Tom Seavers vineyard still carries on his legacy: I see him in the grapes

CALISTOGA, Calif. — The walk takes about 20 minutes, clockwise, uphill then down, and it induces a healthy amount of sweat when the temperature cracks 90, as it does on this late September afternoon last year.

“This is what he did every day,” Anne Seaver says, accompanied by three black labradors. “He walked the vineyard with his three dogs. So what I do, every day, is I walk the vineyard with my three dogs.”

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The walk offers exercise, a remarkable view atop Calistoga’s Diamond Mountain and communion with the past. When Tom Seaver made this walk each morning, he chatted along the way with his late mother or his older brother, Charles, who’d died from cancer decades ago.

A little more than three years ago, Seaver passed away from Lewy body dementia and complications from COVID-19. Now, for his younger daughter Anne, that same walk is a chance to reconnect with Tom.

“All the little things I took for granted about Dad, now I appreciate so much more,” she says. “I can hear his laugh in my head, especially up here.

“I feel almost closer to him now than when he was alive.”

As we walk past the rows of grapevines that constitute Seaver Vineyards on a still and cloudless day, the crunch of the ground under our feet the only noise, Anne leans down to pick up a feather.

“Since he’s passed,” she says, “I’ve been finding all these feathers.” He loved birds, she explains, enough to coo at them when he came across them in the wild, enough to put a quail on the front gate at the vineyard. His favorite poem, the one written by Charles that hangs in the barn at the vineyard, is about watching the geese:

Oh I wish you could have been here on that day
to share the feelings that we felt
to see them fly away.

“The feathers are the symbols,” Anne says. “He leaves the feathers.”

Outside Citi Field, sitting at 41 Seaver Way, there is one extraordinary tribute to Seaver: a statue that stands 10 feet tall, bronze and steel, the pitcher in the middle of his trademark drop-and-drive delivery. It’s a testament to Seaver the pitcher — the pitcher who defined the Mets as a franchise, who won three Cy Youngs and 311 games, who for a quarter-century had received a higher percentage of votes for the Hall of Fame than anyone else in history.

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Some 2,900 miles west, at the top of Diamond Mountain, sits a different kind of monument: Seaver Vineyards. This one pays homage to Seaver the man, to a person dedicated not just to his craft but to the concept of craftsmanship.

Tom and his wife, Nancy, purchased the 116-acre plot in 1997 when Seaver was between broadcasting gigs and feeling stagnant in retirement. He’d grown up in Fresno, and his father had worked in the fruitpacking industry, with a focus on raisins. His first job was working the land there. Later, when he lived in Greenwich, Conn., he’d built his own wine cellar out of cement and PVC pipes.

“He had to make sure he had something stimulating to do,” Anne said.

The plot at the peak of the mountain was overgrown with manzanita and poison oak. It was Seaver who pinpointed the best spot to plant the vineyard by climbing a tree to get a broader view of the property, and it was Seaver who took a machete to the poison oak.

The vineyard was fully planted by 2001, and it produced its first wine by 2005 — Seaver’s last year as a broadcaster for the Mets. For many in Napa Valley, a vineyard is a vanity project. For Seaver, it became a way of life.

“He was in the vineyard every single day,” said Seaver’s winemaker, Thomas Rivers Brown (“the Bill Belichick of Napa Valley,” in Hall of Fame football coach Dick Vermeil’s words). “I can’t think of another client I’ve ever had who spent every day in the vineyard.”

“I called him my best employee, my best vineyard worker,” Jim Barbour, Seaver’s vineyard manager, said. “I would give him a list of stuff to do, and he’d do it.”

Barbour marveled that he never had to teach Seaver anything twice. Seaver embraced a new learning curve, of starting at the bottom of a profession and working his way toward the top. He loved being a rookie again, learning from veterans. And he couldn’t help but compare the process of growing grapes and making wine with playing baseball — the way the season transpired in summer but culminated in fall, how you could only control so much. The vineyard sits on Diamond Mountain, after all.

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“He loved the process of working,” said Karen Seaver, Tom’s niece-in-law, who serves as the vineyard’s chief operating officer. (Anne is the chief financial officer.) “The more dirt under his nails, the better. It was a point of pride.”

“The whole operation out there is as excellent as you’d imagine Tom Seaver would do anything,” said Ron Swoboda, who visited the vineyard with a group of teammates from the ’69 Miracle Mets in 2017. “Everything in his life he did to a degree of excellence most of us could only wish to approach.”

The vineyard, in Swoboda’s eyes, had become an extension of Seaver’s work as a pitcher — the attention to detail, the craftsmanship, the precision.

“You saw Tom in his element,” he said. “It was where he wanted to be. He was so comfortable there.”

Sitting at the northern terminus of Napa Valley, Calistoga is the kind of town invariably described as “quaint.” It contains a single stoplight at the intersection of Washington Street and Lincoln Avenue, right by the local Chamber of Commerce.

“Calistoga is probably the least updated from what it used to be to today,” said Vermeil, who was born there in 1936 and has his own local winery. “A lot of the old storefronts are the same ones I grew up looking at.”

