Photographs by Frank Di Piazza
Sometimes, if you live right, the past and future come together.On a Sunday afternoon in 1971, Jim Dierberg took his wife, Mary, to the Maifest in Hermann, Mo. Why, he’s still not sure—they usually sated his addiction to German culture by flying overseas twice a year, getting lost in the masked and costumed pre-Lenten Fasching festival in Munich and the romping Bavarian Oktoberfest. He’d been going to Germany ever since his European tour of duty, right after law school, in the early 1960s.
“I went back to escape,” he says, describing the freedom of a different language; the perfection of the tidy, immaculate towns; the way strangers would invite him to their parties and he’d end up singing with them into the wee hours, the stresses of his American banking career forgotten.
Now he’d found the same rolling hills and quaint charm, the same gemütlich ambience, an hour from St. Louis.
The train whistled, the river flowed past, picnickers staked their blankets on a steep hill or sat on a stone wall drinking strong German beer. Dierberg drove home pensively. The next morning, he turned to Mary and said, “Let’s call and see if we can buy the bank in town. Then we’d have a reason to go there.”
Dierberg called that morning, and when the bank officials didn’t say no outright, just hesitated, he suggested lunch the next day. When they agreed to bring their chairman, he said, “Bring your accountant, too.”
A few numbers tossed out, an agreement scrawled on a piece of paper after lunch and the deal was done. “Turned out they’d been talking to Boatmen’s for three months,” Dierberg says with a grin. “The bigger you are, the longer things take.”
Once he owned the Hermann bank, he felt a proprietary interest. He bought one of the town’s historic buildings to save it from demolition, and then he bought 13 more. Among them was the old Hermannhof brewery and winery, which had been standing empty.
“Hermann once made 11.5 percent of all alcoholic beverages in the United States,” he says. “But Prohibition came, and they thought it was forever, so they filled the cellars with rubble.” He wanted to return the 1852 building to its first use, so he went around the country, talking to beer makers. “Anheuser-Busch told me, ‘There’s going to be five breweries left—and you won’t be one of them.’”
Dierberg’s next option was a winery—and wine tapped into those months in Europe, too. He’d been called up during the Berlin crisis, landing in France with the 131st Air Guard. As soon as he had some free time, he found his way to the Pigalle district in Montmartre. Walking past the flashing neon of strip clubs and the Moulin Rouge cabaret, he wound up drinking with some portly English gentleman farmers in their fifties, who offered to buy him dinner.
That night, he tasted wine—really tasted it—for the first time.
“Every course was a different wine,” Dierberg recalls. “I’d say, ‘Why this wine with this food?’ And they’d say, ‘This sweetness goes with that’ and ‘Don’t you think this red wine cuts through the fat in the entrée?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, yeah!’”
Beneath the glow of fine food and wine danced a vague memory: His mother had family in France who made this stuff. He paid several visits to his vigneron relatives that year, and he came home dreaming
of farming.
His gift, though, was money. He’d started playing the stock market in seventh grade, quickly doubled his money and continued investing through law school. When he went into the service, he decided, he’d be “out of everything” by May 1—picking, by sheer luck, Black Monday. When he came home, his father’s family owned 80 percent of First Bank and one grocery store, and he had the money to buy them out—and everybody else, too. “At 28, I was the head of a bank,” says Dierberg. “When you’re 28, you’re pretty full of yourself.”
The Dierberg empire now spans banks and grocery stores across the country; Dierberg resigned as CEO in 2003 but remains chairman. He spends much of his free time in Hermann, where he’s creating the Gutenberg Corridor, named for the main street and extending five blocks through the city’s historic district. He had boulders trucked in from Washington, Mo., to create an amphitheater, and the district will be dotted with sculpture, pavilions, small concert stages, a children’s park and a farmers’ garden. Six restored stone-house wineries are scheduled to open this fall as B&Bs, and Dierberg has furnished hotel rooms upstairs in the Festhalle. The new Tin Mill Brewing Co. microbrewery and restaurant was converted from a grain elevator and storage house by Dierberg’s daughter and her husband.
Dierberg shared the cost of decorating Hermann’s new bridge with grape clusters. He gave $91,000 to nearby East Central College to help develop marketing ideas for the Gutenberg Corridor—then grew impatient and plunged ahead without them. He pledged $85,000 toward a new Amtrak station that will also be a transportation museum, highlighting the river, the railroad and the highway. And he spent an amount he won’t specify (it’s estimated at $1.5 million) to buy 150 acres for a living-history museum. George Husmann, who once owned those acres, was a legend in winemaking, spending 12 years in Missouri before moving to the Napa Valley.
Dierberg also has vineyards in California—three of them, all in the Santa Barbara area.
“It sort of pulls you in,” he says. “One day I mentioned to a New York investment banker that I’d been in California looking for a vineyard, and he said, ‘We have a bank in California I bet you couldn’t say no to.’ I said, ‘Oh, I can say no to most things.’ Then he told me what it was, and I said, ‘You’re right.’”
