Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  Jim dried the ones easy to recognize on the woodstove and stored them for year-round eating. He paid an expert $200 to drive the tortuous road into the valley and inspect with him mushrooms Jim had staked out beforehand, wanting to feel comfortable in the knowledge that he could eat even the ones most experts avoided. But all he really wanted to do, after he retired from Anheuser-Busch, was ride his bicycle.

  * * *

  Leonore’s boys represented her family’s fourth generation on the same rudimentary ranch on Monticello Road, a mile-and-a-half stretch of county running straight up the mountain at their backs. She had been brought here at age three, her grandfather having acquired the property and small house in 1919 in a bet on a prizefight in San Francisco. Her mother still lives in the frame replacement of the original house that burned, and first learned of plans to develop the sprawling property across Monticello Road like most everyone in the neighborhood—from the pages of the Napa Valley Register.

  For years the steep 2,300 acres had been known as Munson Ranch, even after it was bought by a Texan preceding the current one who had talked about building a resort and maybe a casino in partnership with descendants of Wappo Indians but had sold to the Halls instead. By then Texans were synonymous in some minds with an invasive pest, anthropomorphic glassy-winged sharpshooters popping up when least expected in Pope Valley and along ridgelines and little creeks like Capell, pushing development schemes and then drifting blessedly away, leaving behind plans for resorts, golf courses, vineyards, wine “estates,” and prospective McWineries.

  Vineyard development higher up was something else again. It would demand not just a lot of water but also increase traffic on a challenging country road, even more so if houses were built. Such projects had languished after the successful lawsuit against Pahlmeyer in late 1999, but now an analysis was being done for yet another Texan who already owned two wineries down in Napa Valley proper.

  People living on Monticello Road were concerned, and the more they heard about it the more concerned they got. Hall had paid $8 million for the property in 2005 and had test water wells dug, supposedly for vineyards with Bordeaux varieties to be planted. “There are no plans to put houses up there,” HALL Wines’ ubiquitous general manager, Mike Reynolds, told the Register. Readers may well have thought he was speaking for another family vineyard and not suspected that possibly hundreds of investors in Hall’s latest real estate syndicate owned a small piece of Munson/Walt Ranch, where surveyors and geologists and soils, water, and plant experts started showing up. One of them told Jim Wilson he didn’t think the county could possibly approve such a massive project on these steep, unstable slopes.

  The erosion control plan alarmed water quality managers down in the city of Napa whose drinking water would be affected, and the neighbors feared not just for their own wells but also sheet erosion runoff that would further destabilize fragile soils, darken Capell Creek, and play havoc with aquatic life. The extended five-year drought to grip the state wouldn’t officially begin for another six years, but anyone paying attention to the weather and scientific predictions knew that something different, unpleasant, and lasting was in the offing.

  In Napa and the little offshoot valleys, people who had nothing to do with the making or selling of wine and wanted their families protected from fire, desertification, and wholesale development began to complain. Whether or not the Halls would get what they wanted depended on the integrity of a regulatory system put in place years before. Hall had paid for an Environmental Impact Report, and about the time it was finally released in 2014, Leonore’s mother walked out to her mailbox and discovered a large envelope inside. Across the road were slopes dense with live oaks and madrones, chaparral, meadows, and pocket wetlands where in season water collected and provided habitat vital to Capell Valley’s wildlife, a natural setting that had for almost half a century borne silent witness to her daily routine.

  She tore open the envelope and found a letter from Craig Hall inside. “Dear Walt Ranch neighbors,” it began, though she still considered herself a neighbor of the old Munson ranch. The letter went on to state that the Halls intended to put in “premier” vineyards and were considering “what additional development rights to maintain while putting whatever was left over into a conservation easement.” That phrase—additional development rights to maintain—struck her as odd, a possible reference to expensive residences nestled among vineyards and sold at high prices to satisfy investors living far from Napa. If getting such houses built hadn’t actually been planned, the wording suggested, the right to do so was being assiduously “maintained.”

