Jordan Estate Tales - Volume 9, 2014 - 14

looking Back
Mrs. Jordan and locals
remember Alexander Valley
when Jordan Winery began

Jordan, over plates of pasta,
wooed André Tchelistcheff
to help them create the first
Jordan wine.

T

oday the town of Geyserville is a tourist destination
with great restaurants, a casino and some of the best
wineries in Sonoma County. About 40 years ago,
however, back when Tom and Sally Jordan came
from Colorado and purchased their first piece of land, the
Alexander Valley was a much different place.
To call it a small town would have been an understatement.
People would stop in the middle of the road to talk to their
neighbors. Everybody knew each other. Everybody farmed.
And most people farmed prunes.
Bill Munselle, whose family has been farming the valley
since the late 1800s, remembered earning money for school
clothes by picking those plummy, purple fruits.
"Everything revolved around prunes," said Munselle,
whose son, Bret, now grows grapes for Jordan. "When
the trees blossomed, in the spring, it looked like the entire
valley was covered in snow. Some years they would delay
the opening of school so that all of the local kids could help
with the prune harvest."
When local residents weren't toiling in the fields, they were
supporting local businesses. Like Bosworth & Son, the
general store. Or Catelli's restaurant, where Tom and Sally

14

Richard Catelli owned the
restaurant back then (his
children, Domenica and
Nicholas, own it now), and
he remembers that luncheons,
especially those during the
summer, were a who's who
of bigwigs in the local wine
business.
"On any given day you
might have the Gallos and
Seghesios, and even Mondavis
from Napa, all sitting in the
restaurant at the same time,"
Catelli said recently, naming
some of the most famous wine families in California history. "The town
was so old-fashioned then that if you were here 30 years, you were still
considered a newcomer. And we could spot the tourists from a mile
away."
Everything started to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The cost of farming prunes went up. Tax shelter incentives for
agriculture businesses enticed North Coast stone-fruit farmers to replant
to vineyards. Word spread that many of the fruit farms in Napa were
making the change. This triggered a massive switchover to grapes in
the Alexander Valley as well-a push Munselle described as a "Gold
Rush."
The Jordans were part of that Gold Rush. As Sally Jordan explained
it, she and Tom always had dreamed of owning a vineyard, and, in
1971, over a bottle of Georges de Latour from Beaulieu Vineyard, they
realized that Cabernet Sauvignon reminiscent of a fine French Bordeaux
could be made in the United States. They quickly set the wheels in
motion to acquire their first piece of property in Northern California.

http://blog.jordanwinery.com/2010/09/video-how-winemaker-andre-tchelistcheff-adopted-us/ http://blog.jordanwinery.com/2010/09/video-how-winemaker-andre-tchelistcheff-adopted-us/

Jordan Estate Tales - Volume 9, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Jordan Estate Tales - Volume 9, 2014