Winemaker’s life was filled to the rim

By ROBERT PRICE

For a lot of people, there is something daunting and unapproachable about fine wine. There are prerequisites, it seems: good breeding or perhaps some sort of advanced degree. Bonus points for an expensive German car. At the very least, a handle on the proper use of the word “bouquet.”

For Justin Meyer, wine was always something people drank because it tasted good — nothing more.

When Meyer, a self-described “Bakersfield Okie” and co-founder of Napa Valley’s Silver Oak Cellars, died this past week, the wine industry lost a great innovator. Wine lovers lost a friend and wine novices lost an advocate.

“I sometimes think the wine cognoscenti, gurus, and snobs, have harmed the cause of vino as much as they have helped it,” Meyer wrote in “Plain Talk About Fine Wine,” his 1989 book.

“They speak a language that intimidates and confuses people, giving the impression that only a select minority can genuinely appreciate good wine.”

Meyer had a regular guy’s appreciation for food and beverage, racquetball and life.

Meyer died from a heart attack Tuesday afternoon at age 63 while he and Bonny, his wife of nearly 30 years, were visiting friends in Markleeville, near Lake Tahoe.

Meyer, who gave the The Californian an interview at his home June 18, was semi-retired. In January 2001, he’d sold his half of Silver Oak to his partner, Ray Duncan, with whom he’d co-founded the business in 1972. Meyer was looking forward to spending the last years of his life helping one son make his way in the wine business and enjoying stress-free time with the rest of his family.

Meyer took a circuitous path to wine-making fame. His path led from the playing fields of Garces Memorial High School to the religious order of the Christian Brothers to the leadership of a cabernet sauvignon-only winery of international renown.

Meyer was born Raymond Meyer Jr. in Bakersfield on Nov. 11, 1938. His father and maternal grandfather worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, his mother for a dry cleaners a block from the house.

He attended St. Joseph’s, a now-defunct Catholic grammar school on Bakersfield’s Oregon Street. Then he enrolled at Garces, which at the time was run by the Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks. The Garces girls were sequestered into separate classes taught by Dominican nuns.

After his grandfather died, the Meyers moved out of their house and took up residency with Justin’s widowed grandmother. From the time Meyer was in eighth grade, it was Grandma who did a lot of the raising. But Meyer also made himself comfortable at friends’ houses throughout the neighborhood — a predominantly Hispanic part of town. He developed a taste for Mexican cuisine and became fluent in Spanish.

“Raymie,” as he was known at Garces, played football (as a running back) and baseball (he pitched and played right field). As class president for much of that time, he helped plan school dances and charity drives for the local poor. He paid attention to his classroom work only as much as was necessary; if his grades kept him eligible for sports, that was good enough.

He delivered The Los Angeles Tiimes, washed dishes at a local eatery and, during his last two summers in Bakersfield, installed attic duct work for his Uncle Leo’s business. That sweaty work, as much as anything, convinced him his future was beyond Bakersfield.

His father, Raymond Meyer, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound laborer for the railroad, was a tough, blunt-spoken man, and he was determined to impress upon his children the importance of education. He underscored his point in a memorable way: Do it, or “he’d kick my butt until my nose bled,” Meyer said.

Meyer graduated in 1956 and spent a semester or so at Bakersfield College.

Then he entered the Christian Brothers order, intending to teach at a high school like Garces somewhere on the West Coast.

The Brothers, as is their tradition, gave him a new name: Brother Justin.

Meyer studied for 18 months at the Mont La Salle novitiate near Napa, where he took vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience, studied religion and worked several jobs at the monastery.
Then he packed his bags for St. Mary’s College in Moraga, where he studied economics — and prayed a lot.

In between there was school and little else — though Meyer, banned along with the other seminary students from participating in intercollegiate sports, befriended the college’s baseball coach and volunteered his time as the team’s groundskeeper.

In early 1962, he graduated and joined the staff at Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento. He remembers that time fondly.

“It was a boarding school then, an all-boys school of about 200 to 300 students, and we had some problem cases,” Meyer said. “You could shape them up, and then they’d go home for the summer and when they’d come back they’d have all their old habits back. But I loved it.”

The long black robe he wore to school every day was hot, but it wasn’t a hindrance in the school yard.