  The letter failed to mention that much of the land going into a conservation easement was too steep or unstable to be built on, by then a familiar ploy used by wealthy property owners to claim land already in de facto preservation and still avoid paying taxes. “By way of perspective,” the letter reminded recipients, “the Agricultural Preserve rights for this property”—it was not in the agricultural preserve, which was the floor of Napa Valley proper, but in the steep watershed—“include the right to build 35 wineries, 35 recreational vehicle parks, 35 campgrounds, 35 hunting lodges and other developments,” an apparent warning of what might be attempted if the Walt Ranch vineyard scheme was opposed.

  Leonore’s mother showed the letter to Jim Wilson and said, “I don’t like being threatened.”

  Neither did her son-in-law, who drove down to county headquarters in Napa, climbed the stairs to the planning department, and asked two different people behind the counter, “What’s going on up on Capell Creek?”

  They looked oblivious. It was then that Jim Wilson realized his bicycle riding was over for the foreseeable future.

  2.

  A small community already occupied a discrete portion of those same hills, hard up against the Walt Ranch property. It was called Circle Oaks, long established and mostly invisible from the road. Many living there were retirees who had built their own homes and watched the seasons come and go, far from the action in Napa Valley proper. They had their own water company to dispense and protect their most precious resource, and they had learned with dismay, back in 2005, that a new test well was being drilled just across the line from theirs. That meant the prospective Walt Ranch development could legally draw down on its neighbors’ water supply, if it so chose, for vineyards and houses.

  Circle Oaks neighbors began to ask each other, “Who would do such a thing?” One of them, Cindy Heitzman, the elegant, white-haired executive director of the California Preservation Foundation, had for years risen early each morning for the ninety-minute drive to San Francisco—sometimes it was twice that—where she tried with like-minded people to protect the state’s historic treasures. These are mostly built structures, but she was also concerned with landscape, for without some integrity of the whole the past becomes attenuated and eventually lost.

  Unlike some historic preservationists, California’s are aware of the value of the environmental community as the other side of the preservationism coin. Now environmental degradation was to be in her face in an unexpected and distressing way. Cindy Heitzman never dreamed she could wake up one day in Circle Oaks and discover that, next door, some thirty thousand oak trees were being cut. There had long been talk of resorts, even a casino, in these hills, pipe dreams of outside speculators who had been showing up since the twilight of General Vallejo. But thirty thousand stumps?

  If this tragedy were actually to occur, the very best she could hope for was to spend every day working in the city and avoiding the sights and sounds of destruction where she lived. Not so her husband, David. A luthier (guitar maker) by trade who worked at home and found solace and inspiration in the absence of all things developmental, David had been an admirer of early Napa Valley architecture when he and Cindy met, and of artifacts the early proprietors left behind. Bald and lean, with an ascetic air that dissolves when he smiles, David once made guitars out of redwood planks from a decommissioned Charles Krug storage tank that
for a century had held an incalculable amount of zinfandel, petite sirah, carignan, cabernet sauvignon, and other varieties.

  When the winery had to retrofit for earthquakes and get rid of some old equipment, a client of David’s took a bottle of Schramsberg over to Krug, hoping to persuade Peter Mondavi Jr., or his brother Marc, to sell him an entire eight-by-twenty-foot monster tank. “But all my client got was a bottom,” says David, who made the guitars from it and called them “BOBs” (bottom of the barrel). He also made a hybrid called a guitello, played like a cello, that “still smells great.”

  David had long had reservations about the Halls, whom he did not know. “There was something twisted about them giving money to good causes down in St. Helena while at the same time kicking people out of the trailer park and removing their homes.”

