A white elephant is, by definition, “a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of.” The latter is no longer true, but those windows still stare into illusions, not those of the founders but the quarterly reports of private and multinational corporations, for it is these that now own what most Americans think still belong to the illustrious families of old.
A tour of the white elephants serves as a reminder of the transitory nature of families and their enterprises, however grand, and their role in shaping the valley. Remembering the names is less important than registering the collective force of those abandoned dreams. Highway 29 is still the main corridor splitting the valley south to north, where Mount St. Helena glows in the distance and the setting sun turns the ridgeline of the Mayacamas into a bejeweled saw edge. Best settle back as the highway sheds the city of Napa and planes across vineyard land, past ghostly eucalyptus trees pinkish in the evening light. On the right stands a stylish frame barn with air shafts on the roof and overall a sense of optimism from the century before, known then as Eshcol (“a cluster of grapes”). Just beyond Yountville is another grand illusion, Far Niente (“without a care”), nestled in the foothills. Both wineries are owned not by their founders but by inheritors in the modern era of derivative wealth.
The Spanish colonial archway over the entrance to the Robert Mondavi Winery nearby, provocative in the 1960s, looks old-fashioned today. Owned by corporate giant Constellation, the winery as a whole represents the valley’s most striking loss of family control of recent times, and a shelter for yet another alien corporation. But the most impressive white elephant of all stands outside the hamlet of Rutherford and is known as Inglenook.
Purchased by Heublein in the Aquarian 1960s, Inglenook was built in the 1880s by the Vermonter Hamden McIntyre in conjunction with William Mooser, and reflected the vision of its owner, Gustave Niebaum, Finnish trader in furs from the Pribilof Islands and a disciple of the wines of Bordeaux. McIntyre’s skill would defy all attempts by subsequent owners to impose their own ideas on it, including those of the current one, Francis Ford Coppola, who added a wall and installed a gate on the road leading in from Highway 29. In Niebaum’s time, and that of his great-nephew and successor John Daniel Jr., trees lined the driveway, the bases painted white, and beyond them were vines still head-trained and spur-pruned in the antediluvian fifties. Scenes from This Earth Is Mine were shot here by the director, Henry King, starring a wistful Jean Simmons and a forceful Rock Hudson. The cinematic conflict was—and still is today—between honor and profit.
The winery’s towering, creeper-covered stone mass remains an architectural touchstone, the added pergola and outsized, ever-flowing fountain mere clutter, as are tables set in the gravel for tourists eating bread, cheese, and sausage purchased in the winery. This would have maddened old Niebaum, a student of Pasteur, who used to stroll through the winery in white gloves, testing for grime while wine flowed down from the upper stories into huge casks.
Some of these casks still stood in the interior gloom when Heublein bought the place in 1969. Gone now, along with the magic of suggestion, they were replaced with a grandiose staircase built with South American timber shortly after Coppola acquired Inglenook’s edifice in 1975. The thriving trade in boutique clothing and other impulse items persists, and up the stairway the museum pays homage to film and to Coppola, featuring a Tucker sedan left over from his movie about car-making like an unwrapped mummy from the temple of cellulose.
In the beginning Coppola attempted to attach his name to Niebaum’s, as if the two shared something more than real estate, but Inglenook remained itself despite everything Coppola and his staff could do to it. Shades of Niebaum and his great-nephew still hang about the magnificent representation of Northern European architecture and an altogether different sensibility from the faux-Mediterranean additions. As the late John Daniel Jr.’s youngest daughter, the poet Marcia “Marky” Smith, wrote years ago:
Father, your ghost still comes—
So thin in the thickening afternoon
Inglenook ushered the first big corporation into the valley, to the dismay of the natives. Then Heublein/née Inglenook opened its mouth and out stepped a corporate wunderkind the likes of which the valley hadn’t seen, who would become one of the most influential arrivistes in the pivotal mid-twentieth-century invasion of opportunists and agrarian utopians, but again we’re getting ahead of the story.
