Starting a Powerful Levain

The book "Breads From LaBrea Bakery" is where I learned how to make starter, with one small change.
My background is in cooking, not baking. French cuisine, actually. My larder always included seven or eight different vinegars, one of which was an unfiltered, unpasteurized cider vinegar. It had a creepy looking slime growing in it, which I surmised was the mother. So, I filtered it through a jelly bag and scraped the captured bacterial culture into my baby starter.
That was six years ago, and man, does our levain have some wang to it! A single tablespoon of that seething mush added to a paste of rye flour and water turned into a ripe rye sour in just one day.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. After I made the starter, I put it in the refrigerator until we opened our bake shop, about a four month period. Now, I greatly respect Jeffrey Hammelman and Professor Calvel, but I must disagree with their assertion that refrigerating sour starter will kill the wild yeast. Boys, the yeast is wild. It lives outside all winter. Ten below and all that, yet still it liveth. How can refrigerating yeast at 40f kill it if it is native to a place with a cold winter climate? To wit, when I fed my hibernating levain it sprang back to life instantly.
My poor starter had been sorely abused by ignorance when I first began using it to make bread. Working twenty hours a day at the shop, I only fed it once daily. It became offensively sour, and weak as far as leavening was concerned; at one point it actually began to liquefy. So I made a habit of feeding it three times a day, which vastly improved the yeast content but diminished it's tang to the level of insipid. I discovered that a bit of whole wheat flour restored it's acidity.
Now the starter sits in the fridge over the weekend and gets fed for a full day before being used in bread. My sourdough is better than the stuff they sell in San Francisco. At least that's what they tell me. (See "Croissants".)