Stanley Cheng, whose wine Xi Jinping drank at White House, talks Napa Valley, cookware and family
Son of Meyer cookware brand's founder began a second career as a winemaker when he bought a California vineyard. He talks to Bernice Chan about the business, how his wines came to be served to Chinese presidents Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao, and his children taking over
"I was born in 1948 [in Hong Kong], the fifth of seven children. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, there was a major exodus from Hong Kong. I went to the University of Oregon [in the United States] to study business, then, two years later, switched to mechanical engineering. My father had an aluminium factory in Kwun Tong making coils, sheets, flashlights, cabinet hinges and spring press ashtrays. In 1964, Teflon had just come out and it was something the world needed. So while I was studying, my father and I decided to go into cookware and we called the brand Meyer. When I returned to Hong Kong, in 1971, we reconfigured the factory and installed new equipment. It took us three years to break even and I was lucky to have infrastructure in place as leverage for a head start."
"Wine is my interest and even when I was studying at university I liked going to the Napa Valley, because it's so beautiful and has nice restaurants and houses. In Hong Kong, we yearn for space, which is why I bought this land, although [I wasn't] being single-minded about planting vines. I have a number of interests - flying gliders and building model airplanes, one-third the size of real ones, and flying them at 100 miles per hour and getting them to do aerobatics. I like fishing and skeet shooting, too."
"In 1992, we moved to Vallejo [at the mouth of the Napa river]. I purchased a vineyard and named it Hestan Vineyards after my and my wife Helen's names. We have 127 acres, 60 of which were used to plant grapes. We started planting around 1997 and we have just planted the last plot of 20 acres. We have an 11-acre lake [which is] our reservoir, but, because of the drought in California, we only have 15 per cent of our water left. I'll have to figure out what to do because we don't get agricultural water from the state.
"We harvest our grapes at night because it's colder and [makes for] better quality produce. It takes three years before you can harvest, then there's one year in the barrel. The first vintage of grenache, I planted five years ago and it came out last year. And now the second vintage is bottled. This year we bought 6½ tonnes of pinot noir grapes because it's too warm to grow them in California. We're going to make 350 cases of premium pinot noir."
"It was unbelievable - we were new out of the gate. My winemaker called me and said, 'Are you sitting down? Your wine got 95 points from Robert Parker.' I was like, 'What!' We thought it tasted good …"