Celebrity Vineyards: Francis Ford Coppola

The following excerpt on film director-turned-winemaker Francis Ford Coppola, is taken from the recently published Celebrity Vineyards, From Napa to Tuscany in Search of Great Wine by Nick Wise.

Francis Ford Coppola in action on the set of The Godfather in 1972

Francis Ford Coppola is one of the most famous celebrities turned vintner in California, if not the world. An admired and controversial filmmaker, Coppola has won writing Oscars for Patton (1970) and The Godfather (1972), as well as three Oscars for The Godfather, Part 2 (1974). His seminal films include The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), among many others. As a vintner, Coppola’s record is no less impressive; his extensive portfolio of California wines is distributed around the world.

According to Coppola, there is a strong connection between the art of filmmaking and winemaking. “Winemaking and filmmaking are two great art forms that are very important in the development of California,” he says. “They both start with raw ingredients – in the case of wine, the land and the grapes, and in the case of film, the script and the actors’ performances.

The winemaker takes these raw materials, ferments, blends, and creates. He says yes to one batch, no to another. The director does the same thing: a series of yes’s and no’s, from casting and costuming to edits and sound mixes. In both cases you have to start with top-notch raw materials, whether it’s the land or a script.”

Lights, Camera, Grapes!

Rubicon Estate in Rutherford

Coppola makes films in Hollywood, but his wine is made in the heart of Napa. The day we set out to find his vineyard, it was early spring and raining so hard that water streamed down the road in lapping waves. Totally blinded by the downpour and aquaplaning around corners, we cautiously pulled over to the side of the road. Just within sight and striking distance was Coppola’s famous Rubicon Estate (known until 2006 as the Niebaum-Coppola Estate and before that as Inglenook). In the summer of 2011, it was once again and forever named “Inglenook.”

Encircled by perfectly manicured vineyards, the almost Disneyesque architecture boasts towers, pergolas, and an over-the-top Roman fountain that was sprouting water despite the downpour. It was hard to believe this eccentric looking building once belonged to Gustave Nybom (later Niebaum), the rugged pioneer of Californian winemaking. Dodging the torrents of water that formed puddles in the parking lot, we dashed through the enormous, castle-like wooden doors that serve as the visitor entrance.

Winery or Movie Set?

A fountain adds a touch of theatre to the estate’s entrance

The décor inside the castle was bewildering. This was unlike any of the innumerable wineries I’ve ever visited. The ornate, dark, and cavernous place resembled the Munsters’ house gone terribly wrong. The queasy combination of plush, blood-red carpeting, crimson wallpaper, and highly polished wood felt like a weird ’70s concept of gaudy grandeur. Creepy film-set-like examples of the estate’s historical winemaking equipment are dusty and cordoned off, while a grand staircase leads to the upstairs museum. Even on this rainy, off-season day, the place was crowded with visitors eager to sign up for a pricy tour.

The well-tailored but far from friendly staff was on hand to arrange tours, tastings, and historical explorations of the estate. With careful individual pricing of all the activities, a trip to this vineyard can become quite expensive, as we would later discover for ourselves. Besides the massive gift shop selling everything Coppola from books to films to clothing and cigars, there are two tasting rooms. One offers the basic cuvées from the main wine portfolio, while from behind imposing wrought iron gates, the more exclusive (meaning twice as expensive) room offers pours of their Estate Reserve wines.

Coppola has art-directed this tourist haven into an awkward combination of film set, museum, and winery. Yet hiding behind this over-the-top pomp and grandeur lies one of Napa’s most famous jewels, the Rubicon. Many years ago it was one of the high quality cuvées that first sold me on Californian wines. Over the years, however, the quality has sometimes dipped and wavered. Would it be back in banging form? We would soon judge for ourselves.

The Wrong Direction

Barrels of Cask Cabernet ageing in the Coppola cellars

A likable and accommodating neighbor, Coppola remains a popular, if ambitious, figure in Northern California wine country. While his filmmaking efforts have been dogged over the years by funding issues and occasionally a less than enthusiastic response from the public, these are not the problems with his winemaking. Coppola’s wines are popular, successful, and widely distributed throughout the world, from England to Australia. In fact, in the last few years Coppola has had to ramp up production to meet demand. His vast portfolio has grown even larger with new wines from Sonoma County. At the beginning of 2006, the director purchased the once highly admired Château Souverain in Sonoma’s Alexander Valley.

Critics might think this acquisition is merely another moneymaking operation to expand into competent but rarely exciting lower-priced wines. However, according to the director, his real reason is quite the opposite. Over the last few years Coppola witnessed for himself the transformation of the Rubicon Estate from symbol to caricature and he didn’t like the direction.

