Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  * * *

  In 2010 Schramsberg had sold more wine than it ever had, an indisputable testament to success. The winery was powered by solar panels and had the Napa Green land certification he had earlier pushed for. But Hugh saw that survival meant adapting to the challenges of a never-ending, always different present, and that what had been done in the past wouldn’t necessarily be acceptable in the future. The most obvious need was another facility in the neighborhood to help accommodate winemaking, and visitors. Schramsberg had long ago run out of space.

  There was another reason for finding a place down the hill, beyond having to thread the needle with more gondolas and flatbeds loaded with grapes, delivery trucks great and small, rental cars, limos, and winery workers. Sparkling white wine and still reds were basically incompatible in the all-important modern world of wine marketing, an assertion going back to Jack’s argument opposing the red wine program: such different wines—cabernet and sparkling whites—were for a small quality producer incompatible in terms of marketing and publicity. They were the vinous equivalent of man and woman, church and state, town and gown. But Schramsberg needed an entirely different kind of facility, with better temperature and humidity controls, as well as open-top fermenters and de-stemming and pressing equipment for red grapes.

  The search began for a suitable place within striking distance of Schramsberg. Someone mentioned a former car dealership on the south end of St. Helena. It was called Epps and had sold Chevys to St. Helenans for years. It sat empty and unlovely behind the A&W root beer eatery just off Highway 29. For decades the Davieses had argued against building within the agricultural preserve, and here was a facility within town limits where wine could be made and sold without affecting agriculture, within easy reach of delivery trucks, grape gondolas, and tourists. It was, Hugh thought, the perfect place, never dreaming that some people might think otherwise.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  Our Town

  1.

  Geoff Ellsworth has a round, cherubic face that belies his half-century of existence. Thin straight nose, delicate nostrils, a way of tucking his chin while talking, big aviator glasses parked on his forehead. His new role is at odds with that of painter, which is one of his professions, another being actor in the ancient, antic tradition of traveling performers. Self-transformation’s his art, as well as his new avocation: community organizing in the place where he grew up.

  Geoff had discovered that he shared the ire felt by a slice of the citizenry. Here it was toward the planning commission of St. Helena, and though no one knew exactly how large that slice was, it had been exposed by an attempt to rewrite the town’s regulations for small wineries, similar to the attempt by the county to rewrite the definition of agriculture. The old regs had served the community well for decades, but the proposed changes would allow expanded sales and activities within residential neighborhoods, and Geoff saw this as a potentially destructive force.

  For years he had followed—at a distance—environmental politics in the valley, which was about the only kind there was. Then suddenly, it seemed, the issues had all landed in the middle of little St. Helena. Geoff didn’t know how to deal with this, so he went online and got access to more videos, these being of the planning commission meetings that had occurred around the time of the changes to the Winery Definition Ordinance. He downloaded them and began to watch, sitting at the dining room table in his mother’s house on Sylvaner Avenue and drawing, always drawing, on plain unmarked paper.

  Just two doors away lived Peter and Carlene Mennen, the money behind the big lawsuit against the vintner Jayson Pahlmeyer more than a decade before. The Mennens and Chris Malan had been joined by the Sierra Club, and their phenomenal victory had preceded a similar but much larger fight now going on in 2015 in the far east of the county, over a potential development known as Walt Ranch. The Mennens had been criticized and even threatened at the time of the Pahlmeyer fight, and trash thrown from passing cars into their yard that brimmed with unruly native species. The Mennens had withdrawn from personal involvement in the big, vituperative environmental issues of the day, but their foundation was still at work.

  Geoff became fascinated with the planning commission meetings and even made a little sketch of the room where the meetings were held, which helped him visualize them as an artist.

  Officials in the videos, Geoff thought, behaved as the supervisors had in the earlier videos he watched when the definition of agriculture was being changed. As if in a special box, the planning commissioners made jokes and remarks in what sounded to him like mock-serious discussion of bike paths and stop signs. Then, on April 16, 2013, he found what he considered the smoking gun. In that video one of the commissioners, a young attorney recently elected, was thumbing through papers at the end of the session when he said offhandedly, “I would like to bring something up, if you guys would care to hear it . . .”

  Geoff sat up straight and punched the volume key on the computer. “I was going through the small winery definition . . .”—the lawyer read from prepared notes on a yellow legal pad—“and foremost I find this language extremely confusing and some things contradictory . . . I just feel like it needs overall updating . . .”

  Geoff felt his pulse quicken. The lawyer was saying, in effect, that wineries in town had to compete with wineries out in the county, “and don’t have the ability to market themselves in ways that Napa County wineries are able to do, specially with tourism, tastings, and marketing events . . .”

  The other commissioners agreed, and the proposal went on the agenda for the next meeting. Suddenly the commissioners were all acting as if this was a done deal and that the planning commission would pass it on to the city council for a vote, and protection of neighborhoods from winery expansions would disappear.

