Saving Our Skins

by Caro Feely

  The manure acts like a starter culture for soil fertility. A tiny dose – 100 grams per hectare, about a handful per football field – is like placing a drop of yoghurt starter culture in a large bucket of milk. It creates a massive change, promotes root activity and stimulates microbiotic life in the soil. While the preparation sounds crazy when you hear it explained – who would have thought of putting cow dung in a cow horn for six months? – it has been proven to create a powerful tonic, with nearly a thousand times more microbiotic activity than the same cow dung placed in a clay pot for the same period.

  The other key preparation, 'the 501', is ground quartz – silica – mixed with rainwater and packed in a cow horn, buried in spring and then dug up in autumn, the opposite timing to the 500. It enhances the light metabolism of the plant and her photosynthetic processes. Again, a tiny dose generates significant results. The microparticles of the quartz are like mirrors bringing light and heat into the vineyard. Instead of spraying as night falls, onto the ground, as we do the 500, the 501 is sprayed at dawn skywards, into the air above the vines.

  When we first started biodynamics we dynamised our preparations in rainwater in a large, smooth-sided, hard-plastic black bin. Wood, copper or concrete are better, but we didn't have the budget. Stirring about 100 litres of water for an hour was a great workout – to do our whole vineyard required about 400 litres. Seán and I each had two bins, working one at a time. I tried doing both at once but found it impossible to co-ordinate. Doing this process a few times not only convinced me that a mechanical dynamiser was necessary, but also how important the dynamisation itself was. At the start the water was like normal water from a tap with a fine smattering of cow dung through it. By the end the water was smooth as silk, languid and soft, totally transformed by the process. If we had had the budget to buy the dynamiser straight away, I would not have understood or experienced this. I was grateful.

  'We have to be careful with the 501 since we already have a lot of heat and light here,' said Barney.

  We could see: the buildings were beautiful, with warm curved walls in natural tones and beautiful tiles, but organised with large overhangs and terraces to protect from the heat, like a Mexican hacienda. In their grand event-room, the ceiling was a ladder of wood beams, great black-and-white photos decorated the walls and the furniture was handmade by Barney from oak barrels. Tasting in a room that was invitingly warm in temperature and colour, filled with books and gift items, we discovered their wines. They were beautiful and hot, the high alcohols almost impossible to avoid with the climate they had. Their challenge was too much sun, while ours was sometimes the opposite.

  I felt inspired. It was idyllic, well planned and beautifully constructed. Like Bonny Doon's tasting room, it gave Seán and me ideas for the professional tasting space that was forming in our heads. But before we could get back to the Dordogne and start planning the project, we had more Californian vineyards to visit and a couple of days with my sister. I was bursting with excitement to see her. It had been too long.

  Chapter 14

  The American Dream

  It was drizzling as we headed up Napa's Golden Mile to our next destination. A door or two up from Opus One, the joint venture between French wine royalty the Rothschilds and American wine royalty the Mondavi, was Cakebread. No showy entrance, just a tiny wooden sign near the mailbox that we nearly missed, understated but chic.

  'Wine and food pairing' visits were on my wish list of activities to offer at Terroir Feely and this trip to the US was a chance to see what innovative winemakers were doing. Research had led me to the Cakebread Cellars wine-and-food-pairing tour, but it was only available in season on certain days and our visit was out of season. I had a vague recollection of the name; Jack Cakebread had been on a course at Stanford with my dad back in the eighties. My dad was a 'neat freak' and very organised – when we first moved to France he called our house a 'corridor of crisis'. Now his organisational trait was paying off; he still had Jack's contact details, despite not having been in touch for years. On receiving my dad's email, Jack's wife Dolores had generously offered us a complimentary tour and a private visit.

  The style was American farmhouse with wooden barns, the tasting room set up rustically between oak barrels and pallets of boxed wine right in the centre of the working zone. It was the lowest season possible but there were clients passing through constantly.

  White blossoms on the miniature cherry trees and daffodils in full bloom announced spring in the central courtyard garden where, Dolores explained, they held their wine-club events. The Cakebreads achieved a homely family feeling despite being a large operation with six full-time staff working on wine-club marketing and organisation alone. They had begun as a 'Mom and Pop shop', working a small parcel of land at the same time as holding down their day jobs in San Francisco. The first year they produced just one barrel of wine. From one barrel they went to two barrels, and so on.

  Dolores introduced us to Ted, a wine guide, to continue our tour through the barrel-storage barn, stacked higher than I had ever seen, into another section of wood-panelled rooms with large panoramic windows and doors onto the vines. Sliding wood partitions could disappear into the walls to open up several small rooms into one large room. It was clever, simple and stylish.

  On a dark, solid-wood table looking onto their hibernating vineyards were four settings with four aperitifs and a number of different-shaped crystal glasses. Prawn marinated in mango was paired with Cakebread's top sauvignon blanc; the Reserve Chardonnay was matched with a teeny tasty pie; the smoky zinfandel was so perfectly matched with a smoked sweet potato I would never forget it; and Cakebread's best cabernet sauvignon was paired with a tiny nugget of venison.

