hopland has a machine . So two of my
growers will be bringing their grapes in machine
harvested now. Each grower will only be allowed to
deliver so much per day, allowing the winery to
handle all growers' grapes and to allow the winery to
process them to produce the best wine.
Industry Trends: More White Wines
Hicke: Just to talk about the industry as a whole for a bit,
you've mentioned several times when whites started
being drunk more than reds, and you responded to this
by making white wines. Is that more or less right?
Parducci: It was very costly for our winery and for every
winery in California when we had to dispose of a lot
of our wood tanks and use stainless, and with a lot
92
of expensive refrigeration, a lot of modern
filtration equipment. It was very, very costly for
the winery. We went from a 95 -percent- red winery to
a 65 -percent-white in just a few years. With the new
technology and equipment, we won many awards for our
white wines because of our winemaking and good
housekeeping, better handling of the grapes, and
bringing in good varieties from good growers. We
were able to make some good wines. But it was very,
very expensive, and it still is a very expensive
project for our winery.
If it weren't for the white wine, it would be no
problem at all making red wines now- -except our
winery is getting to the point now where we couldn't
make a lot of red wines. Our facility is pretty
much- -I'd say 60 or 70 percent- -white wine equipment.
Our new 20, 000 -gallon tanks up in our new facility
are suitable only for white wines; you couldn't use
them for reds very well. You could use them for
storage; that's about all you could use them for.
They're not good for fermenting reds. So you're
really handicapped and stuck with the whites. And I
don't think we're going to be drinking predominantly
whites forever. I think a few years from now we'll
be a red-wine-drinking nation, if we use Europe as an
example .
Hicke: Because as people learn more about wine they gain
more appreciation for the reds?
Parducci: And reds go with more foods. Last night we had
Zinfandel with salmon; there's nothing wrong with
that, and we enjoyed it, didn't we?
Hicke: It was wonderful.
Parducci: It's all up here [points to his head], you know. I
just think we're going to be drinking more red wine
I certainly hope so.
93
Marketing and Product Decisions
Hicke: How do you decide how many different kinds of wines
to make?
Parducci: When we planted fourteen varieties at Talmage , we
didn't know what varieties would do the best in
Mendocino County, and that's why we planted all those
varieties and made all those wines. But I'm hoping
we can reduce the numbers back down to eight or ten
varieties at the most, if that many. I just can't
see making all these varieties.
Hicke: So part of it was experimentation?
Parducci: That's all; that's all it is. And don't forget, now
that we had these varieties, what do you do with
them? We had the Carignanes, Charbonos , Petite
Sirahs, Zinfandels, and we had the French Colombards;
we had all those before all the true varietals came
in. Now we are going to see another change; we are
going to see Nebbiolos come in and many other Italian
varieties planted, and we're going to see a whole
bunch of other varieties being planted.
And the marketing companies today want to sell
what's easy; they don't want to promote a new brand.
That's one of our problems. Gallo can afford to
promote a brand, and he does, by advertising.
Hicke: Does Brown-Forman handle marketing for you?
Parducci: Yes.
Hicke: What's their philosophy?
Parducci: Make money, [laughter] That's all.
Hicke: How do they go about it?
Parducci: They're liquor people, and they have a couple of
brands that made money for them- -Jack Daniels for
one, and Early Times, Bushnell Scotch, Lennox,
Hartmann luggage. I guess these are very profitable
for them. The wine business to them is a very new
thing. They have a couple of Italian labels, and
we're the only California label. They have Bola,
Candida, Cella, and one more, I think. They're
93a
Market Watch
June 1990
Winemaker Makes Presentation
In Honor Of Reagan
Veteran California winemaker John
ParduccI recently t)estowed a check to the
American Cancer Society (ACS) in honor of
ACS's presentation of its "Humanitarian Award"
Winemaker John Parduca (right) greets
former Presider)t Ronald Reagan.
to former President Ronald Reagan.
