Hugh’s boys came down the broad front stairs, Jamie taking obvious notice of everything around her. She had become more than a figurehead after Jack’s death, to the surprise of many people, in charge of an enterprise with devotees on five continents, selling some 700,000 bottles of sparkling wine a year, filling glass flutes for toasts around the world by presidents and premiers, kings and queens.
Schramsberg was unique, Hugh knew that. But people were asking if the next generation could carry on this fabulous family enterprise in a time of economic and political uncertainty. Was this the end of an era in the valley, and a way of life? The demands of the marketplace were ferocious, and the often conflicting desires of long-term investors who had helped his parents get started were now causing some acrimony, with a substantial estate tax due. Could Hugh hold all this together without the counsel of his beloved parents, with his brothers alternately indifferent and in revolt, the valley itself a welter of success, extravagance, and conflict?
The next morning Hugh received a call from Maria in the big house. She was helping care for Jamie and told Hugh his mother was very uncomfortable. He went over and tried to comfort Jamie, but by afternoon Maria was putting cold towels on her, and Jamie was still in pain. She whispered, “My God, this is terrible.”
Hugh touched her forehead, hotter than it had ever been. An hour later things had gotten worse. Two nurses were now with Jamie, who couldn’t stop moving. Several medicines had been prescribed, and there were supplements, too, but when the nurses tried to give these to Jamie, she said, “No more.”
Her struggle continued into the night. Monique and Hugh walked back to their little house just before midnight and were back at her bedside early the next morning. Jamie had fluid in her lungs and was no longer talking. Hugh’s brother Bill and his wife, Gayle, came up from the valley floor, everyone trying to figure out how to help, but by noon things had gotten worse. Hugh thought, “My God, is this it?”
Suddenly she was gone. He wished he had never left her side, the similarity between his parents’ deaths striking him hard: They had both died in this bed, in the same manner, ten years apart. Jamie had been Jack’s chief nurse, and he had needed a lot of help at the end. Lou Gehrig’s disease, with which he was afflicted, involves motor neurons, as does Parkinson’s. First it had incapacitated his fingers, then his hands and arms, then his entire upper body. He could walk until the day he died and he could communicate, although breathing had become extremely difficult. Jack had passed away in his sleep, Jamie beside him.
Hugh thought, “We have no idea where the soul is going.”
This was frightening, but mostly for the dying themselves. He had seen it in his father’s eyes, and Jamie’s, too, and was glad both had maintained an affinity with Buddhism, a surprise to many who knew them because it was unorthodox. It hadn’t been devotion exactly, more like sympathy with basic precepts, and something Hugh hadn’t even noticed as a child. Tibetan monks had come from their sanctuary in Southern California to spend time with Jack during his final weeks, more often toward the end. They had helped the family deal with life in the absence of his father, lifting spirits, directing thoughts and energy, saying, in effect, “Give your love to Jack so he can take it with him.”
The next day the monks arrived and surrounded Jamie’s body with flowers. The smell of incense infused the big house; the bell outside that had been rung when Hugh had been brought home from the hospital, forty-three years before, now rang again for Jamie, while Schramsberg’s workers gathered below the balcony, tears streaking many faces.
In the days that followed people dropped by ceaselessly with flowers and food; there were more monks with bells and incense. Hugh was grateful and thought his mother deserved such an outpouring of love and support. Work went on at Schramsberg as before, while up at the big house Hugh planned the memorial service. Jack’s had been a glorious ceremony up in the Grove, and he prepared for a repetition of this while people took turns keeping vigil at the mortuary.
Hugh’s brother Bill, the oldest Davies boy, was trying to branch out on his own but had returned to the big house with his wife and their young son. Bill had left the family business years before for what he referred to as “health and lifestyle” reasons. Now he and Hugh drove down together with one of the monks, Lama Gyatso, to prepare for the cremation. This was harder for both brothers than they had anticipated. Standing outside, they watched thermals rise from the chimney, and before Hugh was ready—again—he glimpsed a rising cloud of ash: distant birds taking flight.
