Tangled Vines

by Frances Dinkelspiel

  Do you have a hankering for your own vineyard? The eighty-acre Napa Valley Reserve is a place where wine lovers who don’t have the money (prime vineyard land can cost $300,000 an acre) or the time to grow their own grapes can pretend to be winemakers. Located right next to the Meadowood resort in St. Helena, the Reserve is a perfect expression of Napa Valley’s casual luxury, with its artificially weathered wood building, rows of olive trees, an organic garden, and grapevines running up to near the edge of the crushed granite paths.

  For a mere $175,000 initiation fee and a promise to buy at least another $7,500 of wine each year, the Reserve’s six hundred members get the right to “own” two or three rows of vines made from cloned grapes from Harlan Estate.

  In early fall, the Reserve’s rows of grapevines are filled with the bankers and doctors and real estate investors—and their children—who are members. They get up early, mimicking the rhythm of the Mexican or Central American field workers who pick most of the valley’s grapes, don thick protective gloves, and use red-handled grape shears to cut off clusters of ripe red grapes. They then sort out the unripe fruit, leaves, and bugs before the grapes are crushed. Once the wine has fermented, each member can work with a master winemaker to blend his or her own vintage, which will then be aged in French oak for two years and bottled with a personalized label.

  Membership sales have been brisk. The actors Robert Redford and Nicolas Cage belong. Lance Armstrong, the disgraced seven-time Tour de France winner, and David and Victoria Beckham, the retired British soccer star and his fashionista wife, are members. So is Suze Orman, the financial guru.

  All of the members can afford to buy fine wine; it’s the lifestyle they want—getting their hands dirty, smelling the ripe grapes, discussing the fine points of a vintage with a world-renowned winemaker. “I love the visceral side—the land, the grapes, the biology,” said one New York doctor. “That whole thing is extremely appealing.”4

  “There’s a spiritual element to wine,” said a Michigan businessman who sold his company for more than $122 million. “You know you’re producing something from the earth.”5

  The ultimate expression of the Napa Valley lifestyle is Auction Napa Valley, the annual fund-raiser put on by a trade group, the Napa Valley Vintners, in late May or early June to support local charities. The auction—which has cost $3,000 a couple in recent years—draws some of the world’s top collectors, as well as tech and finance moguls enjoying what they have earned.

  The auction is held each year under huge white tents set up on the vast lawn of the Meadowood resort in St. Helena. I attended on a scorching bright blue day in June 2013. The theme was orange. The color was everywhere: on signs, on tabletops, on napkins, on the umbrellas providing shade from the relentless sun. Even the expensive race cars parked as eye candy at the auction entrance, like the Audi R8 Spyder convertible, were bright orange. The day started off under one big white tent. Revelers wandered around and nibbled on lamb sliders, grilled cheese sandwiches, ox tongue, and fresh scallops prepared by nine winners of the Bravo! Top Chef competition. Winemakers holding magnums of their wine mingled with the guests, and poured glasses for anyone who asked.

  I didn’t spot any celebrities—in other years Oprah Winfrey, Jay Leno, and Teri Hatcher had attended—but I saw many well-dressed people in bright cotton sundresses and linen shirts and straw panama hats. There were a few tech titans, too, like Steve Case, the founder of AOL, and his wife, Jean. Most of the people I talked to said they returned year after year in part because the auction organizers pampered them and made them feel special. No detail was overlooked, from the glasses of cold sparkling wine that were handed out as guests boarded the shuttle bus to bring them to Meadowood to the gift bags they took home. The guests felt part of a special inner circle, I heard repeatedly.

  In the early afternoon, as the heat rose into the mid-nineties, a conga line of vintners danced their way into the auction tent. It was the signal for the beginning of the main event. Big spenders, the people who had purchased lots in previous years, were seated near the front at long rectangular tables covered with orange tablecloths. Bottles of fine wine sat on every table.

