The structure is a model of the old Chiles House Andy first saw in the late 1960s when he rolled onto Inglenook property from Highway 29. Inside is Beckstoffer’s version of Napa’s early glory days: walls pierced by inset stained glass suggesting William Morris’s light boxes from the Arts and Crafts movement, ill-fitting doors in his second-floor office from architectural salvage down in Berkeley.
“We love history,” he says, settling into his wooden rocker. “I don’t care if they don’t close right.” He and his wife, Virginia, borrowed shapes, colors, and designs from various places in the valley. Overall, there’s a feeling of space and purpose, with a view of a big barn and outbuildings, unmanicured vistas, with vineyard-making matériel stacked in the staging yard.
Beckstoffer’s heavier than when he arrived in the valley in the 1960s, and his face, too, is altered, but the eyes are those of a man who’s been involved in legal and environmental disputes and ongoing controversy. There are traces of the twentysomething who helped convince Heublein to invest in Inglenook and other properties and hung on tenaciously until he, in essence, “owned the farm.”
What concerns him most in these latter days—and this is exceptional—is the radical alteration brought to the valley by the exponential rise of “hospitality,” that euphemism for tourism. “At this point I have to decide what my career’s worth,” he says, an old man’s tacit admission of limitations required of commerce to preserve the world. “Never in the history of mankind has agriculture withstood urban growth long-term, but here we have the best chance. Agriculture’s clearly the highest and best use of the land, but whether that will save it I can’t say.”
He was a force in the creation of the Winery Definition Ordinance, along with Volker Eisele, back in 1990. It required that wines proclaiming themselves of the Napa Valley be made from at least three-quarters Napa grapes—the so-called 75 percent solution. It also served as a price support for Napa grapes, to the benefit of Napa growers generally and most definitely to Andy Beckstoffer.
But the Winery Definition Ordinance also limited what new wineries are allowed to do to sell their wine, preventing the conversion of new wineries into retail shops, conference pods, and de facto restaurants, which take more land out of agricultural production. Such a law was the biggest change concerning the land since the creation of the agricultural preserve in 1968, and it left much social wreckage in its wake.
Winery expansion is again being demanded, despite unprecedented public opposition, some of it promising true civil disobedience. “Scarce water, bad air, and traffic are great threats to the valley, but environmental damage to the land itself is still the greatest. The community as a whole shouldn’t have to suffer for the economic viability of a few.”
The demand by winery owners for a legal right to build new structures for tourists, otherwise known as “event centers,” may sound innocuous to outsiders but it would release a torrent of construction reaching into the remotest corners of a narrow valley already stressed by similar projects. Of the nearly five hundred wineries here already—officially there are close to seven hundred if custom-crush operations and “virtual” wineries are included—many want to expand what they already possess. The collective bite out of the already finite agricultural lands would be enormous and amount to a second crop of food and “events” as valuable—or more so—than the grapes themselves. “The economics of direct sales to tourists overpower all arguments against it, except the ultimate one—that it will destroy the valley.”
Wineries have become for the most part self-interested fiefdoms, the opposite of Jefferson’s ideal community of yeoman farmers. “I’d hate to go away,” says Andy, meaning die, “knowing I didn’t fight.” Some would take this as atonement for his role in the creation of a collective corporate behemoth in the valley, others as yet another act of pure self-interest.
* * *
One day Andy received a phone call from a neighbor on Zinfandel Lane that runs between Highway 29 and the Silverado. Wastewater from the Raymond Vineyards’ winery was flowing into Andy’s pond, the caller said, and it smelled like hell.
Andy lived nearby and went over to take a look. Yes, it appeared that the weir had allowed Raymond’s gray water to flow into Andy’s pond, although Raymond never admitted this. And, yes, it stank. Winery outflow is greater and more of a problem than commonly believed, and has been a contentious issue in the valley for decades since some wineries continue to dump into the river. Having it in your face when you’re not even generating it was hard to take.
Andy began looking into the problem and in the process discovered something worse: Raymond’s new owner, Jean-Charles Boisset, an inheritor of the largest wine-producing estate in Burgundy and the third-largest producer in all France, was involved in other activities Andy found unacceptable.
