Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  2.

  His assistant’s instructions are precise: arrive at 9:30 A.M. and wait in what’s known as the office but looks more like a monastery in Provence or Tuscany. Bill will descend from the oak-shaded house higher on the property, she adds, though exactly where he will alight isn’t specified.

  The narrow courtyard opens onto a low stone wall underlining the sweeping view of the valley floor and the distant Howell and Vaca Mountain ranges to the east. The foreground’s brushed verdant corduroy studded with distant houses, and the long ribbon of Highway 29 is pinned to coveted Napa terroir by wineries, more houses, and the Oakville Grocery. All is in proper scale, all seemingly subject to the gorgeous supremacy of agriculture and nature.

  The stone building to the right is Bill’s office: deep-set shadow-box windows through which furniture’s visible, vaguely reminiscent of California’s nineteenth-century heritage. Except for the exquisitely restored black-and-white Matchless (AJS) motorcycle, the feeling’s more like an old assay or railway office, or some other romanticized enterprise in the early pursuit of Manifest Destiny.

  Suddenly Bill’s there, a lean presence like a drawn bow: swept-back mostly white hair, wire-rim spectacles, a thin white goatee, the ur-Californian in signature blue jeans, high-topped suede shoes, and an earth-toned shirt with a high thread count, its blousy sleeves buttoned at the wrists. From one angle he looks broad-shouldered and robust, from another frail. This shape-shifter is dominated by cold blue eyes that are often commented on in the press; their hold on their subject can be disquieting.

  Asked about his choice of site for this lovely complex and big house slotted among oaks, he smiles, the gaze softening as he takes up an impressionistic narrative that at this point seems preordained. There’s a fabulous quality to almost everything he says, much of which isn’t readily verifiable, truth and imagination locked in a tale that rarely fails to mesmerize, even when it doesn’t convince.

  “Winegrowing has a real aesthetic. You have to look at the earth as a three-dimensional canvas, though instead of using a brush you have a bulldozer. Follow the contours like an animal moving across the land, so it looks and feels right. It’s the same with architecture. Don’t let it overpower the landscape. And vice versa.”

  By the time Bill arrived on this hillside he had made a fortune as a builder of condos, commercial properties, and mansions from Tahoe to Big Sur. He was one of three controlling partners of Pacific Union of San Francisco, a multibillion-dollar developer, and he turned little Meadowood into the hallowed locus of the Auction Napa Valley, annually bringing together billionaires to buy unimaginably costly lots and acquire a very particular sort of bragging rights. Yet Bill first came to Napa, he says, “to get away from development. And this seemed the last best place able to be saved.”

  It’s a confounding statement, but then paradox is essentially Harlan. He was considered for a time a possible successor to Robert Mondavi, who told him of the virtues of Bordeaux and, Bill says, took him to visit great estates there, giving him “a whole different perspective” and an epiphany of sorts, this “vision of something that would last, that had to start with great land.”

  Bordeaux led him to Burgundy, where he was enchanted by the concept of the clos—small, discreet vineyards of great value, inseparable from a long tradition. The Burgundians told of carrying soil back up the hills that had washed down during storms, an element in his education. He took such impressions back to Napa, where he walked vineyards with Ric Forman, the maverick vintner who never joined the expansionists or the sellouts and who told Bill, in essence, Do it carefully and do it right.

  Bill didn’t become the next Robert Mondavi and had more to gain as wine country’s éminence grise. He commercially developed the south end of St. Helena before residents saw it coming, and as a New World négociant gathered together choice growers to create Bond, based on the Bordeaux example, a less expensive but still pricey second line that generated sufficient profits, he says, to finance the very expensive first line, Harland Estate.

  He also built something called The Napa Valley Reserve near the entrance to Meadowood, a high-end wine country tease one needs an appointment to enter and $150,000 to join. Once in, the six hundred–odd members may acquire a handful of choice vines and have a special wine made from them. They may also buy luxury goods, like Bentleys. The Reserve brought about the sale of so many of those that the manufacturer, Bill says, gave him a seafoam-green Bentley all his own.

