2555 Main Street, Saint Helena 94574
From the perspective of the workers in the field, Greystone Cellars is far more than just a grand winery with historic architecture.
This 1889 towering castle on a hill, built by the son of a wealthy mine owner, is the site where the United Farm Workers (UFW) established the first union-contracted vineyard in Napa-Sonoma. The landscape here has the visual effect of many of the other grand towers scattered across the Napa Valley: It draws the visitor’s eye to the winery and away from the vineyard itself, lending a sense of grandeur to the mythology of artisanally crafted wines and avoiding the stories of the men and women who toil at growing and harvesting. This particular building, and the grounds, are admittedly better crafted than many of the newer faux-Tuscan tasting rooms and may be of interest to those looking for a glimpse of Napa before its aesthetic was driven by global capital.
Tending vines and harvesting grapes is backbreaking and highly skilled work. The hot, dry conditions that produce the best wine grapes also produce long, exhausting days for the predominantly migrant workers that Napa and Sonoma wineries depend on. Strong and sharp clippers used to carefully prune branches vine by vine over hundreds of acres can easily take off fingers with an accidental slip. Exposure to pesticides and fungicides designed to kill every living thing around the grapevines can cause rashes, burns, and other problems for workers. But because the United States structures agricultural labor as supposedly low-skill work, compensation for field workers—even in highly profitable niche commodities like California wine—has historically been abysmally low. Regular health insurance, pensions, stable homes, and educational spaces for children were long essentially nonexistent.
It was under these conditions that the UFW first began organizing workers in Napa in the mid-1960s, encouraging workers to sign union cards, while picketing and lobbying growers to recognize the union. One of their first targets was Greystone Cellars, owned and operated since the 1940s by the La Sallian Catholic order, the Christian Brothers, which had moved production to Napa during Prohibition to make sacramental wines, and which had become a driving force in the growth of the Napa wine region by the 1960s. For a nascent wine industry looking to be taken seriously on world markets (it’s hard to imagine now, but most California wines still came in jugs and were not seen as on par with French and Italian imports), the threat of the kind of boycotts the UFW had successfully organized in the Central Valley was meaningful. On March 13, 1967, the Christian Brothers signed the first union contract for workers in their fields. They were followed shortly by several other wineries. Other growers, wary of the UFW, formed a “Winegrowers Foundation” to coordinate among themselves. They offered higher wages than the UFW contracts called for and established a winery-controlled pension plan for workers. This provided a short-term boon to some workers but left them with little control over their work or future agreements. The growers’ strategy, paired with their increased use of subcontracted labor, prevented the UFW from gaining a significant toehold in Napa and Sonoma. Even though the winery itself was sold in 1989 to a corporate owner, and passed through many stages of mergers and acquisitions over the next decade, the UFW maintained a contract for the workers in the Greystone fields. But due to a combination of changes in the labor structure of the industry, antiunion campaigns by growers, and changes within the UFW, thirty-nine out of sixty workers voted to reject UFW representation in 2008. Today only two UFW contracts remain in Napa.
The Greystone Cellars is currently occupied by the West Coast branch of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), a nonprofit academy that trains chefs, cooks, and entrepreneurs in the art and business of haute cuisine, as it has come to be defined, in no small part through the tastes and culinary fashions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Visitors are welcome on the grounds to see the remodeled building, demo kitchens, extensive gift shop selling all things high-end foodie, and a display of several hundred bottle openers collected by the former head winemaker of the Christian Brothers. Just don’t forget to stop and look out into the fields.