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As told in a
conversation with Mike Tierney
The story begins on
Taft Street in the Rockridge area of Oakland, not far from the
University of California at Berkeley. My brother John was an
undergraduate at Cal and I was a grad student. We both were cooking
part time in Berkeley restaurants and became intrigued with the
developing food and wine scene. We started making wine and John
proved his talents early on. He soon made wine not only for
himself but for a rapidly growing fan club of family and friends.
When John graduated he moved to Sonoma County where he
worked for several years at Souverain Winery. He took courses at UC
Davis and continued honing his winemaking craft. His efforts during
this time earned him a BEST OF SHOW AWARD at the California State
Fair - the state's highest honor for a home winemaker.
At
that time in Berkeley there was an amazing business called Wine and
the People. Located on University Avenue in an old warehouse, owner
Peter Brehm searched vineyard areas all over California and beyond
for quality grapes for home winemakers. One catalogue at the time
headlined, "Why pay $4.99 for a Heitz Martha's Vineyard Cabernet
Sauvignon? You can make your own for $1.66." John took a job there
when Wine and the People began importing winemaking equipment from
Europe for small wineries and serious amateurs. Eventually Wine and
the People became a winery with John as winemaker. It was there John
met fellow employee Mike Martini, original Taft Street partner and
later mayor and city council member of Santa Rosa.
Meanwhile,
back at Taft Street things were jumping. Since our house was built
in 1918 and the garage could no longer comfortably fit a car, we
turned it into something infinitely more useful - a winery. We added
wiring, a new layer of concrete, and we even included an
air-conditioned area for cold stabilizing white wines. Barrels,
stainless tanks, a basket press and hand corker completed the scene.
By the late 1970's, we were making up to 1000 gallons. With
a little quality control and an ever growing following who loved the wine,
the house and garage on Taft Street gained a reputation of its own.
Such a reputation had our next-door neighbor (an early to
bed kind of guy) complaining to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (BATF). He asserted we were illegally making alcohol. I got a
call from an agent telling me she would be out the next day to
investigate the complaint. A law left over from Prohibition states a
family can make up to 200 gallons of wine a year for home
consumption. We were able to satisfy the agent that more than five
families were involved in making wine and we were well within the
law. An interesting aside is that several years later when we
received our government bond, it was the very same agent who gave
the ok.
The fun continued throughout the 1970's and dreams
began to form about making Taft Street Garage a commercial
enterprise. We had everything but money. John and Mike Martini were
not getting rich working at Wine and the People; my brother in law
Arleigh Sanderson and I were not getting rich teaching school; and
my brother Marty was not getting rich enough practicing law. I did,
however, have a friend who was not only successful in business but
also had a hand in a few start-ups. Andy Barlett became our first
president, with the five of us mentioned above as vice presidents.
We would be a boutique winery making small lots of
handcrafted wines. We would continue what we had started in the
garage, but since we were now a high-class organization we dropped
"Garage" from our name. John and Mike Martini were put on the
payroll immediately. They began a search for a winery site in Sonoma
County, where my brothers and I had spent our summers as kids and
felt a close affinity to the Russian River area. In 1980 the Russian
River area was considered too cool for grapes and still had a viable
apple industry. We found a warehouse space in the sleepy town of
Forestville and moved in early in 1982, just in time for that year's
harvest.
Since we were the new kids on the block and wine
was becoming a hot industry, we could not secure enough Sonoma
County grapes to meet our needs. So we used some of the same sources
we had from the Wine and the People days and secured chardonnay from
Sonoma and Santa Barbara, Pinot Noir from Monterey, Cabernet
Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from Napa, and Merlot from Sonoma.
Total production from the 1982 harvest was about 1700 cases.
At the time we planned the business there was simply not
enough wine being produced to meet market demand. Retailers and
restaurateurs from the Bay Area would drive to Napa and Sonoma and
buy whatever they could find. We saw this and figured the least of
our worries would be selling new wine. We planned on making a list
of the top retailers and restaurants and allocating from there.
It didn't quite work that way. We got a few wines placed in
shops and restaurants, but selling wine was a lot harder than we
imagined. After several months of the phone not ringing off the
hook, we realized action was required. I was teaching high school at
the time and decided to take a sabbatical leave for the spring
semester of 1984. Starting with a phone book and a pickup truck, we
finally started to see the kind of sales we had taken for granted
when we created Taft Street.
The next fall when I returned
to teaching, we had secured a place for ourselves in the Bay Area
market. I kept my day job, teaching part-time, and filled my pickup
truck with wine every day after school. We later added wine brokers
in the South San Francisco Bay Area and the North Bay. As months
passed our reputation grew via word of mouth and several good
reviews from wine publications, and a number of out of state
distributors began representing us. By 1990 we were selling 20,000
cases of wine a year, with Sonoma County turning out to be our strongest market.
Awards came in droves. In one ten-year stretch our
chardonnay was a Best Buy in the WINE SPECTATOR nine times. Our 1986
Russian River Chardonnay was awarded the Best of Show at the Sonoma
County Harvest Fair, and John was name Winemaker of the Year.
During the 1990's we expanded our production to meet
national demand. We opened a tasting room and saw a strong local
following develop, which gave us pause. We had gone out of Sonoma
County to secure grapes for an expanded market; yet we saw a genuine
excitement for the wines we were making from grapes grown in nearby
Russian River Valley and other nearby vineyards.
As we
identify ourselves as A SONOMA COUNTY WINERY we decided to
concentrate on those wines originating in nearby vineyards. Working
with local growers has enabled us to create wines which reflect the
individual quality of specific sites as well as show off our own
developed winemaking skills.
We continue to live, work and
have fun in Sonoma County, and plan on doing so for quite a while.
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