  Travel faster, go farther. By now what matters most to Bill is staying put with his “legacy,” a word imbued with the sanctity that has launched many an idea and property. His legacy is less American than Bordelais, harkening back to the left bank of the Gironde where he saw for the first time family succession epitomized by first-growth properties like Latour and Lafite. Now seventy-six years old, Bill has proven to his own satisfaction that wine can be made on the slopes of the Mayacamas about as well as it can be made in the Médoc.

  He wants his estate passed on to his son and daughter in a fractious, uncertain future where a vinous Shangri-la might best withstand the challenges. Hence Promontory, an 860-acre property first seen by him back in the 1980s, with volcanic soils mixed with ancient seabeds and metamorphic rock. A retired geologist from Stanford University was brought in to explain the promontory itself, which had been separated from the main mélange by plate tectonics and the shifting of the San Andreas Fault.

  Also brought in were silent partners, signatures of a Harlan deal, one of whom owns professional sports teams—always a ready source of cash, another a former candidate for a governorship in flyover America. Bill won’t say how much he paid, but undeveloped land on the slopes of the Mayacamas is worth at least $25,000 an acre and as much as $175,000, all part of “the two-hundred-year plan,” though it’s less of a plan than a notion, the two-hundred-year time span chosen because “we can live almost a hundred years now, and your first memory goes back almost that far.”

  Bill Harlan’s first memory is of his maternal grandmother telling stories of her childhood, and through her he could figuratively touch the nineteenth century and pass some of those impressions down to his children who can do the same for theirs. “With the stories you feel connected to the distant past. And you can look almost that far into the future,” an elegant concept, if hardly original. He believes it will be determined by three things: land, family, and debt—that is, its absence. “Land provides a cradle for the family, which in turn provides culture. And virtual lack of debt means you can make it through crashes, droughts, and pestilence.”

  Debt has probably driven more personal wealth, including his, than any other experience in America and California, and wrecked a lot as well. The tradition of heady real estate debt goes back to the days of the pioneer West, and without it Bill would never have achieved what he did. It’s true his heavily diversified Pacific Union rarely puts up more than 10 percent of capital for projects, depending instead on outside investors, but real estate development remains the backbone of his fortune, a fact he doesn’t like to be reminded of.

  “It wasn’t flattering to call somebody a developer,” he says, of the 1980s and ’90s, and it still isn’t. Development for him and many of his peers belongs to that past rinsed clean by wine and the salutary honor “vintner,” though development is still a primary driver of investment in hundreds of new wineries from Canada to Mexico, and certainly in Napa County.

  Few have traveled faster or farther than Harlan Estate. Its understated tastefulness and sense of shadowboxed history is near-impossible to resist, the lovely, costly surrounds as seductive as the wine itself. Visitors—even journalists—should be forgiven some enthrallment, but not all.

  3.

  The two-hundred-year plan has been glowingly featured in various publications and duly accredited by wine evaluators like Parker and Antonio Galloni, who accepted an invitation to an initial private, limited tasting of early vintages of Promontory, as the wine is called, before any was r
eleased. They praised it, a remarkable bit of promotion and image control few but Bill Harlan could have brought off. This might have raised eyebrows in the past, but so incestuous has the world of fine wine appreciation become that the difference between critics and promoters is sometimes difficult to discern. Mutual accommodation is considered proper, and the tacit assumption is that an owner’s past is either off-limits or irrelevant.

  Wine writers today seem uninterested in the bottomless environmental footprints of Harlan, and the same can be said for the anomalies of his life. Unmentioned are Bill’s early, hilarious seat-of-the-pants endeavors, like the time in the 1960s he tried to get a job, bearded and straggly-haired, in finance when he admittedly knew nothing about it, or his decision to instantly become a mortgage banker in the go-go ’70s by telephoning insurers and telling them he knew reputable developers who wanted to borrow money, and then calling developers and telling them he had insurance companies wanting to lend. He called this new creation “the New England Mortgage Company” because that sounded most respectable. These stories, once gleefully told, now aren’t in keeping with “the vision.”

