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So long as Tor cooked, Guillette opened the wines - mind-bending Burgundy Grand Cru and Bordeaux First Growth bottles. I think that’s the greatest gift other than life that my dad gave me.”ĭuring this time, Tor met Don Guillette, the owner of a Grog N Groc, a local wineshop tucked behind a gas station.
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“For the first six months, I didn’t do anything but go to my father’s bookstore,” he recalls, “and he allowed me to take any book off the shelf, and it changed my life. In late 1969, after a mandatory year of service, he returned home. He’d been drafted after taking a semester off of college to backpack in the Sierra, and ended up working in evacuation field hospitals in Saigon, Vung Tau, and the Can Tho Province. “We were not rich people, but it was really rich in the artistic side.” When a fire and then a flood ruined part of their house, the family moved in with actor Jimmy Cagney for a time, and by 1964 they had relocated to Santa Barbara, where his dad opened an independent bookstore called The Ark - which is where Tor worked after coming home from Vietnam. “It was not a privileged life,” he explains. Dad feared flying, so summers were spent outdoors camping all over the Western United States. Kenward recalls “all kinds of musicians, artists, and writers” hanging around the house. Later, he managed to sell a screenplay to Jerry Lewis and did script doctoring for Elvis Presley. His mother, Frances Torchiana Kenward, was a painter and stage actress, and his father, Allan Richard Kenward, was a playwright who had one big Broadway success with a play called “Cry Havoc” that was made into a film. In the mid-1950s, he moved with his family to Beverly Glen, a hippie community nestled into a canyon amid the Santa Monica Mountains east of Bel-Air.
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He attended day care at a Pueblo Indian reservation while living in Taos, New Mexico. These days, happiness for Tor is a glass of wine while listening to Coltrane, allowing for a little ignorance of the news before an early bedtime.Īllan Tor Kenward was born on April 8, 1948, at the Griffith Park Maternity Home in Los Angeles, California, to “bohemian parents” who passed away in their 90s. “Reflections of a Vintner” is Tor’s homage to the early influencers of Napa Valley - a happy, revelrous bunch who wined and dined their way through the 1980s and ’90s. And it is here he found a home at Beringer Vineyards, where he championed the rise of Napa as a culinary destination. It is here he found a lifelong friend in Julia Child, frequently visiting with her, even days before her passing. Whether you call it luck or fate, strong, invisible forces lulled him to Napa Valley, where he met his future wife, Susan Costner, a James Beard Award–winning cookbook author. In his book, he quotes Hemingway, Euripides, and John Keats, among others, and in person, he talks a lot about luck and how essential it is to any career. We talked over a meal during both visits and drank his wine - TOR. A week later, I visited him at his home in St. Not long ago, I spent an afternoon with Kenward at his winemaking facility, Wheeler Farms. Kenward, who has a penchant for drinking rare, older wines - he describes the most memorable as “palate etching” - holds a deep respect for Mother Nature and boasts a comprehensive knowledge of Napa Valley’s evolution in wine and food he is the type of wine-country statesman that most people only ever read about. Though many have passed away, several are still kicking, and a host of them make an appearance in the septuagenarian’s new memoir, “Reflections of a Vintner,” published in 2022 by Cameron + Company. TOR KENWARD, A WELL-KNOWN California vintner with a radiant gaze and sharp, deep-set angular features, knows where Napa Valley’s early trailblazers (and villains) are buried.