Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  He and his wife, Sandy, sometimes came up to Napa Valley “and were always asking ‘what if?’ ” In time they bought 114 acres on the Silverado Trail and then the question became “What now?”

  The answer was hiring Davie Piña to install a vineyard down on the valley floor, have the historic barn on the property moved, put up a windmill for sentimental reasons, and pay architect Howard Backen to create yet another quotidian California space. Davis had wanted a wine label of his own, too, and a life far from the grubbier aspects of the computer phenomenon, but he ended up with something that looked a lot like one of the manufacturing complexes he had left behind.

  Joining the fortunate in the happy garden of aspiring vintners, Davis also named his winery eponymously and started putting together a list of far-flung Napa vineyards from which he might buy grapes with a good reputation. He also started looking for good ground of his own at high elevations. At that point he didn’t know a piece existed in a more or less straight line up Howell Mountain, miles from where his new winery stood and deep within de facto wilderness.

  Davis’s winery site on the valley floor had for months been beset with diesel equipment designed to utterly dominate the physical world and remove those parts of it a man just doesn’t need—trees, rocks, dirt, whatever—and shape the landscape in precise, heretofore unachievable ways. A steamroller and an earth spreader greeted would-be customers arriving before the winery was officially open trying to determine which of the three entrances off the Silverado Trail was the right one, and which of the three sprawling structures and a couple of middling ones was the winery.

  What they couldn’t know yet, because it hadn’t been officially opened to the public, was that Davis’s part of the base of Howell Mountain was being tunneled and that he had brought down from Canada a special, very expensive machine known as a “mucker.” It would go into a tunnel under the drilling behemoth and remove great amounts of loose rock and earth, a wonder to behold for equipment guys. Three decades of digging into wineries’ backsides had left myriad channels that, if linked, would extend all the way to Vallejo. The tunnel-planning, tunnel-building elite thrived on the nuanced ways to do a highly profitable, specialized, sometimes dangerous task, and all these tunnelers agreed that Mike Davis’s mucker was the biggest goddamn mucker yet.

  In the middle of the winery staging area stood the industrial-strength windmill atop a congeries of heavy timber, its long stabilizer more appropriate on a 747 and its purpose unclear. Some speculated that the windmill was a statement that, in essence, said the new winery’s owner—though he had already spent an estimated $28 million—was cognizant of the need to conserve energy. Even, by implication—though this was stretching it—that he believed carbon emissions caused by power plants contributed to, well, if not global warming then to excessive amounts of stuff in the air.

  On weekends Mike Davis came to the winery in Levi’s, plaid shirt, and the cowboy hat to see what still needed doing. He described himself as “a nitpicker in a blue serge suit factory.” He had the ability to spot people on the periphery of his vision and figure out what they were coming to see him about before they got there. He liked to have ongoing staff meetings about every aspect of the new winery that one participant said “could have been figured out in ten minutes by two guys with a pad and pencil.”

  Of all the things dominating his stretch of the Silverado, Davis most liked his old Sevier barn, a towering testament to agriculture that had been “walked” some distance from where it originally stood by removing the walls one at a time with huge cranes. It was then bolted to a new concrete foundation, elaborately retrofitted for earthquakes, and given a freestanding iron fireplace made in a blacksmith’s shop that was interesting but had nothing in common with what the old barn once contained. It was burnished with implements made by the installer that had no purpose, but looked old and authentic and made visitors speculate about what they might have been used for.

  By the fall of 2015 Mike Davis had six months to go until his winery was complete and his vineyard regimen set. His winemaker now drew mostly from the other vineyards with which Davis had contracts, and from a couple of his own. One of his many consultants, hired to find and help develop new sites, had found a new vineyard prospect way up on Howell Mountain: about forty acres total, with only thirteen or so acres suitable for vines. Big trees would have to be cut, the ground ripped to remove boulders, and soil moved around to create a viable site.