Parducci, co-founder and president of Parducci
Wine Cellars in Ukiah. California, made the
donation on t)ehalf of the employees of his
company.
The Parducci presentation was made at a
special reception and luncheon held at the Four
Seasons Biltmore Hotel in Santa Bartwra which
raised more than $41 .000 for ACS. Parducci
additionally donated bottles of its 1988
sauvignon blanc. which was served at the
reception.
Parducci Wine Cellars was founded in 1932
by John Parducci and his father Adolph Four
generations of the family have been involved in
the winery. Parduai wines are marketed and
distributed by the Brown-Forman Beverage
Company.
94
learning the wine business, and they're willing to
promote the brand.
Hicke: How do they promote it?
Parducci: Oh, by doing all kinds of things, like back-up cards,
shelf talkers, putting me on the road, putting a lot
of wine tastings all over the United States, sending
wine to all the wine writers every month, getting a
lot of press and TV and radio interviews- -getting our
name out there in front of the public.
Konocti Winery
Hicke: Let's switch to the Konocti Winery and how you got
it. First I think you got interested in planting
grapes in Lake County.
Parducci: I made wine from Lake County grapes, oh, in the late
thirties. There were several old vineyards there
that I made wine from, and I was very impressed with
the county and the quality of the grapes. When my
boys were in 4-H, they had a friend who raised Angus
cattle. He was also in 4-H, and his father had
excess acreage and wanted to plant grapes. We
encouraged him to do that.
Hicke: You mean as a 4-H project?
Parducci: No, it wasn't a 4-H project. This young man was the
same age as my boys , so he had to be nineteen or
twenty, but his father had some acreage in
Kelseyville and wanted to plant grapes. He was old
enough to take over then. So he planted Zinfandels
and Cabernets, which started a lot of growers doing
the same thing. A few years later a group of growers
hired a consultant to build a winery for them. It
was a co-op and didn't prove to be very successful.
Finally they came to me and wanted to know if we
could help in any way, so I talked my brother into
buying half interest in it.
So we did; we bought half interest in the winery
and immediately put in a lot of stainless steel
95
tanks; we put in over 100,000 gallons of stainless
steel tanks. We bought new presses, built a
warehouse, and did a lot of things with the winery.
We improved our marketing and restructured our
personnel, and then three or four years later I lost
my brother. In the meantime, needing more capital to
expand, we took on two more partners. We just
diluted our share and the growers' share to a quarter
instead of a half, and that's where it stands today.
We fired the manager that we had there and got a
young man who's very aggressive and very good. And
we hired a new winemaker. We have an aggressive
young winemaker in there now, and we're doing great.
We're winning a lot of awards. The Lake County
people are wonderful, wonderful people to work with
because they're all pioneers; they're all old, old
families. Very easy to work with, and very nice
people, and it's a joy to be a partner at Konocti.
We're doing great. We're making some outstanding
wines, and we're going to do better.
There's a lot of new acreage going in. I went
into partnership with a friend of mine, and we have a
400 -acre ranch over there now. It's a beautiful
ranch, all in varietals. It was all planted in
domestic root. As you know. Lake County is losing
all its vineyards with the phylloxera. A lot of the
growers are replanting on other rootstocks, so I
think that in another five years there won't be an
original vineyard left, it's going so fast. But
we're making good wines. Kendall -Jackson [vineyards]
is just across the street, doing great, as you know.
Hicke: How much participation do you have in Konocti?
Parducci: I try to go over there once a week, and we have a
board meeting every month with the growers [Lake
County Vintners] and the owners. We have a budget,
and we're running it very well. One of the members
of the board and one of the owners is an attorney,
Peter Windram, who is an outstanding young man from
an old, old-time family. So we have a great family
of people; it's a great little winery. We have
purchased some more land; we bought the land behind
us and the land in front of us, which borders the
96
highway, so we have highway frontage. The winery
sits almost on the highway, you know. Then we have
all the acreage in the back, and we're putting in a
grape test plot there now. We're going to make that
an experimental station with all different kinds of
rootstocks and different varieties of grapes.
