Discussion of Hollywood gives way to the millennial use of tweets and sound bites, then wine as an antidote to stress, the difficulty of finding adequate accommodation in Mendoza, and the fact that a winery like Newton, with right-of-way through its neighbors’ property, can’t allow in as many visitors as the winery might want. Though this limitation is basic to life in Napa Valley, and is the reason the place still looks so well, it confuses those assembled. “Why not?” one asks. “It’s private property!”
Sensory journalism has evolved like any other, words electronic synapses with vast, near-effortless reach that have drawn enthusiasts of every persuasion, upended the old swirl-sniff-sip-jot hierarchy, and destabilized notable egos, but there’s been a cost.
Among those riding up to Newton the next morning there’s no awareness of the agriculture/urban clash fundamental to all that has happened here. Napa’s more than three million visitors a year also mostly assume the place has always been as it is, nature bent to human wants and as predictable as vineyard views uncoiling on the far side of tinted coach windows.
In most wineries the old saw “visitation” has undergone another Orwellian transformation—“hospitality,” genteelly implying that wineries put themselves out to receive you when in fact they’re enhancing their bottom lines by selling all manner of things directly. This euphemism is about tourism, not agriculture, the hospitality industry wanting as many bodies as possible, and wineries increasingly devoted to harvesting events instead of grapes.
I met the late Peter Newton here, back in the 1980s. A sophisticated Brit, he had made a lot of money investing in Sterling Vineyards up Highway 29, the one with the gondola lift. It was bought by Coca-Cola, then sold to Seagram and then to the liquor conglomerate Diageo, and finally to Treasury. I dug my fingers into the dense coat of Newton’s Grand Bleu de Gascogne hound while he talked about his little mountain, with its imported exotics for gardens he designed, reminding me of Jefferson’s passionate amateur interest in the horticultural.
The juniper topiaries here still look like corkscrews, the roses are still so numerous they take two days to deadhead. The Torah gate leads to the residence, the lotus-shaped front door adding a strange, melancholy splendor to a house safe behind white stones raked in the Buddhist manner. Our tribe is introduced to the Secret Garden with its Thai spirits house; the English garden with its hanging mulberry and curtain of pleached blue spruce; and the Sleeping Beauty Garden with tree roses and a stone fountain brought over from England. The others turn back for the inevitable lunch, but I’m transfixed in the midst of an infinity-edge lawn high above a valley of Lilliputian vineyards stretching north toward the upthrust knob of Mount St. Helena, as if gazing directly into the past.
For a tour of the high, sixty-acre vineyard we board a six-wheeled Swiss all-terrain Pinzgauer of the sort that moved soldiers around Afghanistan. The reverse roller-coaster ride up to the pinnacle passes some of the costliest mountain viticulture on earth. Thin black plastic lifelines dipped into a reservoir far below, to irrigate what would be a semi-desert but for the nearness of the deep, cold Pacific Ocean. Until recently it regularly lofted enough moisture over coastal ranges to fill ponds and assure harvests, before the age of drought.
Talk has been of crush, cuvées, cultured versus wild yeasts, and the subtleties of French oak. Now, gazing directly across the valley at Howell Mountain, we discuss those plastic IVs for vines no less frail than the substance that fills them, water. The average rainfall for Napa has been about twenty-five inches annually but recently—in 2013—it was a quarter of that. Lack of water is on all minds, though climate change is mentioned gingerly everywhere in the valley and the phrase global warming can still disrupt a dinner party.
When Newton’s prized cabernet was imperiled that year, the vineyard manager tells us, they discussed trucking water up from the valley floor. Some rain did fall at the last moment, but what, he’s asked, would the buying and trucking have cost, if it hadn’t?
He hesitates before saying, “Just under a million dollars.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:
The Rutherford Dust Society
1.
