Skip Granger, My Life in Wine

Skip Granger with an Awesome Wine

I was very young when the wine bug bit me. My mother and I made champagne in our bathtub in Joplin, and I was almost thrown out of school when it was discovered in my locker.  When I ”came of age”, I used to take a bottle of wine to dinner with my KU law school classmates and their wives would ask, ”How do we open it, and what do we serve it in?” A jelly glass was fine because I never brought a $50 bottle of wine to dinner then!

Later, while I was a Tour Director during law school breaks, I began to enjoy much finer wines.  And even later, Bruce Walker, my Menlo Capital partner, who also loved wine, agreed to start a winery with me.  Our close friend Wayne Hanson, who had been in charge of the Hunt’s tomato plant, said, ”Grapes are just small tomatoes.” Wayne attended wine classes at UC Davis, the top wine school in the US, and off we went to the races!

We needed a name, and 25 years ago over 67% of all wine purchased in America was bought by women. Market research told us that American women’s favorite painting was Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”  Doing your homework pays off!  The rights to the name were owned by a museum in New York City (not Paris). We were told that it would cost us 10 cents per copy ($1.30 a case with the end label). That was OK with us because we had no way to know how many ads or shelf talkers would be made. I hired a young artist named Evan to paint a vineyard where the church was in Van Gogh’s painting and stylize it. I paid him with a case of wine.  Again, my law school education paid off.

Now we were really off to  the races.  We crushed our first grapes in the fall of 1997 on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral.  Little did we know what we were getting into, or that we would soon be producing 15,000 cases (At 12 per case, that’s a lot of bottles.) and winning major awards.  When our Napa Zinfandel was selected as the best Zin in California, I extrapolated that to be the best Zinfandel in the cosmos, since good Zinfandel was only grown successfully in California at the time. 

Above, Starry Night Winery awards and Skip pouring for a tasting.

Starting Up 

Our winery business started from scratch in Wayne Hanson’s basement. There was a concealed area under the porch that was used to store hidden liquor during Prohibition. We soon outgrew that space and moved to a former ice cream factory (Frosty Acres) with three-foot thick walls that took several days to thaw out before we could move in. It would stay cool during the summer, which helped with our winemaking and storage.

At this early stage, much of the actual crushing and pressing of the grapes occurred outdoors in the parking lot with help from our friends as volunteers that we paid in wine. Wayne, our winemaker, moved a trailer into the parking lot and lived there during crush season. The bottling truck also pulled into that parking lot.

The Grapes

Most wineries buy much of their grape supply in the marketplace.  Since we made eight different Zinfandels, we would have needed a great deal of resources to grow the grapes ourselves in Sonoma, Lodi, Amador, and other appropriate locations.  True wine lovers can tell the difference! One sommelier, Lisa Redwine (Yes, that really is her name.) at the Grand Cafe in San Francisco was so enamored with our Napa Valley Zinfandel that she wanted our entire production. Given the prestige of her establishment, we gave it all to her.  When she moved south, she took us with her to an equally prominent restaurant. To succeed, you take good care of your growers and your customers as I learned early and have practiced most of my life. I guess that in Kansas, we learned the  value of being considerate to people.

The Business

Producing 15,000 cases a year of award-winning wines required a scaled-up operation. We acquired boxes for grapes, machinery and equipment, tanks, barrels, cases, bins, trucks, and more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delivery, Sales, and Marketing

Many people were surprised at my delivery vehicle, a BMW Z3 Roadster. When I pulled up to a restaurant, the owner would often say, ”Skip, I ordered FIVE cases of wine.” And I would say, ”You got ’em – 3 in the trunk, 2 in the footwell and 1 in the passenger seat!”

I was in charge of selling our wines in California, Arizona, Nevada and my home state of Kansas.  My partner covered the rest of the US and Europe, where we had a surprisingly large market.  We made 8 Zinfandels of our 16 varietals of wine, and Zin goes exceedingly well with Hungarian food.  We sold an immense amount of wine there and even brought in a Hungarian partner. 

Tastings

One key to learning about wines is to attend tastings and seminars, and I made that a regular activity.  Several times a month, I would attend such events, which are held more often in San Francisco than in New York, Paris or Napa Valley. How did I get home?  The Golden Gate Ferry came close to our Kentfield home of 32 years. Otherwise, I drove.  Though not required in order to start the car, I blew into a small tube, and if it showed a 0.04 blood/ alcohol level, I would just make phone calls from the car. The legal limit is 0.08, and I have never suffered a DWI.

We did a large wine tasting in Kansas City at Union Station, and many of my Sigma Nu fraternity brothers and KC friends attended.  Below is a photo of Dick Price, East ’61, at a tasting in Wichita.

Many of our friends came to California to visit. We enjoyed taking them to the wine country for touring and tasting after they tasted the wines at Starry Night so that they could compare the others with the best!

 

 

 

We took Bruce Ellis and his wife Ruth Ann for tastings and a wine country picnic.

RIP, Bruce. 

 

Dan Tontz loved our wines and we kept him well supplied.  We went with Dan to some annual ”impossible to get an invitation” tastings, allowing us to sample some $400 to $700 bottles of wine. The Rutherford Dust Society tastings were always his favorite, and we attended several times with him.

Traveling to tastings took us all over the world. Below is a photo from “Australia Today,” a 2014 seminar on 12 wine varietals, followed by a trade tasting of 300 wines. The standard advice for tastings: “Don’t forget to spit!” and “Throw back good wine, down the gullet!”  I used to have to do this for a living – and several times a month. Tough work but someone had to do it. 

 

My very favorite pouring partner was my wife Mary Ann – and she knew it!  Cheers!

 

 

 

 

Sixty years ago, I never thought that I would taste $100 bottles of wine, let alone $1,800 bottles, but life has been very good to us. A lot has happened since then, and it would take too long to tell the whole story here. I would be happy to tell it all to you over a glass or maybe a bottle or two of good wine.

When we moved from Kentfield to Sun Lakes, Arizona, in 2017, my wine cellar had dwindled to 1,400 bottles. My son and a close friend who owns wine clubs did a complete inventory and took 801 bottles of our best wines to his wine warehouse in San Francisco.  He ships me three cases regularly, ‘lest I buy Safeway wines. We now have no cellar, but are well-supplied with wine fridges. Actually, we do not drink as much wine now that we have come of age!

The End of an Era for Starry Night Winery

Oh, by the way, it all ended in January of 2020 when we sold the winery a couple of months before the small winery market collapsed and my partner of 40+ years died that June. 

Amazing timing and incredible luck – like much of my life. 

Now that I’ve retired, I have a new business card.