Hicke: Is that a UC Davis testing?
Parducci: We're doing it with their help.
Hicke: Were they doing some early testing up there, too?
Parducci: No, not that I know of.
Hicke: What are you testing there?
Parducci: We're putting in all kinds of varieties- -lots of
Italian varieties, all kinds of varieties.
Hicke: Not just California varieties?
Parducci: No, we're putting all kinds of varieties in. It's
going to be an interesting plot.
Hicke: How much do you plant of each variety?
Parducci: Probably two rows- -twenty -four or forty -eight vines,
something like that.
Hicke: I've got a bottle that was given to me of a 1980
high-alcohol Zinfandel. I haven't opened it yet, but
I wanted to ask you about the high alcohol.
Parducci: Well, I don't like it. You know, where do you use
it?
Hicke: I guess that's why I haven't opened it, because I
figured we would just drink a little bit.
Parducci: We made that eight or ten years ago by our previous
winemaker. I didn't really agree with a lot of his
winemaking skills.
Hicke: The relationship that you have with the growers is an
interesting one. Does that kind of relationship
happen very often?
97
Parducci: Oh, yes, they're just like part of our family.
Hicke: It works really well?
Parducci: Oh, yes. Working in Lake County is a lot different
than working around here.
Hicke: Why is that?
Parducci: Because the people are natives; they're old-time
families. They're not the Johnny- come -latelys who
come in here and buy a ranch, and he owns a clothing
store or is a movie star or a big-time wheeler and
dealer. It's a whole different breed.
Our partners in Lake County are farmers ; they
understand the soil, they understand what the
problems are at the winery, they understand what it
is to make a dollar, they understand what it is to
make a gallon of wine. They're all part of it; it's
part of their life.
There are some good farmers around here, too;
they're the old-time farmers who understand that both
sides have to make a profit. But over there, most
are natives of Lake County. I don't think there's
one that I know of who hasn't lived there for a
hundred years, or his parents have lived there for a
hundred years .
Impact of Corporate Ownership of Wineries
Hicke: Another thing I might ask you to comment on is big
multinational corporations that buy wineries, and
what impact that has on the industry.
Parducci: It has a lot of impact, because, as you know, they're
tough competition out in the marketplace. A good
example: look at the present grape prices paid- -the
highest in my history. How can we make wines
affordable for everyday drinking at these prices?
Big bucks mean big money to spend for grapes. We
can't survive at current prices. Furthermore,
98
consumption should increase each year and not
decrease .
Hicke: But because large corporate ownerships are backed by
so much capital they can?
Parducci: Yes, and there are large growers all over California.
They have or buy grapes from the Valley that are so
much cheaper and make blends that we are unable to
compete with. Our label says Mendocino County. It
is difficult to compete in the marketplace with wine
produced from these different appellations because of
the price differential of grapes. As an example, you
can buy Chenin Blanc in the Valley for approximately
$200 per ton. In Mendocino it is about $550 or $600
a ton for Chenin Blanc. That is one of the problems.
Mrs. Housewife doesn't look at the mandatory on
the label and doesn't know the difference between a
Mendocino or California appellation, or that
Mendocino grapes are much more expensive. So you
might ask me why I don't use the California
appellation; well, because my company doesn't want me
to do that. My company wants me to stay with the
Mendocino appellation. Therefore I can't compete in
the marketplace.
A ppellations
Hicke: You just reminded me of another question: the
appellation system is one that you've long been
promoting.
Parducci: Yes, the Mendocino, Lake, and North Coast
appellations .
Hicke: First of all, tell me how it got started up.
Parducci: I think it started when we started marketing our
wines. The three North Coast counties started using
the Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino appellations. Later we
were able to include Lake County. Remember Italian
Swiss Colony's "Li'l ol' winemaker, me"? They
99
Hicke :
Parducci
commercialized Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino. It seems
to me that worldwide, the California appellation has
more meaning to the consumer than Mendocino, etc.,
probably with the exception of Napa County.