  There was no connection to Pacific Gas and Electric out there in the middle of nowhere, but Mike Davis bought it on the consultant’s advice, as he was wont to do. All the effort would be worth it, the consultant told him, and that was good enough for him. The site could be hyped by a publicist as primo Howell Mountain terroir for cabernet sauvignon. The wine would go into barrels branded with the Mike Davis name, as were so many flat surfaces at his new winery down on the Trail, and he would be set, reputation-wise.

  Mike would later claim to have never heard of Wildlake, Napa Valley’s premier stretch of wilderness right next to the acres he wanted to develop with all the mechanical resources at hand to clear, rip, densely fill with rootstock, and surround with high fencing in hopes of keeping out not just deer but also bears. If his consultant had heard of Wildlake, or the story behind its creation, this either went unmentioned to his client or, if it was mentioned, the fluctuating team of advisors involved in every decision at Davis Vineyards dismissed it as irrelevant.

  The economics associated with the prospective vineyard are instructive, in light of what eventually happened. The value of the land with trees in place was about $600,000 but would rise to an estimated $2.8 million with a vineyard installed. A dozen acres of vineyard would cost about $1.2 million to install, and after some maturity the grapes produced could be expected to fetch about $30,000 if sold to someone else. Converted to wine, their value would jump to about $1.5 million, minus additional costs.

  The stakes were utterly different here than for Rich Salvestrin down on the valley floor. His vineyard and small winery were a true family operation, instead of a common marketing device. The Salvestrins’ lives and livelihood depended on Salvestrin grapes and wine, not on a fortune in electronics or some other distant endeavor. For Davis, profit to be made on thirteen acres wrenched into vineyard in questionable, fragile terrain was a barely existent point of light out there somewhere. But profit wasn’t the point, brand was. Howell Mountain cabernet would symbolically enhance Davis wine, whatever it actually tasted like. And the remoteness of Wildlake’s environs would add to the wine’s cachet, the vineyard a jewel in a new diadem that was antithetical to wilderness; it might, with luck, help distinguish the label among the collective bling of new brands.

  But before he could do any of this, he needed a timber harvest permit from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, aka Cal Fire, famous—or notorious, depending on your point of view—for allowing the cutting of timber, salable or not.

  2.

  Karin Troedsson’s problem was unique, or so it seemed to her that bright morning turning into the dirt driveway high in Chiles Valley, tributary to the Napa Valley. This nineteenth-century farmstead had belonged to a German immigrant who had a built a house befitting the sea captain that he was—square-framed, broad front porch, a fine but not spectacular view of vegetable garden and vines and the steep, undisturbed hillside across the road, dense with oaks, Douglas firs, and digger pines.

  This had been the home of Napa’s long-standing environmental advocate Volker Eisele. He was the late author of the celebrated—and despised—Measure J, a law that required any proposal by the county to change land-use regulations, or to grant exceptions to individuals, be subjected to a referendum vote by the people. Volker had died of a stroke earlier in the year, leaving a lacuna at the top of the county’s environmental ranks, and his widow, Liesel, had offered the use of her front porch for a forum she thought Volker would have approved of.

  The group had already be
gun to gather in the shade of the old vine heavy with ripening blue-black table grapes. Karin was the attorney for the Land Trust of Napa County and today must perform simultaneous, seemingly irreconcilable duties: preserve the Land Trust’s reputation as an unbiased arbiter in matters of vineyard development and protect its largest single holding now threatened with full-scale disruption on its eastern border. The block of sequestered wilderness was Wildlake, and the prospective developer Mike Davis.

  This was no mom-and-pop, do-it-yourself operation, but the full-court industrial press: felling trees, dynamiting and ripping earth, extracting boulders, shifting soil from one side to the other, burying water lines, installing a wind machine, and stringing steel trellising with miles of wire.

  Costs were all prospective, and all high. One vineyard developer working at altitude in the same range to the south had charged a client between $40,000 and $250,000 an acre “depending on the rock,” of which there’s much. “We used a lot of dynamite, rock crushers, and big iron. The tree part isn’t too expensive, but because you can’t just burn everything, the chipping or hauling of stumps is expensive, too.”