Boisset’s family also owned wineries in other countries and in Northern California, including the historic Buena Vista in Sonoma County. And he intended to increase the number of daily visitors allowed at Raymond—right behind Andy’s house—to five hundred a day and to increase production from 750,000 gallons of wine a year to 1.5 million gallons, an enormous jump.
Moreover, Boisset had transformed what were originally workspaces in the sprawling, workaday winery into party venues. These, Andy thought, had to be illegal. He had never visited the one called the Red Room, but he had heard much about it: red-flocked wallpaper, velvet settees, comely women pouring wine for a select few in near-darkness, a lavish, clublike Toulouse-Lautrecian fantasy soaked in cabernet sauvignon instead of absinthe.
It was patently outlandish in the middle of the agricultural preserve, Andy thought, and almost as hard to take as the claims he heard that Boisset was the valley’s “next Robert Mondavi.” Andy had considered Robert a friend, whose death occurred the year before Boisset bought Raymond, a time when the valley was already at odds with itself and lacking even a symbolic leader. Now Boisset was tooling around the valley behind the wheel of an Aston Martin, in a beautifully cut French suit with a jeweled broach attached to the lapel and shoes from a collection said to rival Imelda Marcos’s of the Philippines.
Boisset was often seen in the pages of the Napa Valley Register receiving civic awards. He made contributions to charity. He even lived in the late Robert Mondavi’s house, the one with the swimming pool in the living room. And he had barrels of pinot noir from Burgundy flown over to mix with Russian River pinot, violating the very notion of terroir, quite the opposite of Robert’s joint venture with the Baron de Rothschild long ago.
“Boisset’s a clown,” Andy told people. “Robert Mondavi wasn’t a clown.”
To Andy, Boisset and now Raymond Vineyards epitomized bad corporate attitude, and there were a lot of contenders for that title. Raymond advertised a playpen, even a “dog motel,” an example of the event center concept run amok that would serve as a cautionary example if effectively challenged. But Boisset would be a formidable adversary, his net worth estimated to be in the billions and he himself married to Gina Gallo, granddaughter of Julio and an heir to one of the largest wine-producing families on earth.
But something had to be done about more than Raymond’s smelly wastewater. And who better to do it than Andy B?
CHAPTER FIVE:
Hands Across the Sea
1.
Yes, red-flocked wallpaper but also red felt on the pool table and red plush on the divan cosseting aspiring revelers, one of whom looks around and says laconically, “Fin de siècle bordello.”
Overall, a rosy saturnalian radiance out of a Byronic dream, decidedly France at century’s end—the nineteenth, not the twentieth—with a framed quote paying homage to Marcel Proust and an antique armchair delicately sat upon by a demimondaine suitable for a film based on The Guermantes Way. Some visitors have come up from Southern California and all are impressed with the opulence. None seems aware that they’re enjoying one of the valley’s most controversial and, according to Andy and other neighbors, illicit spaces, w
here the pour is cabernet sauvignon from the old Raymond Winery in whose bowels the Red Room lives.
Formerly owned by the Raymond brothers, stolid farmers who for many years made good wine in the least showy circumstances, Raymond Vineyards was radically made over by its new owner, whose feet are firmly planted in the two manifestations—French and American—of the opulent, contemporary wine world. Appealing, energetic, skilled—Jean-Charles Boisset remembers names across a broad international spectrum of associates, friends, and hangers-on—he played a prominent role in Mondovino, the documentary about globe-girdling wine consulting, more showman than the late Robert Mondavi and, while equally endowed with Mondavi’s appetites, also possessed of the European bona fides Mondavi longed for.
The Red Room is available to members of Raymond’s wine club, and in fact to anyone willing to pay $500 a year for membership. Like owners of all older Napa wineries, Boisset enjoys grandfathered perks no new vintner could possibly get today—selling things unrelated to wine, serving food to visitors, providing not just a kennel for their dogs and wine with a dog’s name on the labels but also a Theater of Nature, where people may stroll among drought-resistant flora, within view of the parking lot.