  The auction got off to a strong start. One bidder paid $350,000 for a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto with Naoko Dalla Valle, the Japanese-born cult winemaker whom the Wine Spectator magazine dubbed one of the “Three Graces of Napa,” for her beauty and winemaking skills. Another bid $120,000 to travel through Argentina with winemaker Delia Viader (another “Grace”) and Aria Mehrabi, the owner of Mithra Winery. But the thousand people gathered under the white tent regarded those lots as mere warm-ups. They had been anticipating Lot #20, a twenty-year vertical of Harlan Estate. Bill Harlan, who owned Meadowood as well as the Napa Reserve, made legendary wines from a thirty-acre vineyard in the Oakville region of Napa. The world’s top wine critics were uniformly enthusiastic about Harlan’s wines. British wine writer Jancis Robinson called Harlan’s lush, intensely concentrated Cabernets “one of the ten best wines of the twentieth century.” Robert Parker, who many regard as having the most discriminating palate around, had given 100-point scores to five of Harlan’s vintages. The wines are made in such small quantities that they are almost impossible to get. The waiting list is years long. And any wine that made its way to the secondary market commanded thousands of dollars. In short, Lot #20 was the lot of the auction.

  To start the bidding, auction organizers projected large pictures of Harlan Estate wine on three screens behind the auctioneers. The gavel went down. A handful of people seated at tables near the front thrust their wooden paddles in the air. The opening bid was around $100,000. Within two minutes, the number had shot up, up, up, up into the stratosphere, with a venture capitalist named Gary Rieschel determined to hold his lead. Every time someone bid, Rieschel lifted up paddle #26 with his right hand while nursing a glass of red wine with his left. He seemed calm, but aggressive, meeting and raising each bid. He had clearly done this before. “Do I see $500,000 for this lot,” the auctioneer rattled off. Up went a paddle. “Do I see $700,000?” A few bidders waved their paddles around. When the gavel landed, Rieschel had bid $800,000 for an auction lot titled “The Works.” The package included a tasting of every Harlan vintage from 1990 to 2009, two nights at Meadowood, and a celebratory dinner for eight prepared by Christopher Kostow, the resort’s Michelin three-star chef.

  Hours later, as auction attendees left the tent to sit down for a dinner prepared by the executive chef of Blackberry Farm in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Rieschel, then fifty-seven, sat cross-legged on the Meadowood lawn. Dressed in khaki shorts and a beige linen shirt (the only startling splashes of color were his pink-and-yellow argyle socks), the man who had made the day’s highest bid waved off auction handlers eager to protect him from nosy journalists. Rieschel was perfectly happy to speak openly about why he dropped so much money on a twenty-year vertical of Harlan Estate wine. Reischel, the founder of Qiming Venture Partners, a $1 billion fund that invests in early-stage companies in China, explained by way of example. A few years earlier he had purchased a vertical tasting at Shafer Vineyards, a 210-acre winery in Napa’s Stag’s Leap district whose wine Robert M. Parker had anointed as “one of the New World’s most profound Cabernet Sauvignons.” Rieschel and his friends spent hours with the owner, Doug Shafer, tasting and discussing wines and learning about the ups and downs of each vintage. They walked the hillside vineyards. They wandered among the barrels and fermentation tanks. They shared an excellent meal at the winery. They forged a strong personal connection. Reischel called it “one of the most emotional and special days” he had ever spent in Napa. “It’s not about the wine,” he said. “It’s about the people.”

  What does it say that a man like Rieschel, a man with millions of dollars at his disposal, chooses to spend his money on wine? He could spend the same amount chartering a private plane to fly to the Seven Wonders of the World, renting a yacht to cruise the Mediterranean, or buying a painting. Yet he chose to spe
nd his money on wine.

  It’s the pursuit of the experience, the belief that wine opens up worlds and forges friendships that drives people to be so obsessed. Humans have worshipped wine for eons, from Noah to the Greeks to Gary Rieschel. It’s what also drove Mark Anderson.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALL IS LOST

  October 12, 2005

  Delia Viader paused at the entrance to Meadowood Resort, taking a moment to get her bearings. It was just after six p.m. on the evening of October 12, 2005, and the Napa Valley air was still warm and pleasant.

