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Summer / Fall 2006
Larger Than Life
 Pat Kuleto Has Made an Art—and a Glamorous Life—Out
of Rising to the Occasion
By Thom
Elkjer
Pat Kuleto doesn’t wait for adventure to find him. He goes after
it. And he makes sure to capture it fully when he comes upon
it.
When Kuleto created his winery estate, he chose some of Napa’s
loftiest vineyards for his neighbors: Bryant Family, Chappellet,
and Colgin. When he announced plans to plant sangiovese—a much-maligned
grape in California—friends suggested he limit himself to a few
acres; Kuleto planted 34. When he plays poker, the guys at the
table include iconic Napa vintners Francis Ford Coppola, Bill
Harlan, and Carl Doumani. When he and Doumani both had the idea
of mooring a boat in their winery reservoirs, Doumani spent two
years looking for one. Kuleto ordered one built from scratch.
“It’s always a case of abbondanza with Pat,” Doumani says with
a chuckle. He uses the Italian word for abundance to indicate
that where Kuleto’s concerned, a certain passion goes along with
the plenty.
Kuleto started pouncing on adventure early in life. He was barely
out of his teens, working construction and playing bass in a
band in the Sierra Nevada, when an accident severed the tips
of two fingers. He promptly plunked down his workers’ compensation
money for a ticket to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth II. “That’s
when I discovered that wine was part of life,” he recalls.
“At dinner, the waiters walked around with a bottle of wine in
each hand. If I didn’t like one, they poured me the other. If
I didn’t like either one, they got me something else. It was
great!”
Upon returning to the United States, Kuleto became a building
contractor and soon spotted another opportunity: He convinced
a national steak house chain to let him design restaurants for
free in order to get the contract to build them. “I wasn’t a
designer, but I had worked as a busboy, a waiter, and a bartender,
so I knew what made people happy to work in restaurants,” Kuleto
explains, with his usual cut-to-the-chase candor. “I figured
if I designed places where the staff was happy, that would make
the customers happy.”
This seminal insight made Kuleto a rich builder who could have
retired to his sizable winery estate in the California Gold Country
to pursue his lifelong love of hunting and fishing. But with
more than 100 steak houses on his résumé, Kuleto took the momentous
step of designing Fog City Diner, an atmospheric eatery that
opened in San Francisco in 1984.
This well-loved culinary landmark launched Kuleto out of the
ranks of restaurant builders and into the field of restaurant
design—which, it turned out, he had more or less to himself.
As usual, Kuleto did not hesitate. He began designing bigger,
grander, and more unusual dining rooms and creating destination
restaurants in major cities around the country. Today Kuleto
owns pieces of nine of his most successful restaurants, including
Boulevard and Farallon in San Francisco and Martini House in
St. Helena. He will soon bump that number up to an even dozen
with two new venues in San Francisco and his renovation of Nick’s
Cove on Tomales Bay near Point Reyes.
Along the way, Kuleto encountered still other opportunities
that fired his imagination. When a massive fire destroyed his
Sierra foothills property in 1991, he again put an insurance
settlement in play. This
time he stitched together five separate parcels of land on a high ridgeabove
Sage Canyon in the hills east of Napa Valley to create a 761-acre aerie. Within
five years, he was back in the wine business as a vintner. Today
he’s selling third- and fourth-year releases of Kuleto Estate Chardonnay, Cabernet
Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Syrah, and Zinfandel.
 The wines are made by David Lattin, a veteran vintner whom Kuleto
met in 2002. “I came up to the house to get acquainted,” Lattin
recalls, “and wound up staying about six hours, eating and drinking.”
(Many stories about Kuleto involve hours of eating and drinking.)
“We did talk about wine, but mostly we talked about life and
culture and the land,” Lattin continues. “Somewhere in the middle
of the conversation it became clear that we were going to work
together, and we just kept talking.”
They still talk constantly, although Kuleto leaves the winemaking
to Lattin. They clearly agree on their goals and are rapidly
achieving them both in terms of wine quality and critical recognition.
Unlike the wines of his neighbors at Bryant Family and Colgin,
Kuleto’s bottlings are generous wines that please immediately
without sacrificing body, weight,or gravitas. They’re clearly
big-time wines, but you can ignore that and
enjoy them unreservedly.
In other words, they are much like Kuleto himself.
These qualities go a long way toward explaining why the burly,
bearded Kuleto was accepted with relative ease into Napa’s inner
social circle. When much-loved vintner Justin Meyer died unexpectedly
in 2002, Kuleto was afforded one of Napa’s few truly priceless
prizes: He took Meyer’s place in the legendary all-male carousing
society known as the Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and
Dissapatory (GONAD). “Making Pat a member was a natural choice,”
explains Doumani, a founding GONAD, “and not just because his
ability to consume food and drink is second to none.”
Kuleto himself jokes that his home among the vineyards is “a
big kitchen and dining room with some bedrooms attached.” In
case anyone might think he’s kidding, he calls the place Villa
Cucina, which translates as kitchen country house. The house
manages to be grandly proportioned yet cozily intimate, and the
kitchen indeed is the focus of the entire downstairs. Kuleto,
61, shares the home with his son Daniel, nine, and a constant
stream of friends, associates, and other visitors.
While he enjoys cooking and has set up the estate with all the
gardens, game, poultry, and range animals he needs to supply
his own table, he’s simply too busy to man the kitchen regularly.
So he hired chef Janelle Weaver, formerly of the restaurant at
Meadowood, to be the Kuleto Estate chef.
Like Lattin, Weaver’s a relaxed professional who doesn’t mind
if the bar is set high. “Working for Pat keeps you on your toes,
but it doesn’t really feel like work,” she says with a smile.
“It’s more like being part of a family business.”
Hanging out with Kuleto is that way, too. The conversation never
lags, and it usually doesn’t linger too long on Kuleto, either:
He doesn’t need the limelight because his personality is naturally
buoyant. When a visitor asks, for example, why the buildings
and furnishings at Villa Cucina and Kuleto Estate Winery are
all rustic and oversized, Kuleto laughs out loud. A moment later,
he has everyone else laughing, too, with his jolly rejoinder:
“Because I’m rustic and oversized!” |
