Nowadays the population is closer to six thousand. The ranks of city administrators bent on development have been under attack by what she sees as the bane of St. Helena and, by implication, small towns all over: citizens. Specifically, those who bought their houses in the 1970s and 1980s, don’t want things to change, and are secure in their way of life. By this she means out of touch and often immovable.
Also susceptible to what Pam calls “fear-mongers. They stand outside supermarkets and tell people they’re going to lose their privacy, peace of mind, water—whatever—if development’s allowed. Then they write down names and e-mail addresses—if those old-timers have e-mail addresses—and send them blog posts” that further upset them.
Her view through the narrow floor-to-ceiling corner window is of a parking lot, the homely backsides of supply shops, and a long throw to the base of the Mayacamas, where an emerald swatch of Newton Vineyard gleams in the sun. Commerce and nature—the two poles of life in Napa Valley in the twenty-first century—continue to grow further and further apart. Pam has to regularly remind the town that the sometimes shadowy but interconnected, very real force upon which everyone’s fate depends is “business!” Bring to St. Helena more of its most important ingredient—“visitors!”—interested in natural beauty who will spend money to be close to it and, of course, to wineries, so businesses can make money.
Sometimes, thinking about all this, absently fingering beads looped around the neck of her knit sheath dress and wearing just enough makeup to look professional, her thoughts take a more philosophical turn. She has two children, a boy in high school and a girl out of college living at home, as are so many young Americans these days. Pam admits she can’t imagine a better town than St. Helena in which to raise kids. She loves it and is proud of its ranking as one of the top American towns by Cities journal, and wants it to remain more or less as it is. But growth is a paradox, particularly when it’s based on tourism, because tourism tends to devour the thing it craves.
Asked if prosperity is possible without exponential growth, she says, “Absolutely!” But that’s the voice of the old Chamber, before its leaders in Washington, DC, threw in with the multinationals and essentially left its historic membership to its own dwindling devices. Growth must be gradual, she adds, and cites as an example the Wine Train, whose owners want to be allowed to let ten couples a day off in St. Helena, after they’ve ridden up-valley from the city of Napa, so they can dine and spend the night here. Presumably these couples would be more or less sober, though one drunk tried to climb atop the picturesque steam engine while it was running.
Suitable off-loads contribute to the town’s “TOT,” the acronym on every public official’s tongue from San Pablo Bay to Calistoga. It stands for transient occupancy tax, which automatically adds a hefty percentage of tax revenue to hotel bills that is passed along to communities. The TOT contributes significantly to the coffers of the city of Napa, big enough to absorb the growing numbers of visitors, and nearby Yountville, which isn’t. In three decades of breathless TOT pursuit, Yountville has made itself rich while largely depriving its citizens of a community, and Pam doesn’t want St. Helena to turn into another Yountville.
This assertion is common, in its way, all over America. Aspen didn’t want to change into what it couldn’t even imagine turning into in 1960, but did. Telluride didn’t want to turn into another Aspen, but did. Orlando didn’t want to turn into another Anaheim, and turned into something even worse.
“Eight out of ten top property taxpayers here are businesses,” Pam says. “People say they don’t want chains, they want mom-and-pops. Then they won’t shop at them because mom-and-pops are too expensive. It’s hypocritical.”
For decades St. Helena got along without clothing boutiques, specialty jewelers, art galleries, and fancy restaurants. The hardware store, Steves, morphed into a peddler of the most expensive versions of what homeowners need. Citizens used to shop and eat at the local drug store, buy sundries at the five and dime, buy meat and newspapers at the butcher shop, and sometimes get drunk in a bar on Main. People measured their days by something other than acquisition and spectacle, and at night the town took on a somnolence many thought desirable.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said it quite that way,” Pam adds. “We’re all about authentic charm here. But it’s change versus no change, so let’s grant more rentals, like B&Bs, because if we don’t they’ll rent their places out anyway. And we’ll lose the transient occupancy tax.”
Of the more than three million people who come to Napa Valley every year many “choose not to spend money in St. Helena because of a limited number of hotel rooms, the stores closing early, and restaurants less well-known than those down-valley.” No French Laundry, although one eats very well in St. Helena. You see locals in Sunshine Foods Market, also known as Moneyshine Market, and in Model Bakery. But greater opportunities are missed. “A few years ago a lot of city managers and department heads here were part-timers. They weren’t watching the store”—mercantile metaphors persist—“and things fell through the cracks big-time. There was a lot of kicking the can.”
St. Helena suffered from what she calls “visitor leakage. And we spent money on the library instead of paving the streets.”
There’s something odd about St. Helena not shared by other towns in America: It’s often guided by people who either own vineyards and wineries, or make money directly downstream from the business of wine. At least one member of the city council owned a winery, and so did one a city council member. Pam herself had an interest in a zinfandel vineyard with century-old vines right here in town, bought with her first husband and sold after their divorce. She’s still annoyed that they were unable to build a winery on it because it was less than five acres and they did not live on the premises, as required by law.
