Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  Tom stuck to his point that the old, narrow definition of agriculture was best because it had endured; it was real. Food service should be excluded from winery activities in part because it wasn’t traditional, and forcing it on the process would disturb, in both theory and reality, the valuable but delicate balance between farming and wine.

  The existing language was as close as it could get to civic scripture in Napa, but everything was intertwined when it came to grapes, as he knew full well. He had dealt with all the components in the larger equation—farming, making wine, selling it—and the present definition had served the county well since the creation of the agricultural preserve in 1968. It had made the unique American success that was Napa Valley.

  Such a change would also create a discrepancy between the rights of older wineries and new ones whose permits allowed them to serve food. Such a change would create new tensions all their own, bringing friction to a system supposedly based on commonality that had been the watchword since the passage of the Winery Definition Ordinance back in 1990.

  This had sought to ensure that rampant development was at least consistent, defining a winery as an “agricultural processing facility” in the business of “fermenting and processing grape juice.” Wineries were allowed to sell and market wine, too, but marketing activity was an “accessory,” clearly subordinate to production. All such accessory uses had to be restricted to less than half a winery’s footprint on the land, which was generous enough.

  The Winery Definition Ordinance—the passage of which got the former planning director, Jim Hickey, fired before Hillary Gitelman came along—had established the 75 percent rule for Napa grapes in Napa wine, assuring quality while at the same time restricting production. This had angered those wanting to profit maximally from the valley’s reputation, since the white elephants and other older wineries were exempt from the rule if they didn’t expand. But now what had been new wineries in 1990 would have to ask for permit revisions to allow them food service and so-called eventing, too.

  None of this had anything to do with agriculture in the real sense of the word and was in fact antagonistic to it. But food would attract more tourists and sell more wine more profitably, since commissions wouldn’t have to be paid to the radically dwindling number of national distributors, and improve the new wineries’ relationships with the banks.

  It would also cause more conflict with wineries caught between the oldest, with their grandfathered rights, and the newest ones. Farmers and their neighbors all over the valley who had held on to the traditional view of agriculture and land preservation wouldn’t be happy with the effects of the changes, but it would be too late to do anything about it.

  The whole food service question was a Pandora’s box and could prove communally ruinous, Tom argued. And Debra Dommen announced that the baby had just kicked her again.

  2.

  Since the time of the founding of the agricultural preserve, an interesting new dilemma has arisen: the sheer amount of money required to get into the business. A person has for the most part to be seriously rich to even try, and these types naturally come together to promote their common advantages over lesser competitors and anyone else who gets in the way, as we shall see. That often means neighbors and organizations that, once they object to vintners’ demands, are forevermore assigned the role of adversary.

  This was the broad perception of corporations in the valley at the outset of the new century, when even concern for the commonweal had become a relic and political positions were intractable. The Winegrowers, once outliers by choice, had gained allies among the Napa Valley Vintners, even among the Grapegrowers who now leaned toward development. All these organizations acted to assuage members’ fear of limitations on what they considered their needs and, almost as important, their wants. The enemy, from the corporate perspective, was anyone openly in favor of Measure J, which had subjected any changes in land use by the board of supervisors to a popular vote. When these changes, beneficial to only a few, were put before the public, the public tended to reject them.

  Referenda were part of the solution, or a witch’s brew, depending on your objectives. Highest among the political stirrers were longtime environmental advocates like Volker Eisele and Chris Malan. The Sierra Club had sued successfully over Jayson Pahlmeyer’s hillside vineyard development, but that victory had gone by without a promise being extracted from the county that it wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen again later. Now the county was allowing it by simply not acting.

  Memories of that fight still strike fear and rage in the vintner class. A proposal for a new initiative to further limit development in the hills would eventually give rise to another group too rough around the edges for Cakebread’s loafer-and-blue-blazer crowd, but all those who ignored the rules and wrapped their collective arms around free enterprise at any cost denounced sign-carrying, overeducated, “un-American no-growthers.” Thus did the valley reflect a nation whose politics was riven by triumphalism, disinformation, and the base appetite.

  Those in the wine business who most feared losing market share, and others who should have been looking after the county—heads of civic organizations, elected and appointed officials, citizens groups—were either overworked, co-opted, or trying to improve their own financial positions. The board of supervisors leaned unapologetically toward development and forgave wineries their transgressions in what amounted to tacitly approved illegality. New structures, water and sewage systems, vineyard expansions, and excess production were overlooked if they occurred at wineries, whereas similar violations by individual citizens were red-tagged and fines levied.

  If winery owners wanted to flip their investments, they got illegal modifications approved after the fact. The unstated message was that the valley was no longer primarily about wine, agriculture, or even tourism, but money; how you went about getting it was your business and none of the public’s.

  * * *

  Tom Gamble thought, “The big boys are looking for an exit strategy.” Large corporations demanded steady grape supplies but lacked the ability to wait for profits, which is the farmer’s lot. If it ever came down to a vote on saving the agricultural preserve, Mondavi’s alter ego, Harvey Posert Jr., had believed the valley’s corporate megafauna would flop for cash and get out. “The big boys can’t stand the idea of winning some years and losing others, which are the farmer’s odds,” Harvey liked to say. “So they institute changes not good for long-term business.”

