Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

INTERLUDE:

  The Velvet Rope

  The hotel’s anonymity—blond floor-to-ceiling panels—is the antithesis of what’s being discussed: how to build a tasting room so distinctive that visitors will pay dearly for the experience.

  Those in the audience are in the hospitality business and have paid well for advice on creating the perfect tasting room. The basics have already been dispensed with: Add curves to prevent the space from seeming masculine; figure out wind and sun patterns; make sure visitors are comfortable at all times. Take an anthropological approach to retail sales because wine buyers are a “tribe.” Remember that people instinctively turn right when entering a confined space and refuse to buy anything if they’re too close to other tribal members.

  They also won’t buy if the floor’s not attractive, or the restroom too close to the tasting bar. The pourer on the other side must be less than thirty inches from the taster, or more than forty-two inches. And they must feel sure their limo driver’s in a space of his own, watching sports videos and eating free popcorn.

  If your customer drives a Tesla, or flies around in a Gulfstream G6, “you have to reflect that in your tasting room.” This is an “ultra-premium” experience, adds the young architect with sideburns in a plaid shirt and jeans. It lives in an altogether different dimension, creating what would once have been called aura that’s shared by the product. Essentially an evocation of rarity, it offers a fleeting glimpse, and a taste of something more than wine that one may never own.

  For such a winery experience, the designer must “go on to the next level,” artfully replicating the vintner’s life and “vision” with “artifacts” of authenticity—barn boards, traditional-looking objects suggesting provenance, worn finishes on wood and artworks, and objects of feigned spiritual heft. The visitor must feel that these things are somehow his or hers for a moment, and a fleeting bit of the vintner’s “life experience,” too.

  Part of the appeal is that the two will never meet but will share an ersatz intimacy in the transient taste of a wine subjected to the most assiduous mechanical and chemical alteration in the history of viticulture. “Here we get back to the idea of kings and queens. You have created a yearning to get past the velvet rope” by adapting, staging, controlling. But the rope’s still there.

  The speaker helped design a tasting room in a winery sold to a billionaire who wanted his own recognized cult cabernet, as well as the glorified factory in which it is made. But he didn’t want people. So there will never be visitors. People still clamor about the property’s periphery for a souvenir of this new royalty, which would be an $800 wine instead of, say, a faded rose stolen from the vineyard. “The level of exclusivity is what makes it,” the bottle being the ultimate affirmation of brand by virtue of its being utterly unattainable.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  American First-Growth

  1.

  He stands at the end of a hardpan road in Oakville that traverses the most valuable single vineyard in America—possibly on Earth because of its size—as well as America’s most famous. It’s To Kalon—Greek for “the highest beauty”—and freighted with history as well as highly coveted cabernet sauvignon and other Bordeaux varieties. One of the early, large plots of Vitis vinifera in Napa, planted by pioneer Hamilton Crabb in 1868, To Kalon had been preserved by the enormous price its grapes commanded and by its historic provenance.

  The late Robert Mondavi once owned a large piece of it, deeding some to Opus One Winery as part of his joint venture with the Baron de Rothschild in 1980. In 1993, Andy Beckstoffer—perhaps the most powerful vineyard owner in the Napa Valley—was able to buy another eighty-nine acres of To Kalon from Mondavi, which he placed under a conservation easement that brought him a large tax deduction even though there was little danger of its ever being developed.

  Known the length of the valley as Andy, sometimes as Andy B, Beckstoffer is the un-vintner, at ease in a suit and also in boots like the ones he’s wearing hazed with his own valuable dirt, pressed jeans, and a soft green corduroy shirt. The face is farmer-ruddy, dark thinning hair neatly combed, and when he talks his eyes dance under long lashes.

  “We replanted in 1994, 1996, and 1997”—lingering Tidewater vowels struggle to keep up—“with four Bordeaux clones, but no Malbec. They use it in France for filler.” Merlot, too, was later deemed unsuited to the heat, and pulled. Ditto the petit verdot because winemakers didn’t like the taste, and Andy B doesn’t like the yield. “We wanted to show terroir, but also to add complexity that reflects the winemaker’s personality. That means vineyard designation, the old ‘spice box’ concept,” providing a rack of flavors among which winemakers may delve.