“At recess, you’d have a kid come up and announce, ‘I can beat you in handball, brother,’” Meyer said, laughing at the memory. “I’d say, ‘No, you can’t.’”

And then he’d prove it.

Meyer coached basketball and baseball, served as an assistant foot- ball coach and doubled as bus driver.

“The only thing about the job was, you had a room full of kids and when (the school year) was over, they were gone,” said Meyer, who in later years established a scholarship fund for students in the Napa area.

Wine beckons

In 1964, Brother Timothy Diener, a lifelong mentor, gave Meyer a new assignment: wine-maker. Profits from the Christian Brothers’ Napa Valley winery funded the order’s various schools all along the West Coast, so it was a significant assignment. In more ways than one.

The Brothers tried Meyer in every job they had at their Mont La Salle winery, then they sent him to UC Davis, where he earned degrees in viticulture and enology, followed by a master’s in horticulture. He returned to Napa and did a little bit of everything, from the vineyards to the laboratory to labor negotiations. The Brothers emphasized mass production and a full palette of consumer choices.

Changing direction

Keeping up with the many jobs and many wines became overwhelming, and in 1972 Meyer called a man he’d met a year before — Duncan, a Colorado oil man who’d been looking to break into the wine business. They agreed to start their own winery, and in July Meyer left the Brothers.

He also resigned his vow of chastity and married Bonny Smith, whom he’d met at UC Davis. Bonny was a psychology major who’d needed tutoring in Spanish. Meyer was willing and able to help — if prevented by his vows from pursuing all possible aspects of the friendship at the time.

Duncan had purchased nearly 1,000 acres of wine-country land, some of it promising and some of it not. An old dairy milking barn was on one of their newly acquired properties, situated roughly between the Silverado Trail and Oakville, and they set up shop there in September.

They’d hoped to call their winery Silverado Cellars or something similar, but another winery owned the rights to the name and wouldn’t sell it, so they combined “Silverado” and “Oakville” to create the name Silver Oak.

The old Keig dairy was an ugly stucco building with an open attic and big holes in the wall, where cows used to butt their heads while they were being milked. The men insulated it, added wood shutters to block out the sun and added air conditioning. It was humble, but it would work.

The milking shed was situated in the middle of a retired cow pasture. Meyer took down the barbed-wire fences, installed the stakes and irrigation system and planted the vines. For the next three years, that’s practically all he did: plant vineyards.

All Meyer ever wanted to make was cabernet sauvignon, a full-bodied red. He picked cab for two reasons: At Christian Brothers he’d never had the luxury of devoting himself to perfecting any one thing; and Napa Valley was perfect for cabernet — this, of all the places on earth, was the spot to do it.

Many fellow vintners thought him crazy. Just one wine? A red? In the midst of a white-wine craze?

“It would have been like Ford only making Thunderbirds,” Meyer told The Detroit News in a 1998 interview.

But that’s what he and Duncan set out to do. They took their first haul, from a 20-acre vineyard in the Alexander Valley, to the Christian Brothers for crushing and fermentation. Then they transferred the immature wine to their old barn and put it in barrels.

While they waited for the wine-making process to run its course — they’d decided five years was about right — they looked after other interests.

Meyer and Duncan had planned to build a new winery, but when bankrupt Franciscan Vineyards went up for sale in 1975, they bought it and switched their operations there. They bottled up the winery’s existing inventory, which was aging in tanks and barrels, and sold 30,000 bottles for $1 each. Restaurateurs backed up their trucks against Franciscan’s freight loading dock and bought dozens of cases at a time.

Meyer sold out and bottled more, to the dismay of many of his fellow vintners. (They sold Franciscan in 1979 to a group of German investors, although Meyer stayed on as the winery’s president and winemaker until 1981.)

Meanwhile, Meyer and Duncan still hadn’t tasted their own wine — not in the condition they intended to sell it, anyway.

Things were slow those first few years for the three-person team — just Duncan, Justin Meyer and Bonny Meyer, who was the winery’s sales manager. It was, after all, a sideline for the Meyers, who were raising a young family while Justin and Ray Duncan ran Franciscan. Their ambitions for Silver Oak were still humble.

Hitting the big time

Finally, August 1977 arrived — time to taste the 1972 Alexander Valley cabernet. It wasn’t the best Silver Oak they ever made — but it was the first.

