From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Mike Grgich Dies at 100; His Wine Stunned the French by Besting Theirs   
   By Eric Asimov, Dec. 15, 2023, NY Times   
   Mike Grgich, the winemaker at Chateau Montelena in Napa Valley, and his staff   
   were taken aback on May 25, 1976, after they received a surprising telegram.   
   It read in part, “STUNNING SUCCESS IN PARIS TASTING.”   
      
   What tasting? What success?   
      
   Without their knowledge, Montelena’s 1973 chardonnay had been entered in a   
   blind tasting held in Paris the day before. The tasting pitted American wines   
   against some of France’s most famous, hallowed bottles. Nine French judges,   
   including some of the    
   leading names in the French food and wine establishment, had selected the   
   Montelena chardonnay as their top white.   
      
   This result was indeed shocking. American wines back then were considered   
   simple and rustic at best, and no match for the majestic French wines. While   
   the French judges shrank in embarrassed bewilderment, the Americans celebrated.   
      
   “Not bad for kids from the sticks,” said Jim Barrett, the owner of   
   Montelena. But it was Mr. Grgich, who died on Wednesday at 100, who had made   
   the wine.   
      
   Even with this unforeseen success, few expected the tasting to have lasting   
   impact. Only one reporter, George M. Taber of Time magazine, was there. But he   
   wrote an article that drew a flood of attention. Its ripples have been felt   
   for decades.   
      
   For American wines, Montelena’s triumph provided instant credibility and a   
   shot of confidence. For Mr. Grgich (pronounced GURR-gitch), a Croatian   
   immigrant who had struggled for years to establish himself in Napa Valley, it   
   permitted him to realize his    
   dream of owning his own Napa winery. Grgich Hills Estate issued its first   
   wines the next year and is still going strong today.   
      
   The tasting also won Mr. Grgich lasting respect and renown. In 1981, Terry   
   Robards, who was then a wine columnist for The New York Times, wrote, “He   
   may be the best maker of white wine in the United States.”   
      
   Mr. Grgich took a bit of issue with that phraseology.   
      
   “I’m not calling myself a winemaker anymore,” he told Mr. Robards.   
   “I’m a wine sitter. I sit with the wine and see what it needs.”   
      
   His winery said he died at his home in Calistoga, Calif.   
      
   Mr. Grgich’s century-long journey took him to places he might scarcely have   
   imagined as a child. He was born Miljenko Grgic on April 1, 1923, the youngest   
   of 11 children, in Desne, Yugoslavia, a small town near the Adriatic Sea in   
   what is now Croatia.   
      
   His parents, Nikola and Ivka (Batinovic) Grgic, were subsistence farmers. They   
   grew grains and vegetables, raised cows and sheep for milk and cheese, and   
   tended vines, from which they made wine.   
      
   The wine was not merely for pleasure. The local water supply was not   
   considered safe to drink, so the custom was to blend it with wine for wine’s   
   antiseptic properties. Mr. Grgich’s earliest memories, as he told it, were   
   of crushing grapes for wine    
   with his feet.   
      
   Young Miljenko left school at 14 to work at a cousin’s store, but in 1939,   
   with the beginning of World War II, the region was occupied by the Italians,   
   then the Germans and finally a communist faction. Mr. Grgich recalled seeing   
   the communists as    
   liberators until they began seizing people’s property.   
      
   Mr. Grgich was continually drawn to wine, which had become scarce and valuable   
   during the war. After the war, in 1949, he began studying viticulture and   
   enology at the University of Zagreb. Several years later, he joined a   
   demonstration protesting the    
   firing of a popular professor. This drew the attention of the secret police,   
   and Mr. Grgich resolved to leave Yugoslavia for California, which he had heard   
   described as an agricultural paradise.   
      
   His departure, however, would have to wait until 1954, when he received a   
   student visa for an internship in West Germany. So began a four-year trek that   
   took him from West Germany to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he anglicized   
   his name to Mike    
   Grgich, and finally, in August 1958, to Napa Valley, where he arrived by bus   
   with two cardboard suitcases.   
      
   The trip was possible only because Mr. Grgich had placed a “winemaker   
   position wanted” in a wine trade journal. He was offered a job by Lee   
   Stewart of Souverain Cellars, then a leading Napa winery, who also procured a   
   permanent resident visa for him.   
      
   In 1958, Napa Valley was hardly the wine Disneyland it is today. It was,   
   rather, a sleepy agricultural region where scattered wineries coexisted with   
   plum orchards and walnut groves. Mr. Stewart was rigorous and said to be   
   difficult to work with, and Mr.    
   Grgich lasted less than a year at Souverain Cellars.   
      
   He moved on to Christian Brothers, another top winery of the time, where he   
   learned to make sparkling wine. A formative period then began, during which he   
   worked closely with Andre Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu Vineyards, a seminal   
   figure of midcentury    
   American wine, and Robert Mondavi, who galvanized the rapid growth of Napa   
   Valley in the late 20th century.   
      
   In 1972, despairing of ever running his own place, Mr. Grgich was offered the   
   winemaker’s job at Montelena, which Mr. Barrett was just starting. Mr.   
   Barrett, a Los Angeles lawyer, envisioned making a world-class cabernet   
   sauvignon but was discouraged    
   when Mr. Grgich explained to him that in planting a new vineyard, waiting for   
   it to yield fruit and then aging a red wine, five years would pass before he   
   would have any to sell.   
      
   To provide cash flow, Mr. Grgich suggested making a white. They would purchase   
   grapes, make the wine and sell it after eight months’ aging or so. The   
   heralded 1973 chardonnay was Montelena’s second vintage.   
      
   Despite his years in California, Mr. Grgich always considered his wine   
   European in style.   
      
   “I know how to be a wine chemist, a wine microbiologist, a wine doctor, but   
   I don’t want to be a wine doctor,” he said in 1977. “I give more   
   attention to the art of winemaking than to the science.”   
      
      
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