Walk around that main drag enough on any given day, and you were liable to run into Tom Seaver, stepping out of his beige Ford pickup in work boots, jeans, a faded baseball cap on his head and a pair of Felco pruning shears on his hip. He ate breakfast at the Palisades Deli, and for lunch he’d order a tuna sandwich, “with pickles, no papas” — his inside joke with Martha at the counter.

“Dad wanted to come somewhere more private where he wasn’t Tom Seaver, Pitcher,” Anne says. “He could be a little more anonymous. Although he wasn’t: After 20 years, everyone knew him because they loved him.”

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Across the street at the CalMart, a large picture of Seaver hangs above the storeroom. Down the block, the Calistoga Wine Stop was one of Seaver’s favorite hangouts. He’d chat with the late owner, Tom Pelter, sometimes beating him to the store in the morning. He’d joke around with Pelter’s kids, Jonah and Tara, the latter of whom runs the store today with her mother, Tammy. Seaver brought baseball magazines for Jonah and played catch with Tara’s toddler inside the store, never worried about a misfire wiping out his friends’ inventory.

In the back room, Jonah brings out one of the shop’s keepsake bottles: a 1987 Diamond Creek Gravelly Meadow cabernet sauvignon, signed by dozens of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“He’d always carry baseballs in his car or truck to sign,” Barbour said. “He’d go up and down Main Street, go in and shake hands, introduce himself, talk. That’s how Tom was.”

“He gave me the impression he’d been there for 40 years,” said Vermeil.

The chair sits at the peak of Diamond Mountain, the black steel legs blending into the scorched brush of Douglas firs behind it. The once-green polyester seat is bleached now, the backrest charred. This had been part of what Seaver called his “office,” where he’d settle down in the late morning with his newspapers, a crossword puzzle and his labs.

The Glass Fire started burning 27 days after Seaver passed away. It raged for more than three weeks, tearing through Napa and Sonoma counties. Nancy Seaver had to evacuate the family home on the mountain for two months. Anne left her home in Calistoga for a few weeks. They lost roughly one-third of the vineyard to the fire; it spared the house.

“The neighbors over here lost everything,” says Karen. “That to me is the most dramatic aspect to it: How did that house not get burned and that one did?”

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“The land burned black,” Anne says. “It felt almost like it grieved. The landscape will never be the same.”

The fires imperiled the 2020 vintage of the wine. After a nervous taste test the following February, the Seavers decided to bottle and sell it — a vintage that meant so much because it was Tom’s last.

They never considered making it their last. Once the land was cleaned after the fire, they replanted. It takes five years to produce usable fruit, or until 2025. They’ll be younger than the other grapes in that clone; they’ll have to be picked separately, fermented separately, and the mix will be different. The wine will never be quite the same as it was before the fire.

“This is Dad’s legacy and his pride,” Anne says. “We never talked about giving up or letting it go.”

“The first time I walked up here,” Anne says as she points to the chair, “I just couldn’t believe it. It was like a personal assault on my heart.

“Now I love it. I just know Dad’s watching. He’s watching everything grow back.”

When Seaver started the vineyard, he was adamant: “He started off calling it ‘GTS Vineyards’ because he did not want his name on it,” explains Karen (even if baseball diehards knew Seaver’s first name was George).

Seaver wanted his wine to succeed on its own merits. With the help of Brown and Barbour, it has. The vineyard produces roughly 500 cases of cabernet each year. The GTS Cabernet Sauvignon has earned scores of 90 and up from the likes of the Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator. An average bottle sells for more than $300. In 2010, Seaver himself graced the cover of Wine Spectator — the magazine he’d read during his playing days to further his interest in wine.

“That was an incredibly prideful moment for Tom,” said Brown. “That was the realization that this wasn’t just a hobby. It was something he put his heart and soul into.”

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“I have a voicemail from him,” Karen says, “that I kept. It goes to how proud he was.”

Anne and Karen go quiet. And then you hear that voice, that inimitable, orotund voice that defined a franchise, the voice Anne still hears on those walks around the vineyard, the voice that, decades after he called his last Mets game, you can still hear breaking down the guy in the box as a “first-ball, fastball, high-ball hitter.”

I just had a sip of wine, he says, and I’m not telling you what it is — you know, GTS or Seaver Vineyards, something like that. It’s been about four minutes; I can still taste it. Where did this come from? This can’t be our wine, for crying out loud.

Anne chuckles.

We’re just about ready to have dinner, and we’ll save you a glass if you show up, just in case.

Back in Queens, the unveiling of the statue served as a de facto family reunion for the Seavers. The pandemic had kept them apart, up to and through Tom’s passing.

“It was just a very profound experience,” Karen says.

“I don’t want to sound too California woo woo,” Anne says, “but I felt a piece of his energy stay with the statue.”

The rest of that energy, the rest of that spirit, still resides in Calistoga — in the diligent ways Anne tends to the vineyard during those walks, in the grapevines replanted since the fire, in the work ethic and craftsmanship of a Hall of Famer turned humble farmer.

“When he passed, the more and more I could sense him,” Anne says. “I see him in the grapes. I see him in the regrowth. I can feel his laughter and his playful spirit here. You might feel it.”

She exhales.

“And then I find the feathers.”

(Top image: Eamonn Dalton, The Athletic;  Photos: Ryan Anson / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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