Almaden Resident

News

Former Almaden vineyard targeted for restoration work

By Eli Segall

One of Almaden Valley's last links to its wine-producing era has been earmarked for restoration. The 150-year old wine cellar on Chambertin Drive behind the Almaden Winery Community Center, which underwent extensive repairs in 2002, is again on a list of future restoration projects for the San Jose Department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services.

Residents have held informal discussions on future uses for the building, currently tucked away in a side pocket of Almaden Winery Park and locked behind cast iron doors. The building was once part of a 350-acre winery called Almaden Vineyards that, as recently as the 1980s, was one of the biggest wine makers in America.

"We've talked about turning it into a museum, maybe to showcase the history of winemaking in California," said Michael Kubiniec, president of the Almaden Winery Neighborhood Association. "It could be very interesting."

Preserving the history of Almaden Vineyards would offer a peek into what was once a behemoth of the industry. At its peak in 1981, the company sold 13 million cases of wine, reaching all 50 states and four dozen countries; company headquarters, which now houses the community center, oversaw 15,000 acres of vineyards across California. It even kept a helicopter and pilot on site at all times, ready to whisk clients away for lunch to a house near Hollister that overlooked some of its vines.

"It was a massive operation," said Carmella Graham, an Almaden Winery resident who in the late 1970s worked as a sales representative for the company. "Almaden did it up right--they wined and dined a lot of people."

The company's rich and storied history dates back to the Gold Rush. Among the masses that moved west, 20,000 Frenchmen came to strike it rich in the Golden State, including Etienne Thée and Charles Lefranc. In the early 1850s, after unsuccessfully panning for gold, the two shifted gears and bought 300 acres of Santa Clara Valley ranchland, in the mouth of what later became known as the Almaden Valley.

Thée soon died, and Lefranc, who in the late 1850s married Thée's daughter Adele, made the company soar. He imported top quality grapes from France and by 1880 was producing 100,000 gallons of wine per year.

"That was the time of California's great wine boom; vineyards were popping up everywhere," said Charles Sullivan, a wine industry historian who lives in Los Gatos, "and Almaden Vineyards was the leader, no question about it."

Lefranc met an untimely death in 1887 when he was trampled and killed by a team of runaway horses. His son Henry inherited the company, but in 1909 he, too, died unexpectedly when his car collided with an inter-urban trolley, instantly killing him and his wife. Operations were turned over to Paul Masson, Lefranc's bookkeeper and son-in-law, the same Paul Masson who later started a world-renowned sparkling wine company in Saratoga.

Masson steered the company through Prohibition. Although wine production lay dormant, Masson kept growing and selling grapes.

"People peddled grapes door-to-door," he said. "There wasn't even a surplus during Prohibition; everything got bought," Sullivan said

Masson sold the company in 1930, and the new owners neglected its fields and machinery. Louis Benoist purchased the company in 1941 and resurrected it.

Benoist cashed in his chips in 1967 when he sold the company to National Distillers and Chemical Corp. The new owner used its massive wealth to buy up vineyards across California, increasing production tenfold. With the exception of a bottling plant and warehouse, Almaden Vineyards wine was made entirely off-site.

Eventually, the lure of selling the 51-acre facility became too great. National Distillers sold the site in March 1987; nine months later, Dividend Development Corp. picked it up for a rumored $25 million and slowly built homes around it.

By 1993, two different developers--Hayman Homes and New Cities Development Group--had taken control of the property, and in a four-year span built more than 300 homes, burying the vines for good.

The wine cellar is practically all that's left of Almaden Vineyards; all other historic buildings were destroyed in a June 1989 fire.