Controversy swells at Napa Valley’s most famous vineyard.
Napa’s To Kalon is legendary acreage. Can an industry giant make it a brand?
The battle over Napa Valley’s most contested two words — To Kalon — rages on.
Is To Kalon a place? A brand? A historical landmark? Certainly it’s a vineyard. But whose? Six owners lay claim to portions of this 678-acre site in western Oakville. But do all of these portions count as the “true” To Kalon? Who’s entitled to use the To Kalon name? And who decides? To Kalon (TOW-kuh-lawn) is Napa Valley vineyard — perhaps the California vineyard. No other site here can claim to have been as famous for as long as To Kalon, whose wines’ superlative quality was recognized nationwide as many as 150 years ago. Its modern era has been defined by mergers and acquisitions, lawsuits and trademark battles, primarily between To Kalon’s two most powerful stakeholders: grape grower Andy Beckstoffer, who owns 89 acres of the vineyard, and Robert Mondavi Winery, which has 450. Since 2004, Mondavi has been owned by global beverage giant Constellation, a corporation that did $6.5 billion in sales last year.
The standoff between Beckstoffer and Mondavi over To Kalon began nearly two decades ago, when the two companies sued each other following Mondavi’s registration of the trademarks “To Kalon” and “To Kalon Vineyard.” That clash, though settled out of court, confronted Napa with a new set of questions: Could some vineyard names be too historic, or too inextricably tied to the earth, to be apt for a modern business’ trademarking?
Now, those old ghosts are returning. No longer content to merely produce a To Kalon vineyard designate under Robert Mondavi Winery, Constellation is planning to debut an entirely new wine brand focused on the To Kalon Vineyard. It will be the first high-end wine brand created, rather than acquired, by Constellation, and they’ve tapped superstar consultant Andy Erickson to make the wine.
What to call this impossibly pedigreed new brand? Ideally, “To Kalon Wine Company” — Constellation has applied for a trademark for that name, as well as for “To Kalon Vineyard Company.” But might Beckstoffer block Constellation from further colonizing the To Kalon name? So far, he’s convinced the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to extend the period of opposition to the trademark, originally supposed to end in July, through October. Constellation, meanwhile, says it’s considering other names for the new project, just in case a legal battle ensues. (Andy Beckstoffer declined to comment for this story.)
The potential advantages here for Constellation are obvious. It already owns the land and already owns the plain old “To Kalon” trademark. The vineyard’s reputation is already built, with a long and colorful history ripe for marketing exploitation. Most important, “Constellation is so focused on premiumizing its wine portfolio,” says Sam Glaetzer, the company’s senior vice president of winemaking. “We’re seeing people willing to pay more for better quality, and we have the assets.”
Considered with Constellation’s other recent up-market moves — especially the June acquisition of Napa’s Schrader Cellars, whose wines sell for upwards of $500, and who has long made To Kalon wine from Beckstoffer’s parcel — the To Kalon project signals a significant departure for the company that first made its name on Manischewitz.
What happens next could signal a significant departure, too, for Napa Valley. To Kalon, after all, was Napa’s original claim to fame. Could the battle for To Kalon’s definition determine the paradigm for California vineyards going forward, especially where history, fame and profit are at stake?
“I’ve never seen such small clusters,” Andy Erickson remarks as he walks through a To Kalon row. The winemaker resembles a kid in a candy store: For Constellation’s still-unnamed To Kalon cuvee, Erickson gets to choose any blocks he wants from the company’s 450 acres.
If you’ve driven up Highway 29, you’ve driven past To Kalon, whose vines extend westward from the kitschy “Welcome to this world famous wine growing region: Napa Valley” sign. Walnut Lane and Oakville Grade slice through it; Robert Mondavi Winery forms its northern boundary.
At a glance, the place looks flat, unimpressive. But the vines here bore into ancient riverbeds, studded with gravel, whose intersections slope the land gently toward the Mayacamas Mountains. Looking up into the hillsides, you can see the seismic fault line — the precise moment where a lush landscape of live oaks yields suddenly to scrub brush and chaparral.