Wandering in the woods above Inglenook, I once came across the gunboat used in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now stashed amid runty live oaks—a cinematic prop and a reminder of the monumental loss of this property by its original family owners.
Someone who knows Coppola well says the film director paid as much in 2011 to acquire the Inglenook trademark as he paid for the entire property almost forty years before: “I think Francis was trying to heal the past.”
Attempts to equate Niebaum and Coppola were abandoned, but even then the place wasn’t whole, as if sentient wine resisted the best latter-day efforts and Niebaum-Coppola was unable to produce a truly distinctive bottle. Ironically, it wasn’t until Coppola finally hired the assistant winemaker from Château Margaux in Bordeaux that Inglenook began its long journey back to a traditional red wine made from grapes picked early enough to show distinctive but restrained fruit, relatively low alcohol (for Napa), and a hint of the local “Rutherford dust” smell and taste that would have, at last, made old Niebaum happy.
2.
Just across Highway 29, the second-most-influential Napa winery, Beaulieu Vineyard, lacks Inglenook’s regal air. It fed the needs of crafty old Georges de Latour, who had made money at the turn of the twentieth century in cream of tartar, a by-product of winemaking. He sailed prosperously through Prohibition selling wine to California’s Catholic archdioceses. The only notable de Latour architecture is the residence at the end of a long allée of plane trees where the brilliant, diminutive winemaker André Tchelistcheff was brought from Paris in the thirties and de Latour served him a trout dipped from a cold stream on the property.
As late as the early 1990s you could still drive up the lane to the lovely frame structure, all windows and old-world assurance. Even then, no one unexpected would have dared knock unbidden on that august door. De Latour’s daughter, the supremely privileged Madame de Pins, and her titled husband drove her anointed winemaker to distraction producing quality cabernet out of a Dickensian winery. The de Pinses left Beaulieu to their daughter, Dagmar, no match for her American husband addicted to the ease of selling real estate in mid-twentieth-century California. He brokered off Beaulieu behind the backs of wife and mother-in-law in one of the more dubious real estate deals in the valley’s history, the first being the sale of Inglenook.
Heublein acquired Beaulieu, too, and inflicted on the wines a formula that to many destroyed their distinctiveness. Then the next corporate overlord, Diageo, whose first love was spirits, sold off Beaulieu’s precious vineyards so it could lease them back again and not have to bother with farming, not so long before the point of it all.
In St. Helena, farther north, is another foundling now in the corporate embrace, Beringer, owned by an offshoot of Foster’s, the Brobdingnagian Australian brewers. Beringer is a prime example of what can happen to a historic property when it goes through enough sanitizing corporate makeovers. Inspired by Tiburcio Parrott’s Miravalle in 1880, Beringer’s founders were the enterprising brothers who outdid Parrott with their Rhine House next to beautiful elms embowering the highway. Owned by Nestlé for a time, it’s now owned by Treasury, a hamper of brands mostly without vineyards. Beringer possessed good ones and made exceptional wine, before standardization took hold.
Next to Beringer rears old Hamden McIntyre’s second triumph, Greystone Cellars, built in 1889 as a grape-growers’ cooperative and at one time the largest such structure on earth, as well as a testament to successful communal agriculture. Greystone’s lapidary art celebrates the bygone
glory of farmers blessed with good terroir and energy who could fill this magnificent hall, once owned by Heublein and the now-defunct Christian Brothers before being picked up by the Culinary Institute of America, far downstream of Greystone’s original purpose.
One white elephant to hold out against outside corporate ownership sits on the other side of Highway 29, cradled among ancient Douglas firs, beyond broad green grounds. This shade is eagerly sought by community groups and wedding parties. In silent rebuke of Inglenook, Beaulieu, Robert Mondavi, and Beringer, frumpy old Charles Krug Winery no longer belongs to descendants of nineteenth-century viticulture, but it is still in possession of the family of Cesare Mondavi—the so-called Mon-day-vees, as opposed to the Mon-dah-vees—who bought it a decade after Prohibition.
