Sean Thackrey, a self-taught scholar who, between collecting antiquarian books, running an art gallery in San Francisco, and learning five languages, developed a cult following as one of California’s most intriguingly eccentric winemakers, died May 31 in Walnut. Creek, California. 79.
His former wife and partner, Susan Thackrey, said the death in a hospital was the result of cancer.
Mr. Thackrey had no intention of making wine. The son of two Hollywood veterans, he had no training in viticulture — or any agriculture for that matter — when he settled in 1973 in Bolinas, an isolated bohemian town on the Pacific Ocean in southwest Marin County.
Bolinas is only a few miles from San Francisco as the crow flies, but even today it can take hours to get there, in part because locals have a habit of stealing road signs indicating the route from Highway 1. mr. Thackrey, who was soaked in the West Coast counterculture at Reed College, fits right in.
He began improving the property, including adding vines to a fence. On a lark, he made some wine out of it, liked it and decided to give it another try. He bought grapes from the esteemed Fay Vineyard, in Napa Valley, and released his first wine, a cabernet/merlot blend he named Aquila, in 1981. He named his winery Thackrey and Co.
Though he made a negligible amount, and never more than a few thousand cases a year, his wine was an instant hit with Bay Area enology connoisseurs. He soon switched from cabernet and worked with then obscure varieties, such as merlot and syrah, or no varieties at all, mixing grapes and vintages to get the flavor he liked.
By the time he left his art gallery in San Francisco in 1995 to make wine full-time, he had developed a worldwide following, with nearly half of his wines going to Europe and Japan. Enthusiasts fell in love with his muscular, expressive releases, often labeled “editions” – not “vintages” because he could cancel an annual release if it didn’t live up to his expectations – and named after constellations: Orion, Pleiades, Andromeda.
Even at the height of his popularity, Mr. Thackrey kept his operation small, even domestic. He never owned a vineyard, made much of his wine in his backyard, and only employed a few assistants—the better, he insisted, so he could focus on his craft.
“Sean belonged to this cohort of earlier-generation winemakers who, I’d say, really pushed the intellectual boundaries of where California wine could go,” said Jon Bonné, the author of “The New California Wine” (2013). in a telephone interview.
Mr. Thackrey was not interested in trends, whether they set or follow them. He liked to say, “My only goal in all the universe as a winemaker is to produce pleasure,” and he meant it. Not for him the conventional wisdom and advanced vineyard management techniques taught in schools like the University of California, Davis; winemaking, he insisted, was a peculiar craft, more like cooking or painting than farming or manufacturing.
“Does anyone ever suggest that everything else in gastronomy is a matter of cracked numbers, real numbers, hard data and everything else? of course not,” he said in a 1992 interview with Freedom of the Press, a wine newsletter. “Art is about non-reproducible results.”
He was especially opinionated about attempts to categorize and elevate vineyards above winemaking — that is, growing grapes above winemaking. He called terroir, or the idea that wine expresses the soil and climate in which the grapes grew, an “individual piety” and even “wine-growing racism”, and he regarded appellations, legally defined areas of wine production, as an “own piety” and even “wine-growing racism”. gerrymandered marketing gimmick.”
For guidance, he instead turned to such classical texts as “Work and Days,” a collection of instructions from the Greek poet Hesiod to his younger brother on how to run his estate. Hesiod recommended letting freshly picked grapes rest in the shade for up to three days, and Mr. Thackrey followed suit – although most enologists would shrink with the risk of bacterial infection.
Over time, those texts accumulated in Mr. Thackrey’s Bolinas’ home, eventually numbering about 740 and ranging from a sixth century papyrus receipt for vines to “The American Vine-Dresser’s Guide,” published in 1826. He sold the collection in April 1826 for $2 million.
Mr. Thackrey was admired almost as much for his casual elegance as he was for his winemaking skills.
Quick with his wit and able to swing quotes from classical poets and existentialist philosophers with ease, he carried his cult status with light-hearted humor – literally: For many days he could be found working in denim overalls with the words “Famous Winemaker” sewn on. in the chest in gold letters. In 2017, Esquire featured him in an article titled “A Century of Style.”
Although he eschewed the wine world’s obsession with grape varieties, Mr. Thackrey knew his way around a grape, and he was particularly pleased with the grapes dominant in the French Rhone region, such as syrah. But unlike other California winemakers in the 1980s who attempted to replicate the region’s complex wines—a loose alliance known as the Rhone Rangers—Mr. Thackrey just used them as an interesting base material to make something sui generis.
“My wines are like a person,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. “They talk, they change, they tell you something different with every sip. They taste different from one day to the next, from one hour to the next. That kind of complexity makes wine interesting.”
Sean Haley Thackrey was born on July 9, 1942 in Los Angeles. His father, Eugene Thackrey, was a journalist and playwright, and his mother, Winfrid Kay (Knudsen) Thackrey, was a script supervisor, one of the few women to hold that job at the time. When she was 101, her son helped her write an autobiography, “Member of the Crew” (2001).
Sean’s easygoing looks came early: In high school, he came second in town in a contest sponsored by a local dentist to find the best smile in Los Angeles.
He studied art history at Reed College in Oregon and the University of Vienna, but he did not graduate from either school. Instead, he moved to San Francisco in 1962 to work for an academic book publisher.
Eight years later, he opened his gallery with his wife, Susan Thackrey, and a friend, Sally Robertson. They specialized in 19th-century photography at a time when the field was just being taken seriously by museums and collectors, and soon collaborated with the world’s leading art institutions.
He and Mrs Thackrey broke up but remained in a relationship. She is his only immediate survivor.
mr. Thackrey lived in Bolinas occasionally before settling there permanently. Over time, his home, far from the ocean, became a yogi’s mountaintop for artists, celebrities, and passionate wine lovers eager to interact with the master. Unless he was hard at work, Mr. Thackrey would always invite them over for a drink.
“All I know is making wines that I like myself and then trying to find people who agree,” he told the podcast Barfly, in an interview recorded in 2018 but released after his death. “And if we agree, then it’s very simple.”