  Wowed by the genius and delighted that my dodgy stomach was holding up, we followed Ted back to Jack's office via the kitchen, where we met Brian Streeter, one of two professional chefs employed full time. The pairing triumphs did not happen by chance. They were the result of hard work and investment. Brian and his team were testing the recipes for their second recipe book that was about to go to the publisher.

  Jack had been a bomber pilot in World War Two and now, in his eighties, he still came to work at the winery every day. Most of the activity had been handed over to his two sons but he was still the figurehead, overseeing things from his magnificent light-filled office with views onto the vineyards and garden, surrounded by awards, accolades and photos with famous people. The Cakebreads were icons of the American dream, an example of how working hard and smart – with a bit of luck thrown in – could pay off.

  Before we left I bought a copy of the first recipe book, and that evening I became engrossed in their story of how it all started with a little piece of land on what had become Napa's Golden Mile.

  From Cakebread we headed west to Sonoma to meet Kathleen Inman. She farmed next door to a vineyard owned by a colleague from Dublin, who had become a lecturer in San Jose. His vineyard wasn't organic and he outsourced the farming then sold the grapes, but he knew his neighbours and had highly recommended Kathleen, knowing our organic bent and her skill. How lucky that turned out to be.

  Kathleen's wines were powerful, but with a feminine touch and finesse that was ethereal and magic. They had terroir. Her organic vines were offset by a background of lime-green spring growth, carefully hoed beneath the vines and mowed between the rows. Across the road my colleague's vineyard made me want to cry, his old sculpted-trunk zinfandel vines surviving in a herbicide desert.

  Kathleen had organised a comparative tasting of her wines alongside her other neighbour, DeLoach, an organic and biodynamic estate owned by Boisset, a powerful Burgundy family. Their single-vineyard pinot noir from Maboroshi vineyard on the Sonoma Coast hills was, like Kathleen's wine, true terroir. Even Thierry was impressed. But the terroir wines were not budget; nothing was under fifty dollars. Wines selling at less than twenty dollars from these cellar doors were typically bulk wines sourced from conventional growers. Our own single-vineyar
d, terroir-driven wines were worthy of higher prices – they cost more to produce, but we hadn't worked out how to sell them for what they were worth. We debated how to achieve this en route back to Sonoma town.

  Mid-discussion we spotted a sign for Benziger Family Winery; it had been on my wish list so we took a detour. The farm was nestled in a beautiful valley bowl surrounded by vineyards. I ran inside and tried my best charm to wangle a free tour from the tasting-room staff. They called the vineyard manager on an internal phone. Dave arrived looking tired. He explained that they were doing double time since vineyard staff had been cut as part of a cost-saving initiative to cope with the recession. Even a haven like this was not spared. The vineyard hands were the first to go. He flicked his hand towards the tasting room, still bursting with staff, and his face said it all. Clients saw the front face, not the vineyard.

  He organised a visit for us the following day, followed by a special reserve tasting – all on the house. 'Caro, le tour guide extraordinaire!' said Thierry as I shared the news.

  The following day, part way through the tasting, one of the Benziger brothers joined us. I gave a brief introduction to ourselves and the Daulhiacs.

  'Thierry is a seventh-generation winegrower?' asked Bob.

  'That's right,' I said.

  'You sure?' he asked. Thierry nodded; this much he could understand – many of the American accents we had encountered on the trip so far had had him and Isabelle foxed.

  'Seventh generation! Wow, that is really something. Here even the oldest wine families can boast three at most.'

  We tasted the Tribute Red Meritage Bordeaux-style blend, rich and full-bodied, then a pinot noir farmed on the coastal hills.

  'That is beautiful wine,' I said.

  'But it's not seventh-generation wine!' he laughed. 'How long are you staying? Do you have time to join us for a barbecue tomorrow?'

  We had to decline since we were leaving the next day. We were discovering that Americans were very hospitable, but we were also realising that the US was about marketing and brand. Many of the wineries were selling conventional, organic and biodynamic under the same brand name, sometimes talking about biodynamic as if it applied to all their wines when it was often only true of a small part of the range. It confused the customer, just like the advert I had described earlier in the trip.

  In France the whole farm, and hence the whole brand, used for the estate wine had to be biodynamic. We could not use one name for conventional, organic and biodynamic estate and non-estate grown wines. It was seen as too confusing and made our fraud squad upset.

  The only biodynamic place we visited that didn't appear to be doing both was Ceàgo, although looking at their website later I found a pinot noir under their brand that was from elsewhere and not certified biodynamic. Perhaps even they were tempted to take this path following the huge swing to pinot noir created by the film Sideways – another sign of marketing and fashion's power at work. Sideways is a hilarious wine lover's cult classic that lambasts merlot and deifies pinot noir. After the film's success, sales of merlot-based wines in the US dropped significantly – some articles suggested by a third – and pinot noir sales rose even more than that, though some of the wine sold as pinot noir was not pinot noir. Vineyards take several years to grow, and the world's stocks of pinot noir vineyards versus merlot vineyards could not have changed overnight the way the stats had.

