Interview with Steven Kent Mirassou: Remembering America’s Oldest Wine Family
“There is no more beautiful landscape than a vineyard at its most full ... Though I get a sense of the continuity of the family business when I’m in the cellar or on the road traveling from one market to another, I feel it most keenly here... In the fading light of the day, if you squint just so, you can see this place shimmer and become the vineyard my thrice-removed great-grandfather first planted 160 years ago in San Jose.”
—Steven Kent Mirassou
If you are a Pinot Noir lover, you can thank sixth-generation Steven Kent Mirassou’s ancestors for bringing some of the first Pinot vine cuttings to California from France. Discovering Mourvèdre? Mirassou’s family made that possible too. In the 1850s, Steven’s ancestors—the Pellier brothers, Louis and Pierre—imported many grape varieties, as well as prune and other fruit cuttings, to San Jose, planting them in what would legendarily be acclaimed as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
Steven Mirassou’s family is America’s oldest winemaking family—older than the Mondavis, the Sebastianis and the Gallos. He’s now working side-by-side with the seventh generation, son Aidan, growing grapes and making wine in Livermore Valley. Still, Mirassou’s roots run deep through Silicon Valley and South Bay soil. San Jose’s Pellier Park was named for the Pelliers who, in 1850, established the City Gardens Nursery in San Jose’s Evergreen district.
In his new book Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine, Steven Mirassou artfully crafts a love letter to wine and winemaking seasoned by a legacy of a multigenerational family’s passion and pursuits growing and bottling California wine. Filled with history and personal memories, the book evokes a love for the land, grape growing and the family history of winemaking—this is not your typical wine read. The writing about winemaking and his family lineage are colorful and juicy at times, with stories swirling like tasting notes you might find on the back of many of his family’s wine bottle labels. Lineage is such an important part of Steven’s story that he named his winery’s flagship wine Lineage. Today, Steven Mirassou’s Lineage Collection in Livermore encompasses The Steven Kent Winery, The Lineage Wine Company, L’Autre Côte and Mia Nipote labels.
I sat down with Steven Mirassou to talk about his storied family lineage as vintners and the craft of California winemaking, along with a deep dive into where it all started: right here in Silicon Valley!
Mary Orlin: How do you view the contributions your family made to California’s wine industry and Silicon Valley? Let’s go back to the Pelliers, when they arrived and what they did.
Steven Kent Mirassou: The way the family chronicles the story is in 1854 Pierre Pellier [Mirassou’s great-great-great-grandfather] was joining his older brother, Louis, who started a nursery and growing operation in San Jose. Louis had already been out here and it appears Pierre came out to California in 1852 before leaving for France to return with vine and tree plantings for the business. Back in that time you could actually get into San Jose through San Francisco Bay at a shipping port at Alviso. Louis sent Pierre back to France to get the French prune, prune d’agen, cuttings and trees, vine cuttings of Mourvédre, Pinot Noir and some 20 other grape varieties. The vines from the shipments Pierre returned with began plantings in Santa Clara Valley in 1854.
MO: Did the family in France grow grapes?
SKM: They were certainly growing grapes to make wine for themselves. The Pelliers came from a little town called Saint-Hippolyte, east of La Rochelle, a big port town, in the Bordeaux area.
MO: When did the name Mirassou come in?
SKM: The Mirassou family, the next generation, came from Southwest France, the Languedoc area. Pierre Pellier’s daughter Henriette met Pierre Mirassou, and Pierre Mirassou had vineyard property in the same area, what was called Evergreen. He married Henriette and that’s when the Mirassou legacy, the second generation, started in Evergreen, with vineyard property of their own. My great-grandfather, Peter Mirassou, died relatively young, but he became the third generation. And the fourth generation was Norbert and Edmond Mirassou, Norbert being my grandfather.
MO: Were those first San Jose vineyards near what became Mirassou’s Aborn Road winery?
SKM: Aborn Road ran right through the middle of Evergreen. At its height we had roughly 1,000 acres of vineyards in that area, from Quimby Road south to Fowler Road. The fourth generation owned the winery on Aborn Road [built in 1937] and they owned the vineyards in San Jose. In 1966 Daniel Mirassou, my first cousin, and Steve Mirassou, my father [fifth generation], created the Mirassou sales company. Prior to 1966, the family had a tasting room, plus made bulk wine for Paul Masson and for Almaden Winery—[notable as the Almaden Winery Blossom Hill—San Jose location is cited as the first and oldest California winery circa 1852 as marked by CA Historical Landmark # 505].
In 1966, the family started marketing the Mirassou wine brand name. You have to remember the wine business was still a nascent industry in California. There weren’t a lot of wineries in Napa or in Santa Clara Valley at that point in time.
MO: Mirassou had a Champagne division, at a time when California sparkling wine could be called “Champagne.”
SKM: We had the Champagne Cellars. When I was a kid, 13 or 14 years old, I worked a summer disgorging champagne. In 1989 the family moved the champagne production to the Novitiate Winery in Los Gatos, where Testarossa Winery is now. We were there for several years [until 1996–97].
MO: You studied American literature in college and literature in grad school on the East Coast, swearing you’d never enter the family business.
Your father sold his share of the Mirassou Winery in 1984, and eventually opened a Livermore Valley winery in 1996 with you under the name Steven Kent—Kent being your father’s and your middle name—with the goal of making world-class Cabernet Sauvignon. What prompted that?
SKM: There was a sense of dueling visions of the family for a business future. My father was really the only one in the family who actually was passionate about wine, and he wanted to make really good wine. There were challenges for the sales department and production department to make good wine from areas that were not the right areas to grow specific varieties. My father decided he’d had enough, and wasn’t anticipating getting back into the wine business right away. But he founded the brand Iván Tamás with Iván Fuezy. They made their way to Livermore in the late ’80s, and eventually took on the Wente family as partners. I got back into the business, in 1996, after returning from the East Coast. [The Wentes bought out the Iván Tamás brand.]
MO: What are your impressions of what’s happened in the Santa Clara Valley since your family left?
[Interview Note: The Mirassou San Jose era drew to a close in 2002, when that side of the family sold the brand to E. & J. Gallo Winery. The Mirassous sold the Aborn Road winery land for housing development in 2005.]
SKM: It’s a shame. There’s a chapter in the book called “Gods of Asphalt and Shingle,” which tells the story about how Silicon Valley and the development of the computer business in that area really led to the development of housing tract after housing tract, which inevitably meant the loss of acre after acre after acre of some of the greatest growing area in the world. When I was a kid, across the street from the winery were hundreds and hundreds of acres of apricot and other fruit trees that smelled amazing as they were going into bloom, and were incredibly beautiful. That is gone.
MO: Why is it important to tell your lineage story, and what is the Mirassou legacy?
SKM: The fundamental reason for wanting to write this book was to be able to dive deeply into and pull meaning from the craft of winemaking and the family devotion to growing and making something that is so connective and magical.
The Mirassou family helped show that Santa Clara Valley, and then Monterey County, were world-class wine growing areas. My family was one of the winemaking forerunners of the California wine business back in the ’50s and ’60s. What they gave me personally was a love for vineyards, a love of both the craftsmanship and artistic side of winemaking.
I’m looking forward to moving forward with my family as we hopefully get to the next six generations of California winemaking down the road.
Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine by Steven Kent Mirassou (Val de Grace Books, 2021) is available at stevenkentmirassou.com
