San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Napa winemaker launches own label at age 72
Tom Rinaldi has made wine at several of California’s award-winning properties over the past four decades, including Provenance Vineyards/ Hewitt Vineyard in Rutherford, Diageo Chateau & Estates Wines in Napa and the Chalone Wine Group of Soledad in Monterey County.
But most famously, he helped launch the legendary Duckhorn Vineyards in St. Helena, where he came aboard in 1978 and was winemaker until 2000. Under his direction, Duckhorn became the most recognized and successful producer of what was then an unusual grape for Napa Valley: Merlot.
His has been a storied career, and as his 47th harvest comes around this late summer, Rinaldi seems just as enthralled with winemaking as he was when he discovered its beautiful magic after enrolling in science classes at Santa Rosa Junior College in 1972.
Or perhaps, he was first mesmerized by such chemistry back during Christmas of 1968, when he was dropped on a beach in Guam, and, in order to survive, he had to learn how to transform sea water into fresh drinking water (he discovered that the water, by the way, paired nicely with the jungle snake he scavenged and grilled).
Though actually, his interest might have been piqued even earlier in 1968, when he was living in Memphis, tooling around on his motorcycle. He made friends with some backwoods moonshiners and was immediately intrigued how grain, sugar and water could be fermented into illicit devil’s drink.
However he got here, tracking Rinaldi’s path to winemaking is a thrill ride of rich stories, as he bounced around recently in lengthy interviews with a reporter at Madrigal Family Winery in Calistoga.
The Madrigals were the first Latino family to settle in Calistoga, starting with Jacinto Madrigal who came to Napa Valley from Mexico in 1938.
They built a successful business over the years, selling grapes to Duckhorn and Provenance/Hewitt, among other companies, and eventually taking over vineyard management for Duckhorn’s properties.
That history is important, Rinaldi emphasized, as he sampled some 2021 Sauvignon Blanc from a 550-gallon stainless steel tank. The family’s longtime partnership is a true friendship, he said, because even when they became successful enough to build their own winery and launch the Madrigal wine brand, they still welcome Rinaldi to experiment with his own wines on-site.
Rinaldi has long been known for his innovative winemaking practices, driven by his larger than life personality.
Born in San Francisco in 1949, he attended Catholic academies through elementary and high school. He aced his grades, he said, but by the Summer of Love, he found he was surrounded by Bay Area drug culture.
He never did anything too
hard core, he explained, but during high school, he ended up on a wild ride at a Grateful Dead concert, “exploring a little purple Owsley pill (LSD).”
He ended up hiding in a bathroom and closing the commode door.
“I’m freaking out, the area is getting smaller and smaller and I can’t escape,” he shared. “So I crawled on my knees underneath the door. I could hear the music, and next thing I know, I’m up front, looking at the Dead, and they’re looking at me.”
And yes, earlier that year, he had charged the stage at a Rolling Stones concert to give Bill Wyman a hug and was promptly pummeled by the bouncers; after being thrown out of the venue, he climbed a fence and snuck back in.
He’d never been afraid to bend the rules and take chances, he noted wryly. But in his senior year, he signed up for the Navy.
“I just needed to get out of the scene,” he said.
The Navy had some advice. “They’re looking at me, long hair, 17-year-old dude, hippy weirdo and they suggested that I get rid of all the nonsense,” he said.
Soon after his interview, though, he got sideswiped in a football game and tore the ligaments in his knee, requiring a full-leg cast.
He could have gotten out of his military commitment, but instead, as soon as his cast was off, he did his own version of the Death Ride. Officially formed in 1978, the now annual extreme bicycling sport spans 103 miles and 14,000 feet of climbing over both sides of three California Alps mountain passes, including Monitor Pass, Ebbetts Pass and the Pacific Grade in the Sierra Nevada.
By the time he showed up for Navy training a few months later, he said, “I was the fastest guy in the whole unit, and I had studied and nailed the (educational) test, so I got to slide through bootcamp and carry a clipboard. On inspections, I would get an ‘oops’ for transgressions, but didn’t get written up.”
He was soon shipped to Millington, Tennessee, 17 miles outside of Memphis. The recruit in line in front of him signed up for Naval Air and Technical Training Command, so Rinaldi did, too.
He rented an apartment in downtown Memphis, and there, he met his moonshine buddies.
“One day, the brothers kicked my door in and told me, ‘get your ass out of here, get out now,’ ” he said. “I went back to my base, and found out Martin Luther King had just gotten shot. If I had been outside, I would have heard the shots, it was so close.”
The rioting quickly exploded.
“These guys saved me — they were my pals,” Rinaldi said. “I went back to get my stuff, and it was all gone. The whole building had burned to the ground.”
He went on to become an air crewman, surviving prisoner of war training including being buried in a coffin.
“I’m not claustrophobic, so it was no big deal,” he said. “But what they were doing was knocking every few minutes to see if I was suffocating, which was annoying, because I was taking a snooze.”