So you're not in favor of the appellation system?
Oh, I am up to a point. I'm in favor of county
appellations- -Mendocino County, Lake County, etc.;
I'm in favor of that.
Hicke: But not micro-appellations?
Parducci: No, micro -appellations I'm not in favor of, because I
don't think it means too much in the marketplace
overall. Availability of wines is limited and often
becomes confusing to the consumer. However, that's
only my opinion.
Andr6 Tchelistcheff
Hicke: I think Andre Tchelistcheff was a consultant for
Konocti Winery at some point?
Parducci: Yes, before George and I went into it. We kept him
on because he was a friend. He was very
knowledgeable about the industry; we could sit down
and have lunch and a nice glass of wine and be
sociable and learn a lot from him. And I still enjoy
that; I still think he's a great friend.
Hicke: Can you tell me a little bit about him?
Parducci: I don't know too much about his- -I know he worked for
BV [Beaulieu Vineyard] .
Hicke: What about your relationship with him? What are your
impressions of him?
Parducci: I think he's a very knowledgeable wine person. I
think he's a little- -he's just like I am; we're not
modern enough, I guess; we're not keeping up with the
times enough. But he is, because he's consultant for
so many wineries yet. So he is keeping in touch with
100
modern trends and modern appellations. He's a very
outstanding person- -not only outstanding, but an
unbelievable person. At his age, the way he drives
around and goes all over the country, it's
remarkable. I think he's eighty- eight years old.
It's absolutely amazing. And he's sharp! He's still
sharp . He has a good palate , and he has a wonderful
wife. I like the guy very much.
Winemaklng; Present and Future
Hicke: Can you think of any areas of your career that we
haven't discussed?
Parducci: I guess my. traveling is
wonderful experiences i
lot of wonderful people
well known out of state
California. I want to
can. I have no intent i
trying to make wines fo
for another plaque; I j
I enjoy doing it. Some
difficult to do what yo
about all. I've had a lot of
n my travels, and I've met a
I think I'm probably as
as any winemaker in
continue doing as much as I
on of retiring. I'm not
r awards, and I'm not looking
ust do what I have to do, and
times it becomes very
u want to do because of--
Parducci: --the trends. You don't know what the consumer's
going to be drinking next, and you don't know what
grapes you want the grower to plant. It's not a
stable industry anymore, like it used to be. When I
grew up in this business we had four varieties, and
we made one wine and everybody drank it. Today we're
spending fortunes on planting a new variety, and then
three or four years later not using that variety
anymore. It's frustrating and not fun anymore.
At most wine -tasting functions I find that
consumers, instead of drinking and enjoying the wine,
are always trying to find out what's wrong with the
wine. We're looking for something that's not there.
Wine is to be enjoyed, with food or without. It
makes good conversation and enhances every meal.
101
I try to get all of my employees involved in our
winemaking. I enjoy getting people involved in
creating new products. But I find it difficult to
extract opinions from most of my employees, and also
to extract new ideas. I feel I'm much more
aggressive, maybe because I grew up in this business.
Hicke: From what you told me yesterday, it sounds as if you
taste almost the chemistry of the wine- -not so much
whether you like it or don't like it, but you can
actually taste the different components.
Parducci: I don't taste wines that way. They must have
balance, fruit, and complexities that make the wine
taste good. As I said, I grew up in the wine
business, and I still want to put out the best bottle
of wine I can with what I have to work with. You can
only go so far, you know, but with what you do have,
let's try to make the best that we can. Because it's
very important; it's our livelihood. Wines need
satisfied consumers and good press. Otherwise you
take three steps backwards. And we never get any bad
press, thank heavens.
Hicke: I was going to say, you don't have to worry about
that.
Parducci: But I don't want any bad press, either! I want to go
up a couple of steps once in a while; I like to
compete with some of those individuals who are so
much on the hot line all the time. I like to see my
name up there in the [Wine] Spectator with ratings,
in the nineties and above once in a while. That's
what's important- -not because I want to win another
award or anything; it's just that I've got to have
some press that will help sell another bottle of
wine.