His critics insist he’s in violation of even grandfathering’s outsized privileges, but the most obvious affront is the Red Room. He dismisses his critics with Gallic sangfroid: “In France, when we want to act arrogant, we just ignore the little people.”
There’s Delia Viader, owner of Viader Vineyards on Howell Mountain, in the blazer with the gold buttons. It was her vineyard that two decades earlier inadvertently dumped mud into the Bell Canyon Reservoir, which the city of St. Helena still worries about. Next to her is Mark Pope, agreeable owner of the Bounty Hunter in downtown Napa, bending an elbow after paying thousands just hours before for special lots of cabernet at the valley’s trade auction.
The Red Room is packed for Raymond’s annual Napa Gras celebration, guests drifting to the adjoining room where wheels of cheese crowd platters of charcuterie. Out on the main floor of the winery a young woman, who for all practical purposes is naked, dangles upside down from a gymnast’s rope while pouring Boisset’s JCB sparkling wine into eagerly raised flutes. Other, similarly adorned women on the counter pole-dance without poles and arrange themselves on a flight of stairs usually climbed by winemakers and cellar rats to check fermentation in towering steel tanks.
On the far side of the room two women in skeins of dark and white chocolate smile carefully, feathered masks barely concealing their fear that the delicate, artfully applied facades will melt.
* * *
Four hours is long for lunch, even in Napa Valley. But there’s a lot to be done this afternoon: eat, drink Raymond Vineyards’ reserve chardonnay, assess three Raymond cabernet sauvignons from Oakville, Rutherford, and St. Helena vineyards, taste a blend called Generations, and then and only then a bottle of bright, complex pinot noir, part French and part American, called JCB No. 3.
Raymond Vineyards’ well-watered, vernal garden sits on the edge of the Rutherford Appellation—a federal geographical designation for discrete winemaking districts—its white Louis Quatorze–style lawn chairs made of soft, weather-defying synthetics, alarmingly white. At table is the woman responsible for making these wines and four men—five if you count the chef, who is neither up nor down for long, two journalists, and Jean-Charles Boisset.
Thin slices of heirloom tomato in pungent olive oil are followed by an all-American medley of succulent protein that includes bison and alligator. The latter’s a tribute to the memory of Agoston Haraszthy, the early Hungarian disciple of California wine known also as the Count of Buena Vista. He built that Sonoma winery in 1857 and was later supposedly devoured by a crocodile in Nicaragua. JCB owns DeLoach and Lyeth in Sonoma, as well as Buena Vista, where a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about to open.
Boisset’s overlapping interests provide a keyhole through which to view the global vineyard. Jet propulsion brings wine in all stages of production to various experts on other continents—in this case 60 percent pinot noir from the Côte de Nuits, and 40 percent from the Russian River Valley, the French component loaded in barrels onto a plane and flown here for a cuvée without precedent. The concept is daring if impractical and a vinous antidote to “freedom fries.” And if pinot noir can wing in today from Burgundy, cabernet sauvignon can wing in tomorrow from Bordeaux, Chile, or Australia.
His earliest memory, he says, is of the inside of his mother’s womb. There being no witnesses, the story must be accepted or rejected based on one’s tolerance of the imaginative, as with much of what Jean-Charles says. Listen and you may find yourself transported to Vougeot in the French countryside and a house where doors stand open in season to relatives, friends, neighbors, and nature in every guise: animals, insects, breeze, rain, flowers, wine, and, of course, lunch.
On Sundays it was as lengthy as lunch in Rutherford would be half a century later. Since there was no church in Vougeot, the Boissets had to drive to nearby Flagey-Échezeaux, another iconic Burgundian name where there was a church, and after worship and travel there and back the family was hungry. The conversation at table was unbroken, the rhythm of the whole—place, food, wine, family—so natural it was taken for granted and yearned for in later life.
