The Wine Spectator gave a Matthiasson wine a mere 88, “and we didn’t even hear about it.” The wine sold out anyway. “Now there are more young people doing what they care about, with passion,” and that includes drinking unhyped wines. “It’s coming back to that. We were just a little ahead of the curve, but the market was always there.” Media coverage helped, and aided in the fracturing of the old wine industry. “Things went viral—Instagram, Twitter—adding to what is a very exciting time to be making wine, even though there are houses popping up everywhere.”
He gestures beyond the little canal toward the broad vista of vineyards in the middle of which houses rise like sleepy mastodons, sheathed in Tyvek. This doesn’t bother Steve. “The Farmers Guild’s trying to revive the old granges,” he says. “Back-to-the-land has swung round again, a worldwide phenomenon. It’s all tied to dining, the crafts movement, home cooking, and wine’s part of it. Living way in the country isn’t as appealing as it once was,” a reference to the huge swaths of rural America plagued with joblessness, poverty, and drugs. “The new people moving in here aren’t all rich pricks. Some of them care about their vineyards. They take pride in having their names on a bottle.”
He’s helping them do it. From their perspective, having a recognized viticulturist living in the neighborhood is an asset: He can manage their vineyards, the latter-day, Californian version of Jefferson’s Italian vineyardist, Filippo Mazzei, the big difference being that Matthiasson has succeeded where Jefferson and Mazzei failed. Steve thinks his example helps bind newcomers to place through agriculture and the shared mystery of wine, a happier version of the evolved yeoman farmer.
Jefferson’s view of the vigneron’s life changed radically between the time he first wrote of it as fitting for the Virginia yeoman farmer and his declining years when he saw it as drudgery. As mercurial as anyone, Jefferson’s ideals often tumbled in the rough presence of reality.
There’s another analogy, unavoidable as the long shadows reach for this little farmstead all the way from the Mayacamas, as if riding breezes under a luminous California sky. The third president of the United States and the dot-commers and other strivers putting up houses out there have something else in common, not just brains and money made far from rudimentary toil, but a consuming love of abode. No American of historical significance ever put more thought, treasure, and time into his own house than did Thomas Jefferson, often foolishly. He may have brought to his house imagination and a Palladian obsession, but he also brought the inability to ever declare it finished.
Included in Jefferson’s unfulfilled domestic vision were a producing vineyard and a wine of his own. Now, in this broad, beautiful expanse of valley and hills, stunning views are a matter of course and the afternoon shadows sharp-edged, darkness riding behind. Jefferson’s vision of vines as a natural complement to the landscape isn’t just aspirational here, where hammer blows ring like distant gunshots and glossy blue-black clusters of cabernet sauvignon hang unperturbed in the soft evening air.
EPILOGUE:
Wildlake Revisited
It’s late afternoon when we hoist our mountain bikes off the tailgate of Randy Dunn’s Ford pickup and ride down toward the entrance to Wildlake. He’s still waiting to hear from Cal Fire about the contested timber removal permit for the land next door, but work there has been delayed until that decision’s made, at which time a whole new chapter will begin.
Another vineyard is being developed on the mountainside, farther up, and a haze of dust hangs over it, creating in the distance a blemish like that of a nascent wildfire. It has been a full year since we prepared for the 2015 inferno on Howell Mountain, and this one, too, will be the hottest on record. Stories persist of land subsiding over in the Central Valley, and of dry spigots left by disappearing groundwater. Fish and other living things are threatened with extinction if the drought returns, as it must. El Niño pushed moisture past the North Pacific High out in the Pacific this past winter, but the relief was temporary. Another big fire in Sequoia National Park has filled the southern Sierra Nevada with smoke, and farther south, all the way to Malibu, brush fires keep Los Angeles on edge.
But today is about mountain biking, not firefighting, and we take off, broken clouds coming in from the northwest allowing a shaft of sunlight through now and then. The trip down is fast and, unless a rider’s somewhat adept, dangerous. Randy knows the road so well that ruts and exposed rocks have personas all their own, like the changing vistas full of chaparral and big trees.
Randy has the legs and lungs of a younger man. More than once he has taken those half his age down and back up the road from the dense bowl of Wildlake, only to see them vomit in the weeds. Now he wears a ripstop pack in which he carries water, a knife, microchips for the motion-sensor cameras he has mounted along stream banks, and replacement batteries. On every expedition he takes back the used chips and inserts them into his Mac in the office and watches the passage of wildlife: gray foxes, coyotes—sometimes a rabbit with lean jaws, black-tailed deer, and bears great and small that press wet black noses to the lenses.