“Even some of the young-vine blocks are surprisingly amazing,” Erickson says, handling a grape cluster that’s just beginning to blush from green to purple. He’s got his eye on the super-gravelly monastery block, abutting the Carmelite House of Prayer, tucked into the hillside. He’s coveting, too, the block known as Marjorie’s Twilight, with its tight, dense vine spacing. But he even likes the wines from the nondescript vineyard block by the kitschy welcome sign.
“Dark, rich, flavorful,” he waxes, when asked how he envisions his To Kalon wine. “Not austere in any way.”
Erickson, winemaker for Ovid, Dalla Valle and Mayacamas, lends considerable gravitas to the project. As Constellation attempts to reposition itself as a company with premium holdings, the presence of the venerable Erickson makes this new product more than just a trademark with a cool, old-fashioned logo.
Production is expected at around 500 cases. An exact bottle price has not been set (the first vintage, 2016, will be released in 2019), but it will be “north of $150,” Constellation’s Sam Glaetzer says.
It didn’t take much convincing for Constellation to get Erickson on board. “Within 30 seconds of Sam talking, I was like, ‘This is the coolest project I’ve heard about in a long time,’ ” Erickson says. “Just the chance to work with this incredible piece of history.”
To understand how we got here, we’ll have to go back to 1868. That’s the year H.W. Crabb, a crafty pioneer who had ventured to California from Ohio for the gold rush, purchased the land that would become To Kalon. He first planted grandiflora orange trees and Italian chestnuts, but soon understood that he had struck viticultural gold.
Though Crabb first called his Oakville farm Hermosa, he later rechristened it, abandoning that mild-mannered “beautiful” descriptor for a name that suggested a mythical supremacy: “The name To Kalon is Greek, and means the highest beauty, or the highest good,” he said in 1889, “but I try to make it mean the boss vineyard.”
Crabb was “the most prominent vine grower and wine producer on the Pacific coast,” according to the Chicago Herald (1890). “His practical experience,” the Herald noted, “has made the brand of his vintage familiar to every table where good wine is served.”
As a viticulturist, Crabb’s prescience was remarkable. A mad experimenter, he tested all sorts of grape varieties to see which would thrive. Black Burgundy (actually the Italian grape Re- fosco) was his calling card, but he also grew Cabernet Sauvignon. Long before it was standard, he grafted his vine son top hy ll ox era resistant Vitis rip aria rootstock.
As a businessman, too, Crabb was canny, and understood in a way that feels remarkably modern the importance of branding. His was the first wine company to set up agencies in different American cities as the exclusive brokers of his wine. To Kalon Wine Company stores hawked Crabb’s wares in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., largely from barrels into growlers. (Bottled wines were uncommon in those days.) His output was prolific. At his peak, Crabb produced over 200,000 cases of wine a year and 10,000 gallons of brandy.
By 1878, Crabb’s was the thirdlargest winery in the country. “As a successful wine-maker Mr. Crabb is without a peer in the State,” wrote Frona Eunice Wait, in “Wines and Vines of California” (1889).
Much ink has been spilled over what constitutes the “true” To Kalon — Crabb’s To Kalon. His original purchase was just 240 acres, but he acquired additional contiguous plots later. After Crabb’s death, subsequent owners added more parcels; can these be “true” To Kalon? Andy Beckstoffer claimed, in his 2002 lawsuit against Mondavi, that the “historic” To Kalon is a 359-acre site, but land deeds have since been uncovered that show Crabb at one point owned 500 acres.