Hicke: And it's also personal satisfaction to you, I think.
Parducci: Exactly. Look at the awards we've won this year; my
competition gave me those awards.
Hicke : How many awards have you won this year?
Parducci: Barbara tells me over 120.
101a
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, January 27, WsS
{
Wine Industry Honors
Ybiing ZO-Year-Old
BY RODS.
tiufH'
SPECIAL TO 1*iE CfV^PNlCtl
The Califoifiia wne industry |)aid
tribute t»{>ne of its eider sdtes-
men Fgjday, Njhen 300 of John Par-
<hic«'s' closest friends gathered at
the Mark Hepkins Hotei to cele-
brate the Mendocino County wine-
maker's 70th birthday.
The Wack-tie event also honor-
ed an exceptionally long and distin-
guished winemaking career, span-
ning 54 consecutive vintages with
the 1987 harvest. Parducci has been
named winemaker of the year by
industrv' publications and organiza-
tions more often than any other
vintner.
"And this man's not about to
retire," he told the crowd Friday
night. "Im still a very young wine-
maker," he said. "Tliis industr>s
young, and there are lots of chal-
lenges out there."
Parducci's father, Adolph, pur-
chased the origmal Parducci vine-
yard in Mendocino County in 1921.
The winery was founded in 1932.
According to popular legend,
John Parducci's career began at the
tender age of 14, when he was sent
into the jungles of Hoboken. N.J.. to
peddle the family's grapes to home
winemakers. That, and the limited
production of altar wines, helped
the family business squeak through
the Depression and Prohibition.
Today, John Parducci is the ac-
knowledged patriarch of the Men-
docino County wine industry. Three
generations of Parduccis operate
the winer>'. producing a dozen vari-
etal wines annually from several
large, family-owned vineyards. The
Parduccis and their financial part-
ner. Teachers Management and In-
vestment Corp., also own the Kon-
octi \Viner>- in neighboring Lake
County.
John Parducci is particularly
known for his excellent Zinfandels
and Petite Sirahs (both of which he
was among the first to bottle as sep-
arate varietals in the 1940s), and also
for fine Chardonnays. A distin-
guishing feature of Parduccis wine-
making style is his steadfast reluc-
tance to use oak barrels for aging
his wines. "Oak spoils the flavor of
wine, " he claims.
\\. a vertical tasting of Parducci
Petite Sirahs held at the Gift Hotel
on Thursday, tasters discovered re-
markable freshness, balance and
depth of flavor in wines going as far
back as the 1972 vintage.
Parducci Chardonnays, sans
oak with fev^ exceptions, are consis-
tently used by professional tasters
as a standard against which the
character of oak-processed Char-
donnays may be truly judged.
101b
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102
Hicke: That's very impressive.
Parducci: Like I said, everything we put in competitions is off
the shelf; we don't have special lots.
A few things have to happen in our industry.
One thing is that most wine writers must need to
write more about the excellent low-priced wines and
recommend drinking wine with every meal. The
exorbitant prices that restaurants charge for wine is
ridiculous. Restaurants are hurting the wine
industry. When they charge such high prices for
wine, there's going to be no one drinking wine.
Whereas if they had wine that was reasonable,
everybody would have a bottle of wine. But when a
bottle of wine costs you more than the entree, no one
will buy it or enjoy it.
Hicke: I know, and if you buy a good wine by the glass it's
$4.50 in places in San Francisco.
Parducci: Who wants to pay that? We must convince restaurants
that not everyone can afford an expensive glass or
bottle of wine, and that there are many inexpensive
wines that are excellent and can be sold at a
reasonable price. We should persuade wine writers to
write about the many values and quality that exist in
the lower-priced wines.