Only the elegant mountain lion gazes knowingly at the light that comes on automatically at night, piercing the darkness she owns. In the beginning Randy rode with an automatic pistol on his hip, reasoning that if a lion dropped from a tree limb onto his back mid-pedal he might at least have a chance of surviving. But he found that the weapon changed his relationship with everything around him, and he stopped carrying it. He didn’t start again after he saw the first gear-laden human torsos on his computer screen—dope growers passing a camera—and started looking for their stash.
We leave the road, drop into low gear, and head up a serpentine game trail above the stream. Dismounting before a barrier of manzanita, we continue on foot, grabbing at roots and tree branches. Randy reported the trespassers to the state’s drug enforcement agency and that brought the authorities winging over this stretch of wilderness several times before spotting the cannabis patch below a seep. The agents later paid a visit and found the crop and the telltale black plastic drip line just like those used in the vineyards, but apprehended no one.
Randy has the coordinates and he enters them into his GPS, having decided it’s not suicidal to ground-truth the site and see for himself what the growers left behind. But neither does it make for the most comfortable hike. Then we’re in the midst of it, the ground torn up by trenching tools, the plants mostly jerked out. A few little spiky cannabis leaves remain, and a plastic line snaking on upslope, into shadow.
He keeps going. At the end is a half-buried blue plastic bin below a spring, the water crystal clear and probably still full of fertilizer brought up on somebody’s shoulder. The whole scene is oddly elegiac, no mechanical sound in this fastness, just wind and the call of a red-tail hawk winging determinedly northward. That’s the direction from which fiery disaster would have come a year ago. When that fire was over people called me from far away and asked, “Is Napa burning?” No, I told them, Napa isn’t burning, but the question stayed with me.
Misfortune seems inherent in every season these days, the future ever more likely to fill with falling embers, and with bulldozers. Vineyard development is legal but leaves more than an imprint on the land and bits of plastic pipe, owing to irremediable transformation. The time has come to say “No more,” both on principle and as a practicality, words not just for Napa but also for America. But even as they form on the lips they trigger a savage blowback from the collective harvesters of the last resource.
The hawk screams. From up there the valley to the south appears, as any pilot knows, a green-knit homogenous whole. Its verdancy is shared by vineyard and forest alike, and even human-built structures seem subservient to the natural order. This is an illusion as sure as the distant, hazy shimmer of what seems to be an unpopulated inland shore. That’s the San Francisco Bay littoral, home to more than three million people, a number that grows daily, and beyond it live millions more. By century’s end they will number ei
ghty million. Many are likely in time to pass through these lovely mountains and will pause as they do now, nature-struck, whether tourists, investors, or refugees, all momentarily stunned by the beauty of the place. Then they’ll be off again, as they are today, an inexhaustible, ever-transient source of wealth, conflict, and impossible dreams.
AFTERWORD
In the winter of 2016–17 more rain fell in California than in many years. The Sierra snowpack was formidable and slow to melt, the governor relaxed some restrictions on water usage, and the drought was widely heralded as a thing of the past. But much of that snowpack flowed to the sea. By summer wildfires again became a serious threat all over the state, in part because of all the new growth, and regulators worried about the ongoing availability of water to slake the Golden State’s awesome, ever-growing thirst.
The fisheries biologist hired by opponents of development on Howell Mountain found rainbow trout in the upper reaches of Conn Creek, where they were not supposed to be. This small miracle meant that various development plans had to be reworked, or abandoned, and that for a brief moment a few pretty little fingerlings could outshine the brightest lights in the firmament of human endeavor.
Donald Trump was now president, and although Napans voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, many among the vintner and grower classes did not. They were happy with Trump’s general opposition to regulation, but increasingly out of step with a county—and a state—desirous of environmental safeguards.
A serendipitous new ally of opponents to development in the valley was the thirty-mile extension of the fault line brought on by the earthquake of 2014 that now extended from the city of Napa to Calistoga, up the west side of Highway 29.
Farmer Andy Beckstoffer finally got a hearing by the county in his challenge to Raymond Vineyards’ activities, including the Red Room. Meanwhile Jean-Charles Boisset had bought the winery next door. The supervisors voted three to two not to act on Andy’s complaint, including Alfredo Pedroza, who intoned, “This is not Disneyland. . . . This is agriculture in the twenty-first century.”
The appeal by backers of the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative did not prevail in the state supreme court, but proponents vowed to gather signatures again and finally get the issue placed on the 2018 ballot. Few in the county doubted that they would find more signatories than before, or that such an initiative would finally be approved by voters.
Then something unexpected occurred: a spokesperson for the Napa Valley Vintners secretly approached the initiative’s proponents and offered to join with them in the renewed effort to pass it. The issue remained so contentious among members of all of the so-called Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that a confidentiality agreement had to be signed by the negotiators to prevent a revolt before a deal could be done.
