Five decades ago, George Cooper, a World War II and NASA test pilot, planted grapes in Saratoga’s Santa Cruz Mountains and launched the family-run Cooper-Garrod Vineyards. Now Cooper’s son, Bill, and his wife, Doris, are ready to pass not only the winery, but George’s high-flying legacy along to the next generation.
Cooper-Garrod doesn’t just produce chardonnays and pinot noirs. George’s descendants created a line of six Test Pilot wine blends to honor his contributions to aviation, aeronautics and the nascent space program of the mid-20th century.
George met his wife, Louise Garrod — of Saratoga’s Garrod Farms — at UC Berkeley, where he was studying mining and engineering. George was a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corp, or ROTC, when World War II broke out. Called up to active duty, he soon transferred to flight training, eventually flying 81 wartime missions, including three during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, for which he was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2012.
When George returned home to the Saratoga farm in 1945, the Ames Research Center was just six years old and operated by NASA’s predecessor, NACA — the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Bill says George promptly “went down and knocked on the front door and said, ‘You need any pilots?’”
George became the chief test pilot for NACA and then NASA for nearly 30 years, flying 145 different types of planes during his tenure. He was a charter member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and a member of the NASA Hall of Fame. And the system he designed — the Cooper-Harper Scale — to make it easier for pilots to communicate with engineers about how various planes handle is still used by test pilots around the world.
After a career of supersonic dives and aircraft carrier landings, George took up a new challenge in the 1970s: viticulture. With cuttings from Paul Masson, the Saratoga winemaker behind La Cresta and later the Mountain Winery, George started growing grapes at Garrod Farms, which had shifted from growing prunes, apricots and hay to offering stables for boarding and riding horses and horse vaulting.
He made his first batch of wine in the bathtub. The winery released its first commercial vintage in 1994.
“It was fun for him,” Doris Cooper says. “It challenged him in terms of the science and the nuts and bolts of it, but there was also the artistic side that made it a lot of fun. Plus it’s something to share around the table.”
George died in 2016, a few weeks shy of his 100th birthday. Even as he aged and his sense of smell diminished, he retained his sharp sense for identifying wines, Doris recalls. “You’d have him taste it, and he could tell you what the varietal was.”
Today, Cooper-Garrod is a certified-organic, sustainable vineyard and winery estate. A new generation of the Cooper-Garrod family, Cory Bosworth and Trevor Garrod, George’s great-nephew, is stepping into leadership roles. And George’s extraordinary cockpit experiences live on, recounted on the labels of Test Pilot wines, which highlight six of the planes that George flew during his career.
The wines
The P-47 Thunderbolt is a blend of cabernet sauvignon and syrah grapes. Cooper flew this plane — adorned with an image of Cal’s Oski bear mascot and the name “Louise” — for 81 missions during World War II and tested an experimental version at Ames with an experimental reversible-pitch propeller as a dive brake. The label recounts the tale of one particularly hair-raising, almost-emergency landing in a hayfield.
The label on the F-86 Sabre Jet, a Left Bank Bordeaux-style blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot, regales wine lovers with the story of George making supersonic flights around the Bay in 1949, triggering sonic booms as he dove through the air. When people complained about the “explosions,” Bill says, Ames moved the tests to Crows Landing in Stanislaus County.
The F-104 Starfighter, a syrah-viognier co-fermentation, was the first plane capable of sustained Mach 2 flight. George called it the “quickest LA-SF flight I ever made!”
The F6F Hellcat, a Right Bank Bordeaux-style cab franc-merlot blend, commemorates George’s work testing that plane’s stability controls. The F7U-3 Cutlass, a cab franc-syrah blend, represents his plane speed tests for carrier landings, which helped improve safety for the Navy’s early Top Guns.
And then, there’s the P-61 Black Widow, a chardonnay and viognier blend with citrus and honeysuckle aromas. It’s named for the plane George flew over Edwards Air Force Base to drop aerodynamic objects from 43,000 feet, using air brakes and parachutes to avoid crash landings. The research was later used for recovering rocket and satellite payloads.
Details: Test Blend wines are $45 per bottle, tasting flights are $22, and charcuterie and other small bites are available for purchase. Cooper-Garrod Vineyards is open from noon to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends at 22645 Garrod Road in Saratoga; garrodfarms.com.