The common element in all Napa’s conflicts has been neither industrialism nor tourism, but water. Sometimes a minor player, usually a major one, water dogs almost all discussions. It was waste runoff that first drew Andy Beckstoffer into the world of Jean-Charles Boisset, and the use of city water that heightened contention between the new Davies Vineyards and the citizenry of St. Helena. Runoff from a proposed vineyard next to Wildlake on Howell Mountain brought St. Helena into that fray, too, and both state and federal regulatory machinery. And in the Walt Ranch epic, water played the lead in all its guises: purity, destructive potential in flood, utter ruin when absent.
People who would never have worked together but for these various connections came together in the flow of it: Beckstoffer, Geoff Ellsworth, Randy Dunn, Rick Coates, the Land Trust of Napa County, Chris Malan, Vision 2050, and many more. And out of these points of connectivity arose the year’s final conflict, one that drew the cloak from the establishment’s abject self-interest, damaged the community, and sparked possibly far-reaching changes that are still playing out.
Go back now to the final years of the twentieth century when the most obvious problem associated with this most precious resource was the Napa River itself. For most of its journey the river is a little-noticed presence, burrowing so deeply into its ancient bed as to be pitiful if even noticed by those crossing the bridges up-valley. It would occasionally reemerge after heavy rains as its old self, reminding people of its destructive alter ego, the flood dumping much of the valley’s soil into San Pablo Bay.
Ancillary damage to vineyards was considerable, and largely unaddressed, as if the river was an instrument of God and its rages an excuse to attack it in weak moments, including dumping car bodies, urban runoff, and waste into it. Meanwhile the things living in it were, for all practical purposes, disappearing. Then one day a man whose land bordered the river asked if all this might not be changed. His name was John Williams and his winery bore the unlikely name of Frog’s Leap.
* * *
His earliest memory was of running a hand across the velour cover of his grandparents’ Victorian settee, in upstate New York. The velvety resistance of the nap was softness itself, the dust mysterious and provocative, motes lofting through angled sunlight like memories of a distant past. Years later, he would taste a cabernet sauvignon made in the valley of the Napa River, near the sleepy hamlet of Rutherford, and be reminded of that touch and smell.
John attended Cornell University where he came under the influence of the noted enologist Konstantin Frank. A polymath, Frank was said to speak nine languages and made to be desperate by the refusal of Finger Lakes vintners to embrace the proven enological greats of cool climate European ancestry—pinot noir, chardonnay–choosing inelegant grape hybrids instead. John learned two things from this: Institutions and industries, once committed to a course of action, don’t welcome dissent. And wine can drive you mad.
He also learned the importance of money because he ran out of it in the early 1970s and joined a work-study program at the Taylor Wine Company. Then he left for Northern California, where he met a doctor, Larry Turley, who knew the famous Robert Mondavi, who in turn knew a vinicultural tyro named Warren Winiarski. Like many hopefuls in the days of perilous winemaking, Winiarski had been Mondavi’s cellar rat before setting up a small independent operation on the eastern side of an uncrowded valley, in a district known quaintly as Stags Leap. Now Winiarski needed a cellar rat of his own.
John’s duties included most everything in and around the winery. In the process of learning he tasted some of the most beautiful, subtle wines of his life, from vineyards with strange names like Fay and Cask 23, and realized that the sort of wine old Frank had championed back East was imminently possible here and might rival those of Pauillac and Margaux. In those days the grapes were picked when not too ripe, alcoho
l was controlled, fruit and acid maintained, and sufficient tannins imparted through barrel storage to produce elegantly balanced wines. These aged gracefully, were best drunk in concert with food, and left in the drinker the vague impression of dancing with a ravishing partner.
Meanwhile he sold odd bottles of Stag’s Leap to tourists who happened by, pulled hoses, and bottled the 1973 vintage when it was ready, no reason to suspect that through his hands was passing a soon-to-be mythical substance that would radically alter the trajectories of the Winiarskis, John Williams, the valley, and much of Northern California by winning the most famous tasting ever, from the valley’s point of view.
