Napa at Last Light
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph
Map of Napa County
Dramatis Personae
Foreword
Prologue: Monticello West
I. This Earth Is Theirs
Chapter 1 Master and Slave
Chapter 2 White Elephants
Chapter 3 The Legacy Thing
II. Carrying the Defect
Interlude: The Velvet Rope
Chapter 4 American First-Growth
Chapter 5 Hands Across the Sea
Chapter 6 Orwell’s Plow
III. Village and Vine
Interlude: Uber
Chapter 7 Bubbly
Chapter 8 Our Town
Chapter 9 Alive on Arrival
IV. On Howell Mountain
Interlude: The Sanctity of Stuff
Chapter 10 Waiting for Fire
Chapter 11 Wildlake
Chapter 12 The Death of Shame
V. Capell Creek
Interlude: Arise!
Chapter 13 The Riddled Rabbit
Chapter 14 The Grandmother Tree
Chapter 15 Enocracy
VI. Water into Wine
Interlude: The Drip
Chapter 16 The Rutherford Dust Society
Chapter 17 Fifty Feet from Forever
Chapter 18 Chinatown
VII. Life in the Anthropocene
Interlude: The Plea
Chapter 19 Voices
Chapter 20 2050
Chapter 21 Jefferson’s Ghost
Epilogue: Wildlake Revisited
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
For beloved Brooklyn and Cooper
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Prometheus Unbound
They’s comin’ a thing that’s gonna change the whole country.
—John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Note: The names below all appear in the narrative. A founder in most cases made wine at some point, vintner is mostly an ornamental title nowadays, and growers are often farmers who no longer do the actual work. Citizens have become more than bystanders at the twin spectacle of celebrity agriculture and marketing.
Founders:
Jay Corley (Monticello)
Jack and Jamie Davies (Schramsberg)
James and George Goodman (Eschol)
John Benson (Far Niente)
Robert Mondavi (Robert Mondavi Winery)
Gustave Niebaum (Inglenook)
Georges de Latour (Beaulieu)
Tiburcio Parrott (Miravalle)
Jacob and Frederick Beringer (Beringer Vineyards)
Alfred Loving Tubbs (Chateau Montelena)
Peter Newton (Newton Vineyard)
Mike Grgich (Grgich Hills Estate)
Warren Winiarski (Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars)
Jack Cakebread (Cakebread Cellars)
Dave Phinney (The Prisoner, Orin Swift Cellars)
Randy Dunn (Dunn Vineyards)
Larry Turley (Turley Wine Cellars)
Delia Viader (Viader Vineyards & Winery)
John Williams (Frog’s Leap Winery)
Stu Smith (Smith-Madrone Vineyards & Winery)
David Graves (Saintsbury)
Charlie Wagner (Caymus Vineyards)
Ric Forman (Forman Vineyard)
Joe Heitz (Heitz Wine Cellars)
Volker Eisele (Volker Eisele Family Estate)
Vintners:
Gil Nickel (Far Niente)
Francis Ford Coppola (Niebaum-Coppola, Inglenook)
Mike Robbins (Spring Mountain Vineyard/Miravalle)
Jim Barrett (Chateau Montelena)
Bill Harlan (Harlan Estate, Bond)
Fred Schrader (Schrader Cellars)
Jean-Charles Boisset (Raymond Vineyards, Buena Vista)
Christian Moueix (Dominus)
Koerner Rombauer (Rombauer Vineyards)
Jayson Pahlmeyer (Pahlmeyer Estates)
Craig and Kathryn Hall (Sacrashe Vineyard, HALL Wines)
Garen and Shari Staglin (Staglin Family Vineyard)
Mike Davis (Davis Estates)
Growers:
Andy Pelissa (Pelissa Vineyard)
Tom May (Martha’s Vineyard)
Andy Beckstoffer (Beckstoffer To Kalon Vineyard)
Tom Gamble (Gamble Family Vineyards)
Inheritors:
Will Harlan (Harlan Estate, Promontory)
Peter Jr. and Marc Mondavi (Charles Krug Winery)
Bo Barrett (Chateau Montelena)
John Daniel Jr. (Inglenook)
Robin Lail (Lail Vineyards)
Hugh Davies (Schramsberg Vineyards)
Beth Novak Milliken (Spottswoode Estate Vineyard & Winery)
Rich Salvestrin (Salvestrin Winery)
Mike and Kristina Dunn (Dunn Vineyards)
Andrew Hoxsey (Napa Wine Company)
Citizens:
Geoff Ellsworth (Citizens’ Voice)
Susan Kenward (Citizens’ Voice)
Jim Wilson (Defenders of East Napa Watersheds)
Mike Hackett (Save Rural Angwin)
David and Cindy Heitzman (Circle Oaks Homes Association)
Dan Mufson et al. (Napa Vision 2050)
Chris Malan (Living Rivers Council)
Lois Battuello (Freelance Researcher)
Commentators:
Robert M. Parker Jr.