  After he was established in Napa Valley he got into an acrimonious dispute with Tom May, owner of Martha’s Vineyard, producer of the grapes going into Heitz Wine Cellars’ now legendary cabernet sauvignon that had created a sensation. Harlan had bought the property next to May’s and a lot line adjustment would gain Harlan additional acreage and bring great consternation to the aging May, according to his own account.

  One of Harlan’s companies owned a piece of four thousand seven hundred acres up in Pope Valley, behind the Howell Mountains but still in Napa County. He and other owners of the land intended to build ranchettes or the equivalent, some on land too steep and droughty to support it. Investors had tried over the years to build houses or resorts up there using vineyards as cover. This parcel came to be generally known as Juliana and has a long, convoluted history that includes no less a personage than Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore’s grandson, uber-patriot and intelligence operative thought to be a front for foreign money. Roosevelt’s shadowy company was Buttes Gas & Oil, and another entity, Reunion Industries, reportedly paid a subsidiary of Pacific Union $1.5 million for its piece of Juliana.

  Bill says he originally chose Napa Valley because it was “the last best place where development might be avoided,” but he developed it nonetheless.

  Harlan may be from the wrong side of the tracks, but his political sympathies aren’t and never have been. The world changed radically after 1959, now given as the official launch year of Bill’s two-hundred-year vision, and since then midlevel American jobs like meat cutters and even managers have become unavailable to people like Bill’s father. It was part of capitalism’s ruthless expediency that shipped them out of a country no longer bearing much resemblance to the one Bill and his father grew up in.

  But those unionists drove Bill so deeply into the ranks of what passes for conservatism in early-twenty-first-century America that his contacts reached into the White House of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush dined with the Harlans, and slept in a bedroom at Meadowood that was stripped of all its plumbing and electrical work and replaced before the president arrived. One can’t help but wonder what he and Bill talked about. By then Harlan was a charter member of, among many other organizations, the Winegrowers of Napa County.

  “We have a huge responsibility here,” he says, bringing the discussion back to Promontory. “This is more than a mountain, and it still has to evolve to make a lasting contribution to the country and the world.” A tall ambition, indeed. Obeisance is paid to the usual suspects: stewardship of the land, showing “by example rather than preaching the fact that Napa’s a national treasure,” and the importance of location, the Realtor’s absolute. Most pivotal is the close proximity of the San Francisco Bay, its shores providing an inexhaustible source of bodies and revenue drawn by wine and the valley’s potent otherness.

  “San Francisco’s the fulcrum, with life to the south moving at the speed of a microchip, everything virtual. Silicon Valley’s about investment, then you come up here and things move at the pace of the seasons. Instead of a return on investment, we have a return on life.” There’s some truth even in clichés.

  “Life in Napa before the baby boomers involved a connection to the land. Eventually the pendulum will swing back again,” although he doesn’t venture to say when or how. “This is a homogenous community because of the amount of money. As in Jackson Hole and Aspen, we have two different cultures living here”—the rich, and those who work for them. “Here people live with the vagaries of nature, and realize there’s a lot we can’t control. These people rely on each other, with no one job more important than another. Whatever their skills are, it’s noble work because you’re connected to the soil. It involves a long perspective, and you want to build on that.”

  He echoes Mondavi in attempting to equate wine with art: “You move beyond craftsmanship into whatever the chosen endeavor is—music, ballet, sports, wine. It’s only one-half of one percent that can do this.” Free association is Harlan’s wont, and he’s now inspired: “First wine was thought of as just a beverage. There was water and wine, then you bypass the mind to a connection with the spirit, or soul, and a glimpse of the sublime.”