By midsummer 2017, several meetings had taken place and a new spirit of trust seemed to prevail. New guidelines were agreed to by environmentalists and members of the Vintners’ representatives. In general the terms included greater stream setbacks and woodlands protection, including replacing every oak tree felled for development with three others on the property whose long-term growth was assured, and by 2030 all cutting of oaks would be prohibited.
So, after much acrimony, despair, political maneuvering, spent time and money, and the loss of overall goodwill, the hillsides seemed destined for additional protection. But reaction to the agreement, when revealed to the Vintner’s membership, was loudly condemnatory and at the organization withdrew from the agreement. There was simply too much demand for a piece of what was once Edenic, and too much wealth to be denied, though for a moment the possibility of meaningful change had hung in the balance.
Then came the terrible fires in the fall of 2017. Reading and watching the news, I was horrified by their intensity and speed. I had predicted something similar, though further out in time, and felt as if I had somehow helped summon up the disaster. A preamble had been provided two years before on Howell Mountain, and again the fires spared Dunn Vineyards.
But this time more than six hundred structures in the county were damaged, though the percentage of actual destruction of Napa wineries was minuscule, and all the over-all damage small, when compared to what happened in neighboring Sonoma Country. Originally thought to have been set, the fires were nevertheless of human origin, since PG&E lines going down in the winds were the apparent culprits. Those lines were installed to fuel not just the valley’s wineries and vineyard operations but also households and three million-plus annual visitors and all the services of a touristic juggernaut.
Developers and professional growers immediately called for new vineyards that would bring the clearing of more forests, claiming that vineyards make good firebreaks. They also mean more water loss, more people, and more activities unrelated to agriculture - houses, roads, service buildings, power lines.
Everyone in the wine industry was making money, ramped-up tourism pushing the county’s annual take into the billions. But county officials seemed increasingly uncomfortable with controversial projects. Even Deep Root sounded guardedly optimistic: “The county’s climate action plan has been discredited and has to be rewritten. . . . Every millimeter of land will eventually be subject to new laws, which means hundreds of thousands of trees can be saved that might not have been. The system is crumbling from within, people are finally starting to pay attention.”
Huntly, Virginia October 20, 2017
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped with shaping this book with stories, opinions, and facts about the valley and the momentous changes there since Napa and The Far Side of Eden were published. Others helped immeasurably with criticism of the work itself, foremost among them my friend and agent, Ralph Eubanks, who was there from the beginning with unerring judgment and a steady hand.
I want to thank Ben Loehnen for his fresh perspective and guidance, and everyone at Simon & Schuster for their professionalism and care. My wife, Penny, was an inspiration, as was my daughter, Susanna, who helped me look at the writing in a new way. Likewise, among my friends who made suggestions I am particularly indebted to Ridgeway Hall, John Lang, Meredith Hadaway, Joanne Omang, Mark Borthwick, and Paul Franson. There are many others who helped in various ways and to whom I am immensely grateful. Their names are omitted not by choice but because in Napa feelings run high and friendships sometimes hinge perilously on issues and affiliations.
Lastly, I want to pay fond tribute to Napa County itself, a place like no other. In retrospect it seems as innocent as I was when I first arrived, and even today its beauty and example can, against all odds, still engender hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© SHAINAH CONAWAY
James Conaway grew up in Memphis, but lived in Europe for several years before moving to Washington, D.C. A former Wallace Stenger fellow at Stanford University, he’s the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller, Napa: The Story of an American Eden. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and California.
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INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Abreu, Dave, 7
Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee, 232
agriculture:
agrarian ideal and, xx, xxiv–xxv
definition of, 54, 62–64, 67–70, 95–96, 200
Napa preserve for, xx, 20, 43, 45, 60, 63–68, 78, 91, 94, 101, 110, 117–18, 174–75, 183, 189, 196, 198, 234, 278
organic, 30, 60, 222–24
sustainable, 222–24, 227
Aguirre (farmhand), 87
Alaska, 143, 175
alcohol, 14, 16, 41, 106, 115, 119, 132, 221, 272, 278
cabernet and, xxv
over–ripened grapes and, 7–8
and speculation on origin of wine, 4
Alcohol Beverage Control Board, Calif., 107, 182, 264
Alex (Winegrower member), 211–12
Alexander Valley, 182–83
American Canyon, Calif., 70, 271
American Sphinx (Ellis), xxv
Angwin, Calif., 143, 145, 166, 233–34
airport in, 130, 132
and tree cutting and stream setbacks, 234, 236–37
Napa at Last Light Page 29
