Winemaker, scholar, mentor, environmental activist, philanthropist: Winiarski was all of these. He was instrumental in creating Napa Valley’s Agricultural Preserve to protect against urban sprawl from San Francisco. He was the leading sponsor of — even the impetus behind — the Smithsonian Institution’s Food History Project at the National Museum of American History, where he and his wife, Barbara, also helped fund the restoration of the Star Spangled Banner. Their contributions to their alma mater, St. John’s University, helped lower tuition costs for students at the school’s campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. (Barbara passed away in 2021.) Winiarski’s donations also founded the UC Davis’s wine writers library, a growing repository of the world’s best writings about wine.
I first met Winiarski in 2012, at the opening of the American history museum’s exhibit “Food: Transforming the American Table,” which he and Barbara sponsored, and then several times over the past dozen years. He was always modest, unassuming and professorial, speaking of wine in terms of the golden rectangle and Euclidean geometry as a standard of perfection. He pronounced his name Vin-ee-ar-ski, and I never heard him correct anyone who Anglicized it. If something didn’t meet his expectations, however — an inattentive waiter or a disappointing bottle — a sharp edge could appear from underneath his soft-spoken demeanor.
Winiarski was born in Chicago in 1928. Although his family name derived from the Polish word for winemaker, he studied political science and social thought. While researching Machiavelli in Florence in the early 1950s, he experienced wine as a part of daily life. Later, while he was teaching at the University of Chicago, a friend brought Winiarski a wine made by Philip Wagner of Maryland’s Boordy Vineyards that convinced him to make winemaking his calling. He didn’t head back east, though, instead moving his young family to California in 1964. He apprenticed with Lee Stewart at Souverain Cellars (now Burgess winery), then became Robert Mondavi’s assistant winemaker, helping produce Mondavi’s first vintage, in 1966, while the now-iconic winery was under construction.
Then Winiarski took an interesting detour. Between working for Mondavi and establishing Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 1970, he helped Denver dentist Gerald Ivancie buy California grapes and truck them back to Colorado. There they made Colorado’s first wines from European grape varieties and jump-started the state’s modern wine industry. Their names now grace a viticulture and enology institute at Colorado Mesa University in Palisade, and for years Winiarski served as a judge for the state Governor’s Cup wine competition.
The epiphany wine from Maryland and his Colorado connection are little-known aspects of Winiarski’s story. They show his perspective was never limited to California. He saw wine as a part of American life. The Judgment of Paris tasting of 1976 made wine — Winiarski’s in particular — part of the American story.
When told his 1973 Stag’s Leap Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon had won the Paris tasting, besting some of Bordeaux’s most famous labels as judged by top French wine experts, Winiarski replied, “That’s nice.” He soon realized the impact the result would have on California wine and on himself. Today, a bottle of that wine is in the Smithsonian collection, along with a bottle of Chateau Montelena’s 1973 Chardonnay, the top-scoring white wine. (Mike Grgich, who made that chardonnay, passed away in December of last year.)
Nearly two decades later, Winiarski contacted the Smithsonian to ask how they planned to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Paris Tasting. There were no plans, so Winiarski sponsored a symposium on the tasting that led to the creation of what is now known as the Smithsonian Food History Project. Winiarski sponsored several Smithsonian wine events, including a 40th-anniversary commemoration of the Paris tasting and an event highlighting Mexican winemakers in Napa. In 2021, he granted the program $4 million to endow a permanent curator.
Many of Napa’s leading winemakers can trace their craft back to early work they did for Winiarski, including John Williams of Frog’s Leap winery, who recalls bottling the winning wine when he worked at Stag’s Leap in 1975 and 1976. “In any narrative of Napa Valley, Warren and Barbara’s names will be writ large,” Williams said in an email. He cited their advocacy for the Ag Preserve and philanthropy, as well as “Warren’s profound influence on the many who worked for and with him.”
Steve Matthiasson, who makes sought-after wines with his wife, Jill Klein Matthiasson, and consults for several wineries, remembers Winiarski’s focus on the craft. “He impressed upon a phenomenal number of other winemakers that they are artisans with a point of view and an obligation to produce something unique and timeless,” said Matthiasson, who began consulting for Winiarski in 2006. “He elevated wine from a simple daily beverage to something that could be profound.”
Winiarski sold Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in 2007 for a reported $185 million. While that allowed him to expand his philanthropic efforts, he continued to tend a small chardonnay vineyard he owned in Napa Valley’s Coombsville district. When he died, he was preparing for his 60th harvest.
