The Smith Brothers At Smith-Madrone Do It Their Way – The Hard Way

Two news items in the same week at the start of last year, involving the future of wineries, may have had an impact on Stu and Charlie Smith and their Smith-Madrone winery. In one, the Smith’s next-door neighbor on top of Spring Mountain, the venerable Stony Hill Winery – a totem of sorts to the brothers – was sold. According to Stu Smith, the sale doesn’t portend good things for small wineries.

With the second development comes word that bigger, lavish tasting rooms that offer “experiences” and more than just tasting, are now essential for success. One look inside Smith-Madrone’s cold, damp, poorly lighted cellar-cum-tasting room unquestionably informs the visitor that tasting is the only point.

From their redoubt, the Smiths have been going against the Napa Valley grain of culture for nearly a half-century, which makes them literal graybeards. Additionally, they’ve been a constant and vociferous annoyance and check on the political climate that undulates like the fog over the valley. Most of all, Smith-Madrone’s wines have always striven for – and most always achieved – balance, elegance, and complexity that inform the place from where they come. One can say those adjectives perfectly describe the Smith Boys – without the elegance part.

Although the Robert Parker’s and the Wine Spectator’s of the world have hardly given them a sniff, at last, a good portion of consumers now, are coming around to understanding and appreciating their wines.

These prodigiously bearded mountain men have been a confounding presence from the beginning when they started their winery in 1971. That makes the Smiths – Stu the enologist and Charlie the winemaker – pioneers in the second wave of Napa Valley’s history.

Their winery sits at nearly 2,000 feet on the western slopes above St. Helena. As one might expect from such iconoclastic, no BS guys, Smith-Madrone Vineyard & Winery dwells in a ramshackle, unadorned, weathered wooden barn-like building. The structure serves them well in their quest to make about 4,000 cases of no frills – but no less qualitatively delicious — Cabernets and Chardonnays; and an acidity-laced world-class Riesling. Their efforts have resulted in wines – from 34 acres — that are not the blowsy specimens that are the raison d’être that define Napa Valley.

Collectively, the Smith brothers – without irony — say they’ve finally figured out how to make wine, after all these years.  “Yeah, the wines are better,” Stu declares. “We started replanting in 2000 … and that allowed us to bring and use all of our knowledge that we’d learned and in many cases change row-direction, spacing, varietal. We changed the trellis system and canopy management. …”

It’s evident the brothers are, brotherly. They back each other in their winemaking

philosophy, among other cerebral notions. Says Charlie, “Over a 10- or a

20-year span, you can see things are better. You should have seen what it was like

 around here in the beginning. We were picking into heavy wooden boxes. We

 were making wine in a basket press, for Christ’s sake. We were bringing in 25

 guys to pick everything all at one time, and we were driving ourselves nuts.

 Slowly, we figured out there’s actually a better way to do things. We pick smaller

 lots now, and we get them a little bit more where we want them.”

The brothers utilize three stemmer crushers, including one for the whites, “that

we’ve been using since dirt was made,” offers Stu.

He says it was a goal at first, to plant “the four most important varietals in the world and being good, arrogant Americans, we thought we could do all of them well.” So, the brothers put in Pinot Noir (which they tore out in the mid-‘80s because “we couldn’t find the holy grail (of Pinot)”), Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Riesling; the latter because Charlie was, according to Stu, “quite a student of German Rieslings.”

It was the Riesling,  planted two decades before by next-door neighbor Stony Hill, that inspired the brothers to make the varietal that few in the valley were making; which fit seamlessly into their unorthodoxy.

But it was the sale at the end of August 2018 of Stony Hill that has Stu Smith distressed. “

Stony Hill he explains, “is an iconic direct-to-consumer winery; the model which so many people are trying to emulate.” Which is what Smith-Madrone did – long before the yolk of the three-tier system was broken by the Supreme Court in 2005 – partly sell its wines directly to consumers. 

Jonesday

The change in ownership at Stony Hill, Stu Smith says, “is very disturbing to me because the significance of the sale and the reason given brings a big doubt onto the economic viability of (the wine industry and DTC sales).”

So, who the hell are these upstarts, anway? At 71, Stu is still a Boy Scout. Charlie, four years older, is a member of the NRA – and the ACLU. He listens to Bach — and to Miles. It’s clear as well, the Smith Brothers have each other’s backs as to on-their-sleeves political views, of which there are many; and which doesn’t take much to move them to a controlled, but fever pitch. Stu has long been the vocal presence of the operation – or as Charlie terms it, Stu’s “Mr. Outside and I’m Mr. Inside”.

Stu Smith’s political agenda – chiefly on environmental issues – is his cause célèbre. He’s been provoking the industry, as well as environmentalists for years by writing a slew of letters to local papers; and even starting a blog on the last latest big county issue, Measure C, which the Smith’s determinedly opposed – and which went down to defeat by a mere 642 votes last year; but bifurcated the denizens of Napa County as no other in recent memory.  

Counter-puncher Randy Dunn, is a most visible pro-C vintner; and Stu Smith’s converse doppelgänger. Dunn – the owner of Dunn Vineyards on Howell Mountain, whose locale on the nearly precise opposite side of the valley from Spring Mountain, is a delicious metaphor for the demarcation of battle lines. Dunn informed me last year that he bought his first crop of grapes from the Smiths in the early 1970s.

But he unabashedly says — not unlike how Stu Smith also vocalizes – “Stu prides himself in being outspoken frankly about just about everything … He is so stubborn, so bizarre. (But) I like the guy. He’s a lot of fun. But do you want to watch the whole valley get fucked up?

“Lots of people say, ‘There goes Stu.’ We think by now nobody’s really listening to him. He writes a good letter. He’s a good speaker. (But) he just doesn’t get it.”

Smith gets it alright. “All of us little people believe that the winery should feed us. A lot of the trophy wineries have so much money they can lose money in the wine business and have it offset from whatever else they have, or take a tax write off. We have to live and breathe and produce what we sell.”

Smith-Madrone’s MO all along has been to produce “Eurocentric wines as opposed to California (wines),” Stu explains. He says he and his brother rejected making low-acid, high pH wines and “We were wandering in the desert for 40 years, it seemed like. Fortunately the world recognizes (high- alcohol, fruit-first wines) weren’t such a good idea. Fortunately we stuck to our guns.”  

So has the world caught up with Smith-Madrone?

“We make wine for ourselves. We have good palates … and more or less, other people seem to agree with our palate,” Stu Smith proclaims.

Ultimately, Charlie and Stu say they work a lot of “hard hours. Everything we did – (I say) in jest, but not really – everything we do, we do the hard way,” concludes Stu.