  Geoff replayed the video two more times. “So that’s how it’s done here,” he thought, googling the attorney’s name. He discovered that the attorney had launched his legal career not in St. Helena but in Southern California by helping Hollywood wannabes like Chelsea Handler, Tyra Banks, and Rainn Wilson achieve celebrity. Then he had been retained by Francis Ford Coppola to handle the director’s purchase of Chateau Souverain in Sonoma County and all the construction that followed. He went on to work for other companies with issues concerning neighbor relations, water, and zoning, and said publicly of his job: “Knowing how to work with the county employees and city officials, I’ve been able to use the skills I’ve developed to help my clients achieve what they want,” adding that “the county is permitting more wineries. If that continues in the right direction, my firm will grow with my clients.”

  Geoff Ellsworth thought what had happened in St. Helena was special interest legislation, to him a small-bore, if legal, version of the stock market insider trading he had read about. Certain people seemed to have knowledge of legislative changes before anyone else had it, and that knowledge benefited them. He started to look at connections among all those who had favored—or seemed to favor—changing the winery definition, and soon found himself deep in the interwoven social and political matrix that is small-town America.

  2.

  He spent his earliest years on the ridge to the west that he could see today from the pavement in front of his mother’s house. His father had worked for Mayacamas Vineyards from which flowed cabernets and chardonnays of legendary fortitude, doing some of the winemaking and much else in what was hardscrabble viticulture. By the time Geoff was ten he was sick of winemaking, having witnessed how a vintner and his dependents labor together.

  Geoff’s father, Robert, an engineer by training, owned no part of Mayacamas Vineyards and so moved down to the valley floor and opened what amounted to a repair shop and outfitter for wine enthusiasts of all ranks. He called it The Compleat Winemaker and he and his wife, Phoebe, became the go-to source for everything from simple parts to a dizzying array of gadgets. She sold while her husband, the itinerant expert, fixed in situ pumps, bottling machines, and so on, and rewired foreign
grape presses no one else could. “It was like All Creatures Great and Small,” Geoff liked to say. “I would tag along, and have to wait around for hours while the job was completed.”

  When he was older, he and his friends worked the crush every harvest—at Rutherford Hill, Rombauer, Beringer, Domaine Chandon. They made sixteen dollars an hour, good pay, and were required to stay in the vineyards for only eight hours a day, whereas the smaller operations required twelve and even fourteen hours a day. “The truth was that however much time it took, you didn’t go home until the job was done.” That was fine with Geoff, who saw it as a valuable cultural link between wine and the community. This was agriculture, and agriculture was what the place was all about.

  Then, before his last harvest, he and his friends were told they weren’t going to get sixteen dollars anymore, they were going to get only nine. “The wineries had realized they could get unskilled outside workers for half price. And they did, even though those of us who lived here had a history and an emotional attachment to the job.” After that, all harvest workers came from outside the county, “the beginning of the disconnect between the community and the wine industry. By maximizing profits they lost an important connection. The loyalty was gone, and it never returned.”

  St. Helena remained a good place to live, though, with “a great zeitgeist,” European in feel, as if the good aspects of wine had somehow bled into the social fabric, imbuing it with “a high level of education and interest in culture.” St. Helenans went to watch foreign films at the Liberty Theatre run by a man who “brought a new sensibility and willingness to town, opening cultural doors. Afterward, adults and kids would go to Palmer’s across the street to get something to eat and talk about the movies. “St. Helena wasn’t a luxury marketing platform but still a town, socially and economically mixed.” And it was home.

  He left for the University of Oregon, in Eugene, where he studied languages and art. “I bought some acrylics and started painting a wall, and it was liberating.” Color proved to be a “vibrational resource” that would lead to a career, but what he went into as soon as he got out of college was dishwashing. “A friend told me, ‘Go to the best restaurant in a city and get a dishwashing job. You’ll eat well, stay in shape, and not have to think about the work when you’re not there. It’s a great job for an artist.’ ”

  He sold inexpensive canvases wherever he could, mostly in Los Angeles, and this continued after he moved back to St. Helena in the 1990s and began to complement his income with acting. He started a one-man show performing historical mini-pageants about cowboys, football, and the last days of the British Raj, and started a band called the Towne Dandies.

  Traveling between St. Helena and Southern California, Geoff had success in small venues, and he made something of a name as the unorthodox, imaginative performer using props and sets he fashioned himself. “I was able to survive until 9/11. After that I realized art would no longer be something people would spend money on—ours had become a fear-based economy.”

  It began to recover somewhat ten years later, “but by then someone had figured out how to monetize the entire Napa Valley.” Even harvest parties cost money to attend whereas before they had been open to the community. “And you were charged even more for tastings. Time-honored celebrations, ways of acquainting the public with wine, became commodities in their own right for the simple reason that tourists, it seemed, would pay any amount for almost anything.” He wanted to go back to LA, the best market for his work, “but I was afraid that if I stayed away from St. Helena, they’d sell the town.”

  3.