  “It’s not just terroir, man has to be part of it, too.” Gender is everywhere in this metaphor. “If a wine was a model with a chipped tooth, you’d have to give her something to compensate with. If she needs better shoulders, better breasts, give her some. But her real charm is in the way she carries the defect.”

  Martha’s Vineyard cabernet may have been the first model with a chipped tooth, back in the 1960s, its mintiness attributed to nearby eucalyptus trees, an Australian invasive, and in those days a selling point. Joe Heitz’s Martha’s Vineyard cabernet, named for the wife of Tom May who owned the vineyard, fetched a remarkably high price of eight dollars a bottle. The unreconstructed Heitz told people that eucalyptus smelled “like cat piss” to him, but if his wine reminded buyers of eucalyptus, so be it.

  “If you’re going to preserve these vineyards you have to make them very important.” And making this demonstrable on the palate means they’re worth more, since gifted winemakers who steadily raise the price of their Bordeaux blends will pay Andy more for To Kalon grapes. A businessman first and foremost, Andy then decided to tie the price of bottles in which his grapes end up to the price the vintners pay him. This has made him unpopular with vintners, particularly those whose continuing success depends on his To Kalon grapes.

  “The bottle price is what determines the price of the grapes. But for the vineyard to be considered great, you have to be able to prove the quality empirically.” He’s walking along a row of manicured vines now, idly pulling leaves and a rare cluster touching another and dropping them. “It’s just criminal, but we have to do it to preserve quality.” Dropped fruit would fetch, if allowed to mature, a small fortune despite any defects, but dropping fruit on the ground also drives up the price of what remains.

  Shade prettily freckles the clusters, the morning’s first liberated sunlight lighting up glossy blue-black berries as if from within. The only proof of their quality will be in a narrow black bottle you won’t be allowed to purchase unless your name’s on a list. Vintners putting “Beckstoffer” and “To Kalon” on their labels must pay him a percentage of the profits, and one customer, Paul Hobbs, makes a To Kalon cabernet for which he charges $400.

  But twenty feet from Hobbs’s contracted rows are vines under contract to Fred Schrader, who has earned consistent ratings of 100 from the aging drivers of the cult concept, The Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator, and yet Schrader charges only $175 a bottle. “I say to him, ‘Come on, Fred. What’re you waiting for?’ ” since the more Schrader charges, the more Andy Beckstoffer makes.

  * * *

  In 1969 he was a fresh-faced MBA with dark hair and sideburns departing the Heublein corporation’s sequestered compound in far-off Hartford, Connecticut, for a western reconnaissance, an unlikely corporate Meriwether Lewis to an even less likely Thomas Jefferson surrogate. The balding CEO, Stuart Watson, was interested only in the trans-Mississippi as a source of cheap California grapes. He had just bought an unwieldy old showcase called Inglenook in the hopes it would lend Heublein some class. It would have the opposite effect, but meanwhile Beckstoffer played a large role in a momentous midcentury labor struggle, ensconced himself in the valley, and stayed on long after Heublein had slunk away.

  No one today will argue with Andy Beckstoffer’s success, but some will argue about how he
got there and about the nature of his rise. Opinions of him strew the landscape like discarded rifles on the fields of Appomattox. Beckstoffer thought of himself in those days as “just a boy from Richmond” who knew little about wine and drank milk with meals. The Tidewater Beckstoffers had dealt in lumber, and he had to get out of the South to see the affinity with the land as both a southern strength and a weakness, which is an unappeasable yearning for the past.

  He had never seen anything like Inglenook when he first arrived in Napa, nor had he felt a more powerful association with history, not even in the back streets of the capital of the Confederacy. In Rutherford, bottles bearing the labels of legendary Gustave Niebaum, founder of Inglenook, contained more than wine—an inky concentration of another time.