The fourth-largest bank in Canada had gone broke, and everything had been sold except three branches in California. Weary of the trustees—who were stalling because it was such a nice place to go in the winter—the Federal Reserve pushed the sale, and Dierberg had his pick of properties. He chose coastal banks, and then he asked his new employees what the nicest part of Santa Barbara County was. “Happy Canyon Road,” they said—and that’s where he bought land.
He now has three vineyards, in a triangle, about 20 miles apart. The Dierberg Vineyard is 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean and partly encircled by the Sierra Madre, with small hills, warm sun and ocean breezes yielding a perfect balance of ripeness and acidity. Then there’s Drum Canyon Vineyard and the pièce de resistance, Star Lane Vineyard—an old ranch in the San Rafael Mountains, the grapes planted in sheltered canyons on steep hillsides. The Dierbergs’ house is built high, reminding them of Anthony Quinn’s film A Walk in the Clouds, and the vineyards unfold beneath it on land once roamed by famous racehorses (not to mention Roy Rogers’ horse Trigger).
Dierberg also has what’s been estimated as a $2 million share in the Vintage Wine Trust, a real-estate investment trust created to acquire vineyards, wineries and other assets related to the wine industry.
His own California wines are now sold in 27 states for $25 to $50 a bottle, a bit pricier than the Hermannhof vintages. Careful as a father with a stepchild, he’s quick to point out the radical differences in climate, soil and vine stock. Norton grapes tolerate Missouri’s subzero temperatures with hearty exuberance, not delicacy. And however polite his assessments, Dierberg knows
the difference.
“I’ve had 100-point wine,” he says. “I was at a chateau in Bordeaux, at a wine party, and it was midnight. I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I were in a swimming pool, swimming in this wine? Stroke and take a gulp. Stroke and take a gulp.’”
Why is wine so magical to him—is it the French winemaker in his blood? He starts to shrug off the question, but a smile tugs at the corners of his lips. “It brings people together,” he says, “and opens them up.”
“We’re in harvest now; it’s fermenting,” Dierberg says, leading the way down damp stone stairs to the dark Hermannhof cellars. “You are on the Gulf of Mexico right now. See the ripples in the stone? A caveman and cavewoman might have been sunbathing. There are millions of years of difference between that section over there and this one—and we have undiscovered caves yet.”
He continues through the cellars, grinning as he remembers the day Orville Haberle, a legendary old bootlegger, asked, “What are you going to do with this place, Jim?”
“You asking the question means you’ve got an idea,” Dierberg replied.
“Well, maybe we could make some wine and sausage,” said Haberle, who was angling for a job for his adopted Indian son, Tony.
“Orville,” exclaimed Dierberg, “you’d finally be legit!”
They bought antique equipment at farm sales. Haberle stirred the vat. Tony dug out the cellars.
“We called our first wine Orville’s Choice,” recalls Dierberg, still chuckling over Haberle’s bootlegging days. “Once a revenue agent said, ‘Mr. Haberle, can I get up here and look around?’ Orville said, ‘Why, sure you can. I just can’t guarantee you’ll be coming out.’”
As Dierberg continues to restore and add on to Hermann, the layers of memory peel back, past those months in Europe, all the way back to his boyhood. He grew up in Creve Coeur, back when it was farmland and his dad owned a general store. “I took the bus to Clayton for high school, where we were called hayseeds,” Dierberg says. “What I remember is the smell of grass and the open fields of corn. I’d walk to our family store a mile away, and six cars would pass. We knew everybody. It was a town smaller than Hermann is now.” He looks into the distance. “Creve Coeur changed. We’ve all got more money because of what has happened around us, but we lost a lot. We lost community.”
And community is what he loves in Hermann. He’s giving the town places to celebrate its history and local talent, and he’s trying to draw more artists and craftspeople into the fold, filling the town with residents who will fight to preserve its beauty.
And if Wal-Mart wanted to come into Hermann? Would he fight them? “I’d be spitting into the wind,” he says. “I don’t have any power.” He sighs. “People don’t realize what they have until they lose it.”
He climbs up the Himmelstreppe (literally, “steps to heaven”) and looks out at the Missouri River. “Think 50 years from now,” he urges. “How are they going to use that river? I did the Danube thing, toured the rivers and breweries of Austria. The Danube looks three times faster than this, and they have boats out there. They do all kinds of things on the Danube.”
Dierberg sees the future as clearly as he does the past. Last year, when someone asked who the designer of the Gutenberg Corridor was, he said, “There isn’t one. I already know what it’s going to look like. I’ve got it in my head.” He bought the Festhalle—then a Chrysler dealership—15 years ago,
envisioning exactly what it’s become. He made the bathrooms replicas of those in a castle in Frankfurt, commissioned a Bacchus and cherubs from a German woodcarver, bought four fountains from small towns in Europe.
In December, the annual Kristkindl Markt will be held at the Festhalle, with chestnuts roasting on an open fire, carols played on the grand piano, wild persimmon–and–black walnut steamed pudding and an appearance by Father Christmas, dressed in deep-burgundy crushed velvet with faux-mink trim.
Listening to the ladies on the committee plan Father Christmas’ “bag of switches for bad little boys and girls,” Dierberg shakes his head. “Hermann doesn’t have any
of those.”