  4.

  Early March and raining. El Niño has finally touched down in force, dousing the North Coast so thoroughly that the Napa River threatens for the first time to overtop spillway banks put down in Napa by the Corps of Engineers to prevent additional flooding. Up-valley, moving water glazes the Oakville Grade, and on the Harlan Estate sluices through artfully installed stone gutters—no mortar—that line the driveway, cut by that bulldozer operator he said followed a deer trail.

  Bill sits in his office with his back to a view that’s gray, cottony, and wet. The sound of running water is alien, and most of this moisture will drift beyond the Howell Mountains and across the Central Valley at an altitude of two thousand feet to the High Sierra, where it will finally be dumped and begin feeding aquifers and reservoirs. Come October, the valley will again be parched.

  On one side of Harlan sits his son, Will. Same pale Harlan eyes, and a putty-gray shirt his father might have chosen. But Will’s hair is short, dark, and stylish. He has driven up from San Francisco where he lives on Nob Hill, to lead a tour of Promontory, but the rain has canceled that. Across from him sits Harlan Estate’s winemaker, Cory Empting, also youthful and dark-haired, wearing a jacket and an expression of infinite patience. It’s Cory who sometimes speaks of “the wisdom of the vine,” a reference to its natural capacity for adjustment and endurance in the absence of chemicals, fertilizer, and water. Maybe less than a vine whisperer, but he does admire the sort of small farming practiced and written about by the late Japanese rice grower and savant Masanobu Fukuoka.

  Talk has been of changes foreseen over the next half-century, notably rising temperatures and water shortages. Predictions are being made of a catastrophic rise in less than a century, and more severe heat in summer than grapes can stand. One popular theory has it that Napa will actually be cooler because intense heat over the inland Central Valley will suck additional cool air in from the Pacific, but that’s small comfort and has introduced the most uncomfortable subject yet: climate change.

  So far, “crashes, droughts, and pestilence” is as close as Bill has come to uttering the hated phrase global warming. Even climate change is a stretch for him. Two years before, in 2014, it so annoyed him that his majordomo at Harlan Estate, Don Weaver, had to intervene in a conversation with a journalist. But now Bill says, “I think there’s a chance there’s something to the idea of global warming,” quickly adding that he drives a Tesla instead of a car with an internal combustion engine, and asking pointedly, “Is that good or bad for the environment?” The implication being that everything requires energy, including the building of costly batteries.

  Harlan Estate employs solar power, something Bill doesn’t
advocate because “I don’t like the idea of telling people what to do.” Organic practices, and some biodynamic, are also followed at Harlan Estate, and up in the Promontory vineyard, to be officially unveiled the next year, along with yet another beautiful winery. Developers are taking precautions, he insists, that will keep all that fine sediment out of the Napa River.

  His “forester” selectively cuts trees to guard against ground fires, preserving “the health of a forest” that has thousands fewer trees than it did before the vineyards went in. Bill denies that houses might also eventually go up at Promontory, but from the sound of it the infrastructure there is extraordinary.

  Water use has been reduced, another creep toward dealing with climate change. “Harlan Estate is close to being dry-farmed,” Bill adds, finally conceding that “the Earth’s getting a little warmer. The oceans are going to rise—but just a little bit.” Then the climate deniers’ familiar saw, “We need to do more research,” which is true, but then it always is, as climate change is real and already long known.

  Will reveals nothing. If he has learned anything from his father it is that you never tip your hand. “It’s moot at this point,” he ventures. “The real question is, ‘Where are we coming from?’ ” meaning his and Cory’s generation. “We have to limit man’s imprint, so what’s our role in lessening its effect on the planet?”

  But he leaves his own question unanswered.

  II.

  CARRYING THE DEFECT

  A deserter of the corporate boardroom triumphs in the vineyard; a charmer from Burgundy pushes the entertainment envelope; and a member of a family that has farmed the valley for a century battles the scuttling of a sacred rule.