As Quady Nears 50, The Hits Keep Coming

Madera is one of many small and tidy farming towns strung along commercial and colorful Highway 99 as it stretches through California’s long, hot, arid, and fertile San Joaquin Valley.

The city is so proud of its surrounding agricultural heritage that streets carry names like Cherry Tree, Peach Tree, Pistachio, Hazelnut, Almond, Walnut, and Olive.

Wine is recognized by Gamay Street, Merlot Avenue and even Chianti Court, an apparent nod to Italian immigrants who flocked to the area in the early 1900s.

But there is no Muscat Boulevard, an inexplicable oversight by city officials, given the long cultivation and stature of the grape about Madera.

There is, however, a Quady Lane, which helps make up for the city’s slight to Muscat.

Andrew and Laurel Quady, who have lived in Madera for about 50 years, have no idea how their name ended up on street signs, though the Quadys and Muscat constitute a busy and happy intersection built out of desperation and daring.

No California winemaker has done more to capitalize on and promote Muscat than Andrew Quady, propelling the ancient and once revered grape into new fashion and new reverence.

His work with Muscat began by happenstance, when the local farm adviser told him of a rare but abandoned plot of Orange Muscat grapes at nearby Reedley.

He had gotten into the wine trade a few years earlier by making a California take on Portuguese Port, but sales were languishing. The Quadys needed to diversify, to come up with something that might resonate more with the country’s rising community of wine enthusiasts.

In 1980, they turned to that stand of Orange Muscat, turning it into a wine they christened Essensia, which they marketed as the nation’s first premium Muscat dessert wine, generous with fruit, rich with sugar, bracing with spirits.

There were a few Muscat wines about, but while the grape has played a long and fundamental role in the world’s wine culture, it was not highly regarded in California four decades ago.

Andrew Quady saw that few grape varieties have much to say clearly, loudly, and proudly when grown in the torrid San Joaquin Valley. Muscat is an exception. “I wanted to make wine with grapes suitable for our area,” he says in his typically taciturn way.

With Essensia, his instincts were spot on, the wine quickly striking a chord among consumers and critics for its swaggering coupling of heft and body with refreshingly sweet fruit, fortifying alcohol (customarily around 15 percent), and punctuating acidity.

The Quadys have been running with various strains and styles of Muscat ever since, adding one lane after another to a veritable round-about of robust and joyous wines.

“If not for Essensia, we wouldn’t have gotten anyplace,” Quady said the other day when we detoured off Highway 99 at Madera to catch up with the couple. “We couldn’t sell the port.”

Walk into the small tasting room at Quady Winery and be greeted by displays of the many ribbons, medals, plaques, and other awards the couple’s wines accumulate. Behind the tasting counter, a case glitters with 17 shiny belt buckles awarded class champions at “Rodeo Uncorked!,” the international wine competition of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, all gathered by Quady wines.

Nearby, tucked in a corner, is the finely tooled saddle the Houston competition awarded Quady a year ago when its 2020 Essensia was named the roundup’s top dessert wine.

Next year, the Quadys will mark their golden anniversary in the wine trade. Their secret to success is no secret, just recognition that from the start they subscribed to one of wine culture’s more enduring principles: Find the best grape for your place and run with it.

For them, that grape was Muscat, which under the blazing Central Valley sun produces substantial crops that yield wines that at their most direct are luscious, fragrant, sweet, and fruity, the fruit evocative of a Caravaggio still life brimming with apricots, peaches, oranges, lemons, melons, limes.

When it comes to Muscat, Andrew Quady’s mind is as fecund as the San Joaquin Valley’s soils. Orange Muscat was the first grape of the Muscat family with which he worked, then he began to exploit its siblings Muscat Hamburg (aka Black Muscat) and Muscat Canelli.

With each interpretation, his overall goal is freshness and equilibrium. “Andy has always been concerned about balance – sweetness and acidity,” says Laurel Quady.

After Essensia’s debut in 1980 came Elysium, a fortified red dessert wine made initially with Black Muscat grapes Quady inherited from a grower who had been selling the fruit for sacramental wine made by a winery that then folded.

