Jake Lorenzo
From the Library, July 2008
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In the late 1960s, the first California varietal wines to grace this detective’s palate came from the new Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville. I had no idea where Oakville was since I was often mired in my daily commute from Santa Monica to East Los Angeles where I was teaching Hispanic kids to read in English. Teaching got me into drinking, and drinking led me to the wine business.
By 1977, Jake Lorenzo had moved, with his family in tow, to California Wine Country. It was certainly one of the best life decisions I have ever made. In my 30 years’ working in the wine business, I never passed an evening with Robert Mondavi. I shook his hand a couple of times, had a couple of superficial conversations and in the very early days spent many a delightful evening listening to the superb music at his summer concerts.
He was a big man, tall with a booming voice and an enthusiasm that matched, but more than anything Mondavi was a salesman and a dreamer. His dream was to sell a pile of California wine, and his pitch was to take on the established, great wines of the world and challenge them “mano a mano” with his upstart varietals.
Robert Mondavi would march into the greatest restaurants in the world. He would plunk his bottles down on the table, order some of the famous First Growths off the list and insist that his guests taste the wines side by side, knowing that just having his bottles on the same table as the great wines of France lent them an air of legitimacy. He would smile his snake-oil grin and concede, “We’re not there yet, but some day soon our California wines will be as good as theirs.” Then he would pay the bill, tip large and move to the next grand restaurant to repeat the show.
Mondavi was our ambassador to the wine world. He pushed his winemakers to compete with the finest wines of the world because he knew that was where the money was. He was imaginative, insistent, clever and decidedly American in his brash, trash-talking challenge of the established icons of wine. His surprising legacy is that he not only convinced the French and Europeans that California could compete with them, he convinced us that our wine was as good as theirs.
Every California winemaker will be forever indebted to Robert Mondavi because he took the high road in trying to sell his upstart wines, and that high road was to dedicate his efforts to quality.
Mondavi’s passing reminds me of others who have left us, others far less famous but not necessarily less important. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Tracy Toovey’s death. Tracy exemplified the enthusiasm, dedication and sense of wonder that comprised the wine industry in the ’70s and ’80s. Tracy worked as the cellar master at Grand Cru Winery. The hours were long, and the work was very difficult. Pay was not much higher than minimum wage.
Tracy was gentle and kind, but he was fiercely determined to make fine wine and he took immense pride when his attempts succeeded. Tracy, like most of us in those days, lived and breathed winemaking. We hadn’t come from families with wine history, and we were eager to make up for lost time. We all held wine tastings, traded wine and shared any wines we could find from other countries. A chance to taste some of the great wines from France or Italy would see a whole group of us piled into a car going to San Francisco, even if it meant having to work at the winery over the weekend to make up for lost time.
When Tracy got married, the ceremony was held at Grand Cru Winery. Lance Cutler performed the nuptials. Mark Stupich, Jeff McBride and Ray Kaufman all sang in the choir. The guests made up a “who’s who” of working winemakers and cellar rats, and the sheer amount of wine consumed would have made Robert Mondavi confident about the success of California varietals in the future.
Over the next few years Tracy and his wife had two kids and bought a tiny house in Glen Ellen. Most evenings and weekends he would work on the house, adding on bedrooms or a dining room or installing new handmade kitchen cabinets. He planted some vines in his backyard and made wine from those grapes. Tracy worked at a job he loved, passed his time with a family that he worshipped, and spent time exploring hobbies and interests that intrigued him.
In 1989 Tracy Toovey, like the rest of us, had been in the wine business for more than 10 years. We had seen demand for our wines grow and grow. We had been through one ill-financed expansion after another. We had learned our lessons about cold stability, heat stability, malolactic fermentations and Brettanomyces infection. We reveled in harvest, groaned on the bottling lines and enthusiastically shared each new bottling with our contemporaries as soon as they were bottled. Life was good.
Then, for Tracy Toovey, life was over. Tracy was murdered on April 14, 1989 at the winery by Ruben Salcido who was reportedly drunk and coked-up. Salcido ended up killing seven people including his wife and two of his children.
For Grand Cru Winery, the aftermath was not their finest hour. They refused to even pay for health insurance for the surviving Toovey family. Cellar rats, vineyard workers and other winery workers in Sonoma Valley stepped into the breach. We signed petitions donating one hour’s pay each year so that Tracy’s family would have continued health care.
The harvest of 1989 was one of the rainiest on record. It was as if the sorrow over Tracy’s death had opened up the tear ducts in the sky, and it couldn’t stop crying. The mud was so deep in the vineyards that it would suck the boots right off your feet. Whole blocks of Chardonnay grapes rotted to nothing on the vines.
In 1989 most of us in the wine business were young, strong, passionate and in love with our jobs and our lives. To lose Tracy–someone our own age, someone with a family like ours, someone who shared our aspirations–was a devastating blow. It made us think. It made me think about life, family and what is truly important.
Robert Mondavi had a dream, and he will be remembered in history books for achieving that dream and creating the California wine industry as we know it. Jake Lorenzo says that Mondavi never would have achieved that dream were it not for the likes of Tracy Toovey. It was the dedication and enthusiasm that hundreds of workers like Tracy brought to the wine industry that gave it the extraordinary spirit that lifted it into the 21st century.
Tracy Toovey had a dream. He never got to see it through. But he changed Jake Lorenzo’s life, and without you knowing it, he changed yours too. Robert Mondavi can have the history books. Tracy has this detective’s heart. I hope you are lucky enough to have memories of him tucked into yours as well. wbm
