Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  Why Kirin responded to a Frenchman’s “vision” remains unclear, but respond they did. “I had to go to them because no one else could see what we saw in Raymond,” which included a lot of grandfathered rights and utilitarian space waiting to be reinterpreted. One of the Raymond brothers, Walter, and some other old Napa hands, including a veteran of Christian Moueix’s Petrus/Dominus domain, helped Jean-Charles pick a winemaker from among thirty under consideration. Meanwhile JCB “was practically living at Raymond, and spending a fortune on French oak. We kept up production, and walked around the old winery trying to decide what color to paint it.”

  White with gold trim was the choice, “to bring the unique experience I wanted. People would come not as customers, but as guests. I wanted them to dream.”

  Also to be “educated” by purchasing high-end paraphernalia only tangentially connected to wine appreciation (but not to savoir faire and joie de vivre): Baccarat crystal, Lalique glass, all manner of luxuries that would eventually include gold spit buckets, a $5,000 handmade trolley for wine bottles, and a black lacquered case containing an artful arrangement of women’s panties, a black leather whip, and other nonessentials for $25,000. This was so far from anything the Raymond brothers might have imagined that older employees found themselves gape-mouthed.

  An array of sniffers are mounted on the wall of the corridor leading to the Red Room, supposedly containing every essence of wine that can be expelled with the push of a button. On busy days while the real thing’s being unspectacularly made on the far side of the winery, visitors who have left their dogs in the dog motel and their spouses in the Theater of Nature wander in a miasma of commingling chemical approximations of oak, berries, lavender, and cigar box, uncertain of what to do with this experience, but intrigued.

  “I wanted to bring texture and emotion to the journey” with a conflation of wine, desire, and a hint of the illicit. “I’m passionate about the experience—escape, learn—dream! I want my guests to come back, and we’re very lucky to have such a product. Which is art!”

  This is the ultimate justification cited by established vintners all over the valley, and by recent arrivals. Good reviews tended to incorporate “art” as an intrinsic good. Robert Mondavi, Jean-Charles’s American idol, pushed the notion of wine and art to a disastrous conclusion with the failed art and wine museum Copia, in the city of Napa. Its colossal collapse brought down with it the idea that associations with art will float any scheme, however ill conceived, if sufficient money and vanity are packed into it. But Jean-Charles was coming at it from another direction altogether.

  * * *

  He pays homage to the Surrealists, his favorite artists, but declines to elaborate. Part vinous Barnum, part New Age Haraszthy—a contender for the title of father of California viticulture—Boisset also loves Disney and, like Mondavi, has difficulty saying no to anything. Much of what each of these men leave behind is philosophically incompatible with the agricultural idyll in which their dreams flourish.

  Agriculture by definition prohibits commercial activities not related to it, including jazz concerts, retail shops, event centers, the removal of land from agricultural production for parking lots, new roads, storage facilities, and other activities industrial by nature. Wineries cause the same problems for communities as do factories, which in reality is what wineries have become: accelerated water consumption, waste, emissions, noise, increased car and truck traffic, and a daily invasion and exodus of workers and visitors who leave money behind, but at a cost. All fuel growth and tourism at the expense of cropland and a traditional notion of agriculture from the Greeks down through Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau to the present. But those things are all good for corporations, and Raymond, too, had become nothing if not corporate.

  3.

  While Jean-Charles was “living the dream, traveling the world, and adoring women enormously as a bachelor,” he met a Gallo rep in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the city’s toughest sell. It had been assigned to Gina Gallo because, Jean-Charles says, “she was tough.” Also tall, personable, unaffected, and the granddaughter of Gallo’s cofounder, Julio.

  In 2003 they met again at Vinexpo, in Bordeaux, at a table of international wine celebrities, “and she stands up and looks at me with those beautiful blue eyes and boom!” She was headed to Paris the next day, and so was Jean-Charles. He said, “So let’s go out,” and she said, “Can I bring my sister?”

  He invited a dozen male friends to join them, to distract the other granddaughter of Julio Gallo. Later, he and Gina “had a kiss at one of the clubs,” then in Santa Rosa they “had another kiss and—bada boom!—I was in love.”

  The account is touching—two sophisticated products of hugely successful wine dynasties married in San Francisco. A diagnosis of breast cancer for Gina, Jean-Charles says, soon made him “start thinking about the meaning of life,” and kept him in California most of the time, though he was then running things for his family in France as well. Gina recovered, and though children were not supposed to be a possibility, she gave birth to twin girls in 2011.

  * * *

  Margrit Biever Mondavi, Robert’s widow, told Jean-Charles at a chance meeting that the house in the hills behind Yountville, designed by Cliff May so that Robert could swim daily in the living room, “should be your home.”

  He expressed interest, got a call from an agent, then one from Robert’s son, Michael. Clearly the house had become a burden for them, if a valuable one. “Michael asked how soon I could decide,” recalls Jean-Charles, who won’t reveal the price. He called his father, who asked, “What are you waiting for?”

  Discussion became de facto negotiation, though Gina knew nothing of this. Jean-Charles and Michael haggled for two days on two continents—he in Burgundy, Michael in the Napa Valley. Finally Jean-Charles faxed him an offer, and Michael called to say, “Done.”

