July 5, 2000

Burgundian Chardonnay Inspires Couple to Create Stony Hill by Karola Saekel

When Eleanor and Frederick McCrea planted Chardonnay grapes on the old goat farm high above the Napa Valley they had purchased a few years earlier as a rustic getaway, wine experts were skeptical.

Chardonnay? In California? Better plant some other grapes, too -- grapes that are suited to our soil and climate, they suggested.

The year was 1947, and there were all of 200 acres of Chardonnay in the entire state. But the McCreas wouldn't be dissuaded. They loved the white wines of Burgundy that are made from Chardonnay grapes, and they had a hunch that the volcanic soil and the micro climate of their particular land on Spring Mountain -- intense sunshine alternating with cooling breezes and a bit of fog -- might just make it possible to produce wines in that style.

They obtained bud-wood from one of Northern California's oldest wine-growing families, the Wentes of the Livermore Valley, whose founder had introduced Burgundian vines to the area in the late 1800s.

In 1952, they made their first wine, and two years later they released it, 50 cases of what then was called Pinot Chardonnay. They sent a newsletter to friends, offering the wine at $23.40 a case or (after a discount) $21.69, delivered.

Today, many plantings and harvests and prizes later, a bottle of 1997 Stony Hill Chardonnay retails for close to that amount, and the Chardonnay grape has become the work horse of California's white wine industry.

Touring the vineyards with Peter McCrea, the son of Fred and Eleanor, who now owns and operates the winery with his wife, Willinda, it's easy to understand why his parents chose the name Stony Hill. Bordered by stands of redwood and Douglas fir, the rolling terrain 600 feet above the floor of the Napa Valley is nothing if not rocky. But that is the very condition that results in a small harvest of grapes with concentrated fruit flavors.

It's this intense character that has gained Stony Hill wines a devoted following (most wine, if not snapped up by restaurants, is sold by subscription). The McCreas' winemaker, Mike Chelini, who was trained by Fred McCrea and has been with the winery for 25 years, takes pride in his wines' pure flavors. He eschews malolactic fermentation, which he says reduces the natural acid structure of wine, and uses old French oak barrels for aging so the wines are not dominated by the strong oak flavor of young barrels. The Stony Hill crew calls theirs a ``non-interventional'' style of winemaking -- if Mother Nature (aided and abetted by the vineyardist's skill) gives you delicious fruit, don't doctor it.

Peter McCrea still works as an oil company executive, commuting between his San Francisco home, the Chevron office in Danville and the house his parents built at Stony Hill. That house, spacious yet unpretentious, is a far cry from the old farm house where Eleanor McCrea took her children each summer. Homesteaded in 1890 with the typical allotment of 160 acres stipulated by the Homestead Act of 1862, the land may have had various uses but, to the best of the McCreas' knowledge, no grapes were ever grown there before they started their vineyard.

True to the name of Spring Mountain, there was plenty of natural water on the property, but it boasted neither electricity nor phone service during their first summers. ``We children were expected to pull our weight,'' Peter McCrea says.

After high school, Peter McCrea went on to Dartmouth for an engineering degree, then met and married Willinda. His oil company work took the young couple to Saudi Arabia for three years and later to Holland, but they were back in California by the time Fred McCrea died in 1977.

After his mother's death in 1991, the younger McCreas took over operation of the winery, with Willinda heading up the office. Their two children, Frederick, 33, a bank research analyst, and Sarah, 31, who works in retail marketing, are on Stony Hill's board of directors and, their parents hope, will take the family tradition of winemaking into the third generation.

Sarah has already redesigned the label for her parents to ``update the winery's image,'' and a Web site tells the history of Stony Hill and explains the wines and how they are produced. Selling most their wines direct to customers (some loyalists have been on the mailing list since the '50s), the winery has no public tasting room and doesn't need a lot of promotion. Says vintner McCrea with a grin, ``No T-shirts.''