  Foreign companies owned a significant percentage of Napa’s forty-five thousand acres of vineyard, though it was hard to say exactly how much more. Big publicly traded and privately held companies based in the United States owned thousands more, and collectively their influence was greater than the sum of their parts. This was abetted by smaller homegrown corporations with similar interests, all speaking with a single voice in developmental and environmental matters. They had more money among them to invest in electing candidates and passing laws to achieve those ends, their proven sympathies lying with increased development in the hills and in the ag preserve whenever they could get away with it.

  There seemed to be a permanent revolving door for the CEOs, all looking to drive up the price of their winery’s stock so they could retire comfortably. They chose masstige over prestige and made fortunes before the public caught on to the fact that quality had disappeared from wine once considered exceptional. This drove up short-term profits, but it diminished the name for the foreseeable future. Beaulieu, Beringer, and Mondavi were good examples. Much more difficult, if not impossible, was the journey back from masstige to prestige, but by then those CEOs would be gone and the winery passing into the next fraying corporate basket.

  The old definition of agriculture in Napa County’s General Plan had been the law of the land for forty years: “Agriculture is defined as the raising of crops, trees, and livestock; the production and processing of agricultural products.” Added to this rudimentary, long-accepted, even hallowed
concept was the now accepted “and related marketing, sales and other accessory uses,” akin to defining a plow as an implement for parting the soil preparatory to planting then to be turned on its side and used to serve canapés prepared in the barn for sale to spectators.

  The small change seemed innocuous but was in fact as potent as an aggressively metastasizing cancer cell. The new definition, accommodated almost unanimously by the committee meeting in Coombsville, then had to be approved by the county planning director and the board of supervisors. Clearly at odds with the traditional notion of farming, the new definition alluding to food service and other selling techniques was laughable from most perspectives, but not from that of business. And in the end those able to exploit it didn’t care how they did it.

  Tom Gamble wasn’t the only one bothered by the change. Jim Hickey, when he heard about it, told his monthly Elks Lodge luncheon group, the Good Guys, “Change the definition of ag, and you change the county’s destiny.”

  Present at that luncheon was the last surviving member of the board of supervisors that had voted in the ag preserve, Don McFarland. He and Hickey both relished their monthly get-togethers, and the rumored change in the definition of agriculture inspired discussion of bygone days. McFarland spoke wistfully of that night in 1968 when “millionaires were jerking on my coat, trying to get me to change my vote, but I wouldn’t,” a degree of bravery and independence unimaginable on the planning commission or the board of supervisors today.

  Now a Napa County planning director in the line descending from Hickey not only didn’t question the definition change but would claim a few years later—safely ensconced in her new job down in Palo Alto—that she had no memory of how the subject had come up at the meeting in Coombsville. By then the Napa Valley Vintners, the Farm Bureau, the Grapegrowers, and the Winegrowers of Napa County had all expressed their approval, a damning performance all round. In the new language lay a contagion that would, in the long run, result in the demise of a half-century of protections and high-minded aspirations.

  3.

  Geoff Ellsworth, an artist living in the town of St. Helena, eventually a cofounder of a Tom Paine–style mailer called Citizens’ Voice, had a premonition when he first heard about the change in the definition of agriculture. How, he asked himself, had something so important come about in shadow, and who was behind it? He suspected that a master plan existed to increase the advantage of corporations and the larger interests at the expense of farmers and other citizens, and that he would have to look no further than the origins of the change, marveling all the while that such a thing could happen without public debate or even general public knowledge. Why hadn’t someone challenged this as a violation of the law and, using the mechanisms outlined in Measure J that prohibited changes to land-use policy unless they were voted on by the people, gotten the question on the ballot?

  After the committee on which Tom Gamble sat made its recommendations and the county planning department and the board of supervisors expressed approval, Geoff Ellsworth started watching videos of the meetings of the county planning commission, suspecting that the key to the process was deception by elected officials, wittingly or otherwise. It was a grueling mission, the videos full of bad jokes and complicated parliamentary maneuvers. Geoff had to force himself to sit there, doodling, as sessions came and went like bad footage of creatures swimming in a murky aquarium. Never once did he hear a reference to the definition change.

  Then, in a video made in April 2008, he saw the planning director, Hillary Gitelman, sit at a table with her back to the camera and tell the supervisors that the changes proposed for the General Plan were “principally minor,” and adding that “We’ve made this document clearer than it has been historically.”

  Already watching for the smoking gun, Geoff realized that this was as close as he would get. Mention of the alteration to the definition of agriculture came near the end of her testimony when she said only, “Text change was not the purpose.”

  Geoff thought, “Well, it was certainly somebody’s purpose,” a legislative sleight of hand done without proper review under the formidable California Environmental Quality Act and, in his opinion, a moral taint. Changing the definition of a word within a rule to allow what had not been allowed before was deception, pure and simple. It was, by implication, a threat to democracy itself.

