Dame lives in San Francisco. I was introduced to him in the fall of 2012 at a party after the screening of Somm in Napa. I mentioned Hellman’s Port to him then and asked if he might assess it. Over eighteen months, I emailed him about a dozen times and sent photos of the Port. I was hoping to tempt him into meeting me, but he resisted my efforts. When I finally got him on the phone, Dame was polite but initially explained he was too busy. When he wasn’t working, his priority was to spend time with his young children.
But Dame is fundamentally a teacher, a man who explains wine and spirits to those who know less than him. His instinct is to help. And even though his schedule was tight, he has a hard time saying no when he knows his knowledge is needed. He finally relented and invited me over to his house.
The empty bottle of Mumm’s Champagne propping up Dame’s front door was the first clue I had of Dame’s stature in the wine world. It was the largest I had ever seen. Green, with a white and red label, it stood three feet high and three feet around, the height but not the width of a fire hydrant. The formal name for that size bottle is nebuchadnezzar, named after an ancient king of Babylon, and it holds fifteen liters, or about twenty bottles of wine. The Champagne house had hand-blown the bottle as a gift for Dame’s 1996 wedding.
I brought Dame, a tall, imposing man in his sixties, an empty bottle of Hellman’s Port. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him to taste the wine; that idea came later. I had long wondered about the size and shape of the bottles. They were larger and fatter than an average wine bottle.
I handed Dame the bottle. Sediment still clung to one side, but the label was pristine. It took him about thirty seconds to pronounce judgment. He twirled the bottle. He walked over to a window to get more light. “It’s hand-blown. This was nicely done,” he said.
There weren’t many bottle factories in the early 1920s as Prohibition gripped the country, explained Dame. Up until 1920, most California wine was sold in bulk, in barrels. So whoever had wanted the Port in bottles had hired a craftsman.
Dame pointed out that the bottle did not have a seam, which meant it was not made in a mold. Instead, its entire surface was smooth and unlined. An air bubble was lodged in the bottle’s neck, another clue that it was hand-blown. The deep indentation on the bottle, known as the punt, is a classic sign of a hand-blown bottle, he said.
Dame has taught himself about old glass bottles. He grew up on the Monterey Peninsula, a descendant of merchants who arrived in California in 1842, before the Gold Rush. Another branch of the family was in the raisin business, growing grapes in Madera in California’s Central Valley. Dame, who first got interested in wine when he was eighteen and traveling through Europe, went to work after college for the Sardine Factory, a restaurant on Cannery Row in Monterey known for having one of the world’s greatest wine cellars. Dame said it carries 3,200 different types of wine, about 105,000 bottles in total.
Dame began consulting about the age and provenance of wine after British inheritance laws changed in the 1980s, allowing the English to sell wine without prohibitive taxes. A flood of old wine came into the United States and people hired Dame to authenticate it. Dame remembers seeing a bottle of 1870 Château Lafite Rothschild, its bottom still encrusted with dirt from sitting on the cellar floor. Dame had to learn a lot about bottle manufacturing in a hurry, and he talked to glass blowers and artisan glassmakers and scrutinized thousands of bottles from the nineteenth century.
So Hellman’s bottles were hand-blown. That explained their strange shape. But who had made them? Who had filled them with Port and Angelica?
I thought I understood the timing. The Port had been placed in barrels in 1875, where it sat for forty-six years. Isaias Hellman died in April 1920 and his only son died a month later. His other children, Clara Hellman Heller and Florence Hellman Ehrman, and their husbands must have decided to bottle and distribute the wine. The year 1921 was the second year of Prohibition and many alcohol-related companies were casting about for ways to survive. While the law prohibited the commercial sale of alcohol, there were a number of loopholes. Wineries could sell sacramental wine to churches or synagogues. The law also allowed households to make 200 gallons of wine each year for personal use. The Hellmans probably used this loophole to legally bottle the wine.
I couldn’t find any mention of the bottling in any of the 40,000 documents that make up the Hellman papers at the California Historical Society. The only family member who had any recollection of the bottles was my uncle, Bill Green, who told me, before his death in 2014 at age ninety, that he thought Grace Brothers had something to do with it. Grace Brothers Brewery was a Santa Rosa beer-making company, and one of its partners, Joseph T. Grace, was a close family friend. That must be it, I thought. Grace had to close its beer-making operations because of Prohibition and Joseph Grace bottled the wine as a favor to the Hellman family.
It was only months later that I discovered the true connection, and it came while I was browsing through a book on the California Wine Association. I read that in 1920, after Prohibition went into effect, the California Wine Association split its operations in two. One company kept the property and another kept the wine. Joseph Grace then purchased the CWA name and its wine.
