The Grapes of Mirth – Don Felipe Hernandez & the Origins of Feliz Noche Cellars

Felipe Hernadez pours Mr. Picky some of his beautifully crafted wine.

By Jeff Wing

In the rolling, lushly carpeted hills just north of Santa Barbara, California, the Foxen Canyon wine trail is a storied route, a kind of viticultural Yellow Brick Road whose roadside attractions are painterly destination wineries. The trail itself is named after one of the early grape-growing pioneers in the area and dates back to the mid 1800s. The trail (now a paved road, of course) wends its way into the Santa Ynez Valley back country as sinuously as a grapevine, and viewed from the air, the assorted wineries along its length are arrayed like clusters of the celebrated berry. The area is something of a wonderland. There are fenced emus there, and llamas, and dwarf ponies, and in the proper season a riotous display of wildflowers in all the kaleidoscopic colors of a candy shop. In my attempt to rescue my ripening appointment that afternoon I saw none of it. I was on the lookout for former fugitive Felipe Hernandez. In 1972 this future vintner/Toast-of-the-Town made the furtive journey north from Jalisco State in Mexico and leaped the border fence with a heady dream; to eat.

“I was hungry,” he concedes.

The nearly 1000 mile trip north along uncharted dirt roads constituted the first time Felipe, a frankly terrified 16 year old, had ever left his village of Casa Blanca in Jalisco state, Mexico. Nearly 40 years later our paths crossed. Or at least that was the plan. I finally sped by Felipe standing almost forlornly by his pickup truck at a nondescript recessed gate, deep along the trail. A portly fellow in work shirt and Stetson, arms at his sides, his glimpsed body language signaled “how much longer must I stand here?” I made a hurried and ill-advised u-turn on the narrowish country lane, doubled back and pulled onto the shoulder in a puff of dust. His posture lightened.

“Hey,” he called, raising his arms in welcome. “How are you? C’mon, follow me”. We shook hands. I noticed his paw was not the callus-swaddled mit of a farmer.

He climbed into his truck and I into my car. The gate swung open with slow electronic certainty and we drove.

In 1972 Felipe Hernandez was, like everyone then and now, looking for a path to self-betterment. As he and his cousin anxiously traveled through desert scrub along largely uncharted dirt roads in the final stretch to El Norte, he can perhaps be forgiven for not having foreseen that he would one day find a place at the linen-bedecked table of the Manhattan Racquet and Tennis Club. What crazy crystal ball would have broadcast that future?

“I left my home to look for a future, you know. It was a very small town called Casa Blanca, really a village, of about 60 or 70 homes. When you leave your home you don’t really have a plan, the plan comes along as the time goes by.”  Casa Blanca. As Time Goes By. Possibly some men’s destinies are written in the stars. Ingrid Bergman, however, does not figure into this story.  Felipe’s destiny took some sweat and toil in the achievement.

Soon after arrival Felipe learned through the migrant worker grapevine that there might be a place for him in Santa Barbara County’s then-nascent wine region. In 1972, the region was but a plucky and largely unsung bastion of oenophilic hopefuls and businessmen trying like the dickens to gain some real traction in the wine-making firmament. Felipe joined the ranks of this Founding Fatherhood of area vintners, getting his start in the equivalent of the mailroom. From there he rose.

“In 1972 I came to the canyon, and right then I was a field worker, working with grapes. And then later you learn how to take care of them.”  This summation contained much. We sat at a picnic table in unblanched early afternoon sun, next to a small, unlovely artificial pond. Light fell down from an absolutely cloudless sky. Felipe explained that, among other uses, the pond provided water needed to spray the frost off dangerously chilled fruit. Apparently a frosty grape is to be avoided until the time it can be dispensed as a Sauvignon Blanc into stemware. “The sun hits the frost and it’s like a magnifying glass. It’ll burn the fruit.” The unassuming little pond would later play a role in his soon-to-be-announced destiny.

