Michael Novak, a city councilmember and physician with a family medicine practice, has strongly opposed Doumani’s plan. "I would prefer a vineyard there," he says. "The plans are very grandiose, with a lot of buildings and a lot of parking spaces. The development would bring in a lot of traffic. We’re trying to keep the lines of communication open with him so that he can do something more palatable, taking up less acreage."

The odd thing about this particular clash (now headed for mediation) is that Doumani’s architectural plans seem in step with the character of this wine-growing town. The design calls for medical facilities and offices that look more like a row of barns fronting a two-story building. It is a tame aesthetic compared to the Friedensreich Hundertwasser–designed visitors’ center at Doumani’s aptly named Quixote Winery 10 miles away in the town of Napa.

"I thought I’d get opposition to my winery building, but people like it," says Doumani, 74, who owns a huge collection of Don Quixote editions and figurines. In person, he comes across as less quixotic than he might like to imagine. When he devises an unconventional idea, he exhibits an indomitable resolve that usually sees it through to completion.

He met the Viennese-born artist and architect Hundertwasser in 1988. They spent about a decade creating the visitor’s center, with walls that wind like a cartoon castle through a chasm in Stags Leap. Hundertwasser died the year after it opened in 1999. Broken, glossy ceramic tiles in jarring orange, deep azure blue and Mediterranean turquoise are set into its columns. More strands of broken tiles run down the undulating walls; no two windows or shapes are alike.

University of Southern California architecture professor Mark Gangi calls the winery "magic." The building is secluded from the road and invisible to passersby, but the huge gold-leaf onion dome is visible from a distance. "It’s a discovery, it’s whimsy, and Mr. Doumani couldn’t have found a better person than Hundertwasser to do whimsy. He was the expert, a serious absurdist," Gangi says.

Because the Quixote Winery is the only Hundertwasser-designed building in the United States—others are in Japan and Europe—Doumani receives plenty of attention from architecture mavens. He opened the center to the general public in February, but visits are scheduled by appointment only, owing to a deal he made with the neighboring winery, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, which didn’t want tour buses constantly pulling up to the property. Doumani had to make the deal because his winery uses the access road to Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars (not to be confused with his old winery, Stags’ Leap).

Tilting at Wine Mills
That involved another court battle, dating back to the early 1970s, when Doumani was one of the early renegades to start a little winery in the not-yet-chic land where Charles Krug, Robert Mondavi, Louis M. Martini, Beaulieu and Inglenook made what used to be known as table wines. Warren Winiarski, a friend of Doumani’s who started a winery near the outcrop of red rocks called Stags Leap, was also among this group. Both men thought they would name their wine after the legendary stag that met its demise there. In 1986, a judge decreed that they could both use the name—with strict adherence to apostrophe placement. Doumani prefers not to bear grudges and he doesn’t let business rule his life, which is why he commissioned Hundertwasser to begin with. "I wanted to make something that was fantasyland and fun," Doumani says. "Things were getting too serious in the wine business. And, as far as I’m concerned, wine drinking is supposed to be social, fun and should never be taken too seriously."

"Things were getting too serious . . . . As far as I’m concerned, wine drinking is supposed to be social, fun and should never be taken too seriously."

Which is also why he sold Stags’ Leap to Beringer in 1997 for a reported $17 million. "It just got so big that I felt I was no longer part of the process," he says. "It stopped being fun." He retained a 140-acre parcel next door and built the new winery, which produces about 8,000 cases a year to the old winery’s 50,000.

Doumani is a man about town in Napa Valley circles, although he protests that he and his girlfriend, public relations executive Pamela Hunter, no longer hold the fabled parties they used to at Stags’ Leap. "We had a manor house there," he says. "Now we have just six, maybe eight people over at a time." Vintner H. William Harlan, who also owns the Meadowood resort in St. Helena, Francis Ford Coppola and restaurateur and vintner Pat Kuleto are frequent guests for dinner and poker parties at the house, which has an anti-Quixote, Zenlike atmosphere and a calming collection of Japanese weavings, sculptures and pottery.

Doumani can also be found dining out with boldface-name friends, often at the restaurants that belong to his daughter Lissa and her husband, chef Hiro Sone: Terra in St. Helena, which they have owned for almost 20 years, and now Ame at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. Lee Iacocca once lit up a cigar after dining with Doumani at Terra, so all of the other guests at the table did as well. People still talk about how Lissa, who doesn’t allow smoking in the restaurant, made hand gestures to her father, but couldn’t bring herself to tell Iacocca to put out his cigar.

"When we first started this restaurant, everyone would ask if I was Carl’s daughter, and I would say yes," says Lissa, who is the famous one among four siblings. "It got to be that every day, someone would ask me. So I had a pin made up that said, ‘Yes, I am.’"

Wine snobs might go to her restaurant and order Quixote to acknowledge the vintner who made Petite Syrah respectable in Napa Valley (and changed the spelling from Sirah). When others were only blending the Petite Syrah grape (a child of Syrah and the obscure French grape Durif), Doumani championed it as a varietal. As a wine, Petite Syrah is a deep, dark purple and offers flavor without too much fruitiness, good structure with pronounced tannins, and the ability to age for more than a decade. "Everyone thinks about Cabernet Sauvignon when thinking of the Stags Leap region, but everyone should love Petite Syrah," Doumani says. "It’s big, round, the tannins are soft and it ages beautifully, getting more Bordeauxlike the older it gets. While my neighbors were out there tearing out all their Petite Syrah in favor of Cab and Chardonnay, I was planting more."

Tara Weingarten is a special correspondent for Newsweek in Los Angeles, writing about food, wine, cars and travel.