Laddie and Ted scoured the Napa Valley for a suitable place to grow grapes. They fell in love with an old 640-acre parcel that President Ulysses S. Grant had deeded to E. J. Church in 1872 as a land patent grant. The farm was nestled in the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains with magnificent views looking out over the valley to Howell Mountain. The long meadow that formed the centerpiece of the property gave the farm its name.
Grapes and other crops had first been planted at Long Meadow Ranch in the late nineteenth century and for decades its owners had raised cattle, produced olive oil, and cultivated apples, pears, and other fruit trees. The vineyards were abandoned during Prohibition and by the time the Halls purchased the property in 1989, the farming operations had long lay fallow.
The farm and its history inspired the Halls. They didn’t just resurrect the winery, but decided to build an integrated farming operation that harkened back to the ranch’s historical roots. They brought in cattle and Appaloosa horses, and bottled olive oil from the property’s 125-year-old trees. They also bought land in the small city of St. Helena and converted an old barn into the Farmstead Restaurant, one of St. Helena’s first farm-to-table restaurants. It focused on locally sourced and organic food, much of it grown on the property’s gardens, and was widely admired.
Hall was pleased with what he and his wife had accomplished. Production had grown steadily and in 2005 Long Meadow Ranch was producing between 12,000 and 15,000 cases of wine a year, including its signature E. J. Church Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. After fifteen years of work and more than 5,000 visits to stores, restaurants, and wine shops around the country, Long Meadow Ranch wine was carried in some of the best restaurants and stores in New York and San Francisco.
Hall was hoping that the 2005 vintage would be a good one. It had been an exceptionally cool year in California, with early and frequent rains in the spring and summer. Grape growth had been vigorous, which usually leads to less intensely flavored grapes. But the weather had warmed up in September and October, and the sugar level in the grapes still hanging on the vine was steadily increasing. By October 12, some picking had begun, but many winemakers were holding off to let the grape clusters develop as long as possible.
Hall was at his desk tapping away at his computer when Les Dendon, the winery’s chief financial officer, popped in his head. Dendon’s wife, who was driving up to Napa from the San Francisco peninsula, had just called, said Dendon. She had seen a huge plume of smoke in the air. The radio said there was a massive fire at a wine storage warehouse in Vallejo.
Dendon was concerned. Long Meadow Ranch had most of its inventory in Wines Central, including its 2001 Cabernet, which was getting ready for release, every bottle of the 2002 vintage, and its wine library. In addition, Hall had moved a friend’s collection of 1875 wine and port to the warehouse. Dendon suggested that Hall drive down to check up on the fire; he would keep in touch by cell phone.
Hall’s heart began to beat more quickly as he raced out of his office and got into his four-wheel-drive pickup truck. He barreled down the steep and twisting driveway until he hit Highway 29, which led south toward Mare Island and Vallejo. After Hall was ten miles down the highway, it was all he could do to keep his eyes on the road. Far ahead he could see a massive column of smoke rising into the sky, a plume so large it could only mean one thing: this was an enormous fire.
Hall pushed down on the accelerator. He crossed the bridge over the Napa River and traveled south on Highway 29 until it intersected with Highway 37. He veered east toward Mare Island. As Hall turned off onto the cratered road that led to the old naval station, he could see fire trucks and fire equipment drive by, their lights and sirens flashing. The Vallejo police had set up a roadblock, but when the officer in charge saw Hall’s truck, and Hall dressed in a vest and jeans, for some reason he waved him through.
As Hall pulled closer to the wine warehouse he could see dozens of fire trucks with more arriving by the minute from outlying areas. The fire looked hot, really hot, so hot as to make the building almost unapproachable. Hall spotted one group of firefighters in flame-retardant suits spraying huge metal doors with a cannon of water. When the water hit the superheated doors, it produced a wall of steam so intense that the firefighters were forced to retreat.
Another group of firefighters was on the roof, trying to cut a hole in the concrete to let the heat and smoke dissipate. They didn’t have much success. The warehouse, built to store naval parts, was almost indestructible.