  His opinion didn’t improve when he learned that Hall and Mike Reynolds might use the road through Circle Oaks for access to their vast property, and that twenty miles of new roads were to be built, with as many in fences that would adversely affect wildlife. It sounded like infrastructure for a housing development to him, and he tried tracking the ownership of Walt Ranch. What he discovered, he told Cindy, were more than sixty corporate entities associated with the name, “but no one you could call and talk to, and no listed assets. We even tried to buy a Dunn & Bradstreet report. D&B said there was nothing there.”

  When the Walt Ranch Environmental Impact Report (EIR) was first released, Cindy realized “we couldn’t stop this with a meeting of the Homes Association. We got organized and asked for an extension in order to comment, and got a month to respond to sixteen hundred pages. Where the hell do you begin?”

  One day they saw a neighbor carrying a clipboard, gathering signatures for a petition opposing the development, and the Heitzmans joined her, something people still did in communities without locked gates. They held a meeting of the Circle Oaks Homes Association where “everybody vented. David pointed out that we had to look organized and credible to raise money,” and they did, forming a nonprofit 501(3)(c), producing a business plan with bullet points, a bumper sticker, and a map, and canvassing the 189 houses in Circle Oaks.

  Cindy had seen all this happen before in her efforts for the California Preservation Foundation. “You can’t wait to mobilize. And we went from a bunch of ragtag, hand-wringing neighbors to a full-frontal assault.”

  They called themselves Defenders of East Napa Watersheds, with Cindy coaching members in running meetings and setting an agenda. When they needed a lawyer, Cindy found a good, sympathetic one who worked for a very good price. The Defenders created an education committee because the issues had to be explained to people, and they were complex, as all environmental issues are. They then assembled a thousand signed letters of protest and delivered them to the county board of supervisors and the planning commission simultaneously. “We even went to public meetings down in Napa, carrying signs, which was Jim Wilson’s idea.”

  They decided not to be litigants in what promised to be a bruising legal battle over water rights. “Walt Ranch will turn on those,” Cindy predicted, but the Circle Oaks County Water District was better situated to sue on its own. One neighbor happened to be president of Napa Sierra, the county arm of the Sierra Club’s regional Redwood Chapter, and married to a member of the Circle Oaks water board. Both were Yale graduates. “There are lots of people up here like them, and they know how to do research,” the same cohort Craig Hall had left in distant Ann Arbor. “Hall and his people assumed we were just a bunch of hicks.”

  They found various experts to help them: noise experts, frog experts, a geologist, two hydrologists, others. Most had to be brought in from outside the county because locals feared testifying against the Halls would rob them of a livelihood. “We had gone from ‘Oh my God’ to being ready: raising money, doing mailings, getting strategies and attorneys for a challenge like the county had never seen.”

  After the comment period was over, Circle Oaks decided to join with other like-minded groups rising spontaneously all over the valley. They were driven by local concern about the future of their particular communities, part of a larger genesis similar to little Citizens’ Voice in St. Helena opposing unsuitable or patently illegal wineries on Diamond Mountain and in Soda Canyon. Yet another, fighting a helicopter pad near the Napa city limit, joined the lengthening list.

  The Defenders decided to invite them all to a meeting right after New Year’s 2015 at the Oxbow Public Market, down in Napa, to discuss an alliance. The meeting was led by what Cindy called “the dream team,” including her husband as president, Jim Wilson as vice president, Dan Mufson, a retired pharmacologist, as secretary, and Rich Cannon, a retired shop teacher, as treasurer. The very name of the organization announced the remoteness of the terrain and called to mind historic coalitions that had slipped into oblivion but were being revived now by the threat of greater development.

  Another big vineyard project had been approved because their neighbors rose to oppose it too late. And right next door to Walt Ranch was yet another that came to be known as “Little Walt.” Over the ridge to the north were more active or looming threats. New or resurgent organizations were essentially battling the same phenomenon as in the past but in different guises now, all over the county. They took on names like Soda Canyon Road, Watersheds Alliance for Atlas Peak, Protect Rural Napa, Calistoga Citizens for Green Community, Save Yountville Hill, Mt. Veeder Stewardship Council, and Save Rural Angwin. But as yet they had no umbrella organization.