I was on a panel recently with a wine writer
from Chicago. He wouldn't judge White Zinfandels; he
didn't like White Zinfandel. [laughs] I said, "Come
on, you judge a wine for what it is." Then we got
into it, and he said, "Well, they don't have any
flavor or anything." I said, "You know what? That's
the trouble with some of you; you don't understand
winemaking. Did you ever pick a grape at sixteen
[Brix] and expect it to have a lot of fruit and
flavor? That grape's not even half matured, and of
course it doesn't have any flavor, but it has other
things. Okay? That's what you judge it for." Well,
as a panel we accomplished our job.
For many years I have participated on judging
panels in and out of California, some major
competitions. It's difficult for me to assess at
103
this point how much competitions help to increase
vine consumption.
Many wines do not receive wine awards; however,
they do have quality and are good values. Also,
awards in general are not consistent in all
competitions. This leads me to believe that some
improvement can be made in the selection of judges.
I think all competition judges should in some way be
qualified to judge. As it stands now, anyone can
receive an award if he enters enough competitions. I
guess competitions do tend to make winemakers produce
better wines. Also, I see the need for awards to
help the consumer make his selection of wine while
looking at hundreds of labels on the shelf.
I firmly believe that all winemakers work very
hard to produce good wines. However, Mother Nature
doesn't give us a vintage year every year, and we
have to do the best we can. I think we are too
serious with our wines. They should not be critiqued
to death. Let the consumer decide what is good or
bad and what to drink with his or her meal.
To summarize, my opinion as an older winemaker
in our industry is that I see much improvement needed
in promoting wine. Wine is meant to be used with
food; it is a staple of life. Wine should be simple,
easy to drink, inexpensive, and drunk in moderation.
A healthful beverage that God gave us for better
life, health, and happiness.
Hicke: I think that answers all my questions. I want to
tell you how much I've enjoyed hearing your
recollections and the history of the winery. Thank
you very much for your participation in this project.
Parducci: Carole, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
Transcriber and final typist: Judy Smith
104
TAPE GUIDE -- John A. Parducci
Interview 1: July 30, 1990] 1
tape 1, side a 1
tape 1, side b 15
tape 2, side a 24
tape 2, side b 40
tape 3, side a 53
tape 3, side b not recorded
Interview 2: July 31, 1990 62
tape 4, side a 62
tape 4. side b 74
tape 5, side a 87
tape 5, side b 99
105
INDEX
John Par due ci
Adams, Leon D. , 16 : -'
Alder Glen Springs, 9
Almaden Vineyards, 52
Angel, Fentner, 81-83
apellation system, 98-99
award competitions, 88-89, 101
103
Bank of America, and the wine
industry, 49-50
banks, and wine industry, 47-51
Barry, Eli, 30
Beaulieu Vineyard, 99
Beringer Winery, 52
Berkeley Yeast Laboratory, 41,
73
Bolla, Harold, 23
botrytis wines, 72
bottling, 30-33, 63
Brotherhood Winery, 41
Brown- Forman Beverage Company,
1, 48, 60, 89, 93-94
California Land Conservation Act,
1965, 56
California Grape Products, 26
California State University,