Things changed in a big way when the 1974 vintage, uncorked two years later, won a gold medal at the Los Angeles County Fair. (Meyer and Duncan later decided to stop entering wine competitions: Lose and your reputation is tainted; win and demand soars beyond its already impossible level. Still, their wines were so good they managed to win competitions they didn’t realize they’d been entered in.)

Silver Oak started making its Napa cabernet in 1979 — in part, Meyer said, to please the critics who tended to prefer the more tannic reds. So they had the smooth, “feminine” Alexander Valley version and the bold, austere Napa, and both were successes.

Wine critic Robert Parker, writer- editor of the influential Wine Advocate newsletter, assured the winery of lasting credibility when he wrote favorably about Silver Oak’s Alexander Valley cabernet in 1982. From that point, the wines sold out early every year, and Parker continued to give Silver Oak good scores over the years.

They’d hit the big time. One year, 4,000 people lined up down the street on release day, and Silver Oak sold $1.5 million worth of wine. Few customers blinked at the prices, which surpassed $50 a bottle long ago.

Meyer helped change the way people thought about wine-making. In the early ’70s, the winemaker was the thing — you had to have a genius in the back room. Meyer, who considered himself a viticulturalist first and foremost, changed that attitude. Suddenly the vineyard was the thing. You had to have good grapes, and the way to get good grapes was to apply the right techniques to the right piece of land.

It wasn’t just the land, of course. It was attention to every detail — from soil management to cork selection.

Meyer was a purist — he even had to train the barrel makers who’d won contracts with Silver Oak. Meyer demanded kiln dried barrels with a light “toast.” Not charred, please.

The aging of the wine was the key, though. Meyer and Duncan decided their wine would be aged for 30 months in oak barrels (nowadays strictly American oak, which Meyer preferred to French oak or any other, because of its subtle vanilla).

Over the years, Meyer also took the lead in developing ways of fighting vine pests and diseases, such as Pierce’s disease, phylloxeraand eutypa, a fungus that attacks vines at their pruning wounds. As president of the American Vineyard Foundation during one stretch, he helped track down millions of dollars in private and public funds to fight those plagues.

“You have to be crazy to be in the agriculture business,” he said, “because so many things can go wrong. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry.”

Still, he loved his work. Until his interest began to wane around 1999-2000, he couldn’t wait to get to the office every day.

But Meyer was able to keep things in perspective. Family and God came first. Meyer often told the story of the time he and his sons were tossing the football around in front of the winery when a car pulled up. The occupants wanted him to open the tasting room.

He told them the winery was closed on Sundays. They offered money. Incensed, he ran them off.
“The Lord has taken care of me, and I always insisted on recognizing Sunday as a day of rest,” Meyer said.

One day about four years ago, Meyer said, he caught his toe on a wire and stumbled — something he’d no doubt done many times over the years.

“I used to be pretty athletic,” Meyer said. “I’d usually hop about two times on my good leg until I could get my balance. This time I fell flat on my face. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ And it just got worse.”

A visit to the Mayo Clinic revealed he had a degenerative brain disease — cells in his cerebellum were drying out. Within a few months, he was walking with a cane.

But that’s not why he sold his interest in the winery, he said. It wasn’t his “touch of diabetes,” either. It was simply time to go.

“I’ve never missed Silver Oak,” he said. “It’s like a chapter in my life and I’m glad it’s over.”
He continued to make port with Matt Meyer, the second of his three children, but he was otherwise retired and happy about it. At the time of his death on Aug. 6, he’d been talking to Matt about turning over full operation of their enterprise, Boonville-based Meyer Family Port.

Meyer is survived by his wife, Bonny, and three children, Chad, Matt and Holly; his mother, Edith; and two sisters, Jan and Judy.

“Justin loved life,” Mike Stepanovich, of the Bakersfield Wine Society, said. “He just walked around with a continual sparkle in his eyes, like he and life shared this great joke. He’ll be missed.”

The writer Gerald Haslam, a fellow Garces graduate, eulogized his lifelong friend Saturday afternoon in Napa.

“... I can never talk to Justin without encountering Raymie,” Haslam wrote in the afterword of “Plain Talk,” Meyer’s 1989 book, “and I like them both.”

Originally published in August 2002