SHAKEN, BUT NOT BROKEN, A HISTORIC NAPA WINERY RETURNS.
Aug. 23, 2014, was the busiest day Trefethen had seen all summer. Harvest at the Oak Knoll winery was in full, chaotic swing, oozing juices of Riesling, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Trefethen’s tasting room was packed that day, buzzing with visitors who had come to see the Napa Valley at its most exhilarating time of year.
No one knew how much excitement Napa was really about to get: At 3:20 a.m. the following morning came a 6.0-magnitude earthquake, the largest the Bay Area had seen since 1989.
Moments later, Hailey Trefethen rushed to Oak Knoll from her home in the city of Napa with only one thing on her mind: the property’s McIntyre Winery building, constructed in 1886 and lacking the seismic retrofitting that now is required.
To her relief, the ornate redwood citadel with its pumpkin-colored coat of paint was still standing. But it looked like the leaning tower of Pisa. The roof had swayed 4 feet to the west of its foundation.
“You could still hear the creaking,” Hailey says.
Though it makes an ideal climate for grape growing, Oak Knoll’s dramatic diurnal temperature swings cause wood to expand and contract; she feared the building would continue its precarious slant westward. Conveniently, the Trefethens had been working with some steel-mover contractors, whose equipment was already on-site. Thus came the initial fix to prevent further movement: large trucks parked against the side of the building.
The contractor’s cranes helped to move crush equipment to a different part of the property. Winemaker Brian Kays pumped wine out of the oak barrels inside McIntyre, so that the wine could age elsewhere. Tasting-room employees, suddenly unable to work, were put on winery-watch duty — just make sure it doesn’t fall! — for a few days while emergency steel buttresses were erected.
A number of friends offered to let Trefethen use their wineries for the remainder of harvest. Thanks, they said, but no thanks. In the 44 years since Trefethen’s first vintage, never once had the company made wine off-site, and they weren’t going to start now. Five days after the quake, Trefethen’s crew was harvesting grapes again, crushing in hard hats.
But the real work of restoring the McIntyre Winery was yet to begin.
Only now, more than 2½ years after the quake, has that restoration work been finished. And on May 7,
Trefethen will finally re-open the McIntyre doors to the public — reinforced, re-insulated and, yes, seismically retrofitted.
Dozens of other Napa wineries sustained significant damage from the quake, of course; most have long since reopened. But Trefethen’s McIntyre building is one of the valley’s most important — and most vulnerable — structures, and the task of restoring it had particularly high stakes.
That task fell to Hailey Trefethen, 30, part of the family’s third generation of winery stewards with her brother Lorenzo. It was a job that their grandparents, Eugene and Catherine Trefethen, had undertaken once before.
When Eugene and Catherine purchased this property in 1968, the old McIntyre Winery was a selling point — but it been left abandoned for about 40 years and needed a lot of work. There were only three dozen or so wineries in Napa at the time. Eugene, an executive at Kaiser Industries, wasn’t looking to start a winery; he thought he’d just sell grapes. But his son John and daughter-in-law Janet thought differently. They wanted to make wine. Together, the family renovated the winery, starting with finishing its earthen floors.
“That building is the heart of the whole company,” says Jon Ruel, now Trefethen’s CEO.
Designed in 1886 by Hamden McIntyre — the Howard Backen of his time — the winery stands apart from his other work in Napa. It’s redwood rather than stone, McIntyre’s choice for such classics as Inglewood and Chateau Montelena, and set baldly on the valley floor instead of nestling against the hills. Still, his trademark flair is evident in such details as the Y-shaped redwood beams that branch across the ceiling like cane-pruned vines.
When it was built, this winery was among the most technologically advanced winemaking setups of its time. It used a horse-powered elevator to convey grapes from the picking bins outside up to the third story. Crushed grapes would then funnel through pipes down to the second floor to ferment, and finally funnel through more pipes to the first floor for aging. The floors are sloped — a standard feature of modern wineries — to help channel runoff liquid into the drains.
A big part of Hailey’s job, in renovating the winery post-quake, was ensuring that the building maintained its historic status. A historical architect told her to try to keep about 75 percent of the original building material. In the end, they kept more than 85 percent.
After several phases of shoring at the beginning of the construction process, general contractor Archie Cates and his team began ratcheting the building back upright,
reattaching the walls to the floors where they’d split apart. They thought that would take a month; it took a week.
It’s as if the building wanted to return to stasis — what Hailey calls its “structural memory.”
That’s not to say times were easy. With the McIntyre building out of commission, Trefethen held tastings under a tent outside for more than a year, until they could bring another of the property’s antique buildings, constructed in 1906, up to code. (Lorenzo had been living in it at the time of the earthquake; it had no major damage.)
McIntyre got a new foundation. A moment frame — 20 tons worth of steel in beams and columns — splits the segments of the building, to limit the portions that will sway in future quakes. The reframed building got new insulation, sheer walls, a waterproofing layer and siding. The façade was repainted, retaining its distinctive orange hue — a shade the Trefethens can describe only as “pumpkin.”
What’s most remarkable about the new McIntyre Winery is how much it still looks like itself. You wouldn’t mistake it for a Howard Backen opus. It’s still pumpkincolored, all redwood beams, 19th century pipes and drains. Where the moment frame dissects the large, open ground level, the construction team inserted unobtrusive glass walls, “so you can still see from one end of the building to another,” Hailey says.
Now that it’s up to code with an elevator, Trefethen can open McIntyre’s second story to the public for the first time. Guests will be able to taste wines on the sloped floors, amid vestigial redwood tanks. It looks impeccable — except for one cracking, leaning wooden beam. “That’s our remembrance post,” Hailey says.
The saga brings new meaning to the term “challenging vintage.” But the good news: The 2014 wines taste great.
“There was a certain irony when we walked the vineyard Sunday morning after the earthquake,” says Ruel. “The grapes were just fine.”
Now, in the final days of construction, Hailey walks through the McIntyre Winery with a palpable sense of awe. She’s not used to seeing this building with physical barriers. “I got used to it having no floors,” she laughs.
And though construction took almost a year longer than she’d originally expected, she has found ways to be grateful for that. The process, she says, connected her to her grandparents Eugene and Catherine, and to their first years of establishing the family business that she and her brother will now shepherd into the next epoch of its life.
“It ended up being nice that it took a little longer,” Hailey says. “I needed that time to mentally and emotionally adjust. We got to say goodbye to our grandparents again.”