By then Hall heard a distinct noise. It was the sound of breaking glass. As the heat and flames melted the shrink-wrap binding together the towering cases of wine stored in the warehouse, the boxes toppled over, hitting other boxes in a domino effect. The crashes were audible over the roar of the fire.
As the bottles broke, the wine mixed with the water the firefighters were using to dwarf the blaze. Soon rivers of red liquid flowed out through the warehouse doors.
Hall couldn’t believe the scene. It wasn’t chaos, but it was close.
As he sat there in shock and disbelief and watched as firefighters tried to defeat the raging fire, Hall knew his wine was gone.
* * *
As Dick Ward was preparing espresso in the kitchen of his St. Helena home, he turned on NPR. Listening to the early morning news was part of his daily ritual, one he and his wife, Linda Reiff, the director of the Napa Valley Vintners Association, enjoyed every morning. They would eat breakfast and discuss the day’s plans before Reiff left for her office. She only had to drive a few miles to get to work, where she oversaw the trade association that represented more than 300 wineries and fought to protect and promote the Napa Valley brand around the world. Ward, the cofounder of Saintsbury, a winery in the southern reaches of Napa Valley, had a twenty-five-minute commute.
Around eight a.m. the news came on. The news anchor reported that there had been a massive fire at a wine storage warehouse in Vallejo the day before. The fire had burned for more than eight hours, sending a plume of smoke seven hundred feet high above the area. Firefighters had not had a chance to assess the damage yet, but the warehouse was known to contain millions of bottles of fine wine. Much of it was probably damaged, announced the anchor.
Anxiety flooded Ward’s body. Saintsbury wine was in that warehouse, he thought. Ward did a quick mental inventory. He and his partner, David Graves, had sent about 3,000 cases of their library wine, samples of twenty years of vintages, to Wines Central. They had sent the collection of bottles they had made since 1984, as well as two hundred large-format bottles.
Ward ran to the phone. He dialed Graves to find out if he knew any details about the fire. Graves didn’t. Neither did any of the staff at the winery. Ward went on to the computer to check the news stories; he found article after article with the same alarming but generic details: the fire was massive and had probably ruined all of the wine that sat inside the building.
Ward, normally a placid man whose modern eyeglasses give him a touch of the avant-garde, couldn’t sit still. What was going on with his wine? Was it safe or was it destroyed? Sitting in his house miles away from the winery, plagued by uncertainty, wasn’t going to get him answers any faster. It only made him more anxious. Ward jumped into his bronze Honda Element and headed south on Highway 29 to Saintsbury in the Carneros district, the southernmost point of the Napa Valley, right on the edge of San Pablo Bay.
When Ward and Graves had first decided to grow Pinot Noir grapes in the foggy part of the valley, many people thought they were taking a gamble. While some of the best wine in the world is made from Pinot Noir grapes—the wines of Burgundy—very little good Pinot Noir wine was made outside of France at the time. Pinot is a temperamental grape, one susceptible to the elements, and mist, fog, and high winds were endemic in the Carneros district. Most thought it took a master’s hand to coax the very best from Pinot grapes.
Ward and Graves weren’t masters, just cocky. They had met each other in 1976 at a brewery class in the oenology department at th
e University of California at Davis, the university that had become the breeding ground for a new generation of modern winemakers and grape growers. Both had degrees in other topics—Ward had studied structural engineering at Tufts University near Boston and Graves had just left a doctoral program in English at the University of Chicago—but they had decided their lives’ passion was in pursuit of the grape. There was something mystical about wine, they agreed. Grapes grown next to one another in the same vineyard could produce wines that tasted completely different. That idea of terroir, of ground and grape mixing to make something unique, intrigued both men, gripped them, and wouldn’t let them free.
Ward and Graves hit it off instantly. They were both literary and enjoyed discussing history and men of letters. How many other people were enamored with The Lark, that 1895 literary journal of Gilded Age San Francisco printed on bamboo paper that featured the work of Gelett Burgess, a poet who coined the word “blurb,” and others? Or were intrigued by a legendary 1540 Riesling harvest in Germany?
The men also shared a love of Burgundy wine made from Pinot Noir grapes and often lamented that few in California tried to replicate it. The state, particularly Napa Valley, was the land of the big, bold Cabernets, high in alcohol with a rich roll on the tongue.
