When his morning ride arrives at 8:30, Andre Tchelistcheff jumps from the breakfast table like a high schooler eager to flee the house. He is not allowed to leave until his wife, Dorothy, fits him with a shade hat and rubs sunscreen on his weathered paws.
Then he bolts out the door into the passenger seat of a Jeep and soon is bouncing along the country roads to inspect a plot he purchased for Beaulieu Vineyards in 1942.
”Life is very exciting, but you`ve got to keep functioning,” says Tchelistcheff, a Russian emigrant considered the grand master of California winemakers.
Between his accent and the wind rushing into his open window, he has to yell for emphasis. ”I`m 90 years old and still learning every day.”
Though actually only 89 1/2, it is an age when many are content to sit in a rocking chair. But he is up at 6:30 a.m.
”Occasionally on Saturday or Sunday,” he admits, ”we allow ourselves to sleep in until 7,” and it`s not to watch cartoons. He is solving the problems that appear in his dreams-the grapes, the soil, next year`s vintage, the future, always the future.
A progressive thinker
”By my nature I am very progressive,” he says, ”and my progressive thinking is not connected to yesterday or today. I believe in tomorrow, I do. And that applies to all the activities of my life.”
That may explain why, after a 17-year separation, Tchelistcheff has been lured back to work as a consultant to BV, which, in his 35 years as winemaker, was California`s most respected winery, producing some of its most collectible wines. Some BV wines made by Tchelistcheff now sell for up to $1,400 a bottle at auctions.
He retired from BV for the third and supposedly final time in 1973, four years after the corporate coin counters from Heublein, based in Hartford, Conn., bought out the founding de Latour family for $8.5 million.
Tchelistcheff had nothing else to prove. His palate was so refined he could tell by taste whether a wine came from Rutherford dust, Oakville dirt or a furrow in-between.
His index entry in last year`s blockbuster ”Napa: The Story of an American Eden” is second in length only to Robert Mondavi`s.
”Since I started at Beaulieu,” he says, ”it is coming back and finishing the circle of my active life.”
War stories
Tchelistcheff could have sat on the porch of the Oakville Grocery and held court, with young winemakers lined up like subjects, open bottles in hand. He could have spent his days sipping, spitting and spreading his war stories from the Russian Revolution.
”Just like Dr. Zhivago, exactly,” he says.
As a young soldier in the White Russian Army, he was left for dead on a battlefield when 75 percent of his unit was machine-gunned down in a snowstorm.
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”The wise people said, `You have been killed once already,` ” says Tchelistcheff, whose father threw him a funeral, Huck Finn-style. ” `You will live a very, very long second life.` This is part of my philosophical behavior.”
His second life began when he migrated with his family to Paris to study agronomy in a League of Nations program. The expatriate Georges de Latour came recruiting for his Beaulieu Vineyards. He was advised not to hire a Frenchman- they get too homesick. But there was one promising Russian who had been adrift so long he didn`t know a home to be sick for.
Tchelistcheff arrived by ship and train in the fall of 1938, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in de Latour`s black chauffeur-driven Cadillac.
Among other innovations, he developed BV`s ”private reserve.” To this day he is not sure what the term means, as the wine was marketed in a quite public fashion and certainly never reserved.
April Fool
Tchelistcheff left BV on April Fool`s Day of 1973. On April 2 he was 50 miles up the road, at Simi, in his first day as a consulting enologist.
”If I were to retire I would go completely down,” he says, plummeting his hand like a plane toward the sea.
”The man who attains 65 years matures intellectually completely, and has attained a wisdom of living. Why force him to retire? Why not allow him to continue to give of this wisdom?”
He won`t even indulge in a long vacation.
”Two weeks is about my limit, then I start to get ornery,” he says. ”I start to get unhappy, just like a working horse. I can`t be too long in the stable, eating oats. I`ve got to work.”
As work goes, wine consulting can be pretty pleasant. An eager enologist brings over some bottles, and Tchelistcheff sits at his table and critiques. Not exactly shoveling coal.
He is fetched most mornings and driven either to a vineyard or winery. He would prefer to drive himself, but he rolled his trademark yellow Datsun 240Z last fall, ending his career at the wheel.
The chauffeur`s roll
That`s fine with Michael Silacci, 37, his occasional chauffeur and, incidentally, vineyard operations manager for BV. Silacci has a bachelor`s degree in enology, topped by a master`s in viticulture, both from the University of California at Davis, the vintner`s Harvard. He has worked three years in Burgundy.
”You can compare it to learning to throw a football from Joe Montana,”
says Silacci. ”He`s probably one of the two or three most important people in the industry. But the most important thing is his enthusiasm.”
Tchelistcheff is paid to wander through an experimental vineyard of clones, to examine the leaves and to issue words of profundity such as ”So far, so good,” or ”The difference will finally show in the glass of wine.” He has been examining vines for 50 years, yet still is flabbergasted by the leaf shape of an Australian clone.
”God Almighty,” he blurts, as Silacci dutifully notes the details.
Silacci speaks in multisyllable enologist`s terms. Tchelistcheff`s tongue is Eastern European and loses a lot in the translation. Though neither clearly understands the other, in spirit they speak the same dialect.
”My principal purpose of living is to train the young people in my progressive ideas,” Tchelistcheff says.
He admires technology that has elevated grape growers from ”dirt farmers to businessman-scientists.” He likes change. He likes growth. He even likes the Wine Train, which carries tourists north to Napa from San Francisco. He has ridden it four times.
Alas, the hype
What he doesn`t like is hype. ”I remember when people at BV used to sing at work,” he says. ”Now nobody sings. The materialism is a disease. It destroys the spirit of life.”
He surely knows more about winemaking than anybody in the Napa Valley, yet he never chased the cash that spread over the valley like fertilizer.
”Money is the dust of life,” he says. ”I don`t have a wine cellar, I don`t have a vineyard. I don`t have nothing. I only have my head.”