Either way, about 275 acres of today’s To Kalon Vineyard, owned by Mondavi and Opus One, never belonged to Crabb, but were added by Martin Stelling,
“Constellation is so focused on premiumizing its wine portfolio. We’re seeing people willing to pay more for better quality, and we have the assets.” Sam Glaetzer, Constellation senior vice president of winemaking
who took over much of the vineyard in 1943. Crabb had died penniless in 1899 — in fact, $230,000 in debt — forcing his family to sell their land and the To Kalon Wine Company. From there on, ownership of the vineyard became rather fragmented through the eras — there were the Churchills, the Doaks and the Deterts; the U.S. Department of Agriculture and UC Davis; Italian Swiss Colony and Beaulieu Vineyard. In 1939, Crabb’s winery burned to the ground.
Of them all, Stelling came the closest to matching Crabb’s ambition. He planted varietal blocks, including the famous I-Block, source of Mondavi’s old-vine Sauvignon Blanc; André Tchelistcheff called him “new oxygen for Napa Valley.” But Stelling’s death came prematurely in 1950, just as he was preparing to re-open the winery. His dream of reviving the To Kalon Wine Company was never realized.
The next maverick to come to To Kalon, Robert Mondavi, was less concerned with seizing To Kalon’s brand and more concerned with building his own. Still, To Kalon was the precise reason Mondavi built his winery where he did, in 1966: “I considered three different properties in and around Oakville,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir “Harvests of Joy.” “There was one, though, that stood head and shoulders above the others. It was a vineyard with a distinguished history and a magical name: To Kalon.”
Initially, Mondavi acquired only 11.6 acres, but made wine from To Kalon fruit purchased from the other owners. (He acquired more than 200 additional acres in 1969, and even more in when he and his then-estranged brother Peter, of Charles Krug Winery, divided their assets.)
Some of Mondavi’s favorite blocks were at the back of the vineyard, abutting the Oakville hillsides, where a gravel-packed alluvial fan undergirds the vines. These are the portions owned today by the MacDonald and Detert families. (The two families are cousins; their great-grandparents bought the land in 1954.) The Detert and MacDonald sections have some of the oldest vines (not counting the 68-year-old I-Block), dating back to 1963. Both have always sold a majority of their fruit to Mondavi. In fact, Mondavi’s To Kalon bottling is about half MacDonald fruit most years.
In those early days, “Bob didn’t want to put ‘To Kalon’ on a label because he thought it would confuse consumers,” says Graeme MacDonald, who tends his family’s 15-acre plot with his brother Alex. “He was trying to promote his own name. Back then, nobody knew who Robert Mondavi was.”
Two decades later, though, everyone in America knew who Robert Mondavi was. Like Crabb’s, his was the most famous winery. His, too, was the most famous vineyard — but it wasn’t his entirely. And in 1993, when Andy Beckstoffer bought 89 acres of To Kalon from Beaulieau, Mondavi had another brand-minded entrepreneur to contend with.
With other stakeholders in the wings, what’s a smart businessman to do? Trademark. In 1988, Mondavi took out a trademark on “To Kalon,” and in 1994, on “To Kalon Vineyard.”
This presented a problem for the other landowners who would print “To Kalon” on their wine labels. Beckstoffer — who makes no wine of his own, but sells grapes to wineries — is adamant that his clients designate their wines as “Beckstoffer To Kalon Vineyard” on bottles made from his grapes.
So Beckstoffer and his highestprofile client, Schrader, decided to fight back against Mondavi’s trademark. When Schrader refused to cease labeling its wines with “To Kalon,” Mondavi sued for infringement. Beckstoffer sued back.
In those 2002 and 2003 lawsuits, Beckstoffer and Schrader’s argument hinged on a simple concept: “I believe that a vineyard is a place, not a marketing concept,” wrote Beckstoffer. He claimed that Mondavi had obtained its trademarks fraudu1978
lently because it downplayed To Kalon’s name recognition — as if Mondavi had been resurrecting some obscure detail from the past, rather than capitalizing on the moniker’s power and fame.
Before it has meaning as a trademark, went their argument, To Kalon Vineyard “has a primary geographic meaning, and that meaning is Crabb’s To Kalon Vineyard.” The logic is simple: While registering a trademark for your business name is as common in the wine business as in any other, no one can own the mark of a true, geographic place. (You couldn’t register “San Francisco,” for instance, and then sue other businesses that include “San Francisco” in their names.)
