In Dan Duckhorn’s telling, Tom Rinaldi rode up to their first meeting on a Harley-Davidson (HOG), smokes tucked into his T-shirt sleeve. Duckhorn hired him as founding winemaker of Duckhorn Vineyards, and the two made an odd first bet: Merlot, a grape most American drinkers barely noticed. Rinaldi blended in 15% cabernet, they made just 800 cases of the 1978 Three Palms Vineyard Merlot, and critics loved it. Rinaldi, who died Sept. 6 at 77, gets a lot of the credit for the Merlot craze that followed. Chris Kornelis’s obituary in the Journal’s Review section makes the cheeky case that he deserves some of the blame for the backlash, too.
By the 1990s you couldn’t escape Merlot. It got planted where it had no business growing and bottled by winemakers who couldn’t do it justice, and in 2004 Paul Giamatti’s Miles in Sideways delivered the line everyone remembers: “If anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving.” Sales slid. Kornelis’s sly point is that Rinaldi’s Merlot was good enough to make everyone try the grape, and too many couldn’t match it. Even Rex Pickett, who wrote the Sideways novel, told an interviewer in 2007 that a couple of Duckhorns he’d had were outstanding.
Happier than the vets
The man himself ran on cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts. A San Francisco kid, the middle of three brothers, he got out at 17, when friends were sliding into hard drugs, by joining the Navy; he tracked typhoons from Guam and saw Vietnam during the war. At UC Davis he thought about becoming a veterinarian until he noticed that winemakers looked happier than vets. Fifty Napa vintages later, Duckhorn executive Zach Rasmuson calls him “part of the foundational elements of Napa Valley.” He left Duckhorn in 2000, co-owned Patent Wines and consulted from Spain to China. His only child, Angelina Bigelow, says he built a serious cellar over the years and had a weakness for 1990 bottles — her birth year — uncorking one on her birthday. And he isn’t done. Barrels at Patent, including his 2024 and 2025 Cabernets, go into bottle in 2027 and 2028.
Our read
This is an Estate piece, and a gentle one. Rinaldi left the two kinds of assets plans often handle worst: a cellar whose value is part market and part memory, and a stake in a business with wine still aging. Collections often get one line in a will — personal property, to be divided among the children — and that’s how a birthday vintage ends up in an argument. Better to keep an inventory with where each bottle came from and how it’s been stored, get an appraisal if it’s worth insuring (a standard homeowners policy may cap it unless it’s scheduled), and name who gets what. Write down the stories, too. The bottle opened on a daughter’s birthday is worth more with the reason attached.
For co-owned businesses, the barrels are the lesson: a buy-sell agreement and a plan for unfinished inventory keep partners and heirs from improvising in grief. And the career note may be the best one in the obit — he picked the work where people looked happier and stuck with it for 50 vintages. Label the cellar while the person who stocked it is still around to tell you what each bottle means.