John made Stag’s Leap’s 1974 and 1975 vintages, too, but heard nothing in 1976 about the competitive tasting of French and Californian cabernets and chardonnays in Paris until one day he looked up and saw the thin, agitated figure of Warren running down the hill toward the winery. He was waving a copy of Time magazine in which there was a story about the Californians winning “the Judgment of Paris,” the judges all being French critics, not American. Stag’s Leap had come in first in the red wine category, and Chateau Montelena had won in the whites.
After that day strangers began arriving, all wanting a bottle of the 1973 vintage at the astoundingly high price of seven dollars. John was jerked from winemaking duties to selling the stuff until Warren told him to shut the winery door and open it only if an expensive car sat outside.
John returned to New York determined to become the Robert Mondavi of the Finger Lakes. But the reign of the hybrids had endured, along with the reluctance of winemakers to change, despite the fact that John’s East Coast experiments were written about admiringly by Frank Prial in the New York Times. So he went back to Napa and into the cellar of Spring Mountain, in St. Helena, owned by Mike Robbins, another devotee of French wine.
John hung out with other winemakers enamored of the same style—young, adventurous types like Tony Soter and Cathy Corison. Married now, and a father, John bought a piece of property in Rutherford in partnership with Turley and started working for himself. He called it Frog’s Leap, in droll homage to Winiarski’s Stag’s Leap as well as the aquatic life on John’s parcel next to the Napa River, but Warren was neither flattered nor amused.
Years later, after the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, set up an exhibition in the National Museum of American History commemorating the 1976 Paris Tasting, John wondered if viewers would realize that the crabbed notes in the displayed cellar book about the 1973 vintage had been written by him, spiritual heir to Konstantin Frank. But John had not been driven mad by wine, just so deeply into the arms of vino that escape was now impossible.
2.
The barn is old, red, and lovely, topped by a weather vane fashioned into an elongated leaping frog and surrounded by a riot of blooming wild mustard. This and other chest-high nitrogen fixers compose a dense, nutritious jungle overrunning the vineyard and trying to hide the winery’s name painted unspectacularly on a fence rail. Despite sheets of black plastic stretched over a large mound of aging manure, winery and ground look more nineteenth than twenty-first century.
White-bearded now, the unassuming proponent of organic agriculture for two decades is talking sustainability: “We got the farming down but then I realize that there are thirty-five cars parked here belonging to workers. You don’t want to come off holier than thou when half the things you do still contribute to pollution.”
He still hopes for a parking shed with a roof of solar panels to recharge the batteries of the hybrid cars he would make available to employees, and one for a tractor that runs on solar energy. But that’s another dream in the broader narrative of organics, an attempt to instill in farmer and consumer alike a greater appreciation of the taste of place. Inherent in that taste, they say, are healthier communities at both ends of the production cycle.
He grabs a spade, parts the mat of vegetation to more fully reveal the rich mix of cover crop, and turns over black soil full of worms and white nodules on the roots of plants where the nitrogen resides. He learned this and other lessons in the late 1980s after visiting Fetzer Vineyards, up in Mendocino County, which had undertaken an organic regimen early on. John hired a Sierra foothills farmer and itinerant agricultural consultant who traveled the state advocating effective holistic practices.
His advice led to Frog’s Leap using certified organic grapes in 1989. It was making about sixty thousand cases annually from two hundred acres, plus another fifty owned by other organic growers who share his concerns. At the time some organic growers followed the biodynamic principles of the late Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian founder of anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools, but weren’t officially certified.
Steiner’s world-famous lectures, delivered in Koberwitz, Silesia, in 1924, were on agricultural theory and still widely discussed. But Steiner’s “biodynamism” differed from merely organic farming as orthodoxy differed from freethinking. Though some of the ideas were logical, including the closed system that generates its own fertilizer from animals roaming fields and vineyards and limiting outside influences on crops and land, other Steinerisms elevated eyebrows, like planting and harvesting in accordance with phases of the moon, and putting crushed stone or cow manure in a cow horn and burying it for the winter, transforming it into a mysteriously potent force.