  The American wine buyers and consumers drinking the fraudulent wine had no complaints about the product. It was discovered by the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes, a department of the French government with a dedicated police force (the fraud squad). Part of this department's role was to validate labelling so consumers could be sure that what they bought was what it said on the label. A loose marketing statement could land you in jail. Selling a blend of merlot and shiraz – or syrah, as shiraz is called in France – as pinot noir resulted in a suspended jail sentence with a fine of over €50,000 for the wine professionals in Languedoc-Roussillon that masterminded the fraud.

  Visiting Whole Foods in Sonoma that evening, a chain that we thought was exclusively organic, we estimated the wine shelves had at most 10 per cent organically grown wine. I was disappointed and depressed. If this haven of organic products wasn't offering organically grown wine in a serious way, perhaps we were fighting a losing battle.

  But I knew it was a worthwhile battle. If wine lovers knew about the dangers of pesticides, herbicides and systemic fungicides that were rampant in some conventional wines, they would be demanding organic. A study in France based on a hundred randomly selected French wines showed that the average wine had 300 times the level of pesticides that are allowed in our drinking water, and one of the samples had 1,650 times the level. Mainstream resellers and journalists were not educating the wine buyer; they had too much to lose if they weren't selling conventional wines or advertising them. Almost every visitor to our vineyard, however, left with a new perspective, saying they would seek out organic – the only way of being sure your wine is not host to chemical residues.

  Staying in Sonoma we found a classic American diner open early 'til late. They offered the full breakfast, complete with maple-syrup pancakes. From there we could see a traditional yellow school bus pass each morning. The timber houses on the street opposite had large porches out front and mailboxes next to the gate on their white picket fences. It was classic America. As we cleaned the last morsels off our plates, Thierry lamented once again, 'Mais où sont les cow-boys?'

  We still hadn't found a cowboy and time was running out. After being on the road back to LA for a few hours that evening, we agreed it was time to stop. The GPS said the nearest town was Paso Robles. That suited us perfectly, since it was a famous wine town.

  The GPS found a few hotels and we stopped at the first. It was a little expensive but looked good. They were fully booked, however. The next-door hotel looked OK and fit the budget better, so we waited at reception to check availability. Behind us we heard 'clink, clink, clink'. We turned to find two cowboys kitted out in hats, chaps and spurs taking up a spot in the queue. Behind them a crowd of cowboys was gathered in the car park. It was surreal. Seeing our surprise, the receptionist pointed to the poster behind her.

  'It's the State Cutting Horse Championships. That's why the hotels are full, but luckily I have two rooms left.' Thierry and Seán exchanged broad smiles. Cutting horses are trained to cut specific cattle away from the group; a key part of being a cowboy. It was effectively the state cowboy championships. 'Can we visit?' I asked. 'Sure, anyone can go and watch. It's in the showgrounds up the road.'

  She pointed to where we would be able to see more cowboys than we imagined possible.

  At the steakhouse across the road the mechanical bronco was bucking non-stop and almost every seat held a cowboy. When Isabelle ordered a beer she was asked for her ID to prove that she was over twenty-one. Thierry, Seán and I reached to offer ours. The waitress shook her head. Unlike blonde, apple-cheeked, fresh-faced Isabelle, we looked like we were well over the limit. We laughed, then discussed having a go on the bronco. I went up close and read the warning sign, then returned to announce that it was too dangerous for oldies like Seán, Thierry and myself but OK for a youngster like Isabelle.

  Before the cutting horse championships we hit the local cowboy shop. The Boot Barn was a warehouse selling everything cowboy from rhinestone hats to pink cowboy boots. Seán bought a pair: definitely not pink. The arena contained a large knot of bullocks being herded tight by one of the organisers. We scrambled over a barrier of iron bars, crossed the animal walkway filled with perfectly groomed horses and climbed into the stands. The speaker above us announced the next competitor. A beautiful, young, blonde cowgirl cantered into the ring on a bay horse. She dropped her reins, leaving the horse and marked bullock to dance like two worldclass footballers in a classic set of dummy moves. We were gripped. I got chatting to the lady next to me. She owned a ranch near
by and explained the sport, deflating our cowboy bubble.

  'No one is a cowboy any more. This is all about the money. The best cutting horse wins and the person who can afford the best cutting horse has the most money. Most of the top contenders out there are wealthy lawyers or dentists or bankers who do this for a hobby. A real cowboy couldn't afford to do this sport. These horses can dance but they probably couldn't survive one harsh night out on the range.'

  We watched a few more contenders, including a slight, older, dark-haired lady and two older men. They were good and their horses better, but they weren't the young cowboys with rippling muscles I had expected. There were indeed no real cowboys left.

  But American hospitality was large; my new friend invited us to visit their ranch outside Paso Robles that afternoon. Unfortunately, we had to get to LA. On our way out, the beautiful blonde cowgirl was walking along the dust track just ahead of us.