“Mondavi has been selling history, but selling it falsely,” Beckstoffer’s lawsuit went on, “and it should stop.”
Yet Mondavi maintained its exclusive rights to the To Kalon name. In a nowinfamous 2002 interview with the St. Helena Star, Tim Mondavi said, “The trademark allows us protection on the term To-Kalon. It says it’s our right any way we choose to use it. … we can use it, if we choose, to bottle a wine from Nairobi.” Even today, Mondavi could add new land and call it “To Kalon,” so long as it’s contiguous.
In the end, Mondavi settled out of court with Beckstoffer and Schrader. We don’t know the terms of the agreement, but Beckstoffer and his clients were granted some use of Mondavi’s trademark, since the clients have continued to promote “Beckstoffer To Kalon Vineyard” on their wine labels. On the labels of other To Kalon owners Detert, MacDonald and Opus One, however, “To Kalon” is nowhere to be found.
In this story’s most bizarre twist, Schrader, the onetime defendant to Mondavi’s plaintiff, now shares a parent company with Mondavi. This year, it appears Schrader will get To Kalon fruit from both the Beckstoffer and Mondavi holdings.
If To Kalon is valuable in large part because of its history, it’s perhaps ironic that the custodian of that history is one of the figures prohibited from using the “To Kalon” name on his own wine — Graeme MacDonald.
In the small cottage where MacDonald lives, abutting I-Block’s gnarly Sauvignon Blanc vines, he keeps his extensive collection of To Kalon ephemera: advertisements for Crabb’s To Kalon Wine Company stores; invoices from the Crabb era (grapes cost $4-$10/ton; hay cost $7); winemaking textbooks with chapters authored by Crabb. It was one of these artifacts — an old To Kalon Wine Company letterhead, from circa 1900 — that inspired Constellation’s marketing gurus to launch the new brand.
That the MacDonalds and their cousins the Deterts are prohibited from printing “To Kalon” on their own wine labels doesn’t bother them too much. As growers, they have good relationships with Mondavi/Constellation, and their brands are so small, with strong enough followings, that they feel they can effectively communicate to customers the true source of their wines. (Graeme MacDonald even leads To Kalon seminars for Mondavi’s sales teams, though accepts no payment.)
“I can’t say that I wouldn’t want to see To Kalon on our label,” says Tom Garrett, who makes his family’s Detert wines, “but I totally respect what Mondavi is doing.”
For Graeme and Alex MacDonald, stewarding the To Kalon name is about more than just printing wine labels. “Crabb, Stelling, MacDonald — these names will all be forgotten,” Graeme says. “But To Kalon has endured, and it will endure.”
But in what form, and at what price? Does Mondavi get exclusive claim forever to “To Kalon” — Beckstoffer’s courtsettlement exceptions notwithstanding — simply because it muscled those trademark registrations? Or is there, or should there be, a fundamental meaning of “To Kalon,” tied not to legal documents but to the land?
Does armoring a famous place’s name with trademarks set a dangerous precedent? “The risk,” as Graeme MacDonald puts it, “is that ‘To Kalon’ could eventually become inauthentic in the minds of consumers.”
It’s not outlandish to imagine that To Kalon’s contested status could eventually catalyze an American vineyard classification system, of the sort that exists in Bordeaux and Burgundy in France, or at the very least a centralized vineyard registry, as Napa trademark attorney Richard Mendelson has advocated. Will there eventually be a protection against labeling as To Kalon a wine from Nairobi, trademarks be damned?
All that hangs in the balance. In the meantime, Graeme MacDonald is working on a much smaller project: persuading the U.S. Board of Geographic Names to name the small creek that runs by his cottage “To Kalon Creek.” It’s been approved at the county and state levels; now it lies with the federal government.
“It would be the first time that the name To Kalon appears on a real map,” MacDonald says.