  Robin Lail, great-grandniece of the founder, would remember seeing bottles of old Inglenook brought up from the cellar, having been ordered by this brash young Heubleiner. Maybe those cobwebby artifacts were for impressing visiting executives, or big growers whose grapes Heublein wanted for its millions of gallons of cheap stuff—one was named I Love You—or maybe they were bound for his own cellar. Whatever their destination, the provenance was impeccable, their rarity known, their value enormous, and their inspirational power incalculable.

  Andy went to the Central Valley to address groups of growers supplying Heublein and was soon dealing with Cesar Chavez, who called the strike by the United Farm Workers of America. It led to the very effective boycott of California lettuce and table grapes nationwide, and when a grower stood up in a hall down in Escalon and asked the visiting Heublein rep, Andy Beckstoffer, why he and other suppliers were being singled out, Andy said, “Because you’re not sharing the wealth.”

  Andy had earlier pledged himself to “going as far into the free enterprise system as possible,” and that required adaptation, even to the ways of a labor radical. So he signed a contract with United Farm Workers on top of a television set in a San Jose motel that ended the nationwide boycott, assumed the leadership of Heublein’s subsidiary, the Vinifera Development Corporation, and began to manage Heublein’s extensive vineyards in Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties, which he would eventually own.

  The story is well known, but not the fact that when Andy left the corporate world he took with him a huge debt. People said Andy B would be cut down to size by the corporation he had once served and that was now breathing down his neck, but he avoided bankruptcy and emerged triumphant. And now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Andy B is talking publicly of corporations being inherently compromised, even dividing them into “good” corporations and “bad” corporations, of which the latter are clearly in the ascendency.

  2.

  Napa’s historic wine estates once amounted to an unacknowledged, Americanized, decidedly unofficial version of France’s ranked châteaux in Bordeaux. Chosen for the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris, the French contenders were winnowed to Grand Crus Classés and then down to a final handful making the most expensive wine, like châteaux Latour and Margaux, that were designated premier crus. This sanctification by the federal government would never happen here, but the landscape that supported the original American premier crus of Napa Valley was, in Andy’s view, occupied by three classes: the processor (winery), the farmer (vineyardist), and the worker (farmhand).

  The latter was most likely Mexican—and still is—though the list of nationalities is long, running down the spine of the Americas like a tenuous, shadowy conduit akin to the black plastic pipes delivering the source of life to the vines. But it still provides the human capital without which the valley would have failed long ago, and in the twenty-first century that traditional supply is threatened for the first time.

  Of all three—processor, farmer, worker—the class that profited least from Napa’s fame was the worker. “When Heublein arrived in California,” says Andy, “the workers existed to be exploited. In the Central Valley I saw, firsthand, man’s inhumanity to man: paper-thin mattresses, sewage running in the streets of the labor camps. Those guys were meat, nothing more.”

  In corporate eyes, people like Andy were the butchers for the processors—getting the product ready—and that product was the blood of the vine. But he told his bosses in Connecticut that working conditions had to be improved with investment—executives refer to this as “unproductive money”—because Cesar Chavez knew that growers need both the processors and the workers, or the crop will rot unpicked. Napa Valley successfully resisted signing with the United Farm Workers, but the contract affecting the Central Valley indirectly forced improvements in Napa, too. This in turn improved many aspects of life from Calistoga to San Pablo Bay, prompting Andy to claim that today he’s “honored for things I was condemned for back then.”

  It was the second class—farmers—that most interested him. He liked them more than he liked the salesmen, and they foreshadowed the path he would take. Meanwhile Heublein was bringing new technical expertise to Inglenook and Beaulieu, as well as cash and nationwide marketing, but the company remained deeply overshadowed by what he calls “corporate attitude”—distant rule rather than local, formulaic rather than adaptive, growth rather than quality—plus obsession with quarterly profits, an abhorrence of long-term commitment, and the use of charitable and political contributions as cover for self-centered activities.