  Viader looked around. Meadowood was familiar to her, as it had become the center of the Napa Valley social life ever since Bill Harlan and his now-deceased partner Peter Stocker had purchased it in 1979. The two men had poured millions into the 240-acre estate, transforming it from a small country club into a world-class resort where bungalows nestled among ancient oak trees and guests played croquet on a broad and sweeping lawn. Viader had been at Meadowood just a few months earlier when she attended the 2005 Napa Valley auction in June with her boyfriend, Tim Mondavi, son of Robert Mondavi, the man many credited with raising the reputation—and consumption—of Napa wine. That evening had been a bittersweet affair. The Mondavis had just sold their wine empire for $1.03 billion to Constellation Brands, merging the family-owned business with one of the largest beverage companies in the world. All eyes were on the Mondavi family—and Viader—as they entered the white auction tent. What was their reaction to the sale, which signaled the end of an era in Napa Valley history? But the auction had been fun as well. Jay Leno, the host of The Tonight Show on NBC, was the host. Everyone had laughed when he deadpanned: “This is a performer’s dream. Rich people who have been drinking.”

  Viader, who was born in Argentina but who had spent a lot of time in France before moving to the United States, was back at Meadowood that evening for another party. This time, Silicon Valley Bank, a lender to Viader and many other Napa Valley winemakers, was celebrating the accomplishments of some of its most successful clients with an elegant evening under the stars.

  Viader Vineyards was nineteen years old. In May 1986, when Viader was a single mother of three, including one son with Down syndrome, she had persuaded her father to let her use the land he owned on Howell Mountain on the eastern side of the valley. Viader’s father, an Argentinian diplomat who once served as a military attaché to the United Nations, had purchased the hillside property years earlier as an investment.

  Viader had always had a head for numbers. It was trait that she might have inherited from her paternal grandfather, a large landowner in Spain who had emigrated to Argentina after the government confiscated his holdings in the name of agrarian reform. He moved there during the first decade of the twentieth century, where he formed a partnership in a tobacco venture with the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Just as her grandfather had learned to re-create himself and prosper, so would Viader.

  Viader was well educated but had no experience with wine before she started a winery in 1986. A blond woman with delicate features and green eyes, Viader spoke Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin, and English and had gotten the equivalent of a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris. She had also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at two campuses of the University of California—Berkeley and Davis. But she had never selected a grape variety, plotted out a vineyard, or blended grapes. Because Viader loved to drink wine, particularly French Bordeaux and Burgundy, she had fantasized about bringing that Old World approach to California wine.

  The idea seemed a folly. The land on which Viader planned to create a vineyard was so rocky and steep that standing was difficult. Most of the grapes in Napa at that time were planted on the flat valley floor or on hills with a slight incline.

  But Viader had seen vertical vineyards on steep slopes in Europe and was convinced it could be done. She hired Dave Abreu—who would later become a famous vineyard manager—to design her vineyard. He planted twelve acres of closely spaced rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grapes running up and down the hill. That, too, was unheard of in the Napa Valley, where most hillside vineyards were terraced. But Viader had heard that a vertical orientation gave the grapes better sun exposure.

  Disaster struck early on. Viader used dynamite to crack apart the hill’s volcanic rock. During some heavy October rains in 1989, dirt from the exposed hill liquefied. The mud and rocks flowed down the hill and into the Bell Canyon reservoir, the source of St. Helena’s water supply, and then buried the shooting range of the St. Helena police. The landslide, many believe, was an impetus for the Napa County Board of Supervisors to adopt a hillside ordinance establishing erosion controls on the hills in 1991.

  But matters eventually stabilized. Viader made her first vintage, a combination of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, a blend that the young winemaker regarded as more restrained than the fruity, high-alcohol Cabernet Sauvignons that were increasingly popular in Napa.