The cow horn and other Steinerisms are just the “sacraments” of biodynamics, in John’s view. They do no harm to the farm, unlike fertilizer, which leeches into the ground, and spraying with herbicides and pesticides as most do in Napa, which drift onto neighbors’ land and crops. “I believe in cosmic forces,” John ventures, “but I can’t run a vineyard this size by the calendar alone. Organic farming has evolved into a deeper understanding: If you want healthy soil, you don’t want the guy tending it to be so poor he has to live in his car or under a bridge. And you don’t want your winery using up too many resources.”
He leans his spade against the barn.
“In the end, if you respect the principles, you take better care of everything. That’s got to lead to better wine.”
* * *
In 1997 an epochal flood scoured the banks of the Napa River and left behind ugly, twenty-five-foot mud walls. John had just agreed to purchase fifty acres to expand Frog’s Leap, and a portion of those acres had washed down toward San Pablo Bay. The seller agreed to knock $60,000 off the price, and John immediately called a riparian expert. After looking at the damage, he told John that fixing the riverbank would cost $30,000, adding, “In cash.”
John said okay.
“Well, that never happened so fast,” meaning the decision to spend so much money.
The expert dumped big “toe” boulders at the base of the bank, drove stakes into the bank above, and wove mats with live willow branches. He put sand on the mats and watered it, and the following year willows began to grow in. Meanwhile John went up and down the river, looking at what he called “the levee wars”: neighbors trying to deal with undercut banks overgrown with invasive species, including nonnative blackberries, host to malevolent insects like the glassy-winged sharpshooter that spreads the bacterium causing Pierce’s disease, which can kill grapevines within a few years.
“It was a never-ending battle. We needed a systematic approach.”
What really opened his eyes were the old car bodies he found dumped in the river in the vain hope that soil and debris would accumulate around them and make a difference. Meanwhile siltation in the increasingly narrow channel had decimated salmon and steelhead. The human overlords all needed regulating, and the only way to get that was by having neighbors agree.
“A snowball’s chance in hell,” John thought.
Judging by the comments he had heard over the years, of all the growers along the river only Andy Beckstoffer seemed likely to favor draconian measures for fixing an old, intractable, now desperate situation. What the rest needed was subtle educating, and the only way to do that was by bringing everybody together socia
lly and very gradually introducing an alien idea.
* * *
The first meeting of what would become the Rutherford Dust Society was just the occasional coming-together of growers and winemakers in the neighborhood. This time they were to discuss planning a tasting of wines made from grapes grown on Rutherford’s broad plain, made famous by the recently deceased avatar of Napa Valley winemakers, André Tchelistcheff. The tasting would be in faraway New York, to remind Francophilic Manhattanites that some exceptional cabernet sauvignons from Napa tasted much like those from France and were just as good—often better—when made in the old-world style.
At one point in the meandering conversation, John Williams said, “You know, there really is no Rutherford,” meaning no political and social designation within which people voted and then acted in concert. “We’re talking about promoting a community that doesn’t exist. I haven’t been to your wineries, and you haven’t been to mine. There’s no living history here beyond the 4-H Club. We should find out who we all are.”
The effect was silence, followed by reluctant grunts. When John later raised the question of the ailing Napa River and problems it caused adjacent growers, one of them said, “I don’t give a shit about the Napa River. But I’ve got a Pierce’s problem that just won’t quit,” and he conceded that controlling invasive plant species that harbored pests was needed.
John started visiting his neighbors. One of them, irascible old Joe Heitz, demigod of Martha’s Vineyard cabernet fame, did something highly uncharacteristic: He hosted a lunch for the nascent Rutherford coalition, and John knew he had struck a chord. “I began to see a nexus,” he later recalled, “and not just a marketing organ. We were facing fines after the passage of ballot-box propositions for vineyard setbacks from streams and flood control and so I went to Davie Piña.”
Napa at Last Light Page 23