  When Jean-Charles got back to Napa he drove his wife up to the house, where an agent was waiting. “I told Gina, ‘We can go in and look at it—or we can just have it.’ Neither of us had been inside, but in life you sometimes just do things in a lucky moment, and this house had the highest amount of energy of anyplace in the valley. It fit so well with my love of history and Napa, architecture and California’s indoor/outdoor living.” So they just did it.

  A photograph taken in the now Boisset-Gallo house graced a Christmas card a few years later. It showed Gina and Jean-Charles in formal attire on each side of little girls dressed in brilliant white dresses. Jean-Charles stands slightly apart, smiling ambiguously, as inclusive of the viewer as he is of his wife and daughters. He seems to be saying, Now isn’t this something?

  * * *

  In late 2015 Boisset received a copy of a letter that had been sent to the county board of supervisors by the white-shoe San Francisco law firm Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger. It regarded the Napa County Code enforcement action against Raymond Vineyards and read, in part, “This firm represents Beckstoffer Vineyards in matters related to the repeated, flagrant, and longstanding violations of Napa County land use regulations by Raymond Vineyards . . . Over the past four years, Raymond has profited tremendously from its unlawful actions, to the detriment of the County’s law-abiding residents and business. Thus far, however, the County has all but ignored these violations.”

  The law firm urged the county “to take prompt and effective enforcement action against Raymond . . . ‘Red Tag’ and require Raymond to remove the unauthorized improvements it made to convert over 10,000 square feet of office and production space into four accessory hospitality and tasting rooms.” In short, the county should enforce its own rules. “We recognize that Raymond is not the only winery that has violated County regulations or permit requirements. . . . [T]here is nothing punitive or unfair about the County simply requiring a property owner to comply with the law or preventing those who violate the law from unjustly enriching themselves at the public’s expense. . . . [I]t appears that, following their purchase of the facility in 200
9, Raymond’s new owners made a series of deliberate decisions not to follow those rules—and to see if they could get away with it.”

  Jean-Charles told journalists—over lunch, naturally—“There’s always someone trying to bring you down. You can’t let the little people stop you. They’re like mosquitoes—they bite you, and then they die.”

  But Andy B wasn’t likely to oblige. Instead, he sat back and waited for the county to move against Raymond, assuming that the county government now had no choice and that the fight would soon break out into the open.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  Orwell’s Plow

  Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful.

  —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

  1.

  Napa’s place in the global wine market is by definition small, like the valley itself, but its worldwide reputation is outsized, based on more than a century and a half of producing good wine, the Paris Tasting of 1976, climate and soils that produce predictably good cabernet, and a concentrated opulence rarely encountered elsewhere. This displayed wealth, including corporate, is used by those possessing it—or their designates—to sell themselves and to sell the valley as a unique, well-contained, convenient venue for monied travelers. That is how the world sees Napa.

  The consequences of so-called high-end tourism are increased traffic, glamorized winemaking and farming, clashes between winemakers and neighbors, and staged programs and events at hundreds of wineries that threaten to overpower all else. Shrinkage in the number of national distributors contributed mightily to this trend, but this neither explains nor excuses it. Wineries selling directly to customers may eliminate fees and generally double their money, a near-irresistible dynamic.

  But the engine driving customers to wineries is tourism by definition, and catering to and feeding the human element in this newfound bonanza changed the valley. It now threatens to permanently debase it.

  Not so many years ago, agriculture was not only considered the highest and best use of the land, but laws regulating tourism were strictly enforced. Experiences like those at Raymond were practically nonexistent. Today Jean-Charles Boisset is far from alone, just better than his competitors at providing entertainment that draws revelers-cum-buyers through doors thrown wide by the heterodox associations of wine. The phenomenon had many contributors, but none more important than an obscure committee—there’s always a committee—seeking in 2006 not to explicitly weaken the long-established law limiting promotion by any means but to do so under the guise of making the valley “better.”

  The committee’s stated object was to “reconsider” existing county laws and perhaps to tweak (read: subvert) them in the direction of events and concomitant profits. This meant inserting words seemingly innocuous so wine would flow around the sainted agricultural preserve’s rigidity and find its way to more lips and satisfy more unrequited desires, including the desire for more profits.

  Tom Gamble no longer wears the ten-gallon hat he had on when elected to the Farm Bureau’s Land Use Committee at the annual picnic back in 2000. It was held at the Charles Krug Winery, and Tom’s hat reminded people that he ran a small line of organic “beeves” up in the east hills, a sentimental connection to Napa’s mixed agriculture that is now almost entirely gone. The Gamble family had farmed in Napa County for eighty-four years, and that included Tom’s vines planted on broad riverine flats in the middle of the valley.

  Tom was now wearing a flat-crowned straw instead of the ten gallon, reminding the same people—grape growers, family, friends—of the hat worn by Andy Hoxsey, who had also inherited big, historic vineyards nearby that had belonged to Andy’s grandfather, Andy Pelissa. There were several Andys among the agricultural preserve’s early supporters, as well as a rich assortment of newcomers and future stars passionately opposed to development. These included Jack and Jamie Davies.