Then came the tropical cyclones. He signed up to be a typhoon tracker, taking missions all throughout the South Pacific, launching and landing from Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan and Vietnam.
“We flew into the eye of typhoons in the middle of the night,” he said. “On purpose. And they had to be at least 130 knots (150 mph) or else it didn’t count. You’d be pinned to the ceiling then bang on the floor, and I never ever got airsick.”
Dropping monitoring pellets and using a sextant, he’d find the North Star, define longitude and latitude, then radio in the specs to alert military air and water fleets to get out of the storm’s path.
“We got bonus hazardous pay tax free and free postage,” he recalled with a shrug. “It was a small price to pay when we scored 8 cents a stamp.”
Already, Rinaldi knew he was fascinated by science and math, and maybe — just maybe — pushing his limits. He returned to Sonoma County, and enrolled in Santa Rosa Junior College on a GI Bill, focusing on chemistry and biochemistry.
“After graduation, my buddies were going to Davis — we were going to be veterinarians or medical doctors,” he said. “But then I saw all these wine classes. They had the same prerequisites for being a doctor — chemistry, biochemistry, calculus. And I thought, ‘doctors and vets are miserable because no one is happy when they come to see them.’ ”
Upon claiming his degree in Enology and Fermentation Science in 1976, he landed an internship at Freemark Abbey Winery in St. Helena.
“I saw all these wine classes. They had the same prerequisites for being a doctor — chemistry, biochemistry, calculus. And I thought, ‘doctors and vets are miserable because no one is happy when they come to see them.’ ” Tom Rinaldi, winemaker
“Jerry Luper was the winemaker at the time, and he asked me all kinds of laboratory questions,” Rinaldi said. “No one’s going to trip me up on that. And then he said, ‘well it’s 4:30, what are you doing the rest of the afternoon?’ I said, ‘I’m going downtown and getting a beer.’ He says, ‘may I join you?’ Other guys (being interviewed) had told him, ‘oh, I’ve got some wines to put together tonight, and all kinds of work, right’ … he said he liked my answer best.”
After his internship ended, he was offered a cellar job at Rutherford Hill Winery in Rutherford.
“I would ride my bike from Church Street in St. Helena up the steep mountain, and they had a punch clock, 8 a.m. on the dot, for hourly pay. I’d get there at 8:11, and other workers would yell at me,” he said. “The tanks had alarm bells that went off if levels changed, so we’d know to shut off the pump but had to guess which pump. All day long. So on Friday, after one week, I quit.”
Phil Baxter, the winemaker at the time, immediately moved him into the winery lab, and Rinaldi found his forever, blissful niche as a scientist.
“I was learning how to doctor wines, yeah, to make them better,” he said.
Early on as a budding winemaker, he massaged the rules here and there, relying on his “whoopsie” charm for forgiveness. His first Duckhorn vintage, a 1978 Three Palms Merlot vintage “was really a knockout,” and the winery counselor asked him how he made it. It included 15% Beatty Ranch Howell Mountain Vineyards Cabernet, “for muscle.”
Rinaldi told him, and the counselor was shocked. Rinaldi explained he hadn’t realized that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau requires that 95% of grapes must come from the vineyard printed on the label.
Rinaldi apologized to the authorities and got first-time/ last-time use-up permission to sell the wine.
That air crewman training came in handy as he tested alcohol levels to keep wines under the 14% threshold that marks higher tax rates.
“The legal way of testing alcohol was to boil wine using an ebulliometer (manual chart), and compare it to the boiling point of distilled water,” he said. “But depending on the air pressure, you could manipulate the results. If you tested when a storm was moving in or it was raining, you could fudge a few points. Of course, now though, it’s all GLC (gasliquid chromatography) and gives you to the gnat’s ass what the real alcohol level is.”
On his off time, Rinaldi became known for more airmanship, as he buzzed neighboring wineries like Sterling Vineyards in his glider.
“I got too low, once, and I heard about it for a long time,” he said, of winery tourists screaming on the terraces. “I also learned that you never want to land in a vineyard. You’re going to die, first of all, but the winery has a $40,000 insurance deductible for the vines you destroy, and you also you have to pay the grower for the four years it takes for the fruit to come back.”
These days, the 2018 Duckhorn Vineyards Napa Valley Three Palms Vineyard Merlot — goes for $110. And to this day, Rinaldi still remembers the first wine he ever tasted — a Green Hungarian at $2 a bottle, when he was 16 and could sneak into Napa Valley wineries without being carded. He also remembers the first wine he ever loved — a 1963
Beaulieu Vineyard Rutherford Georges de Latour, priced at $3.
Now, for his next chapter, Rinaldi is at work on his own label, Patent, offering small batches of Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Rosé of Syrah and Grenache.
He also crafted a 2021 wine called Barely Legal (the brand name changes each year), but it’s only for friends and family.
No worries about Patent, he said with a smile.
“I’ve done things under the radar before, OK,” he said. “But this one is completely legal.”