That was a Eureka moment. I realized that Grace probably took an inventory of his new assets. And during that process, he probably discovered the two neglected barrels of 1875 Port and Angelica sitting in a warehouse somewhere. That’s the way Grace came to bottle the wine as a favor to his friends.
* * *
It was only as I was leaving Dame’s house that I realized I should have asked him to taste some of Hellman’s Port. After all, he was a man who knew wine better than almost anyone else on earth. He had an encyclopedic memory of wines he had tasted over the decades. That included Port, too. Dame had showed me an empty bottle of an 1868 Port sitting on his kitchen table. He and his friends had just finished the bottle the week before. The oldest Port he had ever drunk had been made in 1780 or 1790. And I had thought I would be giving him something special with a taste of an 1875 Port!
Getting a second appointment with Dame was just as hard as the first. I emailed him. No answer. I emailed him again. Silence. I finally caught him on his cell phone while he was driving to Sacramento. When I asked if he would taste the Port, he was reluctant. He was about to go on a long trip to Australia. But once again Dame couldn’t bring himself to turn me down. I promised the visit would be brief.
It rained the night before my appointment, the first wet weather the drought-stricken Bay Area had seen in months. The traffic across the Bay Bridge was bumper to bumper and never went faster than twenty miles an hour. Even though I had allotted an hour for the drive, I had been delayed leaving my house in Berkeley and didn’t think I would arrive in time. As the car inched along, I worried that if I was late, Dame would shut the door in my face.
I did sense some impatience on Dame’s part as he led me through the garage to his kitchen. He didn’t greet me warmly, or offer up chitchat. He was all business. I handed him a full bottle of Hellman’s Port. It was one that I had been saving for around fifteen years. Forest green wax covered the top. Dame tipped the bottle over a garbage can and began gently hitting the wax with a knife to break it apart.
Dame then eased a corkscrew into the cork. It crumbled into a few pieces as he extracted it, but he finally managed to pull it out. “The seal is still good,” he said, as he showed me a piece of the moist cork. That was a good sign, since the flavor of wine deteriorates if a cork dries out, permitting oxygen to enter the bottle.
Almost immediately a sweet aphrodisiacal scent filled the air. I was standing about four feet away from the bottle yet I could smell the Port’s fumes. The aroma, cooped up inside a bottle for ninety-three years, rushed out. “It smells fantastic,” said Dame.
Dame brought the bottle into his dining room. We sat down and Dame poured the Port into two glasses. It was dark amber, almost the color of the redwood it was once stored in.
The liquid was translucent. I had thought it would be opaque. It’s comparable to an “old, beautiful tawny Port,” said Dame.
I lifted my glass and let the Port swirl over my tongue. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the flavor. Sweetness exploded over my taste buds, followed by a pleasant sharpness. I have never been good at thinking of adjectives to describe wine, but Dame, with decades of practice behind him, didn’t have that problem.
“It has a wonderful old clay smell that I love,” he said as he lifted the glass to examine it more closely. “It’s delicious. It has almost a sour cherry quality to it, like cherries soaked in brandy. There is a sweetness of fruit here.”
He paused and thought. His brown eyes softened. “It’s phenomenal,” he said.
The longer we sat there, the mellower the Port became. The exposure to oxygen softened the alcoholic sharpness I had tasted when the bottle was first opened. Time seemed to mellow and slow down, too. The anxiety I had been feeling about imposing on Dame’s time melted away. He also appeared to forget he was busy. We talked. I told him a little about the history of the bottle, how my great-great-grandfather had purchased the land in the 1870s and how excited I had been when I discovered Jean Louis Sainsevain was the winemaker.
Dame had drunk many old wines during his career and always enjoyed them for their history, but Hellman’s Port actually tasted good, he said. Many of the old wines he had tried had lost their fruitiness, and tasted flat, but this Port was bursting with fruit flavor. There was no way this Port had been forgotten in the back of the winery, Dame said. It must have been deliberately set aside because it was so special. Dame said he wished he could have tasted the Port with the friends he was with the previous day—the other thirteen Krug Cup winners, the people who had passed the Master Sommelier exams in the first try.
“Wines like this must be shared,” said Dame. “It is history. It is an honor to drink it with you as a descendant.”
Suddenly Dame jumped up and went into his bedroom. When he came back he was holding a solid gold cravat pin. At the top was a tiny gold nugget. One of his ancestors had found a large nugget during the Gold Rush and had made it into five gold cravat pins for his five sons. Dame has a nineteenth-century photo of his relatives wearing the pin. Apparently, only three of the pins remain in the family.