  So are fences, gates, ongoing roadwork, and road use taking months with the toing and froing of dozens of workers, vineyard managers, assistants. Digging successful wells at that altitude for irrigation could cost as much as $100,000 apiece. The dust would be more or less continuous and, as with vineyard runoff in perpetuity, would end up in Bell Canyon or some other reservoir far below. By then the trees would be mostly gone and the land unrecognizable to those who once thought they knew it.

  The Land Trust’s membership, like many institutions, was neatly split between distinct factions. One wanted to preserve land for its own sake, as a refuge for wildlife and human beings in the future, a dedication that required no further explanation in the land of John Muir. The other faction cared for little other than tax deductions that came to those who gave up development rights on their land in perpetuity. The tension between them was, if muted, real.

  Some members took deductions for land that would never have been developed anyway, because of its rare ability to produce extremely valuable grapes, or because it was by nature undevelopable. In some cases this was, if not an outright scam, a close approximation. At best it was hypocritical to the Muir faction, which had included Volker Eisele before his death. He and Liesel had put the entire hillside visible from the porch on the other side of Chiles Valley Road into a conservation easement. Though they had taken the deduction, no single house and tiered garden would ever be carved into that fragile terrain, even though allowed. Volker had insisted he was placing the easement on the land for the right reasons, as a preserver of it, not a tax evader.

  Tall and slim, Karin wore jeans—it was the weekend—and her straight reddish hair touched her shoulders as she took a chair and opened her briefcase. She took out a sheet of paper on which she had jotted down the reasons the Land Trust was concerned about the creation of Mike Davis’s thirteen-acre vineyard on Howell Mountain. Also at the table were Randy Dunn and next to him Mike Hackett, a retired airline pilot and a once-ranked tennis player as well as the director of Save Rural Angwin, a grassroots organization with a range of conservation objectives. He and Randy had been tennis partners until Randy damaged his hips and had to swap his racket for a bicycle, but they remained friends.

  Next came a representative of the Sierra Club in round glasses reminiscent of the fiery suffragette from Prohibition days, then a slim, well-dressed, dark-haired woman named Christina from California Fisheries and Water Unlimited, an anti-logging group. And just taking chairs were Leonore and Jim Wilson, she a poet and he a former quality assurance manager at the Budweiser brewery in Fairfield. Both were foes of the gargantuan development project to the south, known as Walt Ranch, proposed for bucolic little Capell Creek where they lived.

  Alan Galbraith, recently elected mayor of St. Helena, arrived in a dress shirt without a tie and suit trousers left over from his former life as a Washington lawyer, his thinning white hair combed back. Then came Geoff Ellsworth in his fly-fishing vest. In the past the group might also have included Hugh Davies, president of Schramsberg Vineyards directly across the valley from the Davis Estates, but Hugh’s fight with Citizens’ Voice over the Davies Vineyards expansion in St. Helena had vastly complicated environmental politics.

  Hugh had been close to Volker and one of the last people to see him alive, driving up to Chiles Valley following Volker’s stroke and finding him seated in the living room with a blanket spread on his lap, surrounded by books in German—Goethe, Mann, Rilke. Hugh had held his hand while Volker tried to speak, but he wasn’t able to, leaving Hugh and others wondering what final wisdom this veteran organizer had so valiantly tried to voice.

  Also expected on the Eisele front porch—ardently hoped for, actually—was a Sonoma County activist named Rick Coates, of Forest Unlimited, the take-no-prisoners advocate of trees. Coates’s political legerdemain was said to border upon wizardry. He regularly went after Cal Fire, which despite its firefighting capabilities was the bête noire of environmental and conservation groups trying to save trees everywhere, from the Pacific to the High Sierra and from the Mexican border to Oregon.

  Rick was said to have all the moves, and his reputation as an enigmatic, effective force preceded him wherever he went. He had been informed of Napa’s problem by phone, but his appearance today was more hoped for than assured, the drive from Sonoma long and arduous and, this being a Saturday, traffic-plagued. “He said he’d come,” said Christina brightly, “for the cost of a tank of gas.”