“I never intended to have a Hollywood museum at what I still call Inglenook,” he told Wine Spectator in 2006. He was also rightly concerned about the vast, complicated, and sometimes bewildering portfolio he’d built, with a price range that started at selling basic wines for $30 and then jumped to $145 for the Rubicon. The lesser wines were starting to take over the portfolio and the image and reputation of the unique Estate wines, in particular the Rubicon, suffered from the consolidation.

The Chateau Souverain acquisition helped solve this problem. The new Sonoma winery, known as the Francis Ford Coppola Winery, now handles the lesser cuvées for the general public. To bring a more serious feel and ramp up the quality of the Estate wines, Coppola scored a very public coup by prizing away one of the main winemakers at Château Margaux in Bordeaux.

Born into Winemaking

A 23-year-old Francis Ford Coppola during his time at UCLA

In 1939, in Detroit, Francis Ford was born into a creative and supportive family environment; his father, Carmine, was a composer and musician, and his mother was an actress.

The family moved to New York when Carmine became first flautist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra; they settled in Woodside, Queens. Growing up, Coppola was a self-confessed “lonely kid.” At the age of eight, a bout of polio confined him to bed for a year, during which he spent his time studying science.

“I was terrible at math, but I could grasp science,” he says. “I used to love reading about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.” Instead, he discovered the screenplay to A Streetcar Named Desire and began making 8mm home movies.

Though he had talent as a musician, he studied theater arts at Hofstra University, where he later decided to switch to filmmaking. He moved to California to attend UCLA, eventually going to work for Roger Corman, a job that would launch his filmmaking career.

By the early 1970s, he’d reached the pin- nacle of success with his first Godfather movie and finally had the financial resources to buy property in Northern California’s wine country. He had always had an affinity for wine.

Growing up Italian meant that as a child his European parents allowed him a little wine, served with water (although Coppola preferred adding ginger ale). They called wine at that level plain rosso and bianco (which, not coincidentally, are also the names of the current entry-level wines made at his Sonoma Winery).

But it was not until 1975, when he was 36-years-old, that he was able to purchase the former home and adjacent vineyard of Gustave Niebaum.

Gustave Nybom and the Inglenook Vineyard

Inglenook’s founder, former fur trader Gustav Nybom

Gustave Nybom was born in Oulu, Finland, in 1842. After attending maritime school in Helsinki, he was commissioned by the Nautical Institute to map Alaska’s coast. By the end of the 1860s, he was the world’s leading fur trader.

He was appointed Consul of Russia in the United States in 1867, and helped promote the purchase of Alaska. He married well and lived in San Francisco. Well educated and cultured— he spoke five languages – he was interested in the wines of Bordeaux and decided to create a vineyard that could compete with, and indeed one day surpass, his favorite European wines.

He discovered the Inglenook vineyard in Rutherford. Originally planted by bank manager William C. Watson in 1871, its name was derived from a Scottish expression meaning “Cozy Corner.” In 1880 Niebaum (who had by then Americanized the spelling of his name) finalized the purchase of the 78-acre Inglenook Estate, plus an additional 124 acres of nearby farmland, for $48,000.

He took to the task of winemaking with uncommon zeal. He understood the demands of climate, aspect, and soil in growing successful grapes and is considered the forefather of what we nowadays call “terroir” in California. He bought vineyards, planted the same Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grapes being grown in Bordeaux, and built a winery designed by architect William Mooser that was considered futuristic at the time.

Inglenook’s first vintage under Niebaum produced 80,000 gallons of wine. His was the first Bordeaux-style winery in the United States and soon, to increase production, he purchased another 712 acres of surrounding vineyards. Within ten years, Niebaum’s wines were world-renowned, even winning gold med- als in the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889.

After he died in 1908, all winemaking ceased for three years at the Inglenook Estate. Then, in 1911, Niebaum’s wife took charge and revamped the estate, hiring Benjamin Arnhold to run the winery operation.

“Pride Not Profits”

An old guest book at Inglenook, signed by Jean Harlow and Clark Gable who give their address as simply “Hollywood”

In 1919, Prohibition arrived in the United States and production at Inglenook ceased until 1933 when Carl Bundschu (who would later run his own famous winery) supervised the winemaking. When Mrs. Niebaum died in 1937, ownership of Inglenook went to her nephew, John Daniel, Jr., who would brook absolutely no compromise in the quality of the wine.