  In 2000, Wine Spectator, the influential glossy magazine that touted wine and wine country living, named Viader’s 1997 red, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot grapes, its number two wine in the world. The renowned wine critic Robert Parker called it “terrific … a wine of exceptional finesse and elegance.” Her signature “Viader” was selling for $100 a bottle, and her most elite product, V, a Petit Verdot, sold for $150 a bottle.

  The evening of October 12 was to be a celebration of all Viader had accomplished the previous nineteen years. Viader, who many regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Napa, with a lilting accented voice that enhanced her mystique, dressed simply, but elegantly, in a black pantsuit. Her home at the top of Howell Mountain near the town of Deer Park was nearby and it had only taken Viader ten minutes to speed down the road to Meadowood. She pulled into the parking lot shortly as the sun was starting to set.

  Suddenly her cell phone rang. Viader looked at it, not certain if she should answer. But the call was from her son Alan, the second oldest of her children. He was her vineyard manager and heir apparent, and was poised to take over as head winemaker.

  Viader flipped open the cell phone. At first she couldn’t quite understand Alan. He was in a panic, his voice strained, his breathing hard. He seemed close to tears. He told her something about a warehouse. He screamed into the phone that everything was on fire.

  Viader paused at the entryway to Meadowood. Fire? What fire? What warehouse? What was he talking about? But then she remembered. Alan was talking about the Wines Central warehouse on Mare Island in Vallejo, a place about nineteen miles away from her winery. The warehouse, with its thick concrete walls that served as a natural insulator and bulwark against earthquakes, seemed like a good storage facility. It was right near the highways that led to San Francisco and Sacramento, and close to rail lines that carried cargo to ships. Viader had sent all of her 2003 vintage, about 7,400 cases, there just a few weeks earlier.

  As Viader hung up, a feeling of doom flooded over her. She had millions of dollars of wine in that warehouse. She needed to go there to see what was happening. But she still had to face the dinner hosted by Silicon Valley Bank—her creditor, the institution that was rewarding her for her loyalty and accomplishments by hosting a celebratory evening. Viader steeled herself and walked into the banquet room. She saw her personal banker and pulled him aside. “We have to talk,” she said.

  * * *

  Ted Hall was bustling around in the office of Long Meadow Ranch headquarters, located on a hill high above the floor of the Napa Valley. It felt good to be back and focusing on his winery and ranch operations after a hiatus. In January 2004, Hall, a heavy man with a round and friendly face, took a yearlong break from overseeing his winery and farm to serve as chairman of the board of the Robert Mondavi winery—the first time in its history an outsider had taken the helm. The company that had elevated the profile of Napa Valley’s wines to equal those of France and Italy had been in free fall at the time. Mondavi had
stepped down as chairman in 2001 and then, after installing his son Michael as his successor, helped oust him after just a few years. Revenue was falling. Hall, a former McKinsey consultant who had an extensive background in wine and finance, was brought in to stop the decline. Within a year Hall, considered a master strategist and turnaround expert, had negotiated the wine company’s sale to Constellation Brands for $1.36 billion, a 61 percent increase in value from the time Hall had stepped in. He pocketed $2.5 million for his efforts.

  The work had been intense, but it was over. Hall was at Long Meadow Ranch, which he owned with his wife, Laddie, and son, Christopher. Hall and his family had long lived in San Francisco, where Hall served on the board of the San Francisco Symphony and was a member of the secretive, male-only Bohemian Club. He was also a jazz aficionado who had started his own record company. But Hall had another identity as an amateur vintner. He had grown up in a small farming community in western Pennsylvania and made his first batch of wine in 1971 with two classmates from Stanford Business School. They purchased Carignane and Zinfandel grapes from a longtime grower in Gilroy, south of San Jose, and, in what would become a Silicon Valley tradition, handcrafted the wine in a garage in Santa Clara. Hall made wine as an amateur for seventeen years. Then he and his wife decided to enter the business professionally.