Carl Doumani, Napa Valley icon, dies at 92
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- Carl Doumani moved from L.A. to Napa Valley in the 1960s and restored Stags’ Leap Winery.
- The name of the winery set off the “Apostrophe War” with legendary Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars.
Carl Kheir Doumani, a mid-century Los Angeles developer-turned-wine-country icon, died April 22 in his sleep at his home in the Napa Valley, according to his family. The former owner of Stags’ Leap Winery, once at the center of a wine-country legal battle called the Apostrophe War, was 92.
Doumani moved to the Napa Valley in the late 1960s, founded three wineries, sold two of them, and lived the life of a bon vivant and raconteur that amounts to a fading breed in the Valley.
Winemaker Stu Smith said he knew Doumani was slowing down when he’d missed a couple of lunch dates with his pals, a standing monthly commitment that he and 11 other friends had kept since the late 1970s. In his later years Doumani showed signs of dementia, a reminder that all of them were getting old. “There weren’t a lot of us left,” says Smith, who with his brother founded Smith-Madrone winery in 1971.
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Doumani was born in Los Angeles to Lebanese parents and raised in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, according to his daughter, Kayne. She says that her father’s uncle homesteaded property in Palm Springs, and as a youth Doumani was hired to build “dingbats,” rapid-construction apartment dwellings that soon filled with California newcomers.
He began attending college at UCLA, but early in his studies was offered the chance to purchase a bar and restaurant in Westwood Village called Dudes — despite being a few years shy of legal age. So began a lifetime of development, property management and entrepreneurship. Eventually this took him to the Napa Valley in 1969.
“I think he was looking to buy about five acres,” says Aaron Pott, a longtime friend who made wines for Doumani for decades, “but the broker was offering about 400.” Those acres were in the heart of the Stags Leap District, one of Napa’s most esteemed grape-growing regions.
He pulled together investors and struck a deal, intending to build a hotel and restaurant. But in 1971 he revitalized Stags’ Leap Winery, founded in 1893, making wine from the property’s existing mature vineyards. The name immediately earned him the ire of Warren Winiarski, the founder and proprietor of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Winiarski sued over the name, and Doumani did not back down.
The matter wasn’t resolved until 1986, when the California Supreme Court affirmed Doumani could use the name Stags’ with an apostrophe after the “s,” thus ending what came to be known as the Apostrophe War. (The two resolved their differences sufficiently to bottle a joint effort, called Accord, after the settlement.)
Doumani’s general obstreperousness — he would routinely clash with the Valley’s vintner’s association and conservation organizations or anyone who told him what he could and could not do with his land — attracted like-minded winery owners who took it upon themselves to vent at monthly lunches. The group of 12 came to be known as the GONADS, or, the Gastronomical Order for Nonsensical and Dissipatory [sic] Society. The GONADS met monthly at one another’s wineries for over 50 years, sharing bottles, cigars and endless stories.
“We were all quite strong in our opinions,” says Smith, “and Doumani was no shrinking violet.” Lunches routinely ran into the dinner hour; the only forbidden topic was politics and, needless to say, the wine flowed freely — so freely that Doumani eventually bought an Airporter-style van so that all of the ‘NADS could get home safely.
Doumani sold Stags’ Leap Winery to Beringer Vineyards, then California’s longest continually operating vineyard, in 1997. Soon after he founded a winery called Quixote, named for another character prone to tilting at windmills. An avid, lifelong art collector, Doumani persuaded the renowned Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser to design the winery, which is one of the most fanciful and unique structures in Napa Valley.
Doumani himself was never a winemaker; in 2008, he hired Pott to make the Quixote wines. “He made me a deal,” says Pott. “He said, ‘You can make your wine here, and I’ll give you fruit from one-and-a-half acres.’” As monthly payment, Pott received a piece of art from Doumani’s collection. Pott has artworks from Robert Motherwell, Cartier Bresson, Calder and Cocteau, which speaks not only to Doumani’s largesse, but to the depth of his collection.
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Pott also lunched with Doumani weekly for more than a decade and heard stories of a well-lived life. In the mid-1970s family commitments obliged Doumani to take over the management of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, decades before that city’s family-oriented, G-rated years. “This was the height of the mob era,” says Pott. “He had stories that could have been right out of Scorsese’s ‘Casino.’” Doumani sold Quixote in 2014, and he started a third winery, ¿Como No?, which ceased production in 2018, as he was approaching the age of 90.
I got to know Doumani because of his love of Petite Sirah (on his labels he always spelled it Petite Syrah), a gruff, age-worthy red grape variety well-represented among the older plantings on his original property. My book about Rhône varieties on American soil titled “American Rhône” included an entire chapter on Petite Sirah for which I interviewed Doumani, the grape’s fiercest advocate. He always took the contrarian position that Petite Syrah was better suited to the Napa Valley than Cabernet Sauvignon, especially when it had some bottle age — and in this he may be right. “He never understood why others didn’t love it like he did,” says Pott. “If you get to try an old wine, from the ’70s, you’d know.”
Doumani is survived by three children, Lissa, Kayne and Jared. With her husband, Hiro Sone, Lissa ran Terra restaurant in St. Helena, which hosted many a Carl Doumani dinner until it closed in 2018. He also is survived by two brothers, Michael and Peter; two grandchildren, Gianna Lussier and Imogen Doumani; and his sister-in-law, Carol.
A fund has been set up in his memory at Providence Community Health Foundation. Funeral arrangements were private. A celebration of life is planned; more details at www.carl doumani.com.
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