  But the most damaging aspect of bad corporate attitude was, in his view, self-interest at the expense of community. Although the claim made vintners writhe, Andy—the newborn farmer—set out to make other farmers realize that they, too, should use “business ways” to succeed: depreciate equipment, determine real costs, treat interest as real money. Make wineries buying grapes cover growers’ basic expenditures so farmers don’t have to sell their land, as they were forced to do in the 1970s and ’80s.

  He helped found the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association, pointing out that grapes are not a commodity but a specialty product. Failing farmers endanger agriculture overall in the valley, since maintaining the high value of Napa grapes is essential to preventing residential development: “Adam Smith was right. If an asset isn’t producing revenue, people will move to one that is. Like houses. And we want revenue to come to the land as well as wine.”

  Bringing growers into the political and social fabric of the valley was essential, an echo of Jefferson’s desire to improve the lot of farmers for social cohesion and cultural enhancement. Andy credits the most accomplished salesman of his day, Robert Mondavi, who was also a processor, for nudging Napa onto the cusp of international renown that the Paris Tasting later affirmed. “If Bob hadn’t said, ‘Our wine can be as good as anybody’s,’ the Napa Valley of today wouldn’t exist. But he was also telling farmers, ‘I’m your friend.’ One day I told him, ‘No, you’re not. Because you’re not sharing the wealth with the farmers.’ And Bob said, ‘You’re right—let’s do a bottle price formula.’ ”

  Apocryphal or not, that reasoning eventually led, in 2015, to Andy calling into his office, one by one, his loyal customers. Sitting in his rocker, he told them all that from then on they were going to share more of their wealth. Specifically, $18,000 would be required to purchase a mere ton of To Kalon grapes, when the average price in the valley was under $6,000. Or the vintner could pay Andy one hundred times the bottle price per ton, whichever was higher. The math was more difficult to swallow than to understand, but the price would soon rise again.

  Then came the second rule: from now on the minimum price for a bottle of wine allowed to put “Beckstoffer To Kalon” on the label would be $125. That’s $25,000 a ton, and a $300 bottle of wine from his grapes would cost the once-unimaginable sum of $30,000 a ton. Andy stressed that “this isn’t a commodity, it’s a specialty item.”

  The growers’ share of the wineries’ total revenue had instantly doubled. The reaction among his clients was outrage, followed by speedy acquiescence, for without To Kalon grapes their bottles might drop into the dreaded less-than-cult status. Beckstoffer had not o
nly raised some growers to equal social status with vintners, he had also brought about the capitulation of some of the most reputable vintners. Grapes were demonstrably worth what he charged if the consumer would pay cult prices and many could and would, for such was the power of brand at the high end.

  Engendered was a yearning both counterintuitive and often irresistible, the same impulse compelling the purchase of Rolexes and Teslas when lesser creations serve equally well, and often better. Some To Kalon wines made from grapes picked early were indeed impressive: powerful, flavorful assaults without overpowering alcohol or cooked fruit, full middle palates, and finishes like long, straight-arrow flights trailing cabernet descriptors and a mere hint of costly earth.

  People who had known Andy for years laughed at his new pricing strategy that forced clients into luxurious dependency, but others asked why a bona fide Republican, a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization, and a supporter of conservative causes, was simultaneously coming out against additional winery development? Why was he praising what he called “the screamers”—Cesar Chavez and local activists like Volker Eisele, even the environmentalist Chris Malan—who caused the vintners such grief? Why was he railing against winery expansion and giving money to protesters like Citizens’ Voice in St. Helena, all on the fringe of haute valley life?

  One possible answer was that uncontrolled winery expansion sullies life in general in the valley, and Andy’s life specifically, as would soon become clear.

  3.

  Beckstoffer’s vineyard operation sprawls next to a lonely stretch of Conn Creek Road in Rutherford. Turn onto the long dusty lane running toward the mountains and enter an outsized diorama of a nineteenth-century farm, except that the vines are trellis-trained. Agriculture’s unlovely heavy machines are parked off to the right, and at the far end of the lane sits a precise apparition: a little Victorian similar to the house that’s adjacent to Inglenook winery on the other side of the valley: bright yellow clapboards, a porch, and a steep red roof, all in a tourist-free zone.