A Grand Old House with a Story to Tell

Come into town over the , turn right onto Front Street and go past the Depot. There she is, on the right: a big pink Italianate mansion, a “painted lady” if ever there is one. She’s seen better days, sure, but the remains imposing: two stories, a wrap-around porch, towering palms on the property. Surely there’s a story there.

Indeed there is. From 1897 until her death in 1981, at the age of 95, Isabelle Victoria Simi lived here, the one-time owner ofwhich she inherited from her father Giuseppe.

Giuseppe and his brother Pietro started their winemaking career here in Healdsburg a few years earlier, and the house stood across the street from one of their earliest winemaking buildings.

It must have been an idyllic place to grow up. Then as now, palm trees decorated the property, which extended down to the banks of the Russian River; old photos show well-tended flower beds and children playing on the porch.

The house at 68 Front St. was built by Adna Phelps, who moved to San Francisco shortly after completing it in 1895. The first resident seems to have been a young ambitious French winemaker named Georges de Latour, who never quite found his place in Sonoma county. Instead, he soon moved to Napa to found Beaulieu in 1900, which still brands their premium cabernet with his name.

Healdsburg then was a much smaller town, but was already becoming known for its wines: in fact, Pietro and Giuseppe began making wine as far back as 1868, and by 1876 were successful enough to purchase the winery at the Depot (now the corner of Hudson and Front) from John Chambaud. That’s the stone Chambaud building on the corner, once used to make brandy, now a complex of offices.

Giuseppe Simi bought the house in 1897, when his daughter Isabelle would have been about 10 or 11. As she grew into womanhood, she herself gained confidence and beauty: She was named Queen of the in 1904, and photos show her surrounded by her court at the then-annual event.

But 1904 proved a pivotal year. About the same time as the Water Carnival, Isabelle graduated from Santa Rosa Business School, then both her father Giuseppe and uncle Pietro died shortly afterward, within a month of each other. Only 18, Isabelle took over the running of the winery, though at first she had to vie with Pietro’s son Louis F. Simi for control.

In 1908, she married Fred R. Haigh, a cashier at the Sotoyome Bank in town. The weekly Sotoyome Scimitar called them both “prominent and well known in their individual activity and in the social set.” Soon after, the two of them gained control and ownership of Simi Winery.

By this time, however, the main winery operations had moved from the depot to a property two miles north of the center of town on Redwood Highway, where the present day Simi still stands.

When the Simi brothers first saw the region, they were struck by how much it resembled Tuscany. In fact the original name was Montepulciano Winery, named for their home town, and for years word “Montelpulciano” was boldly painted on the winery’s spacious facility.

The train tracks ran right through the winery, and on to other stops northward: Chianti Station, Asti, and others likewise named for Italian towns. Most of the early wine grapes grown were Italian varietals – primarily carignan and sangiovese, bedrock of Chianti.

By 1904, when the Simi brothers died, they were among the most successful wine makers in California, producing over half a million gallons of wine from their 400 Healdsburg acres. Four years later, when Isabelle Simi Haigh and her husband took it over, they continued to successfully manage it until Prohibition came in 1920.

While other winemakers were intimidated into pouring their finished wine into the streets, the Simi’s held onto their bottled wines for 14 years -- some say they continued making wine -- believing that some day the market would return and their holdings would prove valuable.

After Prohibition, Simi began producing more wine, and within a few years, by judicious blending of new wines and old, they were winning national awards. Though Isabelle was by default the winemaker during these years, when her own daughter Viviene (born 1912) came of age, it became she who took over the science of winemaking for the family.

Another innovation in wineries came shortly after Prohibition ended. Isabelle realized that wine tasting was the way to sell wines, so in 1936 she had a huge 25,000 gallon redwood wine cask from the cellars turned on its side and relocated to the highway to become an usual and eventually famous tasting room.

(The new visitors center was built in 1990, and the historic redwood cask is gone.)

Simi’s success continued for decades, their tasting room a well-known tourist stop on what became Highway 101 and the wines continued to lead the way in the post-Prohibition resurgence. Throughout, Isabelle held court at the tasting room, as she had held court for the Water Carnival in 1904.

But in 1968, her daughter Viviene Haigh died, at only 56, and it seemed to take the wind out of her mother’s sails. She sold the winery to Alexander Valley grower Russell Green in 1970, though she hardly went out quietly.

“They can’t get rid of me,” she was quoted as saying. “I’ve always said my father found me under a vine in the field and that’s why I’m still here.”

The sale was marked by a huge party, with many area winemakers in attendance – Rodney Strong, Lou Foppiano, Edoardo Seghesio and the Pedroncelli brothers from Healdsburg, and Hans Kornell and Jack Davies (Schramsberg) from Napa.

In keeping with the Simi tradition, when a new winemaker was hired in 1973, she was Mary Anne Graf, first woman to graduate from UC Davis’ enology department. From 1979 on the winemaker was Zelma Long; the first male winemaker was Paul Hobbes, who started in 1999.

Gradually, Russell Green shifted the priority of the winery to Alexander Valley properties – the line marking the  runs right through their parking lot – and Bordeaux varietals replaced the Italian grapes that the Simi family built their fortunes on.

For her own part, Isabelle Simi Haigh continued to work in the tasting room at Simi through the 1970s, seven days a week. She became an even-more colorful and outspoken woman, wearing a signature vest decorated with political and other buttons, speaking her mind and sharing the stories of a lifetime in wine. She continued to live in the house at 68 Front St. until she passed, in 1981.

Now childless and widowed (Fred Haigh died in 1954), she willed her house to the family that had been her housekeepers and caretakers in her later years, the Grecos. The current owners, Al and Betty Greco, kept it empty for a while, but when vandals began to take what they wanted – a Tiffany lamp on the balustrade for one – they let their own children move in who, from all appearances, did not treat the faded lady as well as she deserved.

The house is now vacant, and offered by . It was initially priced at over $1 million, realtor Leslie Kipp told me, though it needs a great deal of work. The current price is $785,000, and while they have had offers there has been no sale, a place of history and dreams fading with time.