Then came Electra, a non-fortified lighter-style Muscat modeled on Italy’s popular Moscato d’Asti, retaining the variety’s floral fragrance and zesty fruit but with a slight effervescence and just 4.5 percent alcohol.

This was followed by Black Red Electra, a similarly styled red version that quickly became the most popular wine in the Quady portfolio. A sweet rosé version joined the Electra family four years ago. And this year a semi-dry version, Electra Black, joined the family, a blend of Muscat Hamburg and other black grape varieties.

The Quady portfolio now also includes three vigorous and layered vermouths under Quady’s Vya label – “Extra Dry,” “Sweet,” “Whisper Dry” – each infused with up to 18 botanicals, such as bitter orange peel, galangal root, and quassia bark in the Extra Dry, balsam fir needles, linden flowers, and sage leaf in the Whisper Dry. His goal with what he terms “America’s original craft vermouth” is to provide vermouths ideal for both blending into a cocktail or sipping on their own as an aperitif. For sheer complexity, provocation, and delight, they compete with trendy gins at a fraction of the cost.

Other labels under the Quady imprimatur are Salt of the Earth, a series of off-dry Muscat-based wines from a collaboration involving the Quadys and veteran Madera Muscat farmers Denis and Teri Prosperi, and Lucky Day, their most peculiar releases, two sweet Moscatos, a “Gold” made with Orange Muscat and a “Red” made with Black Muscat, each carrying 16 percent alcohol, prominently promoted on the front label. You will not find Lucky Day in California because Quady’s distributor does not carry it, but it is hugely popular in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

The San Joaquin Valley has a long tradition of producing superb Sherry-like wines, another style not exactly in vogue, but the undaunted Quady also is reviving its stature with a solera-refined Palomino Fino in the amontillado vein, meaning it is somewhat dark, smoky in fragrance, distinctly nutty, toasty and yeasty in flavor, and long in the finish. For the wine, Quady uses traditional Palomino grapes from a biodynamically farmed Fresno vineyard more than 50 years old.

The Quadys’ romance with Muscat began before they arrived in Madera. They were introduced to the grape’s potential not long after Quady graduated from UC Davis with a master’s degree in enology in 1973, a particularly auspicious class that included several other graduates who went on to contribute significantly to California’s wine trade – Merry Edwards, Tim Mondavi, Tom Ferrell, Peter Graff, Stu Smith, Dave Stare and Steve MacRostie.

To celebrate, the Quadys headed for France. There, in a café overlooking a Roman amphitheater in the Rhone Valley settlement of Orange, the prix-fixe lunch they ordered concluded with glasses of Beaumes-de-Venise, a fortified dessert wine based on Muscat, and slices of “some kind of peach cake, kind of like pound cake,” recalls Andrew Quady. Some of the wine was poured on the cake, the rest drunk. “The wine was fabulous,” says Quady. “It was an affordable alternative to Sauternes.”

He had ended up in Davis to study food science more as afterthought than original academic intention. He had already earned a degree in chemical engineering at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California, where he grew up.

That landed him a job in explosives with a fireworks company at Fontana, working on military projects, During the yuletide of 1969, the factory caught fire, sending rockets over the city, showering it with experimental aluminum chafe intended to thwart radar. In the aftermath, Quady was laid off, with others, though not responsible for the holiday pyrotechnics.

He and Laurel had been developing an interest in cooking, working their way through the Time Life series of cookbooks. That prompted him to look into food science at UC Davis and his subsequent enrollment.

Though smitten with Muscat after their revelation in Orange, he did not immediately pursue a career in the wines that the variety could give. First, he took a job at a winery in Lodi. While at UC Davis, he had become acquainted with Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti, who subsequently urged him to make a California version of Port with Zinfandel grapes from Cary Gott’s vineyard at Montevina Winery in Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley. That was in 1975.

Quady agreed, making 1600 cases in his time off from his day job. Corti bought 200 cases of the port. Quady was stuck with the other 1400 cases, which he was selling slowly as the couple moved to Madera in 1977.

That first 1975 port was aged in a friend’s winery and bottled in Napa. When the couple moved to Madera, he initially worked at Mission Bell, owned by United Vintners, part of the Heublein consortium.