3.
Hugh had heard all the stories: on the first day of harvest employees, friends, and family gathered to pick the grapes, load them into wooden boxes, and bring them down to the secondhand press, a hollow cylinder with removable plates. The juice flowed into a steel basin from which it was pumped into a settling tank. Once, the press, after having been filled, wouldn’t start. André Tchelistcheff, the Russian-born, Bordeaux-trained former enologist at Beaulieu Vineyard, turned to Jamie and with old-world formality said, “Madame, your duty is clear,” and she had removed her shoes, stepped into the press, and began to tread.
There was the story about Aguirre, the Mexican who had saved Hugh’s father’s life. Aguirre had gone to school in St. Helena when there were only a dozen Spanish-speaking families in the valley. In those days families traveled from town to town in season working the harvest (la pisca), picking walnuts, prunes, grapes, apples in Sebastopol, apricots in Fairfield, cotton all the way down in Fresno. Aguirre was only twenty when he arrived at Schramsberg, and thought it a desolate place, but he took the job as foreman because Jack let him move his young family into the old carriage house.
Aguirre helped clean the tanks, a sometimes dangerous job because one had a small opening at the top just large enough for a man, and no manhole at the bottom. After it was cleaned it had to be retouched with epoxy paint, which had a powerful odor. He and Jack took turns going down the rope ladder to do this, and when Jack came out looking tired, Aguirre said, “Why don’t you stay out here?”
“Because I’m the boss,” said Jack, “and I’m going back down.”
He did, and he fell from the effect of the fumes. Aguirre heard and went in after him. With the help of the gardener and two painters working on the house he got Hugh’s father back up, but his shoulders lodged in the narrow opening. The Mexican’s shout was so loud that it brought others. Jack was extracted at last and laid out on the ground. Hugh saw, with great relief, his father’s eyes open.
The doctor later told Jack, “You owe your life to that man.”
* * *
Hugh’s earliest memory was of a man in a silver suit stepping out of a metallic pod. Much later, he learned that this had been Neil Armstrong emerging from the Apollo 11 mission spacecraft on July 21, 1969, on the moon. Hugh had been upstairs with the rest of the family, in what was called the Marshmallow Bedroom because the mattress was lumpy. They were all crowded together on the four-poster, under screened windows blanketed with June bugs, high above the garden and the ponds alive with croaking frogs. Looking from the man in the silver suit to the spreading branches of what he would learn were maples, then to the bright orb against a velvet black sky, joyous excitement coursed through him: the family was a team playing a part in a mystery joining everyone on the planet.
From the beginning the house was the center of things: winery offices, visitors’ room, laboratory. But the long oval dining room table by the bay window was the most important place. Business meetings, marketing presentations, wine tastings were held around it, and when Hugh was small the patterns in the Asian carpet provided imaginary courses for him to push his cars along while, above, his parents talked to important people, like André. Friendly, diminutive, bushy-browed, he had brought quality to the valley after Prohibition, to anyone who had needed a hand.
There had been a saxophonist named Marge, and several young winemakers. One of them, Harold, had a technical degree from UC Davis. Buoyant, playful, he
drove a Volkswagen van and loved Frank Zappa and wore rubber boots and blue jeans. Behind his beard was a jolly countenance the Davies boys all chased after from the lab to the winery where the big tanks stood amid hoses, pump, filter, and buckets. One day, trailing him, Hugh became fascinated with a tank valve, moved the handle, and wine gushed onto the floor, a terrifying sight.
The dining room may have been the strategic center of Schramsberg, but the basement was the center of winemaking. When Hugh was older he watched his parents in the blending and dosage trials, and listened as they proposed solutions to each other, joined by retailers, writers, winemakers, restaurateurs, all friends, all together at the table. Hugh knew what camaraderie meant before he heard the word, and knew what his father had meant when he quoted Robert Mondavi: “If you succeed, we all succeed.”