Elin McCoy
Jon Bonné
FOREWORD
A journalistic foray to California in the early 1980s led me into gorgeous mountains bracketing a narrow valley unlike any place I had ever known. I grew up in the faraway South, yet here on the far side of the same continent were distinct similarities to the place I had left behind. Like the South, many in the Napa Valley were related, they helped each other, shared and traded things as southerners might (equipment, knowledge, wine) and intermarried with a bit less alacrity than in rural Tennessee. But in Napa they raised children to take over what was an odd combination of farming, high craft, and an almost religious belief in the God-given rightness of “the cause”—not states’ rights, but their ability to make wine as good as anyone’s, anywhere.
The established families were agricultural, and a few of the scions rocketed into roles for which they weren’t prepared, like Jett Rink in Edna Ferber’s Giant, or stories out of William Faulkner’s fiction, with sunstruck approximations of the Snopeses. Other accounts read like latter-day narratives from Genesis, such as the brothers Mondavi brawling in the vineyard and the expulsion of Robert, that family’s own prodigal son. There were actual southerners, too, including a vineyard owner from Tidewater Virginia who would be an ongoing player in Napa’s rapidly unfolding, truly phenomenal success.
The valley I came to know in the 1980s is reflected in my book Napa: The Story of an American Eden, a social history comprised of the stories of latter-day founders of great wine estates and those working to perfect their own sometimes idiosyncratic visions. These harkened back to the vineyards of France, Germany, and Italy, and from extended families and the collective exp
eriences of others emerged a critical and financial success of a sort never before seen in America.
As important was the idealism of newcomers whose energy and imagination made the new Napa possible, names like Forman, Winiarski, Heitz, Davies. Crucial to the management of so much success were growers, winemakers, and citizens whose names still ring in the clear, sun-laved air of Northern California: Pelissa, Erskine, Cronk, Eisele, Malan, all pushing for control of the mounting bonanza that now threatens to emulate California’s traditional boom-and-bust past best symbolized by the Gold Rush.
The 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s were in retrospect years of great innocence and promise, the latter soon realized and the former rapidly diminishing. My book’s sequel, The Far Side of Eden, dealt with the growing conflict between new wealth and individual freedom in the final years of the twentieth century, and many of the same people, older and sometimes wiser, appear in its pages, as do some of their children. Land-use issues loomed large, and still do; so does the phenomenon “lifestyle” vintner, inherent in the conflict between development and the agrarian ideal.
The latter is embodied in the agricultural preserve established in 1968 to prevent the valley from becoming another extended bedroom community and is still a matter of contention. Cautionary tales included that of a maverick whose ambitious vineyard development set off a gargantuan legal struggle with the Sierra Club and a homegrown environmental wunderkind, an epic battle that sharply divided the valley. But the real subject of that book—and of the one in hand—is the valley itself.
This last of the trilogy comes at the end of an era and combines narrative journalism with personal reflection. It is based on three decades of note-taking in a place I came to know and love, and in ways to mourn. Readers of the first two books will recognize many of these characters, but some, like the times, have changed, reemerging in new roles. Burnished by experience, they and the valley are drawn in the harsher light of a long year stretching from the conclusion of a severe drought in 2015 to the eve of the national election of 2016 that ushered in a new era for the nation and the valley.
This book is not about wine but about place and people. The reader doesn’t need intimate familiarity with viticulture, or the exclusive world now representing it, to see this as a unique American story with great value in its own right, and a shared relevance. Wine isn’t just another example of corporate commercialism, for the traditions it represents have always stood apart. They no longer do. Napa was so blessed that its land and communities should have withstood the excesses of the system, should have survived in their own right even as others passed by in America’s ongoing maelstrom of development and greed. But it has not and best serves now as a microcosm of a country where opportunity and the ever-intensifying struggle for financial supremacy have trumped even the most sacrosanct ideas and institutions.
The story begins with a ruminative look at the mysterious subject itself, wine, and its influence beyond social cohesion, money, and sensory appeal. We then move through Napa’s once-great wine estates, Brigadoon-like visions that became white elephants and had such influence on the desires of the inheritors. Collectively they and their imitators changed the valley: citizens, laws, vistas, the place itself. Avatars of our time, some positive, some decidedly not, these all reflect more ambition than vision in a place whose fate is unavoidably tied up in theirs.
Not so long ago Napa was thought of in Edenic terms, but today is as closely defined by conflict as by wine. Characters weave in and out of the narrative, for there is no other way to accurately and fairly portray the valley. Key players distinguish themselves by deeds, not properties, and this will leave its own lasting impression on readers.
Two words—the valley—denote both the flats laid down through time by the Napa River, and the steep forested hills on either side that are the wellsprings of the valley’s water. Here, real lives form a matrix of connections and sensibilities around this precious resource that will ultimately determine how their stories play out. A few characters have been assigned pseudonyms, or in some cases, no name at all, often at their own request.
