Posted on: Monday, October 7, 2002

Winemaker proud of working-class roots

By Michelle Locke
Associated Press

Winemaker Elias Fernandez shows off the cave where Shafer Vineyards' wine barrels are stored. Associated Press

NAPA, Calif. — Moving briskly up the sunny slopes of Shafer Vineyards' premium hillside lots, winemaker Elias Fernandez samples a handful of purple-black grapes and pronounces judgment: "You guys should try these!"

Fernandez has 18 years experience making Shafer's highly prized wines, but his vineyard roots go deeper than that. The child of migrant farm workers, Fernandez learned grapes the hard way, picking them in the 100-degree heat of harvest and pruning vines in the numbing chill of winter.

Thirty years later, Fernandez is helping to change the face of an industry where Hispanics are still much more likely to work in the fields than the front offices. He's been named Winemaker of the Year by Food & Wine Magazine, honored by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and has a Shafer wine named to reflect his work ethic: Relentless.

"One of my goals in life is to just tell young people to educate yourselves — no matter who you are, what you are, just educate and you can do good things," Fernandez said.

At 41, Fernandez is at home in two worlds. He can talk to enthusiasts about a wine having "nice vanilla on the mid-palate" and tell vineyard workers, in fluent Spanish, how to pick the grapes so they don't get leaves mixed in with the fruit.

Workers new to Shafer are sometimes surprised by the award-winning winemaker who looks and talks like them.

"One of the advantages I have over a lot of winemakers is that I can speak the language. I understand them; they understand me — exactly what we want," he said. "They respect me and I respect them because I know what it's like to work out there."

Ask Fernandez the secret of his success and he's quick to point to his parents, who came to the Napa Valley in the 1960s to pick the then-reigning crops of prunes and walnuts. An old snapshot shows Fernandez as a pint-sized kid peering out from a picking bucket as his mother, Rosemary, takes a break from work to smile at the camera.

His father taught him vineyard skills; he remembers learning how to drive a tractor sitting in his dad's lap. His mother made sure young Elias stayed in school, harvest or no harvest, and in third grade, she signed Fernandez up for the school band, starting a brief but successful musical career.

Fernandez chose the trumpet — which eventually took him to the University of Nevada-Reno on a music scholarship. The Napa Valley pulled him back.

"When I'd drive back, I'd go, 'This place is really beautiful,' and I started realizing: I need to figure out what I really want to do with my life."

What he wanted to do, he decided, was study winemaking at the University of California-Davis. Suddenly, he found himself sitting in science courses surrounded by "people with calculators hanging on the side of their belts."

He got a D on his first chemistry midterm. His spirits sank as the professor started writing on the blackboard, listing how many people got A's, B's and C's, drawing a line under C-minus and advising, "Anybody that got C-minus or under should consider dropping the class."

Fernandez didn't consider it. Instead, he found a tutor, brought his grades up and ended the course with an A-minus.

After graduation in 1984, Fernandez heard of an opening at Shafer, a small winery in the Stags Leap District of Napa Valley. He was interviewed by Doug Shafer, whose father, John, left a career in publishing to start the winery in the 1970s.

Fernandez drove up to the winery and, "for some reason, I felt that this was a place where I wanted to work."

Doug Shafer was winemaker then and Fernandez was his first hire, as assistant winemaker.

They didn't think much about it at the time, but it was something of a milestone. "Most of the Hispanics were out picking grapes," Fernandez said.

"The first 10 years we were grunting and sweating and no one knew who we were and the wines didn't jump off the shelves like they do now and it was tough times," Doug Shafer recalls. "He stuck with us and we learned on the fly. The good news was we got better every year."

In 1994, Fernandez became winemaker and Shafer took over as president of the company as his father moved to chairman of the board.

Today, Shafer Vineyards produces 32,000 cases a year, which includes 2,200 cases of Hillside Select cabernet sauvignon, the kind of highly sought-after wine you have to be on a mailing list to buy. List customers pay $150, and the wine can fetch more than twice that via Internet auction.

Doug Shafer came up with the name after hosting a party for vineyard suppliers and hearing their praise for Fernandez.

In his spare time, Fernandez tends his own small vineyard with the help of his three sons, ages 7, 9 and 11. As a lesson in self-reliance, the boys don't get an allowance but they do get paid for vineyard chores.

Amelia Moran Ceja, president of her family's Ceja Vineyards, calls Fernandez a "testament to tenacity."

Ceja said she's often stopped and asked what she does at the winery. Is she a bookkeeper? Some other type of employee? No one ever pegs Ceja, a woman and a Hispanic, as a company principal. "If you are a Hispanic you don't own a wine company," she said.

Ceja, also a child of farm-working parents, thinks things are changing, slowly. "Everyone conspires to help everyone else in this industry," she said. "This is only the beginning."