Fresno, assistance to
wineries, 55-56
Cellarmaster wines, 76-78
Christian Brothers winery, 22,
34, 44, 47, 52, 68
Cloverdale vineyard and winery,
6, 7
Concannon Vineyard, 42, 78
consumer education, 57-58, 61,
75-76. 98, 100, 101
corks, 32, 33
corporate ownership of wineries,
97-98
distribution of wine, 44-48, 57
59
Edmeades winery, 72
extractum, 2-3
Fessler, Julius H. , 41
Fetzer Vineyards, 75, 86
Fitzpatrick, Robert, 81-82
Foppiano, Louis, 26
Gallo, E & J, Winery, 34, 93
Garrett & Co. , 26
Garrett winery, 7
Giannini, A. P. , 49
Golden, John, 81
Gomberg, Louis R. , 49
grape varieties, planting of, 42
44, 51-54
Heinz, William F. , 17-18
Holzknecht, Fred, 48
Hudson, Grace, 17
Italian Swiss Colony Winery, 7,
52, 98
judging panels, 102-103
Kendall-Jackson vineyards, 95
Konocti Winery, 94-97, 99
equipment, 94-95,
expansion, 95-96
106
La Buena Vlda winery, 65
labeling, 30-33, 43
Lake County Vintners, 95
Lanza, Horace 0. ,
Largo Ranch, 53
15-16
marketing of wines, 36-37, 48,
59-60, 71, 89, 93-94, 98
Marola Ranch, 85-86
Masson, Paul, Vineyards, 52, 79
mechanical harvesting, 90-91
Mexicans, as labor, 90
Mondavi winery, 86
Monostori, Joe, 41, 67
Myersons marketing company, 48
Olmo, Harold Paul, 68
Opper, Kurt, 79
Pacific Vineyards, 26
Parducci, Adolph B. , 3-22, 26,
27, 34, 35, 38, 44-45, 47, 49-51
arrival from Italy 3-5
making port and sherry, 64
Mendocino county vineyard 8-9
and prorate, 26
retirement 38
sale of Parducci Winery, 47
winery in Cloverdale, 5-6, 17-
18
winery in Ukiah, 6-22
Parducci, Adolph, Jr., 13, 46,
47
Parducci, Billy, 83, 85
Parducci, Billy, Jr., 83, 85
Parducci, Dick, 83-85
Parducci, George, 13, 46, 47,
50, 81, 83, 94, 99
Parducci, John,
brothers, 13, 34, 44-47, 50,
81, 83. 94, 99
children, 83, 84, 85
cousins in Tuscany, Italy, 5
early life in Cloverdale, 1-2
83, 85
13, 44-45, 47
father. See Adolph Parducci
grandchildren, 83, 85
grandparents , 4,5
great -grandmother, 85
high school, 21-23
junior college, 23
mother, 5-6, 12-14
public relations travel, 100
relationship with growers,
95-97
selling grapes in New Jersey,
8-12, 18-20
wife. See Margarett Romer
Parducci
as winemaker in 40s and 50s ,
38-47, 62-64
Parducci, Margarett Romer (Mrs.
John), 17, 23, 28, 29, 30,
31, 84
Parducci, Richie,
Parducci, Vernon,
Parducci winery,
building of, 16-17
early growth of, 34-36
effect of WW II on, 38-39,
expansion of winery and
vineyard, 47, 83, 85-86
experiments with grape
varieties 64, 65-6-7
gift shop, 28-30
in 1930s, 16-18, 21-22;
Indians as grape pickers, 16-
17, 80
modernization of equipment and
techniques, 39-41, 63-64,
88, 89-92
ownership change, 1964, 47,
48
product development, 65, 71
sale to Teachers Management
Investment Corp., 34, 80-
83
shift from red to white wine
production, 91-92
tasting room, 28-30, 36-37,
39
winemaking in 40s, 62-3
107
Perelli-Minetti, Antonio, 15-16
Petri, Angelo, 38, 39
Petri, Louis, 24
Petri Wine Company, 22, 24, 34,
52
phylloxera, 55, 56, 95
Pio, Bartholomeo , 22-23
Prohibition, 6, 9, 15, 16
prorate, 1930s, 25-26
research, 6-7, 55, 68
Hopland test plot, 55,
urbanization, effect on wineries,
54-55
Vintage Wine Merchants , 48
viticulture in Mendocino County,
87-88
regulations, state and federal,
58, 71-72
restaurants, and wine lists, 69,
76, 102
Roma Wine Company, 22, 34
Romer, Margarett. See Parducci,