So she dislikes the protesters and e-mail address collectors. “Hello! We’re in the Napa Valley! The process is being hijacked.” The same charge Geoff Ellsworth makes of the vintners and developers. “There are only a few people doing this. They’re saying the wineries will steal your water, using fear tactics. We had eight meetings to explain what the city was trying to do. Three hosted by the Chamber, and then a couple of those people took it to the streets. Well, the way it works here is that everything happens at dinner parties. That’s where I first heard about the referendum.” She pauses. “The Chamber stuck its neck out, and we made enemies.”
* * *
Forty percent of houses in St. Helena belong to people who don’t live in them. Many owners don’t vote here, and they don’t join clubs and civic groups. Squabbles like the one over the winery definition don’t intrude on their consciousness, nor do they feel bound by the usual restraints of citizenship. According to a shop owner, they view St. Helena as just another stop in a peripatetic, leisurely life and “are often unpleasant. They see everybody else as their enablers.”
Stroll along Main Street and you’ll find plenty of charm but a dearth of basics. Enterprises not found in other American towns of six thousand souls include a laboratory that analyzes wine and can alter its components and their relationship to one another. On the second floor of an old building facing Main through tall windows is Soutirage, discreet pairer of producers with fine wine collectors like Joe Schoendorf, who is on Soutirage’s board.
On the wall hang photographs of bottles of La Tâche and Corton-Charlemagne. Here a supposedly unattainable 2011 Screaming Eagle cabernet can be had for $5,000, a case of 2008 Harlan for $9,000, and a hard-to-come-by bottle like Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20-Year-Old bourbon for $1,500. “We’re concerned with provenance,” says an affable young Brit in a black knit sweater who became an oenophile while studying law and philosophy at University College London.
Nearby is the narrow tasting room of Orin Swift Cellars, named for the parents of the former owner, Dave Phinney, who owns a lovely brick fortress across Main that was bought with the proceeds of the sale of his brand The Prisoner. It was just one
of several recent spectacular spin-offs involving people in the valley and once unheard-of sums, paid not for quality but to capture thousands of eager drinkers of luscious, alcoholic wines. This historic building, once a monument to small business, now provides space for wines put together by Phinney and his partners from vineyards as far away as France and as close as just down Main Street.
Climb wooden stairs with heavy banisters, pass through a thick-paneled doorway into a room with fourteen-foot ceilings and confront a forest of bottles standing in antique light. The labels are dark and arty, like snippets from a Goya painting. The proprietor dresses younger than he is—boots, checked shirt, John Deere hat, the contemporary agricultural version of the nineteenth-century entrepreneur for whom the building was constructed. Symbolism is important here—Phinney also sells spirits, a brand of denim jeans called Mercury Head (“heads or tails, you stand a fifty percent chance of winning”), and skateboards. He would sell Orin Swift to Gallo, which has a sea of wine to put in bottles with trendy labels, for more than $200 million.
He rises from his desk and comes warily forward. Asked about the successful referendum that thwarted the winery definition change, his gaze narrows. “They got enough signatures, but I don’t really understand how that happened. Living here and not wanting wineries is like moving to Aspen and not wanting snow. Those of us who work don’t have time to fight, and retired people”—the familiar culprit—“do have the time. I don’t like people telling me how to run my business.”
* * *
While the referendum saga was still unfolding, Schramsberg moved into the former car dealership here in town. This was a commercial site, not a residential one, and therefore untouched by the battle over the residential winery definition. Schramsberg obtained a license from the state’s Alcohol Beverage Control Board, as required by law, set up a small fermenting operation within an ungainly hulk that had once been filled with new Chevrolets, and started making the twenty thousand gallons of wine it didn’t have room to make up on Diamond Mountain.
After harvest, Hugh and his CFO and others on the winemaking and hospitality teams decided to apply to St. Helena for an expansion of this new facility. They wanted to make many times that amount of wine and have tasting rooms and host as many as 150 visitors a day. It was all legal, if a stretch. Geoff Ellsworth as yet knew little about this project, and Hugh expected city planners to ask Schramsberg to cut back on the numbers, which he was willing to do. He assumed that such a compromise would move things smoothly along.
He was wrong.
CHAPTER NINE:
Alive on Arrival
1.
Susan Kenward passed Geoff Ellsworth on the street one day, and he said, “You have to attend the planning commission hearing today. It’s very important and I can’t make it.”
Geoff was a friend. Susan had seen his one-man plays and her son had made a video of one for a school project. She had even bought some of Geoff’s art. She made sure to tune into the planning commission session on television, and what she saw and heard there shocked her.
Susan had the broad vowels left over from a Virginia childhood even though she had lived in St. Helena for decades, as well as the natural assertiveness of a blonde in blonde country. She was married to Tor Kenward, the former head of public relations for Beringer on the north edge of town, back in the 1990s, who now had his own successful boutique wine made in part from To Kalon grapes he bought from Andy Beckstoffer.
Susan hadn’t been involved in the referendum drive, although she had given her signature. Now she was reminded that, a year before, Schramsberg had asked to be allowed to make only twenty thousand gallons of wine and now they wanted to make many times that. And have a tasting room, too. Susan thought Schramsberg had planned this huge expansion all along, and by not telling anyone proven themselves disingenuous, which bothered her a lot.
