Inglenook

Gustave Niebaum was born on August 30 in Helsingfors (present-day Helsinki), Finland, into a Swedish-speaking family. Niebaum received his master papers from the Nautical Institute in Helsingfors, and was given his first command in 1864 to captain a ship headed through the Bering Strait to Russian America, later purchased by the United States as the Department of Alaska in 1868. He explores the land and water routes of this frontier region and begins a career in commerce. As ship's captain, Gustave Niebaum sails into San Francisco Bay, after traveling throughout Alaska and its surrounding islands, with a cargo of fur hides and sealskins worth $600,000, a fortune at the time. He settles in San Francisco and, along with several partners, founds the Alaska Commercial Company, which establishes trading posts and shipping lines in Alaskan territory. Within a decade of leaving Finland, Niebaum is a multi-millionaire with a refined taste for life and a dream of building an American winery to rival the great chateaus of Europe. Niebaum buys the Inglenook property as well as the adjoining Rohlwing Farm for $48,000. After extensive travel and study, Niebaum chooses Inglenook's site, intuiting its extraordinary potential for growing grapes. He continues to acquire smaller parcels of neighboring land over the next several years so that by 1887 he ownsed 1,100 contiguous acres, spending a total sum of about $60,000. Fluent in several languages, Niebaum assiduously collected books on every aspect of winemaking, assembling a private library considered to be one of the most valuable on viticulture and oenology. John Daniel Jr.—Niebaum's grandnephew, who assumes management of Inglenook in 1939—eventually donates this library to the University of California at Davis. Inglenook's Chateau winery was conceived to be a state-of-the-art facility. The Chateau's design is based on gravity-flow, one of the first of its type in Napa Valley, and includes an early form of rebar—using cable from cable-cars in San Francisco—to stave off earthquake tremors and to help the building shift safely. True to his fastidious nature in each step of the winemaking process, Niebaum devises California's first grape-sorting table and also installs the state's first bottling line to ensure the wines' provenance from growth to bottle, the latter always bearing the California Pure Wine Stamp and secured with an intricate wire maze to guarantee the wine's integrity. After almost 200 years, Inglenook is still a prominent, luxurious winery in Napa Valley.