His motto was “pride not profits” and he often refused to bottle vintages or vats that he felt didn’t meet his standards. The wines under his stewardship have historically been considered the best ever produced from the Estate. (The 1941 Inglenook Cabernet Sauvignon was rated a perfect 100 points by the Wine Spectator in 1990 and named one of the top wines of the century).

Unfortunately, Daniel’s admirable aggressiveness got the better of both him and the Estate. Profits dropped drastically and in 1964 the conglomerate Allied Grape Growers bought the Inglenook brand name, the chateau, and 94 acres from John Daniels, Jr., who barely managed to keep the mansion and 1,500 acres of vineyards. Just before Daniels died in 1970, the Estate once again changed hands when Heublein Incorporated purchased a majority interest from Allied Grape Growers. The quality of the wine sank ever further and the property was marginalised.

The Move to Rutherford

A print advert for Robert Mondavi wines featuring an endorsement from Coppola

In 1975, Coppola and his wife Eleanor bid on the Niebaum Estate. For reasons that no one could explain, big companies like Seagram and established winemakers such as Mondavi, had passed on the opportunity to buy the property, or even test the land for suitability.

Eventually, 1,560 acres of the Inglenook Estate were sold to the Coppolas. In the French tradition the new owners linked their name with Niebaum’s and created the Niebaum-Coppola Winery.

The Coppolas had purchased the land to make a family home, not start a massive winery. They planned to grow a couple of acres of vines to produce a small number of bottles, using the ancient foot-crushing method of Coppola’s grandfather.

“I could pretend I was my grandfather,” the director once said. With this in mind, he planted some vines, which produced about four barrels of wine in 1977. The family had come together to stomp the grapes barefooted, a family tradition still celebrated at the Estate when the Coppolas invite the neighbours, do a stomp, and then drink the wine at a big annual Harvest Party.

Searching for something a bit more sophisticated, Coppola tried to hire winemaker André Tchelistcheff, a Russian émigré who’d arrived in Napa in 1937 and is considered the father of modern day winemaking in California. (He famously coined the term “Rutherford Dust” as a taste description for the wines from the area).

Roman, Eleanor, Francis and Sophia Coppola. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain, Getty Images

Coppola was smitten with Tchelistcheff’s European vision of traditional Bordeaux-styled wines made in California. Eventually, Coppola persuaded the modest vintner and after some minor difficulties, hired him. (Coppola had to borrow the money to pay Tchelistcheff and rent the winemaking equipment.)

Tchelistcheff stayed with the Niebaum-Coppola Estate until 1990 and is considered the innovator of the Rubicon, the now famous Cabernet Sauvignon Bordeaux blend that became the Estate’s flagship wine. First produced with Tchelistcheff in 1978, the wine would become the gold standard for quality California Cabernet Sauvignon in the ’70s and ’80s. Today the 1979 vintage fetches $500 a bottle.

In 1990 Coppola had the grapes grown at the estate genetically tested, establishing that they are the original vines Gustave Niebaum brought back from France in the 1880s. This clone is now patented as Rubicon Estate Heritage Clone #29. At present Inglenook has 2,000 acres of certified organic vines and now concentrates exclusively on the Estate grown wines: Cask Cabernet, Blancaneaux, Edizione Pennino, RC Reserve, and of course the Rubicon.

Financial Dilemmas

Celebrity Vineyards by Nick Wise

A lot of press was given to the financial crisis that plagued Coppola in the late 1970s, midway through production of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. Coppola was forced to mortgage the Estate to raise the $25 million of his own money that he needed to keep the project afloat.

Then, when the winery was having financial difficulties in the 1980s, the proceeds from the last film in the trilogy, Godfather III, helped save it. In 1995, money from Bram Stoker’s Dracula allowed Coppola to buy the remaining Inglenook vineyards. In 2002 he built on the original winery site, enlarging and improving the property.

In comparison, the Sonoma Estate is much less serious in style, wine quality, and atmosphere. While Inglenook remains a serious player in the production of quality Cabernet, the Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Sonoma is being run as a place for fun and family games.

Thus it features a family pool, cabins for rent, and a movie gallery to entice the public. “I’m a movie director so I need a theme,” Coppola said to James Laube, wine critic and writer for Wine Spectator, in 2006. “I have one philosophy about business: I’ve always wanted to give the public value. The theme for the Sonoma property is life. I want to create a happy Italian feeling!”

Celebrity Vineyards, From Napa to Tuscany in Search of Great Wine by Nick Wise is out now. Published by Omnibus Press, the book is priced at £19.95 and is also available to buy as an eBook.