One Family.

"There is a charm about the forbidden
that makes it unspeakably desirable."
– Mark Twain’s notebook

There is undoubtedly a little bit of Tom Sawyer in all of us, but John Trefethen may have gotten more than his fair share when God was handing out mischief. Take, for example, the cider incident at The Webb School, a boarding school in Southern California John attended in his teens.

“Back then,” John relates, “possession of alcohol by a student was grounds for immediate expulsion. Expulsion! Not a slap on the wrist, not suspension, but expulsion! It was the worst offense you could commit, worse than having a girl in your room after-hours. So naturally, we had to figure out how to get our hands on some.

“I think it was the fourth week of freshman year that we made our first cider. We bought a big jug of apple juice, and added some baking yeast we stole from the kitchen. We stuck it up on the top shelf of this guy’s closet, where it was warm and nearly impossible to find. We checked on it every ten seconds or so for the first few hours, and then got bored and forgot all about it.” That, as it turned out, was a mistake. That weekend, the entire dorm went on a camping trip, and in their absence the yeast went to work.

“The bottle literally exploded,” he chuckles. “We put the cap on a little too tight and the pressure just blew the whole container apart. There was cider everywhere – all over the poor guy’s clothes, in his shoes, everywhere. And the entire dorm reeked of fermenting cider. To this day, I don’t know how we weren’t caught.”

Undaunted by the results of his first fermentation, John tried again, this time in his own closet. “After that first time, I couldn’t get anyone to help me make the stuff. That guy wasn’t too happy about his clothes. But whereas everyone else saw a disaster, in my mind it had been a great success. I mean, it fermented, didn’t it!”

John quickly developed his technique until he had perfected the ratios of cider and yeast and learned to hang the jugs outside his window on a string at night, so as to prevent the smell of fermentation from permeating the dorm. Then, he shared a little bit with his friends and immediately had to quit his alchemical experiments. “It just got way too popular, way too quickly. Everyone started asking for some and the adults started giving me sideways glances. The funny thing was, it didn’t even taste all that good. That yeast gave it the flavor of soggy bread. If it had been at all palatable, I don’t think they would have let me stop making it.” And just like that, the notion of producing superb wine was planted in his head.

This desire persisted, and when John’s father, Gene Trefethen, bought the old Eshcol property in 1968, the temptation was too much to resist. In 1970, while a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he developed a business plan for a fictitious, small, family-run winery as a project for one of his classes. And on the weekends, he went to Napa, where he began making small batches of wine in his parents’ basement. This time around, he had better yeast and the aid of a booklet on winemaking he had pilfered from a friend at UC Davis, but the experience was laughably similar to his days of making cider at Webb.

To start with, the equipment was slightly sub-standard – he used trash cans as fermentation tanks – and the basement lent a dark, clandestine feeling to the whole endeavor. “It felt like I was running a moonshine still in the ‘20’s.” Perhaps most amusingly, the winemaking booklet offered no advice on the perils of sealing fermenting liquids in a container, and one weekend, John put the lid of one trash can on a little too tightly. He returned the following weekend to a basement painted in half-fermented grape juice. “I should have remembered the cider,” he groans.

Still, John was encouraged by the results of his home experiments, and in 1973, along with his beautiful young bride, Janet Trefethen, he put his business plan into action, producing the first commercial vintage of Trefethen wine. To everyone’s astonishment, it was palatable. In fact, it was pretty good.

And it only got better. In 1975, John and Janet hired their first winery employee, David Whitehouse, a graduate in oenology from Davis. On only their second vintage together, 1976, they made the Chardonnay that would win gold in Paris, and John’s entrepreneurial venture really started to take off.

Today, John still spends full days and sometimes nights at the winery and in the vineyard, working to motivate his team with his joking personality and still youthful energy. Still attracted to things he probably shouldn’t be doing, he spends his weekends at the racetrack, driving Porsches and BMWs far too quickly and lapping people half his age. “He’s still the biggest juvenile delinquent I know,” says Janet, smiling.