  Such is the complex overlay of personality, topography, politics, and society embodied by descendants of another age still seen in St. Helena, Yountville, and Napa, ambulatory vessels of history known to fewer and fewer people. They are, for the most part, still faithful to agriculture, at a time when money and notoriety seem to trump all else, and in 2006 Tom Gamble became one of twenty-four people named to a citizens board charged with reviewing the county’s General Plan.

  The assignment sounded like work to him, which it proved to be, calling on him to drive regularly from his farm office just north of Yountville—the one with an old movie poster on the wall showing a grinning Ernest Borgnine in Abilene—down to the city of Napa and then east into Coombsville. Each time, he passed the Napa State Hospital (formerly known as Napa Insane Asylum) and would come to think of this as a fitting prelude to what followed.

  The committee met in a school that provided space for the meetings and was chaired by the county planning director at the time, Hillary Gitelman, a trained professional in land use in a perennial blue blazer. Tom’s fellow members were a varied lot: retired teachers, a couple of architects, a winery heir, a sales rep for a steel supplier, some older longtime valley residents, a vineyard developer, and the executive director of the Winegrowers of Napa County, the only paid advocate on the committee.

  Her name was Debra Dommen, and she was self-assured, outspoken, and pregnant. Soon Dommen was telling the group that every time Tom spoke, the baby kicked her.

  * * *

  The Bush economic downturn began and would soon be a recession, but for the moment the General Plan had to be updated, and it seemed to Tom that both Gitelman and Dommen were in favor of relaxing conservation safeguards built into the existing plan. The lagging economy had increased pressure on the county government to grant permits to wineries wanting to do things not allowed under the old rules, including serve food. It wasn’t called that initially, however; instead, it was euphemistically referred to as “wine pairings,” and cast as an essential part of selling wine although wine had been successfully sold to visitors without food in Napa for a century and a half.

  Tom was aware that he straddled two worlds here. First and foremost, he was a farmer. But he also owned a small ten-thousand-case winery like a number of other growers, because the economics of grapes had changed. There were not a lot of Andy Beckstoffers out there, and most growers generally needed an extra source of income. Selling your own wine, even with most of your grapes going to other wineries, made an appreciable difference. And you didn’t need “tastings” to do it, just good wine to offer drop-ins interested in sampling the products of the land—in Tom’s case, a sprawling vineyard he had inherited split by the Napa River and lines of big old trees.

  And if a farmer grew grapes sustainably, he also needed capital to replant, another argument in favor of selling some wine to improve return on investment. It helped keep the family business rolling and paid inheritance taxes and some other expenses. But Tom had no interest in entertaining tourists, an activity he considered antithetical to farming.

  Wineries that bought most of their grapes from growers were pushing for building concessions that took land out of production. This was not in the spirit of agriculture, but still they clambered to put up more structures that sold directly to visitors, even though this created a dissonance in what had been a tight alliance of growers. Some wanted in on the tourism bonanza in a bigger way, and the Farm Bureau felt the heat of these demands within its ranks.

  The citizens meeting in the school went through each element of land use in the General Plan—goals and definitions—and discussed what might be changed and what might be added. Usually such committees tightened up rules to assure the continuance of historic practices—in Napa’s case, farming as the highest and best use of the land—but for some reason pressure was this time being brought to loosen them. Very quickly, it seemed to Tom, the definition of agriculture in the General Plan was raised, along with the possibility of changing the wording to include something about tastings.

  Neither Gitelman nor Dommen tried t
o argue that preparing and serving food could actually be defined as agriculture, which was preposterous. But implied was the notion that some mention of food service should be included to help those struggling. Then, almost immediately, the argument was being made that no new wineries could succeed without it.

  In retrospect, no one could put a finger on exactly who suggested the change. The planning director seemed to support adding the language, with Dommen adamantly in favor. As a paid advocate for a large, powerful political organization, she regularly sought to affect county elections and get legislation passed that would help the wealthy members of the Winegrowers of Napa County. Critics had pointed out for some time that actions by the Winegrowers led to outcomes good for them but not necessarily for the community. Its proven sympathies were with supervisors favoring development over all else.

  Since Jack Cakebread first invited potential members to his “pond house” in the late 1980s and formed the Winegrowers, its membership had been recast by death and incapacity. But its influence had grown and members now included representatives of multinationals as well as prominent family corporations like Trefethen, Far Niente, and Trinchero, and outliers like Craig Hall and Bill Harlan. A significant addition would be Kendall-Jackson, notorious cutter of thousands of oaks along the Central Coast’s interstate highway.

  Changing the definition of the ageless practice of farming in the county where the first agricultural preserve in the United States was established seemed to Tom Gamble rash and unwarranted. He also thought it odd that Dommen had been allowed on the committee in the first place, since the other members were citizens without apparent links to partisan politics. She was a corporate animal seeking to improve her employers’ bottom lines and, he suspected, her résumé as well. Gamble and some other members of the committee were struck by her stridency and the fact that the planning director seemed to openly defer to her.