One evening he found himself being singled out for what became an exceedingly well-disguised turn of fortune. “I came to turn the water off in the night and my boss was there and said ‘I’m gonna have a party tomorrow, do you mind coming to my house and cleaning my yard? So I came in the morning and really cleaned the yard well, and he liked the job I did.” That successfully executed chore led to a new job with a new boss, a new vineyard and a new alignment of stars. A page turned, gently. The elements were in place. Enter the Frenchman.

“What happened was, they brought a guy here from France in 1975 to show us a thing or two, to show our winemaker how to get a better crop in the fields.” The hired interlocutor was just what the doctor ordered. “ In the 70s we weren’t interested in much else but growing lots of crop. The French guy was teaching us how to perfect the wine, taught us a lot of things in the field. I was putting those things in my mind right then.” Felipe soaked up the offered viticultural wisdom like a barman’s sponge. The consultant’s contractual chatter was intended to give the winery an edge. Felipe saw something else in the moment and took it all in. “He taught me how to prune, how to process the fruit, taught me how to limit the amounts of clusters, taught me to measure the clusters with my hand to be sure they are all identical; identical acid, identical sugar. That’s how I began to get hooked into this deal. Yeah. I started picking the guy’s brain.” The other field workers took in just enough to justify the day’s wages. Felipe was saving the info to his Stetson-shaded hard drive, storing it away for a sunny day.

He began to experiment. With the boss’ blessing he set aside a small plot and began working with zinfandel grapes to see what he could come up with. In 1976 he produced his first wine. It wasn’t bad. As it happens, that is the year California’s Napa Valley so upset the fancy-pants French by beating French wines in a blind taste test called, somewhat grandly, The Judgment of Paris; a watershed moment that arguably put California’s previously under-appreciated wines on the map. As Felipe’s covert winemaking skills improved by leaps and bounds, he began to dream. Might he one day produce a wine of his very own? Bottle under his own label? But he had no desire to compete with the large winemaking concerns whom had so far nurtured and raised him in the business and treated him and his colleagues so well. Over time he produced line after line, much of it awful. He made lots of mistakes, and arrived at two important convictions early on; don’t throw your new-found weight around, and while taking these baby steps into self-educated viticulture, don’t produce such huge amounts of grape juice that when things go wrong you have to dump a lot of wrecked product. Produce small amounts of wine and make it the very best wine you possibly can, small collectible vintages whose volume can be more easily massaged into greatness. His present work with limited production boutique wines sprang somewhat accidentally from these first self-directed commandments.

Today his elegantly diminutive Feliz Noche line, whose name bespeaks Felipe’s simple and glowing view of life, is celebrated, touted and served in some of the toniest establishments in the country, from Toscana in Los Angeles to the Manhattan Racquet and Tennis Club in the Big Apple. He has completed his journey from illegal border jumper to Toast of the Town, as sometimes happens here in Opportunityville. Along the way he became a U.S. citizen, a moment that was not lost on him, and which may just be the crowning achievement of all his restless and gladdened forward motion. He becomes ruminative talking about it.  “I’ll never forget at the end of the ceremony when they played the National Anthem, you know? That’s something that will stay in my mind forever. I remember that moment big time.” He looks away and falls silent.

This former starved illegal has sired a computer programmer, a mechanical engineer, a nurse and a police woman on track to be an FBI agent. And then there is little Felipe, the youngest at 14. “Don’t call him Junior”, Felipe cackles helplessly. “It’ll piss him off.”

Felipe’s journey has been less an arc than a liftoff. He has yet to reach apogee.  From dusty flyblown country hamlet to the finest eating and drinking establishments in the U.S. Many in the cufflink set would probably be hard-put to imagine the saga whose finish is as fine as that of the wine filling the high-gloss goblet they pinch and swirl; an epic that began with a brazenly criminal act. Possibly the Feliz Noche wine label should feature a stylized illustration of a boy in dust-covered blue jeans hurriedly scaling a fence.

“Of course there is luck, but you have to make the luck happen. A lot of hard work and a smiling face and everything will follow. It’s a very simple formula.” Felipe pushes back his cowboy hat, itself a sweat-stained prop from an episode of The Big Valley. He stares briefly into the middle distance, the shadow of a grin appears. He seems to reconnoiter. “Sir, I been as lucky as hell.”