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| First Person |
Vintner with a Mission
Ted W. Hall
06/01/2004
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Ted W. Hall owns the 600-acre Long Meadow Ranch, perched atop the Mayacamas
mountains in Napa Valley. The ranch is the nation’s first ultra-premium
organic winery and olive oil frantoio. At its heart lies a striking, V-shaped
olive oil and wine facility—designed by famed architect William Turnbull—built
of earth excavated from the ranch itself. Before turning his hand to winemaking, Hall was a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. In January he was
elected chairman of the Robert Mondavi Corp.
 I grew up on a small farm in western Pennsylvania, near the Ohio River, where
my mother was an organic gardener in the late 1940s. We were living in this
beautiful rural place because my father was working on a secret project during
World War II to help develop artificial rubber. It was an odd juxtaposition: My
father was a chemical engineer, and my mother an organic gardener. This pairing
had an enormous influence on my work and life philosophy. I began to understand
with both my head and my heart that an organic approach to farming actually
results in higher quality and lower cost, while providing genuine consumer
benefits.
Later, as a graduate student at Stanford University, I began making
amateur wine in 1971. Our first “estate” was a garage in Santa Clara. Later we
moved to a cellar under a house in San Francisco. I produced wine for 17
consecutive years, and won a lot of amateur awards. More importantly, I made
some really bad wine. This good and bad experience very much informs our
approach to winemaking today.
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