Most formative for young Jean-Charles was his maternal grandmother, an elementary school teacher and a blend of Wiccan and the Pied Piper, “very good with a pendulum in detecting rhythm and vortex. The kids would all run to her.” She taught Jean-Charles to “douse” for springs and to detect “energy” and “mineral flows” by swinging a crystal. She also, he says, practiced some Gallic version of feng shui and introduced him to the telluric arts he describes as “interactions with the Earth, which are the basis of biodynamics and the realization that we all have a purpose.” But, most important, she taught him English.
By age nine Jean-Charles thought he “understood the actions of the Earth, sun, and moon. When I discovered Rudolf Steiner”—Austrian founder of the Waldorf school and creator of the concept of biodynamism—“I already knew his principles.” His grandmother “had made me see farming as something beyond viticulture, a sense of why.”
As kids he and his friends “played naked, swam, fished, rode horses. Meanwhile my parents were building the business. They moved to Nuits-Saint-Georges, and the business got bigger. My father was buying and selling, mostly vineyards. He was driven, one of many doing well, and then my grandfather got into exporting. I saw everything in the business, lived it, and besides the practical stuff learned the art of life that is built around wine.”
At age eleven he was brought to the United States and then to California, where he decided “this was the only place to be, in the dream of the American way of life,” too young to know that many in Northern California dreamed of the Burgundian way of life. “I thought I must be half American, given to me at birth.”
He attended the Lycée Rochambeau French International School in Bethesda, Maryland, where he turned into an exceptional soccer player and later considered becoming a professional striker on the French team. But his father said, “You should carry wine barrels instead of doing sports,” the beginning of Jean-Charles the entrepreneur who went from “visions of living in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, like Marco Polo discovering new worlds” to getting an MBA from UCLA and living in Oil City, Pennsylvania.
To visualize this requires real imagination. The cumulative effect of the steady Latin gaze, mussed blond hair, blue mohair jacket with that heart-shaped, bejeweled gold pin, French cuffs held in place by gold links embellished with red enamel roses, wince-inducing black patent leather shoes with long pointy toes and socks an approximation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cherokee Red (which you may purchase in replica in Raymond’s gift shop) is thoroughly continental and in no way Pennsylvanian. “But there I got into corporate finance. I was interested in derivatives and the art of the deal. I would have been big in it. But
my father kept saying ‘You should think about wine.’ ”
So in 1993 Jean-Charles came back to Northern California, looked around Sonoma and Napa, and asked himself, “ ‘Why would I go any other way?’ ”
2.
His parents, meanwhile, were pulling out of America. “They thought it was a nightmare. Europeans just don’t get the United States—it’s too big. Opus One doesn’t get it, or Christian Moueix,” founder of Dominus, the estate carved out of land bought from the Daniel sisters in another age. “I do get it, and I told them, ‘We should be buying wineries.’ Quality in California is great, but Europeans don’t realize that, either. And my mother said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it? If you believe in it.’ ”
The Boissets had good brands in France. Jean-Charles put together a small team of consultants on a back street in San Francisco, and they all went looking for wineries and distributors, at a time when there were hundreds of the latter. “In 2003 I made my first big step and bought DeLoach, in the Russian River Valley,” producer of good pinot noir and chardonnay. “That was a big deal. And I tried many times to buy Buena Vista, until I finally got it. I was magnetized by the experience and decided to bring savoir-vivre to America,” assuming that Americans had little and would welcome “the osmosis that would make them dizzy, energize them to live the next vision.”
If he had managed to buy Buena Vista earlier he probably would not have bought Raymond and built the Red Room, the Theater of Nature, and the dog motel. He certainly would not have had to deal with the leaky wastewater that brought Andy Beckstoffer into l’affairs de Raymond, who had no desire to live any vision his new neighbor had in mind. But Raymond possessed lots of vineyard, and wines with the soft, distinctive Rutherford notes first praised by André Tchelistcheff for their redolent, “dusty” character. Jean-Charles thought Raymond could easily be converted to biodynamic farming. Instead of turning to his family for additional financing, he turned to the Japanese, specifically Kirin, yet another Pacific beer company following Foster’s of Australia into the historic wilds of Napa that by the twenty-first century were anything but.
Napa at Last Light Page 6
