Sad news of the passing, at age 95, of Warren Winiarski, the founder of one of Napa Valley’s early and legendary wineries, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. If you know your Napa lore, you know the famous story of Winiarski’s 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon—the first ever from his new venture—winning the “Judgment of Paris” blind tasting in 1976, which scandalized the French, who couldn’t conceive the possibility that a California wine could compete with their established Bordeaux vintages. Winning the Judgment of Paris put Napa Valley on the world map for wine.
You can read a detailed account of Winiarski’s long path to the summit of premier winemaking here. But there is more to the story.
I like to call him the “Machiavellian winemaker,” because Winiarski was a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s before he decided to settle in Napa and enter the wine business. His chief focus—and what led him to a serious interest in winemaking—was Machiavelli. In fact Winiarski wrote the chapter on Machiavelli in the first edition of the History of Political Philosophy that Strauss and Joseph Cropsey edited and published in 1963. That indispensable reference work is now in its third edition, and Strauss swapped out his own chapter in place of Winiarski’s in those subsequent editions, but those of us who have that now-rare first edition hold Winiarski’s treatment of Machiavelli in high regard.
One of Machiavelli’s most famous statements in The Prince is “that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders.” And nothing is more doubtful of success in California agriculture than winemaking. A commonplace joke runs: “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large fortune.” Winiarski, whom I only got to meet on a couple of occasions, was spectacularly successful. He sold Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 2007 to an Italian-led consortium for a price somewhere above $100 million. Which shows that political philosophy can pay off.
In his essay on Machiavelli, Winiarski notes this theme as follows:
“In the Discourses, Machiavelli indicates he has discovered new orders and modes; he says that he has entered upon a ‘way’ hitherto traveled by no one. . . The new principles are justifiable and even necessary because of the decisive inadequacy of the old ones.”
In discovering the possibilities of the mineral-rich volcanic soil of the Stag’s Leap appellation on the east side of Napa Valley, Winiarski instituted a new mode of California winemaking. And it can be said simply that Winiarski’s breakthrough at the Judgment of Paris established a “new mode and order” to the world’s wine scene. And as Machiavelli warned, the person who introduces a new mode and order “has all those who benefit from the old order as enemies.” The French don’t like to be reminded of the Judgment of Paris.
To be sure, there were some well-established winemakers in Napa before Winiarski, such as Robert Mondavi, who was Winiarski’s first employer when Warren moved there in the mid-1960s. To extend the literary analogy, Mondavi might be considered the House of Medici of Napa, but Winiarski can be considered the “greater Columbus” as Machiavelli playfully suggests in The Discourses. This is why I call him “the Machiavellian winemaker.” Winiarski never completely abandoned his early intellectual interests. In addition to becoming a substantial supporter of his undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College, he occasionally taught seminars on Machiavelli in its summer program in Santa Fe.
I’ll mark his passing by breaking out a special bottle of the winery’s premium offering, Cask 23. It’s been aging in my cellar for a while now, and should be at peak drinkability.