The conversations inspired Ward and Graves. In 1978, a friend offered them some Cabernet grapes from Nathan Fay’s highly regarded vineyard in the Stag’s Leap appellation6 of southeastern Napa. The two men, who had been interning at various Napa Valley wineries, drew on their burgeoning skills to make a barrel of wine. They named it The Lark after that long-ago literary magazine and included a quotation from one of the editions on the label: “Unending flow of dark red Napa claret.”
The wine was good, really good. Ward and Graves found that both they and their friends had no difficulty polishing off a bottle and going back for more. So when the experiment was over, the men tried again. This time they bought grapes from the Carneros region on the edge of San Pablo Bay. Sparkling wine producers had long been using Pinot Noir grapes from the Carneros district, but Ward and Graves were among a new generation looking to make red Pinot Noir wine.
Once again the men reached into the literary world for inspiration. They selected the name Saintsbury in homage to the British historian and literary critic George Saintsbury, who at age seventy-five had written his opus, Notes on a Cellar-Book, considered one of the best tributes to drinking ever written. The wine was good, prompting the pair to purchase land and plant Pinot Noir grapes in 1981. (They eventually planted Chardonnay as well.) Every year, Ward and Graves set aside a few cases of the vintage for their wine library. They wanted to see how the wine aged. Many wine collectors and critics were skeptical that California wine could get better as it sat in the bottle. Most thought the wine, with its bold flavor and high alcohol content, was best drunk within two or three years. Ward thought otherwise. He thought Saintsbury’s reds were as good as French reds, and could deepen and become more complex with time.
Saintsbury Winery would have its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2006. Ward and Graves were planning to host tastings in New York and San Francisco and invite prominent wine critics to a “vertical” tasting, which would offer a sample of every vintage made since the winery’s beginnings. The guest list would include luminaries like Jancis Robinson, the British wine writer, whose articles influenced thousands of wine lovers around the globe. Ward had been looking forward to demonstrating how Saintsbury wines stood up over the decades.
But with the news that a fire had broken out in the place where those wines were stored, Ward had the feeling that the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration might never happen.
CHAPTER THREE
THE WRECKED REMAINS
Two days later, as R. Steven Lapham drove his blue Acura into the lot near the Wines Central warehouse, his first thought was that the building didn’t look too badly damaged. While Vallejo fire department vehicles were parked nearby, as well as a large white and blue trucks from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there were no visible smoke stains on the building’s outside white walls. The wooden door, with its carvings of grape clusters and a Franciscan friar holding up a glass of wine, was not even singed.
But Lapham’s assessment changed as soon as he stepped inside. Wine storage warehouses are usually sterile-looking spaces, with fluorescent lights shining down on rows of shrink-wrapped cardboard wine boxes stacked high on pallets. But parts of the interior of Wines Central looked like they were in a war zone. The electricity had gone out, leaving the cavernous space dim, with light coming only from the gaps three stories up that once held the rows of windows. Case upon case of wine had collapsed in the inferno, sending millions of bottles crashing to the floor where they lay in shattered piles. The flames had burned away the sides of many cardboard boxes, exposing an eerie sight of upside-down wine bottles. The air was pungent, a mix of wine, wood char, smoke, and sodden cardboard.
Lapham stepped gingerly through the water and wine that had pooled on the concrete floor, and within minutes his fine leather loafers were soaking wet. Lapham hadn’t expected to be called to investigate the wine fire, so he had dressed that morning in his lawyerly best: a blue suit, white shirt, and shoes more appropriate for the courthouse than a warehouse.
Lapham was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, a jurisdiction that stretched from the state capital in Sacramento 286 miles south to Bakersfield. On the afternoon of October 14, he had driven from Sacramento to Vallejo to interview a witness for an upcoming racketeering trial against members of the Pitch Dark Family, a notorious Vallejo gang whose members were widely believed to be drug dealers and murderers. But shortly after Lapham completed the hour-long drive down Interstate 80, he got a call from his boss redirecting him to the fire-ravaged Wines Central warehouse. The fire had happened two days earlier and ATF investigators were looking for signs of arson.
