1.Who taught you?

I was taught by my late uncle, the great Mike Grgich himself.

2.Who have you taught, and where are they now?

Many people passed through the Grgich cellar after I joined in 1986. The first winemaker, Gustavo Brambila, whom my uncle brought from Chateau Montelena, was already here when I arrived, so I cannot claim I taught him anything. The second winemaker was Gary Ecklin, whom my uncle hired fresh out of UC Davis, and he retired after 37 years. So we had that consistency in the winemaking, and by 2000 I had assumed the title. I cannot claim I taught anybody spectacular things in the cellar.

My main passion is growing grapes. I'm proud that I started organic, biodynamic, regenerative farming here, and I have a couple of guys in the vineyard who work with me. I helped them develop a passion for regenerative farming. One of them was Bernat Sort-Costa, a Spaniard who came here many years ago and got poached by Harlan. So maybe we did something right, if Harlan wanted him to start that kind of farming.

3.Is there a vintage you date your life by?

I have a different perspective. Here in the upper valley, I don't think we have great vintages and bad vintages. They are stylistically different. If you only like blondes, you cannot say all other women are ugly. They are not. And I have six kids, so it's like asking which is your favorite kid. I cannot say.

But I can tell you about the ones that were more difficult. The one that pops into my mind is 2011, when we had rain and some unripeness. In those vintages you have to be skillful and you have to work hard. Once you put in that kind of effort, you come to like those vintages, even though on paper they are not perfect.

4.What's changed in the trade since you started that someone new would walk right past?

When I came here in 1986, it was more of a farming community. Many winemakers shared knowledge. Then too much money came to Napa Valley, and Napa turned from a farming community making terroir-driven wines to luxury brands making cult Cabernets, mostly encouraged by Robert Parker. I am a bit saddened by that. I would like Napa to be more of a farming community, because I strongly believe wine is all about a sense of place. That is the biggest change I've seen, from a business driven by where your vineyard is and how you farm, toward luxury, points, and scores.

5.Walk me through a typical harvest day at the peak.

My late uncle Mike would get an ulcer during harvest. He worried every day. I would tell him, what are you worrying about? We are not in France, where every second vintage is ruined by untimely rain and rotten grapes. There's no such thing here. For many years I was in charge of picking dates, and he would ask, what are you picking today? I'd say we're not picking. He'd say, you have to pick, get the grapes under the roof where they're safe. I'd say, Mike, if you wait a couple of days, the quality will go up. He was okay with 90 percent quality. I wanted 100 percent. So we always had disagreements.

For me, harvest is the most joyous time of the year. I wake up whistling and singing. I'm usually up at four or five in the morning and call my vineyard guy. If we are harvesting whites, we typically start at 1 a.m., so by four or five I'm checking on the crew and how things are going. Overwhelmingly it's good news. Sometimes a tractor broke, or something else broke, but we deal with it, and I don't get stressed. I remind myself this is all part of life.

Then I go to the winery, and I spend the rest of the day inside, because we make wine with wild yeast and no sulfur. That's entirely possible, but you have to be present. I smell every fermenting tank and barrel every day, and you have to be around to make sure everything goes smoothly. It's much easier to make wine industrially. You kill all your native yeast with sulfites, pound the juice with commercial yeast, feed them, and everything roars. But that kind of winemaking produces industrial wines with no soul, and we want to make authentic wines. I come home after ten hours with more energy than I started with.

6.What decision do you make that you can't fully explain to someone else?

The best example is when to pick. People ask how I decide. Yes, we sample grapes and analyze pH, TA, and Brix. I walk the vineyards, look at the grapes, and taste them. But how do I make the decision? It's a gut feeling. Yesterday it didn't feel right, today maybe not, and then the next day it just feels right. People say that's crazy, that's not scientific.

The way I explain it is with my wife. We have six kids, and she is an amazing mother. You'd better love your kids if you have six of them. She just has to look at them and she knows exactly what's going on, why they're sad, why they're happy. I ask her how she knows, and it's a mother's instinct. I've developed an instinct for grapes, and that is something that cannot be explained.

7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.

We sometimes have more difficult vintages, so let's name them. In 2011 we had untimely rain. The whites, the Chardonnay, were okay, but the Cabernet rotted. I had never seen Cabernet rot, and it has happened only one time in my career here. We had to struggle sorting the Cabernet, but again, it's part of life.

Another difficult vintage was 2020, with the smoke from the fires. We dealt with it through our farming. We did not lose any grapes, and we made really fine wine with no smoke in it. Then 2022 brought unbelievable heat, between 108 and 118 degrees for seven to ten days. We did fine with that too.