Margarett
Schoonmaker, Frank, 78-79
Scotto brothers, 42, 43
screw caps, 32
Sebastiani Vineyards, 55
Shimmin, Charles, 81
shipping grapes in the 1930s,
10, 19-20
Smith, Bobby, 65, 66
Sonoma County Wine Growers
Association, 26-27
Talmage Ranch, 47, 53, 54, 68,
93
tannin in wine, 76-77
Tchelistcheff , Andre, 99-100
Teachers Management & Investment
Corp., 34, 80-83
Twight, Benny, 24
Twight, EdmondH., 23-24, 26, 38
Twight, Walter, 24
University of California at
Davis, 55, 68, 73, 96
assistance to wineries, 55,
73
wholesalers and distributors,
education of, 59-60
Williamson Act of 1965, 56
Windram, Peter, 95
wine ,
bulk, 18-19, 22, 34, 36, 43,
44, 52
fortified, 32, 42
generic (jug), 69-70
health benefits of, 61
shelf life, 59
Wine Advisory Board, 59
wine industry, stability of, 100
Wine Institute, 16, 59
Wine Spectator . 101
winemaking me thods , 62-79
Winkler, Albert J., 7, 65
yeasts in wine, 72-74
Grapes Mentioned in the
Interview :
Alicante [Bouchet] , 6, 29, 42
Beclan, 6
Burger, 6
Cabernet Sauvignon, 53, 87, 94
Carignane, 42 58, 93
Chambourcin, 65
Chancellor, 65
Charbono, 6, 93
Chardonnay, 53-54, 55, 66, 87,
90
Chenin blanc, 53, 68
108
Flora, 53, 67-69
Franken Riesling, 53
French Colombard, 6, 42, 68, 93
Camay Beaujolais, 53
Gewurztraminer, 66, 68
Landot, 65
Malaga, 70
Merlot, 53
Mourvfedre , 66
Muscat, 19
Napa Camay, 88
Nebbiolo, 66, 88, 93
Petite Sirah, 42, 87, 93
Pinot noir, 53, 66
Rayon d'Or, 65
Rhine wine, 42
Sangiovese, 88
Sauvignon blanc, 6, 55, 68, 71
Semillon, 53, 68
Sejrval blanc, 65
Thompson Seedless, 70
Zinfandel, 19, 42, 55, 58, 87-
88, 93, 94
Pinot Noir, 43, 77
port, 43, 64, 70-72, 78
Primavera (May Wine) , 67-68
Red Port, 32, 70
Red Muscatel, 32
Riesling, 43
Ros^, 43, 44
Ruby Port, 70
Sauterne, 43
Sauvignon Blanc, 58, 70
sherry, 43, 64, 78
Special Tawny Port, 70-71
Sweet Sherry, 32
Tokay, 32, 78
White Port, 32
White Zinfandel, 59, 102
Zinfandel, 43, 54, 66, 76, 78,
92, 96
Vines Mentioned in the Interview:
Angelica, 31, 32
Barbera, 43
Blackberry, 32
burgundy, 43,
Cabernet, 43, 54, 58, 66, 70
Carignane , 78
chablis, 43, 87
Chardonnay, 54, 57, 58, 70-71,
77
Chenin Blanc, 98
Dry Sherry, 32
French Colombard, 43, 62
Fume Blanc, 58, 77, 89
Cewurztraminer, 69
Loganberry, 32
Merlot, 54
Moselle, 67
Muscatel, 19. 43, 78
Petite Sirah, 42, 66, 77-78, 89
Pink Fum6, 71
Carole E. Hicke
B.A, , University of Iowa; economics
M.A. , San Francisco State University; U.S. history with emphasis on the
American West; thesis: "James Rolph, Mayor of San Francisco."
Interviewer/editor/writer, 1978-present , for business and law firm
histories, specializing in oral history techniques. Independently
employed.
Interviewer- editor , Regional Oral History Office, University of California,
Berkeley, 1985 to present, specializing in California legal, political, and
business histories.
Author: Heller. Ehrman. White & McAuliffe: A Century of Service to Clients
and Community . 1991.
Editor (1980-1985) newsletters of two professional historical associations:
Western Association of Women Historians and Coordinating Committee for
Women in the Historical Profession.
Visiting lecturer, San Francisco State University in U.S. history, history
of California, history of Hawaii, legal oral history.
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