We quickly settled in Napa and soon were able to purchase a brand new, four-bedroom home for $24,000 with a $1,800 deposit, a gift from my parents. That was 1973. Sometime that year, one evening the phone rang. “C’est Bernard Portet de Grand Lebrun. I saw Jean-Marie Martin in the phone book and I wondered if you were the guy from boarding school.” We met for lunch the next day at the Vintage 1870 in Yountville. Bernard, a French-trained winemaker, was in California for just a few months, hired by a francophile businessman who wanted to have a winery in the Valley. They started Clos Du Val, a well-known winery in Napa Valley, and Bernard remained its president and winemaker until his retirement a few years ago. We became very good friends, always sharing major family events or ups and downs in our personal lives. We played tennis together and shared lunch every few weeks.
I was very excited to be part of a new trend in the world of viticulture, the art of growing grapes, and enology, the science of wine making, in wines made from noble grape varieties. Viticulture was my strong point and I had no training in enology. We were replacing pear or plum orchards with grapes or planting vineyards on hillside land previously used only for cattle grazing. Of course, Mary was very busy with our daughters, sewing little dresses, planning or taking them to birthday parties. We lived in a court and the little ones of the neighborhood played outside a lot or came to the front door asking,”Can Caroline play?”
Managing and planning new vineyards for absentee owners was a demanding job and I worked long hours, six days a week. An opportunity arose to manage vineyards in Sonoma County for a company with very ambitious plans. It was a start-up winery, Geyser Peak, owned by Schultz Brewing Company from Milwaukee. One time, while my mother was here, we had a party. My mom was worried we did not have enough chairs for everybody to sit down; she was very surprised that my boss, the president of the winery, whom we casually called George—not Mr Vare, as it would had been the right thing to do in France—sat down with his wife on the step going down to the living room. My mother had a lot of things to report back home.
We sold the Napa house at a $3,000 profit and bought a house in Santa Rosa. My mom, after hearing about the job and location change, said, “Your father thinks you are moving too often.” Of course the French farmers, at least in the past, stayed in the same place all their lives. I was at odds with with my French family but with a growing family to support and living in California, I had no choice but to follow the norms. The move was easy and we met some other young couples who became longtime family friends. Our daughters meshed very well with the other kids in the court. I was often welcomed in the late summer afternoons by chants of, “Pop’s home! Pop’s home!” I sometimes loaded up the kids in the back of my truck and drove everybody two blocks to FosterFreeze for an ice-cream cone. When Caroline started kindergarten, she walked three blocks to school with the neighborhood kids. I felt grounded in my adopted country and very welcome.
We started to have a lot of visitors. My brother Michel spent a few days with us on a business trip to purchase a large quantity of bulk dry prunes destined to be packaged and sold in France. Hughes, my sister’s son, spent two consecutive summers with us, needing to get away from his family. We enjoyed his stays with us very much and it contributed to establishing strong family bonds to this day. He was very stubborn; one extremely hot Sunday, we decided to go to the beach to cool off and have a picnic dinner there. Hughes came out of his room wearing a “speedo” kind of swimwear. “Hughes, you are going to be cold!” “No, no I’ll be fine.” He didn’t want to hear that the Pacific Ocean in Northern California is freezing in comparison to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Both times he came, he landed on the East Coast and hitch-hiked to Santa Rosa and back to New York. Mary dropped him off at the local freeway on-ramp to begin his journey back to France. I happened to drive by there a little later. He was holding a cardboard sign saying, “French, New York.” He always managed to be invited in a home every night, even when he went back through Canada. He is still a free spirit to this day. My mother also came for a visit, spending time knitting sweaters for her granddaughters or sewing beautiful curtains. In her own way, she wanted us to have a semblance of old French classic decor.
In June 1974, I received a call from my brother, a rare occasion. “Our father died in his sleep last night. You have to come for the funeral right away.” That was a busy day! I had to settle the work schedule for my vineyard foremen, buy a dark suit, go to the local Federal Building to get an exit visa, and by 5 p.m. I was headed to SFO. After a long delay in Quebec due to mechanical malfunction, and a connecting flight from Paris, I finally arrived in Bordeaux and the family home, Augey. I was totally exhausted, but jet lagged, so I could not fall asleep. Lots of people from around the country came to pay their respects. After the funeral mass outside the Rauzan parochial church with my dad’s casket in plain view, several dignitaries gave their eulogies. The weather was very hot and humid, the talks were hard to listen to—and the man that I feared and admired was gone. We walked up the hill behind the hearse to the cemetery. The casket was lowered into the family vault, and we said goodbye to our family members and close friends. I experienced my first loss.
In the fall of that year, I was asked to go back to discuss how to settle the estate. Though my older brother Michel was in charge, my brothers and sister had very conflicting desires and needs. In front of my mother, my siblings argued and fought. An agreement was drawn up, but they were bitter and they ceased to talk to each other. I thought it would never happen in my family, and I was sad that my mother was in the middle of it.
In 1978, early one morning in May, Mary told me, “Don”t go to work. I am going to have the baby.” We dropped the girls at St. Rose School on the way to the hospital. With this baby, I was finally allowed in the delivery room and to our surprise it was a baby boy! Later on that morning, I went to the school. It was lunch recess and, as soon I arrived, the girls and their friends rushed toward me. After hearing they had a baby brother, they cried with joy. Caroline recalled that I fixed taco salad to celebrate that night. Nick and his mom came home that evening and he slept through his first night.
His sisters were crazy about him, giving him lots of attention, holding and playing with him. Nick still says, “I was raised by four mothers telling me what to do!”