  On the table sat a hard cheese, rarely seen before at the Eiseles’ because Volker had detested cheese of any kind. As a child he had been fed it while in foster care in Nazi Germany, and he never got over the experience. There were crackers, too, and grapes from the overhead vine, plus stemmed glasses next to a bottle of the Eisele Estate’s syrah rosé.

  Hackett, spreading his hands to include everyone, said, “We’re here because Mike Davis spent twenty-eight million dollars on a winery on the Silverado Trail, with a modern windmill, caves, and what he hopes will be grapes from Howell Mountain. He plans to clear-cut a thirty-odd-acre parcel on the edge of Wildlake. The cumulative effects would be very damaging to the Bell Canyon Reservoir, and to the wilderness. We want to stop it.”

  The discussion that followed was typical of struggles in the organizational phase: statements of allegiance, bona fides, accomplishments, interests in this battle about to start, suggestions. These included bringing peer pressure to bear on Davis, and possible legal steps by the Land Trust to block the vineyard. Karin pointed out that the Trust had never before opposed—or supported—a land development project, “but Napa Valley is one of the biodiversity hot spots in the United States,” and Wildlake was a prime part of the mix. “It would be amazing if the Land Trust said that, even though we have someone trying to develop there, we wouldn’t object. We don’t have any choice.”

  Uneasy about it all, she added, “We’ve been Switzerland”—meaning neutral in Napa’s long-standing land-use hostilities—“for so long. And we still have to be sensitive about our image, so we can crawl back into our role as protector of land when this is finally over.”

  Mike Hackett went through a litany of possible ways to put off the decision by Cal Fire in order to allow more information, and opposition, to surface: extend deadlines for hearings on timber harvest and the environmental impact study, stress the deleterious impact on St. Helena’s drinking water, which already had a significant algal problem as temperatures rose each year, and build opposition through media by publicizing the impact on birds, primarily nesting.

  Someone offered to come up with a list of migratories, and another for special plants and animals. The western pond turtle was a star among threatened species, present in Wildlake. And make clear that crucial wildlife corridors, planned for decades between Howell Mountain and Mount St. Helena, would be disrupted. Randy added laconically, “
There’ll be a lot of bears in that vineyard,” and the reality of what would happen to them was abhorrent.

  “Shaming” was discussed as a possible way to force a person to reconsider a choice that would clearly be destructive of both nature and community. And no better way to shame than to bring influential people like Land Trust board members forward who might speak to Davis.

  “Noise and poor air quality are huge issues,” Randy said. “We’re talking fifty to a hundred guys coming in every day, twenty cars back and forth on a gravel road. They’ll spread invasive plants.” He had called Mike Davis, he added. “I wanted to tell him I thought he could put the property in easement and still come out ahead.” Davis got back in touch, thanked Randy, and said he was going to see the project through.

  “Maybe if he sees the light,” said Karin, “he’ll get us out of this nightmare.”

  A small, well-used sedan came up the Eiseles’ driveway, passed the massive oak, and parked under the linden trees. A rail-like figure in running shoes got out. He had a white beard and white hair held in a ponytail by a rubber band, and he carried a manila envelope: Rick Coates.

  After introductions he took the last chair, sipped some water, and ate a grape. Karin told him, “We’ve asked Mike Davis for meetings but gotten no response.”

  Coates asked how far along the whole project was, and Hackett said, “About thirty million dollars’ worth,” upping the estimate a bit.

  “This guy’s not worried about making a profit,” added Randy.

  “No, he just wants to win.” Coates’s smile was rueful. “Winning stimulates this type like nothing else.”

  One recourse was to challenge the timber-cutting permit, he suggested. “Always remember that the California Department of Forestry is not your friend. Ask for permission to cut trees, and they’ll say ‘May we sharpen your saws for you?’ ” It was a familiar joke. “I only know of one harvest plan that’s ever failed to get approved. The best thing to do is try to blunt the official comments with denials, buy more time, and eventually get into court.”