Charles Krug and the Oldest Napa Winery

There is an argument to be made that California wine, as a serious enterprise, begins with a borrowed cider press.

Charles Krug was a Prussian immigrant who arrived in California during the Gold Rush era and eventually made his way to the Napa Valley. In eighteen sixty-one, he borrowed a small cider press from Agoston Haraszthy, the Hungarian entrepreneur who had spent the previous decade introducing premium European grape varieties to California soil, and used it to press the first wine on what would become this estate in Saint Helena. It was not the first wine made in Napa Valley, but the winery Krug established from that beginning became the template for how the valley operated for the next two decades.

Krug's methods, his approach to fermentation, to cellar management, to the relationship between viticulture and winemaking, were studied and imitated by the men who went on to found other estates throughout the valley. His early operation relied substantially on Chinese labor, as did most of the valley's vineyard development in this period, a history the winery's current reputation rarely acknowledges.

The winery survived Prohibition on a federal sacramental wine license, producing communion wine for Catholic congregations. It is the oldest surviving winery in Napa Valley: not the oldest land with grapes, not the oldest name attached to a property, but the oldest continuous winemaking operation. The Mondavi family purchased it in nineteen forty-three. The family dispute that eventually forced Robert Mondavi out of Krug in nineteen sixty-five was the event that produced the Robert Mondavi Winery six miles south, and by extension the modern Napa Valley. Everything connects back to this borrowed press.