And occasionally we bring in 40 tons of Chardonnay, fill the press, start pressing, and something happens to the press a few times on the first day. Of course, the press never breaks down in the winter when you don't need it. It only breaks down when you need it. Again, I calm myself down. No panic. We lost a few tons, maybe 500 gallons of juice. These are things you have to deal with in life. Nothing is going to be perfect, and you have to keep your optimism and your poise and move on.

8.Who's the legend around the winery?

Many of your questions are difficult and require thinking, and thank you for the challenging questions. This one is a no-brainer. I was so blessed to be brought to this country by my late uncle Mike Grgich and taught by him. I lived with him for 37 years and saw this incredible, humble man with incredible wisdom, and I learned so much from him. I feel very fortunate to have been able to live in his shadow.

9.Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year?

Yes. We invite all our vineyard workers, about 40 field workers, and with the winery that's somewhere between 37 and 40 more. We bring in a wonderful Mexican lady who cooks original Mexican food, and we have a feast at the end of every harvest. This is very common in Europe, maybe not as much in the United States. We work hard for six months, and we love to celebrate.

And we recognize people. Most field workers are never recognized, and many times they are shocked that anybody notices them. But we are based on farming, and without their hard work and dedication there wouldn't be any good wine at Grgich Hills.

10.What do people outside the trade always get wrong?

Many people who enjoy wine believe it is the product of a great genius, a rock-star winemaker. In reality, wine is a product of nature. We have to remember that wine is made not by the winemaker but by a microscopic fungus called yeast. Without yeast, nothing. Only Jesus could turn water into wine, not a winemaker. So winemakers get too much credit. Winemakers are important, because you can turn good wine into vinegar if you don't know what you're doing. But you cannot take average grapes from the Central Valley and turn them into the most magnificent wines. That's not possible.

11.What's the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

When I started, I did every kind of job, from washing barrels and floors to shipping. In a small family winery you do whatever is necessary. If the toilet clogged, I was the first one in.

One day I was reshuffling the bottle bins. We had a very modest tasting room connected to the warehouse, and I was moving some Zinfandel from one place to another. Mike had just come out of his office when the pallet broke. At least ten cases fell, and we broke maybe five or six cases of wine. It was the 1979 Zinfandel, Mike's favorite. He looked at me, looked at the wine leaking across the floor, and walked out of the warehouse without saying a word.

We were living together at that time, and over dinner, once he had calmed down, he said, Ivo, I had to walk away. I wanted to kill you. That was my favorite Zinfandel. I felt so bad for him. I still remember that day.

12.Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though a faster way exists?

I'm not a big fan of computers and AI and things like that. Every vintage, I record every day in a book, just one or two sentences about the weather and what we did that day. People make fun of me and say I'm writing my memoirs. When we crush, I have another book where I enter every block, with simple analysis and maybe a little description.

People laugh at me, and then I challenge them. Okay, vintage 1993. Describe the season, and tell me the pH of this lot. The guy who keeps everything on the computer takes about two hours to find it, and I have it in three seconds. So don't tell me that's an improvement. Maybe it could be faster, I don't know, but it works for me, so I never changed. Thank God I don't need any computers or AI for the work I do. I cannot be replaced by AI.

13.What were you taught that you've since stopped doing?

Many things. My uncle developed his winemaking, and when I tried to change something, he'd say, what are you changing? I'd say, this is what they do in Burgundy. And he'd say, Ivo, I already beat them. We don't need to copy what they are doing. He did not want to change his procedures.

One glaring example: when I started, as soon as we crushed Chardonnay, we pounded it with sulfur dioxide to stop oxidation. Mike thought that if you oxidize Chardonnay, you ruin it. Now we do the totally opposite. We do oxidative winemaking. We crush the Chardonnay with no sulfites at all, and the juice looks like brown crap. But we found out this is wonderful, because the phenols that cause browning precipitate out and we get rid of them, so the wine is not bitter. Ten or fifteen years later, when that Chardonnay has aged beautifully and the free SO2 drops below 10, it won't brown the way it did in the old days. That's a 180-degree turn, from pounding the juice with sulfites to supposedly preserve freshness, to completely oxidizing it. We are making better wines than ever. That's one example. There are a few more, but I don't need to go through every one.

14.Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

In our case, sorry to tell you, no. We have no such thing.

15.When someone who knows nothing about wine walks in, what do they already know that you can build on?

Many people are put off by how wine is presented. It seems like you have to be an expert to order a bottle in a restaurant, and that's a disservice to our industry. So I tell people we were all born with the senses of sight, smell, and taste. Maybe a small percentage lost that ability, but overwhelmingly we can all do it. It's like muscles. If you want bigger muscles, you practice.