Now she watched, on television, Hugh Davies standing in front of everybody and talking about his family’s history in the valley. But he didn’t address any of the concerns that were going through her head. Finally she got so mad she drove into town and found, gathered outside the meeting, friends of the late Jack and Jamie Davies. “They were all furious, too,” Susan later told her husband. Some of those people gathered at Geoff’s house, where a decision was made to officially start a nonprofit, Citizens’ Voice, a 501(c)(4) that eventually garnered more than three hundred contributions in amounts varying from $25 to thousands.
When a sympathetic but cautious woman said, “I can’t put my name on this,” Susan realized that the sensitive nature of the issue cut several ways, with the capacity to offend no matter what tack you took. The Davieses’ enduring reputation as a family with deep roots in the valley, always on the right side of the preservation argument, now seemed to have gone in the opposite direction. So Susan came up with a solution, as Susan liked to do: PayPal. It assured anonymity, and it helped significantly with those who wanted to resist anonymously.
More than one lawyer offered to help pro bono. But Citizens’ Voice would have to hire its own legal team if the board approved the expansions at the new Davies Vineyards, originally seen as a small production facility without frills. Because by then Citizens’ Voice would be challenging both Schramsberg and the town of St. Helena, trying to haul the whole controversy before a judge.
There were so many things to object to about the Schramsberg project, Geoff thought. He had gone to the mayor as soon as he heard about it and told her he wasn’t opposed to businesses succeeding, but this new development would have a devastating effect on the town. “St. Helena is the crown jewel of the valley,” he said. “We have rules built in that are supposed to protect us from things like this. It’s the equivalent of letting free enterprise into Yosemite Valley.”
The mayor just laughed. In retrospect that was not the wisest reaction. Geoff went home and delved into files he had amassed about the project. The city had made only a negative declaration, meaning it was found that no adverse environmental effects would result from the winery expansion. Which meant no proper environmental impact study would be done, and the planning commission would vote it in anyway, knowing that high school students would pass by frequently, and that parking was a problem.
He received more phone calls from Sonoma County, where resistance to wineries was now a full-blown movement. It reportedly even had a children’s alliance for water conservation. By now Geoff fully understood the warning “Once you let them in, you’ll never get them out.” St. Helena was facing—for a small town—something entirely new, he thought, a high-speed business model for new wineries using “hospitality”—another way to bait the old tourist trap—to significantly up the ante, the parochial equivalent of the leveraged buyout. The wine industry was in cahoots with banks that loved the idea of wineries with paid-for “occasions” for paying tourists built into their use permits, a great business model: sell wine, wine tastings, food, and events, with ever-increasing tourism as the surefire generator of bodies and therefore revenue.
If neighbors objected, according to this argument, they could be ignored because a precedent had been legally set. The objectors, proponents believed, would eventually get fed up with objecting and some would leave town, as some had already done. This was the opposing argument to Joe Schoendorf’s, that St. Helena hadn’t lost population because it had put restraint on new business; it had lost population because people no longer wanted to live in the wine-country equivalent of The Truman Show.
Some people wanted a life that didn’t revolve around selling wine, food, and high-end bling to strangers. But many in Napa Valley now wanted to scrub towns clean of those who wanted limits on business, part of the anti-government sentiment across the land. The pro-business cohort sought to install its own elected officials who, in turn, favored proposals from partisans. And these sought to overturn basic rules by which a town persevered. The justification for dismantling government was the tired old Chamber of Commerce clichés about unlimited free en
terprise.
Geoff and others had accepted their relegation to an unofficial “complainer class”—geezers, hotheads—but were dismayed by the paucity of youth in their ranks. It felt as if social protest had skipped a generation caught up in the pursuit of money and electronic distraction. The triumphs of the Free Speech Movement—Mario Savio in Berkeley, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, anti–Vietnam War unrest, Watergate, the fight over the winery definition—were ancient history and seemed to lack relevance in a fragmented America. Twenty- and thirtysomethings might speak out against cutting redwoods, but they seemed unaware of similar forces cutting away at the ground beneath their feet.
Objectors could be driven out by the proponents of untrammeled commerce. What they would leave behind was a beautiful town ready for a mounting wave of touristic amoebae. That was the way Geoff saw it. And one big, nagging question remained: Whose idea had this been? Somewhere down the line he would find out, he was sure, but meanwhile there was an entirely new kind of harvest in the valley. Wine sold directly to visitors upped profits by half, eliminated the middleman, and greased the skids for changing residential neighborhoods by insiders. Due process had been truncated and the people ignored in a vitally important matter.
* * *
Donna Oldford lives in the same middle-class enclave in west St. Helena as Geoff does, the one with streets named for grape varieties and, by coincidence or cosmic design, freighted with land-use issues and the names of those prominent in them: not just Peter and Carlene Mennen and Geoff Ellsworth, but also Stu Smith, the big-bearded co-owner of Smith-Madrone Vineyards & Winery up on Spring Mountain and an avid champion of property rights. Donna’s political, too, and proud of the niche she has carved out of the valley’s ongoing winery squabbles.
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