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Yahoo!Santa Barbara has long been a gracious place, though lately it’s become a bit more exclusive. The death at 93 of Ralph Auf der Heide—writer, artist, and cofounder of the Wine Cask empire—made me reminisce of a time when the city was smaller yet somehow freer and more sophisticated. For friends of Ralph, of course, it’s his stolid yet sweetly funny company we will miss most. After that, it’s a now-diminished vision of civility and pleasure. Ralph’s departure feels like the end of an era.
Nobody who knew him would call Ralph a relic, though. He was too funny and alive to ever seem quaint, as the tributes that poured forth during the memorial service at the Live Oak Unitarian Hall richly attested. Born in Los Angeles in 1915, Ralph attended Beverly Hills High School and later studied English literature at San Francisco State, where he met a teenaged girl named Lisl, the daughter of an Austrian emigrant Ralph was tutoring. After he took Lisl to her junior prom, they became an item, according to Lisl, who said, “My mother’s lessons got shorter and mine got longer.” Their love affair lasted 67 years.
Ralph was compelled to put aside his pleasures for the real work of supporting his family, with a Depression and a World War in the background. Yet he soon began incorporating his passion for music into his financial life, selling Hi-Fi equipment and records. But it was his love of fine wine that introduced most of us to Ralph.
In the early 1970s, Ralph, with a handful of friends and fellow investors, opened the Wine Cask in a corner of El Paseo not far from other pleasure-oriented shops like Frances Dwight’s Under the Greenwood Tree, the Coffee Bean (exotic then), the Poster Shop, and Hammer’s Books—a cultural oasis now dominated by law offices. Originally, the Wine Cask was more like Trader Joe’s, great wines at shockingly good value, though they also stocked first-growth European vintages. The genius of the store was Ralph’s illuminating presence, but the timing was ingenious, too, opening precisely when interest in California wines exploded and as Santa Ynez Valley vintners first appeared. Ralph taught well-attended wine classes, first at the former Adult Education storefront on the Westside and later in his and Lisl’s home.
And he was a funny host. The labels on wine bottles in the store sometimes bore references to Bacchae and Maenads. Widely read in ancient literature, he employed not the usual jargon of wine connoisseurship—reds were not only “voluptuous” but “sybaritic.” It was cliché-free shopping. Likewise, Ralph’s classes employed unconventional methods that undermined snobbery while they underscored appreciation. He used to begin by passing out glasses full of the components of wine—tannins, oak flavors, and the like. One night, a particularly well-heeled woman poised over a glass she held, sniffing savagely, and thrust the glass into Ralph’s nose, demanding to know what that fragrance was. “Hand lotion,” said Ralph with sonorous finality. Classes normally ended in laughter.
Ralph was serious as well, suffering no fools. (Although he did talk to me.) He and Lisl were inveterate letter-to-the-editor writers until their disgust with the daily paper led to their oft-proclaimed boycott of its pages.
But perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Ralph’s life, besides his devotion to Lisl and family, was his sudden immersion in art at the age of 72. After a trip to Germany where Ralph rediscovered a form of painting on glass that is echoed in Chinese snuff bottles, painting backward so that details had to be painted first and backgrounds last, he took off with the form, and, by his own accounting, was shown in nine galleries and more than a dozen shows. Dick Cavett and Ted Danson have original Auf der Heides.
He published articles about art and wine and wrote an important book on wine-making. Characteristically, Ralph was working on two books, which he hoped to publish before he died, but unfortunately did not see them into print.
Lisl said that Ralph never believed in his own mortality. Perhaps it was something earned by surviving the turbulence of that last century with integrity intact. Ralph exemplified a willingness to be true to himself while caring for the fate of those around him. He wrote, “If my paintings have any meaning at all it is because they depict my observation of the human condition in its most whimsical, absurd, conflict-and-surprise-filled states.” This was a spirit that helped sustained this city for many years. I hope more people like Ralph are waiting to be born.
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