  The zoning had been changed, too, by allowing every ten-acre plot in the county to have a commercial winery event center, and if you didn’t have ten acres, you could do a lot line adjustment and cobble together additional acreage. (Given how often these “adjustments” moved property to the “adjuster,” the suspicion that they regularly resulted in the “adjusted” neighbors losing land that was really theirs seems unavoidable.) This plan went to the planning commission and then to the board of supervisors after just a three-month interval, not enough time to analyze the possible impact.

  To Geoff’s mind, the public had no idea what the changes meant. That a simple Mitigated Negative Declaration could be prepared instead of an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), making a full-blown change to county zoning, was wrong because it meant, presto, intensified commercial use on heretofore sacrosanct agricultural land. All this should have been voted on by the public under Measures J and P, just as the change in the definition of agriculture should have been voted on.

  The more Geoff thought about it, the more diabolical the process seemed. Both industry and local government had engaged in what struck him as a conspiracy to put marketing on the same level as farming. That way, when someone complained that an orchard, field, or vineyard got torn out for a paved event center—or, he imagined, a roller coaster like the one down in American Canyon, or nude dancers on a flatbed truck outside a winery—they would be asked, “Didn’t you see the law from 2008? Wine marketing is agriculture!”

  Wine marketing was now whatever you wanted it to be. It had meant one thing to old Joe Heitz back in the day, and it meant something entirely different to Jean-Charles Boisset and what would surely be a wave of imitators.

  Hillary Gitelman soon left Napa for Palo Alto to take advantage of a better opportunity, and one imagines also happy to get out of Dodge ahead of the fallout from the definition change. And Debra Dommen left the Winegrowers to perform pubic relations for Treasury Wine Estates, aka Beringer Vineyards.

  The struggle would surface again in 2016, but meanwhile another was shaping up in Geoff Ellsworth’s very backyard, the lovely little town of St. Helena. There he essentially reinvented himself as a dedicated—and effective—opponent of development by government fiat, the new bête noire now at large in the Napa Valley.

  III.

  VILLAGE AND VINE

  Development collides with the classic notion of the enduring American small town; a scion of the old order is torn between allegiance to the past and withering market demands; and local citizens rise in unprecedented opposition.

  INTERLUDE:

  Uber

  The drive sweeps steeply upward to a glass and steel amalgam of a house with no apparent entrance beyond the patterned squares of stone set about with low sprawling ground cover that holds all this together visually. There’s a metal panel beside a door with a speaker, a dark vertical screen, a cavity that looks like it might be for reading fingerprints, a built-in computer keyboard, and a discreet metal plate bearing the impression of a bell.

  I press it, but no response. I take out my cell phone and send the house’s owner a text: I am outside.

  Wind carries up the valley, pushing shrouds of cloud but no rain in this, the biggest fire season ever, 2015. A walk around the outside—one can’t easily circumnavigate this house, recently assessed at $100 million—reveals more stone sheathing, glass, a sod roof, and a lower postage-stamp lawn as green as a dream, in deep calm out of the wind. On the higher level are four impervious metal garage doors, but no sign of an entrance or a human being. It’s a bit like gazing into a vast, multifaceted aquarium devoid of fish.

  I
am being hailed. A middle-aged man in a red knit shirt and stocking feet gestures, and I go up to him. We shake hands. “Joe,” he says, as if it’s my name, not his. His last name is Schoendorf, and he adds, “This is a shoeless house.”

  Indeed, the sculpture in the entranceway is a brutal composition of fine English leather shoes skewered by sharp wooden spikes, a strong incentive for the visitor to listen to his host. The floors are stone, too, cool even in September, and the house seemingly large enough to wear out a pair of socks if you walk from one end to the other.

  We descend stairs to the broad living room beyond which is a southern view of Napa Valley. Joe leads the way into what looks like a cramped metal galley in a ship, though this one has no apparent crew, opens a locker, and takes out a black $100 bottle of Silex, the Pouilly-Fumé from the Upper Loire.

  “I don’t drink California wines,” says Joe. “I asked Aubert de Villaine”—a co-owner of Romanée-Conti—“how old his oldest vines are, and he said fifty-five years. We don’t have anything like that here.”

  The Silex is indeed clean, complex, lively. We sit on separate couches in front of a dead fireplace. Summer’s over, winter still a ways off. Joe crosses his legs. His face is long, his dark eyes inquisitive, but he’s in a hurry, having, as he put it on the phone, “a hard stop at six twenty” and it’s already a quarter to.

  Joe came to Napa for the first time in 1966 “and made it a point to get to know the people and to reach out to those who would be my neighbors.” Getting his permit for this house took years and required—in his view—digging a cave in the mountain and filling it not with wine but with ten thousand gallons of water, “the basis for all our heating and cooling, all by mother nature. It made no financial sense because of the cost,” adding with a laugh, “I belong to the point one percent, and I feel good for being green. But when I’m in board meetings with Al Gore, I get tired of it. I can’t count the number of times he says carbonization.”