Schramsberg: The Vineyard Nixon Made Famous

Jacob Schram was a German immigrant who worked as a barber to save enough money to buy hillside land in Calistoga in eighteen sixty-two. The land was not flat and easy to farm; it was steep volcanic hillside, the kind of terrain that most Napa Valley buyers in that era passed over. Schram built wine storage tunnels by hand into that hillside, creating a cellar system that would keep wine at consistent temperatures through the Napa Valley summer without refrigeration.

In eighteen eighty, Robert Louis Stevenson visited Schramsberg during the summer he spent in the Napa Valley after his marriage. He described the property and the wine tunnels in his book The Silverado Squatters, one of the first significant literary accounts of Napa Valley winemaking. The attention did not make Schram a wealthy man. The winery fell dormant after Prohibition, the tunnels silted in, the vines were abandoned.

Jack and Jamie Davies purchased the property in nineteen sixty-five and revived it as a producer of traditional-method sparkling wine, using the old tunnels for bottle aging. In nineteen seventy-two, President Nixon served Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs at his historic toast in Beijing during his opening to China. The winery became internationally known overnight, without any involvement in the decision that made it famous.

The tunnels Schram dug by hand in the eighteen sixties are still in use. The wine that Stevenson wrote about admiringly is still being made in the same hillside. Schramsberg is a California Historical Landmark. It is also one of the cleaner examples in Napa Valley of what happens when immigrant labor, literary attention, and a president's dinner choice converge, none of them planned, all of them consequential.