* * *
What happened in Napa Valley hadn’t happened before in California. Napa wasn’t France, Italy, Germany, or Spain, but the “New World,” where hope and enthusiasm for making wine was kept alive by the desire to rival the finest of Europe. This hope was met with skepticism outside the valley, and Schramsberg’s sparkling wine was doubly risky, and doubly exciting.
Schramsberg dealt with many growers in the valley, their names signposts in time: Carpenter, Pelissa, Frediani, Phair, Collins, Pecota, Draper. Eventually Schramsberg’s Blanc de Blancs would be taken to China by President Nixon and used in a toast with the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, unbeknownst to the Davieses before a neighbor called and said, “Turn on your television set.”
* * *
Hugh went to Champagne with his parents and brothers when he was in the first grade and kept a diary. What most impressed him were the grand old châteaux in Champagne—those of the Rousseaus, Louis Roederer, Bollinger, Pol Roger, where he met the families. Years passed, and the sons of these houses came to spend summers at Schramsberg, working in some aspect of winemaking, and Hugh and his brothers did the same in Champagne, Cognac, even Australia, all part of a tradition going back a century or more in Europe but newborn in America.
At home, Hugh and his brothers played in the caves, calling them “the tunnels.” Two heavy wooden doors set in stone stood beside the lower pond, shaded by maples, oaks, and manzanitas. Water dripped from the overhanging stone, and during winter rains people passed through, sometimes pushing carts of bottles, a scene out of the distant past.
The tunnels were strange, irresistible, magical. However cold and wet outside, deep underground it was dry; in the furnace of summer, the tunnels were cool. They had been dug by Chinese migrants in the late 1800s, after construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad freed up the laborers. These men made up the early workforce for the burgeoning wine industry, too, before the Mexicans. The caves were the first in the valley and provided darkness and constant coolness required by sparkling wine.
April, May, and June were the busiest, when wine from the prior year’s vintage was to be bottled. First some yeast and sugar were added to induce another fermentation in the bottle. The yeast consumed the sugar and produced fine bubbles of carbon dioxide, called beads, then the bottles were set to rest on their sides in stacks, some to stay there as long as seven years, some for twenty-five, while the sugar caramelized.
The boys were attached to crews as they became old enough, and eventually would perform all sorts of jobs. There were dangers. One day Hugh, a teenager now, was setting a bottle in a tub, trying to keep pace with the older workers, when he struck it against another bottle. It exploded and at once he felt a wet, warm sensation. The production foreman jammed a towel into his mouth. Dripping blood, Hugh was led out of the caves to a car and driven to the hospital in St. Helena, where two dozen stitches were needed to hold his lip together.
Music in the tunnels—mariachi, salsa, banda—never ceased when the workers were down there. Soon, though, they would all be wearing gloves and safety masks.
4.
In Schramsberg’s gardens some of the old plants from the time of Jacob Schram still flourished. Jamie had refused to alter the character of the place, and when making floral arrangements for special events would use her own flowers from the garden. She walked there, noting what had to be done to make it better, color very important to her because she had once been a painter.
Whenever labels for the bottles had to be altered, Jamie would lay the samples out on the dining room table, and she and Jack would talk about them. Schramsberg was on its way by then, but large questions remained: Which of the boys would pick up the legacy and eventually lead this unlikely enterprise? Jack and Jamie encouraged them all to get involved. “You don’t have to,” they would say, “but it would be great.” Hugh and his brothers could work together like three legs of a stool, each with a distinct function—production, marketing and sales, finance and administration.
They called individual meetings with each boy. These were uncomfortable. Their parents would ask, “What do you want to do with your life?” They would tell the boys individually, “Do well in college. Get good grades. Be a stand-up person—a doer, not a user. Make something of yourself.”
* * *
Hugh attended Bowdoin College and was accepted as a congressional intern in Washington, DC. He wanted to get into the environmental movement, to do something that made a difference. His parents were environmentalists, after all, though he felt that label never really fit. Environmental regulations made developers unhappy, but Hugh was glad the state and the valley had them and he wished the laws were more restrictive.