It was no surprise that U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott turned to Lapham when a case involved fire. Lapham had spent much of his twenty-one-year career pursuing arsonists. A lithe California native with blue eyes, graying brown hair, and a laid-back demeanor that concealed a sharp prosecutorial instinct, Lapham was expert at understanding the physics behind fire and the mechanics of explosives. Those skills had helped him win numerous convictions, including one against a prominent Sacramento developer who torched his own warehouse to collect $4 million in insurance proceeds. He had also prosecuted three militiamen who planned to blast rocket launchers into two storage tanks that each held twelve million gallons of liquid propane. They were nicknamed the “Twin Sisters.” If the right-wingers had succeeded, the explosion might have devastated a five-mile radius, killing 12,000 people.
But Lapham’s most absorbing case to date—and the one that brought him a modicum of fame—involved Ted Kaczynski, the brilliant Harvard-trained mathematician turned Montana survivalist also known as the Unabomber. Over a period of seventeen years, Kaczynski had terrorized the United States by sending mail bombs to people and institutions he thought represented modern science and technology run amok. His targets seemed random; he sent bombs to Sacramento, Chicago, and even smuggled one onto an airplane. The bombs had killed three people, including the owner of a computer store in Sacramento, and injured twenty-three others.
Lapham was part of the Sacramento-based federal prosecution team and it was his job to pore through the 40,000 pages that Kaczynski had written in his isolated wooden shack in rural Montana railing against the rise of modern technology. Lapham’s task, one that drew on his methodical approach to law, had been to annotate the impenetrable document and see which words or phrases would bolster the federal government’s case. It took Lapham eighteen months to pore through the notebooks. He found some appalling evidence, like Kaczynski’s reaction to the news that one of his bombs had killed the Sacramento computer storeowner in 1985. “Excellent,” wrote Kaczynski. “Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a t
hing. 25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.”7
But there was another reason Lapham’s boss had called. In addition to being an expert in arson, Lapham was an expert in crimes involving wine. In fact, Lapham was widely looked on as the prosecutor who had made the federal government regard wine fraud as a serious issue. Over a five-year period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lapham had overseen a complex fraud prosecution of California grape growers, grape brokers, and winemakers who had passed off cheap grapes and wines as expensive varieties. Lapham won numerous convictions, sent the worst offenders to jail, and forced the others to pay millions in fines.
Lapham liked to visit the scene of a fire. He took his time, wandering around the perimeter of a building, looking at the placement of windows and doors, escape routes and entrapment points, then moving inside to study the path of a blaze. He called the walk his “visual,” his time to imprint on his brain the particulars of a fire. Lapham was a physical man by nature, preferring movement to sitting behind a desk (he cycled or skied on weekends) and took the opportunity to go into the field whenever he could. His colleagues would say that his calm demeanor allowed him to absorb more than most; he tamped down his emotions and ramped up his powers of observation. It was the details, after all, that won convictions.
As Lapham shined a flashlight around the dripping interior of Wines Central he could immediately see that if the fire had been deliberately set, this case would be much, much, bigger than the fraud prosecution of the California winemakers and grape growers. His light landed on the wines of dozens of different producers. Sterling Vineyards. Beaulieu Vineyards. Domaine La Due. Justin Winery. Sean Thackrey. Realm Cellars. Sinskey Vineyards. Tres Sabores. Toasted Head. In total, the fire had affected ninety-five wine producers.
Anyone with a small amount of knowledge of the fine wine world of the Napa Valley and other parts of California would have been astonished—and saddened—at the sheer amount of ruined wine in the warehouse, much of it cooked as the concrete building heated up like a kiln. The names on the labels were some of the most respected in the wine world. They ranged from small producers who only made a few hundred cases a year to huge corporations like Diageo, owners of Sterling Vineyards, Beaulieu Vineyards, and Chalone, which made millions of cases annually. As Lapham walked around, he could imagine all the years of work that had gone into that wine—the planting and harvesting of the grapes, the crush, the fermentation and aging in barrels. Now, the flames had erased it.
Tangled Vines Page 4
