Raymond Vineyard and Cellar had its first crush in 1974 making it a venerable winery amidst a plethora of newcomers, but the roots of the winemaking Raymond family go back much further — five generations — to plant them literally with the first of those who came to the Napa Valley more than a century ago and decided this might be a great place to make wine.

The saga really begins in 1870 when Jacob and Frederick Beringer emigrated from Germany. Their Beringer winery was one of the few that survived Prohibition, and when Roy Raymond arrived in the valley in 1933 it was not only where he found work but where he met his future wife, Martha Jane Beringer, granddaughter of Frederic.

Raymond, who started as a cellar worker at Beringer, ended up spending 37 years at the winery, until it was sold to the Nestle corporation. In 1970, Roy and his two sons, Roy Jr. and Walter, bought 90 acres on Zinfandel Lane and planted the foundations of Raymond Vineyards.

“We decided as a family we wanted to stay in the wine business,” Walter said these 30-some years later as he walked around the winery the family built.

Not far from the modern winery is a 50-by-50 foot metal building. Now a farm shop, Walter explained, it served as the first Raymond winery.

“We built (the winery) ourselves,” he said, “from the ground up. We’d do a little work on the building, then crush some grapes. My dad put two-thirds of the shingles on the roof … he mowed the lawn until the end of his life.”

 By the time Roy Sr. died in 1998, Raymond was well-established as a maker of wines — cabernet sauvignon, merlot and chardonnay — of exceptional finesse and balance. And now, while Roy Jr. now serves as the winery’s executive advisor and Walter is the president and head of winemaking and production, a fifth generation has stepped into the winemaking business. Walter’s daughter, Krisi, is working in sales, marketing and winemaking, while Roy Jr.’s son, Craig, is now vineyard manager.

“I started working in the cellar with my dad,” Walter recalled. “My first job was washing floors. My dad started us at the bottom. He said never ask anyone to do anything you haven’t done.”

 It’s become a family tradition, noted Krisi, who was accompanying her dad on the tour, and recalled watching the winery grow from the perspective of a kid. “Everyone was involved. We all worked,” she said.  “I think they knew the way to make sure someone goes to college is to put them on the bottling line.”

Walter was the head winemaker from the winery’s inception, and as he poured a retrospective tasting of  Raymond’s cabernets from the last 30 years — 1977 (the fourth vintage and a favorite in library tastings, he noted), 1982, 1987, 1992 and 2004, it became apparent that if wine is poetry in a bottle as Robert Louis Stevenson so famously observed, or geography in a bottle as wine writer Jancis Robinson maintains, it’s also history in a bottle.

  In 1974, when the two brothers and their father harvested their first grapes, the place he favored to go was Alfredo’s Pizza in Napa; there were 2,834 acres of cabernet sauvignon in the valley, yielding a little more than 10,000 tons, and the selling price was an average of $454 per ton. In 2004, according to Raymond notes, the valley’s 15,917 bearing acres of cab yield of 42,385 tons that sold for an average of $3,948.

“Did we see it coming?” he asked. “No. Winemaking was just what you did for a living. We were farmers. You had a vision that you could be successful but no” — with a laugh — “not this.”

The influx of new vintners and wineries — which accounts for the proverbial large fortune it now takes to make a small one in the wine industry — has been a good thing, Walter reflected. “It’s raised the bar, not just for winemaking but for marketing.

“When you start growing, you’re in it for the duration,” he said. “It’s fun making things that people enjoy.”

There’s a danger in putting wine on too high of a pedestal, he added. “At winemaker dinners I tell people ‘Wine is wine. You like it or not. It’s to be enjoyed with food, with a nice group of people.’

“Of course,” he added, “when people don’t like your wine, it’s like calling your baby ugly.”

Along the way, he said, there was a learning curve as they experimented with varietals. “We’ve gone from a lot (of varietals) to a few,” he noted. “We all know a lot more now than we did.”

Looking ahead, he said, “It’s back to the future in a way; we’re going back to some of the things we did.” While plans are to expand the winery’s hospitality center, they’ll also be planting more sauvignon blanc, while staying with their winners, the prized cabernet sauvignons, merlots and chardonnays.

In the end, he said, it all comes back to where the Raymond brothers started, with farming. “You’re only as good as the grapes that come in,” he said. “You can’t make good wine with bad grapes.”

Looking out from the house his father built on the Raymond property, which will be expanded into a tasting center, he said,  “I remember being pulled through these vineyards on a tractor. You could do those things.”

And his daughter Krisi, now raising what will doubtlessly become the sixth generation of winemakers, added, “You still can.”

Open House

Raymond Vineyards’ open house and warehouse sale is Saturday, Dec.1, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with wine tasting and cheese, and entertainment by Dickens carolers. The winery is at 849 Zinfandel Lane, St. Helena.