The Quadys subsequently bought a nearby home that had been bonded as a winery, giving them the foundation for their eponymous brand.

Quady never gave up on port, and continues to make two with traditional Portuguese grape varieties. One is a fruity, easy-sipping style not quite ruby and not quite tawny; he calls it Quady’s Batch 88 Starboard, the “88” a reference to 1988, the year he began to release it, the “Starboard” a sly reference to both the side of a ship opposite the port side and to California being on the opposite side of the globe from Portugal. The second is a vintage port, but he makes it only in years when the fruit yields an exceptional take, the most recent being 2018, not yet released.

As we toured, tasted, and talked, Quady opened a bottle of his original 1975 vintage port. He would have no trouble selling it today, given its bright ruby color, floral aroma, lilting sweetness, plummy fruit, and suggestions of smoldering peat.

He also opened a bottle of the Quady 1986 Amador County Frank’s Vineyard Vintage Port, composed, balanced, feisty, and threaded with suggestions of caramel, licorice, and spice. While the 1975 was made with Zinfandel, the 1986 was made with traditional Portuguese grape varieties that Quady had persuaded Frank Alviso to plant in his Shenandoah Valley vineyard.

The Quadys are quick to acknowledge the help they have received in achieving their success, starting with their former winemaker Michael Blaylock, who joined them in 1984 and oversaw production until his retirement in 2017. Their crew today includes resident winemakers Darin Peterson and Crystal Weaver-Kiessling, along with other long-term dedicated employees, among them Dan Mejia, manager of bottling and labeling, going on 40 years.

The Quadys also have a son in the wine trade, Herb Quady, who in 2005 with his parents’ blessing and assistance established the highly regarded winery Quady North in southern Oregon’s Applegate Valley, where he focuses on Rhone Valley varieties and the Bordeaux variety Cabernet Franc. Their daughter Allison Quady also is in the family business, advising on sustainability practices and communications.

The Quadys recognized early on the role that imaginative marketing could play in building a brand. For one, they retained Southern California artist, vintner, and restaurateur Ardison Phillips – credited with introducing the concept of “winemaker dinners” at his West Hollywood restaurant Studio Grill in the 1970s – for the bold, impressionistic, and soulful art on the label of many of their wines.

For more than a decade, the Quadys also sponsored an annual cooking competition for chefs who were to create original dishes to accompany one of their wines. Up to 50 chefs customarily joined the challenge.

And today, their websites for Quady and for Vya contain numerous recipes for dishes and drinks that take advantage of their products.

While at UC Davis the Quadys had an opportunity to follow other members of the UC Davis class of 1973 to Sonoma County and Napa Valley. But that proposed project, involving a winery in the Carneros district at the northern reaches of San Francisco Bay, fell apart, so they moved to and settled in Madera, without regret.

Since then, they have turned out up to 200,000 cases a year, and were on track to top 300,000 cases by the end of this decade. To that end, they purchased a second hulking and shiny new bladder press, a pricey piece of winemaking equipment that nonetheless stood idle this harvest as the Quadys joined much of the rest of the state’s wine trade in dialing back projections concerning growth. They made around 160,000 cases this year, and like the rest of the industry they are trying to figure out where to go from here.

Quady attributes the family’s success to working with grape varieties and wine styles ignored by others and then making the best wines possible from them.

And despite his renown with a steady stream of novel wines, his touch has not been entirely golden. Consider Deviation, apparently too much of a deviation from Quady standards. A fortified Muscat, Deviation is Quady’s attempt to make a softly spiced dessert wine redolent of roses. Toward that effort, he infused Muscat with rose geranium leaves and damiana, a wild shrub common to Mexico. Never mind that damiana has purported medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities, Deviation, while still available, has been slow to catch fire. “It doesn’t sell much,” concedes Quady.

But as the winery’s long and varied mix of wines shows, he’s always on the lookout for new potential and to capitalize on it quickly and smartly. Do not be surprised if the next Quady product is a ready-to-drink Manhattan involving a partner’s whiskey and one of the couple’s Vya vermouths.

Even without that, the Quady tasting room, as remote and isolated as it may be, is worth a stop for the variety, history, and steadiness it represents. Just don’t look for a Quady Road to take you there.