  The twenty organizations each sent one person to a meeting, and among them they came up with a name: Napa Vision 2050, “a county-wide coalition formed to advocate for responsible planning to insure the sustainability of the finite resources of Napa County.” They had tacit allies among growers and vintners who for the most part remained out of sight because the subtleties were many and the retribution real if you valued consultancy fees and grape contracts.

  Concern within the wine industry for the desires of those outside it had declined precipitously in recent years. In the summer of 2015 a spokesman for the Winegrowers of Napa County would stand up at a national convocation on tourism held in Napa and falsely state that ten percent of the valley’s residents were “basically against everything.” He dismissed their concerns as unimportant, even laughable, without addressing what those concerns were.

  3.

  The board of supervisors early on had been asked to hold a preliminary hearing on the Walt Ranch application and had refused. The Halls did offer to meet with critics on their own, at the Meritage Resort and Spa south of Napa, where Geoff Ellsworth arrived in time to see Craig Hall in his Tesla changing from a business suit into an everyman’s plaid shirt before going inside. But that public relations gesture satisfied no one.

  Finally the planning director, Dave Morrison, put together the public venting about the Walt Ranch EIR held on Napa’s Corporate Way, the meeting that had brought together county supervisors, planning commissioners, sign carriers, and other objectors and exposed Craig and Kathryn Hall to the collective ire of the community. “Six hundred people out of a population of thirteen thousand showed up on a weekday morning,” recalls Cindy Heitzman. “It was pretty outrageous.”

  Since the meeting had been Morrison’s call, he had put his job at risk, existing as it did at the pleasure of a pro-development board. It might well turn on him at any moment to deflect attention from its own failings. A similar board under the influence of the Winegrower’s newly elected candidate back in 1989 had fired the best planning director Napa ever had, towering Jim Hickey, who had the temerity to ask the question the county’s ruling body had danced around since 1968: What is a winery? Answering it had launched the long-delayed soul-searching that was still playing out in dozens of far-flung fastnesses on both sides of the valley.

  Out of that old fight had come the “75 percent solution”—the requirement that three-fourths of the grapes going into wines designated as being from Napa had to actually be
from Napa. That compromise struck most outsiders as a dubious accomplishment: “Shouldn’t there be one hundred percent Napa grapes in Napa wine?” But to get to even that partial victory reformers like Eisele and Beckstoffer had to agree to “grandfathering,” or legalizing what for recently built wineries would be illegal behavior like operating clothing boutiques and de facto restaurants.

  Even the Farm Bureau, usually a proponent of good land use, had of late felt the undue influence of developers within its ranks who lobbied tirelessly for more vineyards and tree felling in steep, fragile terrain, defending it as “farming” when in fact it was a real estate play. But at least the Farm Bureau didn’t speak out against the position of the Defenders of East Napa Watersheds. This, as Cindy Heitzman pointed out, “said volumes.”

  By 2014, Walt Ranch had produced no revenue since being acquired in 2005 and was burning up considerable capital. Criticism of the Halls in Napa Valley was no longer relegated just to the riddled rabbit or the Gehry flirtation, but focused on the possibility of a phantom development above Capell Creek.

  “Napa County is special, unique,” wrote one lifelong resident to the Napa Valley Register, “and I don’t feel that preservation is a top priority for the Halls. In fact it takes a backseat to developing properties with park-like settings for the urban crowd, with fabulous views of other people’s vineyards. Hall knows this makes for increased property values for the next sale. It’s a pity they don’t seem to understand Napa County and what it’s about.”

  When the Halls arrived in Napa in the 1990s they had quickly become benefactors of charities, the arts, and political causes, but were not de facto members of the social elite, such as it was. Garen and Shari Staglin, also wealthy Democrats, were friends, and so were some among the Republican mélange who regarded the Halls as merely agreeable Texans. In general Craig came across as inoffensive, personable, unknowable.