A bit farther on is Freemark Abbey, which also did well in the famous Paris Tasting of 1976. It was later bought by the Legacy Estate Group, among other investors, which went bankrupt in 2005, and was sold to shape-shifting Jackson Family Wines of the alcoholic, wood-infused chardonnays.
* * *
Among other pilgrims of the 1960s was a Los Angeles real estate attorney named Jim Barrett. He looked upon his job as “the equivalent of selling frozen chocolate bananas” and wanted to do something with soul. He and partners bought Chateau Montelana, a towering, spooky tribute to a fortune made during the Gold Rush, not in precious metal but in rope, an essential component in dragging California’s first romantic adventure. The first proprietor of Montelena, Alfred Loving Tubbs, bought the land just north of Calistoga, at the foot of Mount St. Helena, after visiting White Sulphur Springs Resort nearby. Tubbs sold Montelena to a Chinese engineer who created a garden and what he called Jade Lake, with a steep footbridge, the whole of it overgrown by the time Barrett came along.
Fantasy has always been a part of the property’s allure, but nothing could equal the Paris Tasting of 1976, which delivered a gift to Napa’s doorstep from a British wine writer and merchant named Steven Spurrier. Montelena won in the whites category, and the tasting was hailed in Time.
The other winner in the Paris Tasting, in the reds category, was Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, a less happy tale in that it no longer belongs to the Winiarskis, who sold it in 2007 for $185 million to Chateau Ste. Michelle of Woodinville, Washington, which is partially owned by the tobacco and food conglomerate Altria (formerly Philip Morris), and to Piero Antinori of Italy. Thus in a single stroke the property that surpassed sacrosanct premier cru Bordeauxs like Château Haut-Brion and Château Mouton Rothschild and did most to assure Napa’s international reputation joined the latter-day white elephants.
The collective failure of Napa winemaking families to hold on to hard-won individual reputations and land contrasts starkly with the French examples that so inspired the mid-twentieth-century American idealists. And those wines the Napans narrowly beat in Paris in 1976 are still made by France’s same vintner families. Some of those families sold wine to Thomas Jefferson.
CHAPTER THREE:
The Legacy Thing
An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.
—Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution
1.
Up behind Far Niente, off Oakville Grade Road, which eventually leads to the Sonoma County line, nestled in the steep foothills of the Mayacamas is what might be the most audacious foray into fast-track canonization in the valley’s history. The name is H. William Harlan—the H is for Howard, which doesn’t suit—and he already owns an extraordinarily successful, eponymous vineyard that produces a wine worth a thousand dollars a bottle, five vintages of which received a 100-point ranking in Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. That is an extraordinary amount of perfection even for Napa Valley, and Harlan’s new vineyard, Promontory, was being celebrated before any but a few had a chance to view it or taste its bounty.
Harlan grew up in the same town as Richard Nixon, Whittier, Southern California, and there the story must begin. Whittier’s elemental qualities gave both men a powerful desire to get up and out, but how they did so couldn’t have been more different. Sometimes in his aerie Bill Harlan ponders lessons taught by his hometown, a former outpost of Spanish explorers and later a farming juggernaut totally unlike Napa. Whittier shipped trainloads of oranges and lemons across the country in the days of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and its seemingly endless orchards filled the air with the fragrance of citrus.
Ranks of trees also produced walnuts, and past them ran—starting in 1904—the first of Pacific Electric’s Big Red Cars on the trolley line extending all the way to Los Angeles. In its first two decades more than a million passengers rode each year, but the advent of the automobile and an orchestrated campaign by large oil companies killed the Big Red Cars. After World War II many of the orange and walnut trees were cut and subdivisions built to accommodate an influx of aspiring Californians that never really ceased. This was what later happened to the Santa Clara Valley farther north, before the microchip boom, a tragedy that inspired supervisors up in Napa Valley in the 1960s to create the first agricultural preserve.
