Karl Werner joined the school as a mature man, at the height of his professional powers. He had a great baritone voice, a ‘Germanic’ authority, and the air of a traditional paterfamilias. Given that, it is to his great credit that he immediately recognized Robert as a conscious being, and accepted him as his teacher. Karl never deviated, for one moment, in that regard. Having joined the school, he gave all that he had to it, creating Renaissance Vineyard and Winery, training up all its staff, and bringing the organization to a world class level. In the 1989 VINEXPO Challenge – the apogee of all wine tasting events – Karl’s Special Select Late Harvest 1985 won a gold medal, and Renaissance wines won three out of the four awards given to American wines. He did this in ten years, from nothing, with a bunch of amateurs. When Karl joined the school in 1975 he was thrown in with a generation of impertinent young baby boomers, all imagining themselves to be experts in the Fourth Way. I can’t imagine what friction this caused him, but he bore it so well that we all learned to love him. He was at the center of the great heat of the clearing and cultivating of the 350 acre vineyard, the first harvests, and the creation of the great concrete winery itself. He taught us all he knew. His standards of hygiene in winemaking were light years beyond any of the standard practices used in California at that time. He made lunch for his team every day. And he was more than just a winemaster. In the early years of the school Robert would spend all the money that came in, to create pressure for us and to create new opportunities of different kinds. Karl had an awareness of budgeting; of the infrastructural needs of the property, and of the relation between the costs of different octaves. And he could make a point clearly. He kept things on course and in balance. At one point Robert said, “Karl is the steward of the school.” Just after he died, I was at his home clearing up some RVW things. I happened to see one his notebooks open on a table. The pages were filled with short, well spaced angles of thought, written with a wide nib ballpoint pen – with such force you could see the indentation the pen made on the paper. The writings stood out across the room. They were all quotations from Goethe and Rilke, in the original German. These were clearly sacred things to Karl. They were part of his past, but – to my eye in that moment – they were also the seeds of his future. They were what he had affirmed, what he had made central to himself, and what he had actually finally become. He had done his best, and we are grateful to him.