His parents had been dedicated to the idea of the agricultural preserve, established back in 1968, in part with their help. That law had prevented houses from being built on parcels of less than forty acres; it had kept Napa Valley from becoming just another bedroom community.
Hugh had shied away from business in the beginning, telling his parents he simply wanted to do things good for the earth, like working in Washington to strengthen the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, and help set aside more pristine areas as wilderness. So he went to work for a public interest research group (or PIRG) as a phone volunteer, soliciting donations. Then he quit and went backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail, prompting his father to say, “You have to support yourself, son. You don’t want to be a basket weaver.”
They bartered: After the trip Hugh would come back to the valley, work the harvest season, and spend the winter pruning in Schramsberg’s hillside vineyards. He also worked for the Trust for Public Land in San Francisco, but ended up studying chemistry and physics at Santa Rosa Junior College, his ongoing practical education fairly typical of the scions of winery founders. This penance included working in Champagne and continuing his studies. He was twenty-nine by the time he got his master’s degree at UC Davis. In a way he never really stopped studying. By June 1996 he was ready to get back to California to work in earnest. He was not a basket weaver; in some ways his life had been like his father’s: rise early, try harder, go further. He had been set back from time to time but the whole had been, if not joyful, pretty cool by comparison with that of others his age. And it had been lonely.
When he got home he was made Schramsberg’s enologist—junior winemaker—then assistant winemaker, and finally head winemaker. Life began to take leaps now. His brother Bill, who worked for Schramsberg in sales, resigned and went out on his own. The middle brother, John—good-looking, dismissive of the wine business from early on—left and ended up doing deals in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Before Jamie died, John had shown up in the Napa Valley in a chauffeured limousine and demanded an early inheritance. The unexpected fight between mother and middle son had made it into the San Francisco Chronicle, and Jamie shared her pain with Hugh. He was wounded by what John had done, but there was no escaping family at Schramsberg.
Hugh had met and married a lovely girl named Lily from just down Highway 29, whose family also owned a small winery. They lived together in the little McEachron house but not for long; the split-up a
micable, Hugh was once again alone. He served a year as the president of the Napa Valley Vintners, a title that floated annually among the wine estates, large and small. While president he supported environmental actions on behalf of the hillside and viewshed preservation ordinances, and Napa’s “green” certification, which brought some reprimand from men who had known his father: “Now, Hugh, aren’t you going a little fast here?”
On a trip to Oklahoma City for the Vintners he found himself in the company of a girl from Coombsville, Monique Nelson. He had known her since his UC Davis days, but not well. Now she worked for Joseph Phelps Vineyards, and he noticed that she had eyes the color of jade, dark blond hair, and a manner both proper and friendly. They went off to Mexico together, then climbed Mount St. Helena, and Hugh took along a ring he had bought through a friend in New York. They were married on a rainy day in October in the Grove, where Monique asked him to sing “Green Eyes.”
The ceremony and several nine-liter bottles of sparkling wine behind them, officially man and wife, both wanting kids, they were ready for life to begin.
Their first son, Emrys, was born that year, as joyous an occasion as any. Their second, Nelson, came along fourteen months later, and their third three years after that. They had not intended to name the youngest after Hugh, but did, to be called Huey.
Hugh adopted a single ruling maxim: Take one day at a time. He wanted to move his family into the big house, but initially there was opposition from the board. Some directors, his brother Bill, and an aging shareholder both wanted to use the house to sell more wine to tourists, but traffic already threatened to overwhelm the little road coming up from Highway 29. The logistics of moving people once they got there, from the parking lot to the house and then to the caves, or the other way around, were daunting. But to prevent a schism Hugh deferred that decision, and the big house sat empty while he, Monique, and their brood remained packed like sardines in the little house down the driveway.
Napa at Last Light Page 10