So the start is, you smell it, you take a sip, and all you have to say is I like it or I don't like it. All of us can do that. Who cares what Parker says, or any famous wine writer? It's you. It's personal. It's what you like. Forget about, oh my God, I might like a wine that people say is bad. Who cares? You're the one drinking it. Later on, if you're interested, you train your nose and your senses, you get better, you develop more nuances, and you become a sophisticated taster. But anybody starts with I like it or I don't like it.

16.When someone pours your wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn't in the tasting notes?

That in our case there is a spirit in this wine. There's energy. There's life. Most wines today are dead. They are correctly made, technologically, but they lack life. I truly believe great wine is a living thing that evolves. A living wine can last 100 years and evolve, just like us, and people don't understand that. This is not a chemical product like Coca-Cola. It has energy, vigor, life, and spirit. The spirit of a place, and maybe even of the person, the farmer who brought it to life.

17.What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?

Years of work and learning. Not only learning by going to UC Davis or reading books. That's all important, and I've done it. But learning from nature. If you're a farmer, there is no bigger teacher out there than nature. Our regenerative farming is based on biomimicry. We observe what nature does and mimic it, and that's the best way to achieve a real sense of place and authentic wines.

You don't have to be a genius to do this. It takes commitment. If you want to be a good parent, you don't need an IQ of 150. It requires love and passion for your kids. Anything in life worth doing requires love and passion.

18.What's your favorite wine that you don't make?

Very easy, actually. I love Champagne, and we don't make Champagne. I like French Champagne. Unfortunately, things are changing. I just heard the horrifying news that the French government, which controls everything, is allowing producers in Champagne to go up to 15 percent alcohol because of this terrible global warming in Europe. I feel sorry for my friends there who are still making wine, but it's obviously not the same wine as 30 years ago.

I go so crazy for it that I don't eat much red meat, but a few times a year, if I have a beautiful filet mignon, especially one with a bit too much marbling, I drink it with good French Champagne. For me personally, that's a better combination than red wine. I like the acidity, the bubbles, and the freshness cutting through the fat.

19.When you make a great one, do you know right away?

I've just finished my 41st harvest, and I don't have 41 years of the same experience. I have 41 different experiences. That's why this is the most beautiful thing to do.

Greatness comes gradually. It doesn't go from zero to great. It starts with the vintage. We have the same soil every year, and we cannot change the soil. The difference is the weather, and disease or the lack of it. So at the beginning of harvest, by tasting the grapes and seeing the health of the vineyard, I can say this one has potential. This year was moderate. There were no extremes. Rainfall was a bit below average, and budbreak was a bit early, but who cares. Every condition was good, and the crop was small. Usually when you have a small crop with smaller berries, there's more intensity. Think of a fruit tree. If you put 100 pounds of peaches on a small tree one year and ten pounds the next, the ten pounds will always taste better. Each plant can produce only so much flavor, and if you divide it over 100 pounds instead of ten, the smaller crop will be more concentrated. Of course we cannot say one cluster per acre gives the best flavor. It still has to be balanced.

So we start with potential. Then I follow the fermentations and how they smell, and experience tells me a bit more. But you have to make the wine to see. Young red wines that will age gracefully for many years are very aggressive. Someone without experience will say, oh my God, this is undrinkable, it's too acidic, too tannic. But you know how it will develop. It's a process of building. You start with a good vintage, and then you evaluate. About six months after the wine is made, you can pretty safely say this is going to be a really, really good vintage.

20.One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

I really like Sauvignon Blanc. I fell in love with it when I tasted Didier Dagueneau's Pouilly-Fumé and Silex, from the famous producer in the Loire Valley, and I thought southern Napa was a great place for Sauvignon Blanc. We have an incredible five-acre vineyard, over 30 years old, in Carneros, the coolest part of Napa. For many years we made a Fumé Blanc, and I asked Mike, can I please make a small production of Sauvignon Blanc? I named it Essence. Maybe that's pretentious, but for me it is the essence of southern Napa Sauvignon Blanc, and I love it.

People say Chardonnay is the winemaker's dream variety, because it can be molded to the winemaker's liking. Sauvignon Blanc is all about the aromatics that are in the grapes. A great Sauvignon Blanc is always a sign of great farming and a great site, and since I'm a farmer first, that's why I like this variety. You cannot create a great Sauvignon Blanc by putting it through malolactic and aging it in 100 percent new barrels. Some people try, but for me that's a caricature. We ferment ours in neutral oak foudres of about 1,500 gallons, and I love it because it faithfully presents a sense of place, with huge natural acidity, energy, life force, and the minerality I like so much.