  They were the politicians, council members, planning commissioners, hired staffers and their allies in the wine, hospitality, and development industries. Geoff started going to public meetings attended by a handful of older residents who brought some of the old countercultural élan that was clearly missing among the younger generation. One of these accomplices heard in her yoga class that the city council planned to sell city hall—or lease it—and that the city wouldn’t reveal the name of the lessee, widely believed to be a group of investors wanting to build a hotel within the historical shell.

  Geoff went to a council meeting and stood up and announced that this wasn’t the way business was traditionally done in St. Helena, and that citizens deserved to know what was going on. Afterward, a woman named Sandy Ericson, whose mother had once been the mayor of St. Helena, explained to him the necessity of exposing long-term development plans early. She had lived in Marin County and knew a lot about transparency in local government, and they teamed up as opponents to leasing city hall.

  The proposal was withdrawn, again without explanation, but the proposed changes to the winery definition remained. Geoff went to the first public discussion of the changes, held not on city property but at the Montessori School. This, in his view, was the locus of social and political intrigue by those with close ties to developers and people in city government, both elected and appointed, with the tacit support of the monied parents of students enrolled in the school, including Hugh and Monique Davies.

  Again Geoff stood up. He reminded everyone that there were 180 agricultural parcels within the city limits, and that a big winery could just move in and radically change the environment. “The wine industry isn’t the only stakeholder here,” he said. “The other is the homeowners,” whose property values could plummet, and their lives, too.

  Later, one of the old-timers came up and handed Geoff a book. “You may need this,” he said.

  The book was Ballot Box Navigator, a step-by-step guide to launching referenda like those first sanctioned in Southern California in the 1960s. A referendum was a means of direct citizen involvement in important issues because it allowed specific issues to be placed on the ballot. Citizens could vote it either up or down, and if it passed it was automatically law, without interpretation. All they needed was an acceptable draft of a law, and a lot of citizens behind them.

  One such referendum vote, old Proposition 13, had been vilified in the 1970s for drastically reducing property tax revenue going to government, thereby harming the state’s university and other systems. But referenda had also been the savior of much of Napa’s wooded hillsides. And Measure J had prevented county officials from making land-use changes in the agricultural preserve without a formal vote, stymieing exceptions often granted by clueless or beholden supervisors. This essentially took a lot of development out of the county’s hands.

  The citizens of St. Helena could put their measure to stop the proposed changes to the winery definition directly on the ballot, but first petitioners like Geoff and Sandy had to collect signatures from 10 percent of registered voters. That meant at least 320 signatures.

  He began writing letters to the editor of the St. Helena Star. He told people who asked about his sudden interest in civic affairs, “As Churchill said, ‘Everything I’ve done in the past has given me the skills to deal with the problems of the moment.’ ” He began to listen to self-hypnosis tapes, read novels revolving around the law by John Grisham and other writers, solved Sudoku puzzles to strengthen his mind, and watched more videos of St. Helena government functions at the dining room table.

  St. Helena was subject to its own laws and unaffected by those pertaining to the county. It had its own winery ordinances. But Geoff thought St. Helena’s attempt to loosen regulation could be replicated beyond its borders, that is, throughout the county. Increasingly, he felt, citizens were being left out of a process that sought to basically change the town. And he and his allies were going to do something about it.

  When proposed changes to the ordinance were presented to the public in Vintners Hall, Geoff, Sandy, and others took turns telling the planning commission, in effect, “Don’t vote on this.” But the commission passed it anyway, with only one dissension, and the next day, “We hit the streets.”

  They collected signatures outside the post office, at the supermarket, on the street. Their ranks grew. Sandy’s website, St. Helena
Window, served as an effective, modern-day political pamphlet, laying out the issues and raising objections to the official view. The most stalwart of the objectors talked to anyone who would listen, explaining what had happened, what might happen, and what was at risk—neighborhoods, the town itself. They also collected e-mail addresses and sent each person the website link, a self-generating loop of information and outrage, with voices heard from outside the county, too.

  One, in Healdsburg over in Sonoma County, invited them to cross the Mayacamas and learn what they were really up against: “winery centers” with ticketed events financed in residential neighborhoods by outsiders with speculative loans. “Once you let them in,” the caller said, “you’ll never get them out.”

  In St. Helena the objectors still didn’t really know what they were up against. Branded as “out-of-it types with too much time on their hands,” “old-timers,” “fringers,” and even “nuts,” they endured veiled threats about job loss and other retaliation. The stress increased; one ally was hospitalized with heart murmurs, another suffered a shingles attack. But the list of signatories grew until finally they had more than five hundred, far beyond the required number. This stunned the city council, which decided to kill the new ordinance in a midnight vote. But the fight was just getting started.

  4.

  The Chamber of Commerce occupies an impromptu row of offices set back from Highway 29, its foyer offering brochures promising visitors fun and satisfaction. On the wall behind the desk of its CEO and president, Pam Simpson, is a blow-up photo of the sign that stood on the southern town line when she took the job: ST. HELENA POP. 5,100 ELEVATION 255. It reminds her every day of what she’s supposed to be doing, which is “serve business.”