Five of the seven sections are devoted to specific struggles similar to those all over the country but heightened by Napa’s fame and outsized concentration of wealth and notoriety. Complete in themselves but interrelated, these stories are bound together by common fears and common foes, with overlapping casts and, in some cases, common dreams. And deep within them lurks the potential of their unraveling.
Much rides on the outcomes of our latter-day Gilded Age, the enemy personified by abject self-interest—individual and corporate—and by co-opted officials, judges, and representatives of the presumed civic order. Altered lives, captive dreams, the loss of virtue—all reflect like facets on the main character of the book, the valley itself: extraordinarily blessed with natural beauty, globally recognized, relegated now to the vagaries of human ambition.
The struggles are in their way all between profit-driven schemes and the preservation of places and resources. Unless the characters can agree on and effect sustainable development, the things that render life worth living here and elsewhere will disappear and this lovely corner of the earth will become unfit not just for vines but also for people.
The challenge is relevant to the arc of human history going back to the origins of wine itself and, as is true wherever wine is made, place is inseparable from the voices of the people living in it. Their stories, old and new, touch us, whether outlandish or all too human, comingling like lees at the bottom of an old bottle brought up at last into the light, now uncorked.
PROLOGUE:
Monticello West
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
There’s no little mountain, just the flat floor of the Napa Valley with a backdrop of dry, distant chaparral. The winery is called Monticello nonetheless and is much like its namesake outside Charlottesville, Virginia, but smaller. None of Jefferson’s beloved Chinese Chippendale railing above the faux-Palladian porch, and the geometric wood tiles in the entrance hall are not in Monticello’s pattern. “When I saw how long it took the carpenter to lay those tiles,” says the owner, a retired National Security Agency linguist named Jay Corley, “I thought, ‘My God, I’ll go broke.’ ” But then, spending too much money on your house is very Jeffersonian.
Corley, in khakis and Stanford University windbreaker, bears no resemblance to the third president of the United States, yet his white hair gleams in the refracted autumn sunlight as Jefferson’s does in the well-known painting by George Peter Alexander Healy. I interviewed Corley twenty-five years ago for the book I was then writing and remember him sitting at his desk after lunch, nursing a glass of red and discoursing on the challenges of selling what was still considered in some circles an un-American product. I was struck then by how effortlessly a former spy of sorts became a “vintner.” But transformation was the hallmark in Napa in the wake of the Paris tasting of 1976 that favorably compared California wines with top-ranking French ones and catapulted the valley and its estate owners into vinous stardom.
Wine has triumphed in Napa, more than two centuries after Thomas Jefferson envisioned something similar taking place on his own turf. I have often wondered what the author of the Declaration of Independence would make of wine’s prominence in California’s landscapes. It was Jefferson’s hope that grapes would provide an alternative to tobacco that had already worn out the commonwealth’s soil and that affordable wine would wean the yeoman farmer from hard cider and whiskey and help civilize him. “No nation is drunken,” Jefferson wrote plaintively in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, “where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.”
Monticello Vineyards west is a relatively modest endeavor by Napa’s standards, yet it hardly represents that agrarian ideal. Jefferson considered farmers essential to the survival of democracy
because they were tied to the land by living on and working it; the discreet planted parcel was the farmer’s preserver and the farmer, by virtue of his devotion to the land, the preserver of the nation.
Working in vineyards—which could also be done by women and children—was an essential part of that vision. But here such labor is done by outsiders—many of them undocumented immigrants—and the aspirations of the vintner class are much more akin to those of the aristocracy that Jefferson deplored even though he belonged to it.
Jay Corley’s prosperous children run what amounts to an upscale roadside attraction offering well-made but expensive wine while the paterfamilias expounds on things Jeffersonian. “The proportions of the dining room are about right,” he says, showing me around. “Jefferson would come in early and sit and read until the rest of the family gathered for dinner.”
There’s no signature dumbwaiter, and the wine cellar below, with its temperature controls and plush decor, is full of New World cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay that didn’t exist in Jefferson’s time, rather than the wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Germany, and northern Italy that Jefferson prized.
“Jefferson was all about quality,” Corley says, which is true of what Jefferson drank. Wine was a fact of daily life at the real Monticello, but usually consumed after a meal. Though Jefferson liked his Latours and Haut-Brions, paragons of structure and depth, his precise tastes are unclear. Of a wine he encountered on his European pilgrimage in 1787 outside Turin, he wrote: “There is a red wine of Nebiule made in this neighborhood which is very singular. It is about as sweet as the silky Madeira, as astringent on the palate as Bordeaux, and as brisk as Champagne.”
He imported two dozen varieties of Vitis vinifera from Europe and had them planted on a single acre on the south slope of Monticello. Filippo Mazzei was brought over from Tuscany for the purpose, but Jefferson lost interest in the enterprise and never spent a moment actually working in the vineyard, so he’s not a good example of his own agrarian ideal, either. But his ultimate wish was not “dear” wine, but the sort most people could afford, and the high prices and high octane of Napa’s cabernet sauvignon (“rocket juice”), often pushing 16 percent alcohol, would have shocked him.