The writer Garry Wills described Whittier in his biography Nixon Agonistes: “I saw little of that agrarian valley remaining as I came down off the throughway and went east out Whittier Boulevard, past the very small buildings and very large signs that trigger America’s bottomless lust for hamburgers. . . . Even one day in Whittier, spent imagining the America of Nixon’s childhood, is suffocating. That world has a locker-room smell, of spiritual athleticism.”
Nixon, “a self-made man,” had been the “boy who, listening to trains in the night, became a racing engine of endeavor,” as did Bill Harlan in the following generation. Bill’s grandfather told him what grandfathers were supposed to tell their grandchildren in mid-twentieth-century America, that there was nothing they couldn’t do if they chose. Bill would say in later years, “Some words you hear only once in your life, but you remember them. They’re in there.”
His father worked in a slaughterhouse, which was struck by the Teamsters. The strike hardened his father, and indirectly changed Bill, too, who grew up unencumbered by books, a rangy kid good at sports but with a sense of the aesthetic. He attributes this to color renditions of the world’s great artworks he saw on the backs of cards bought by the packet at the five and dime.
He worked in local vegetable gardens to make money, and raced motorcycles through the sunny days of SoCal until he went off to Berkeley, still unsure of what it was he wanted to do. He didn’t excel academically, earning spending money by playing poker in the basement of a fraternity house. And, he says, when union members struck a soft drink bottling plant in nearby east Oakland, Bill told people, “I’m going to work as a scab,” an exceptionally gutsy move. But in there was an aversion to unions, too, and a visceral imperviousness to the politics of the Age of Aquarius.
Union members followed Bill on his delivery route, and sat next to him in restaurants while he ate lunch, announcing to other diners, “This guy’s a scab.”
He stuck it out, being single and without worry about the effects of the strike on a family. Some union members, he claims, followed other workers home, hassled their wives, put nails in their car tires. “And they could level a mom-and-pop shop in three minutes, tipping over shelves and leaving broken bottles all over the place.” He would never forget it.
Harlan was considered the least likely to succeed in his graduating class. His next step involved another motorcycle, as well as trains and buses, and the continent of Africa, which he claims to have traversed north to south under the influence of Alan Moorehead’s The Blue Nile. He had at last been induced to read because he found himself alone so much, in more or less constant motion. “To travel far,” he likes to say, “you have to travel fast.”
But he can’t name another book that had a profound effect on him. Another favorite during the African trip dealt with visions—“a really wild piece of psycho-pictography”—but that title, too, is lost. Likewise the specific
s of conversations he had with stars and luminaries in San Francisco where he ended up—the actor Sterling Hayden, Zen sage Alan Watts, fading Beats still hanging out at City Lights bookshop in North Beach. Not memory loss, just the effects of continued speed and distance covered, his upward trajectory transcending real visions just as it transcended the politics of the 1960s.
He learned to fly and then, typically, figured out how to make money selling airplanes. He bought a sailboat and plied the Pacific, lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, including one named the Taj Mahal, and turned that experience, too, to profit, taking advantage of the last unregulated housing in Northern California. Along the way he earned a reputation for intelligence, guile, charm, and occasional ruthlessness. But his rarest quality in the rising real estate tide was imagination and the ability to massage a vision of a particular place into something extraordinary.
He bought a little country club in a lovely valley—Napa—not yet maxed out on real estate development, envisioning even then, he says, someday producing a wine of his own that would in ways be comparable to a Bordeaux, maybe even to Richard Nixon’s beloved Château Margaux that the president drank surreptitiously while in the White House. But Bill was the anti-Nixon: adventurous, joyful, effective in the freewheeling entrepreneurial mode. If Nixon had hung around with someone like him in the old days there would have been no Nixon presidency and no Watergate, but no Environmental Protection Agency, either. Over and over again Bill would remind people of how well this country accommodates material ambition when it’s combined with the genuine ability to dream.
Napa at Last Light Page 3