That gesture gave me the answer I had been seeking for the last few years: Why is wine so special? What drives people to become fascinated by it?
The answer, of course, is that it brings people together. Here I was with a man I barely knew, a man who was pressed for time, yet who decided to help me better understand my ancestor’s Port. We had sipped a bit together and thought about the past, about the era the grapes were pressed, about the men who brought the wine to fruition. Drinking the Port at ten a.m. had left me a little lightheaded—and also very happy. I had shared a piece of my family history with Dame, which prompted him to share his family history with me. We were doing what people had done for millennia, and would continue doing as long as there were grapes in the ground and wine to share. We were connecting. And wine was what brought us together.
“This Port has plenty of time left,” said Dame, as he leaned back in his chair and twirled his glass. “It’s going to outlive us.”
EPILOGUE
R. Steven Lapham retired from the U.S. attorney’s office in 2013. He is now a Superior Court judge for the Juvenile Division of Sacramento County Superior Court. He said he likes intervening in the lives of young people and helping them to stay out of the court system. The walls of Lapham’s office still hold mementos of his days as a prosecutor, including court drawings of the Unabomber case. Lapham had to write about his top ten cases when he applied for the judgeship; one of those was the Mark Anderson prosecution.
Brian Parker is still a field agent for the ATF, based in Sacramento. He continues to investigate arson cases. When he started investigating Mark Anderson he did not have any children. Now he has three.
Ted Hall’s Long Meadow Ranch continues to make highly regarded wine. The Halls have expanded the farming operation of the ranch as well. In February 2010, they opened Farmstead, a farm-to-table restaurant, in a former nursery barn on two and a half acres at the south end of St. Helena. The place has become a destination. In addition to a well-regarded restaurant, the property holds a tasting room, a fruit and vegetable garden, a seasonal farm stand where people can buy olive oil produced by the ranch, and a store. It wasn’t until the Halls opened Farmstead that the fire subsided as a central influence on their business.
Delia Viader’s Viader Vineyards is flourishing, although recovering economically from the fire was delayed even further by the 2008 recession. The operation is now a family affair: Alan Viader is the head winemaker and his sister Janet oversees sales and marketing and the wine club. Marciela Viader, Alan’s wife, is the director of the culinary program. A professionally trained chef, she prepares banquets and meals for visiting VIPs. Viader also leads wine-related trips to places like Argentina, her ancestral home. Viader oversees the winery’s operations and she assists Alan when he is blending the wine.
Dick Ward of Saintsbury keeps a few cases of wine that survived the Wines Central fire in a back area of his barrel room. Some of the white cardboard boxes are still covered with soot. The bottles were a custom blend for Premiere Napa Valley, the winter auction that mostly draws retailers looking for unique vintages they can sell to their customers. Saintsbury suffered a fair amount of damage when an earthquake hit Napa on August 24, 2014. Hundreds of bottles of the winery’s remaining library wine fell to the floor and broke. Saintsbury estimated the damage as $50,000. The bottles were not insured.
Mark’s brother Steven Anderson died, destitute, in 2013 of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. He died one day before he would have turned fifty-nine. He is buried in a pauper’s grave in Sonoma County.
Doña Maria Merced Williams Rains Carrillo moved out of her home on Rancho Cucamonga in 1876. She lived in poverty, but one of her and Rains’s daughters married Henry Gage, who became the governor of California. She died in 1907 at the age of sixty-eight. One of Doña Merced’s great-granddaughters, Lita Grey, married the actor Charlie Chaplin.
The 1875 Port and Angelica—A bottle of this Port is displayed at the historic Vintners’ Hall of Fame at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena. It is part of an exhibit of the history of California wine. There are probably a few dozen bottles left of this wine in private hands scattered around the country, most with Hellman’s descendants. Bottles occasionally come up for auction.
Rancho Cucamonga—There are only about 500 acres of grapevines left in San Bernardino County, down from around 23,000 acres in the early 1960s. Just a few remnants remain of what was once the country’s largest winegrowing region. The Hofer family, who once owned 1,000 acres of grapes, still has a five-acre parcel near the Ontario airport, with a small amount planted in vines. The Galleano family owns the largest vineyard in the county, the 300-acre Lopez Ranch, which sits between two freeways and a Staples and a Target store right near the San Gabriel Mountains. The Filippi family, which started to grow grapes in the 1920s and purchased the site of the Cucamonga Vineyard wine cellar, still makes wine in the area, although they now buy grapes from others. Despite this decline, the Cucamonga Valley was officially named an American Viticultural Area (AVA) in 1995.
The Cucamonga Vineyard—Wine is still being made at the site of the original vineyard, although not from grapes grown nearby. Bryan Farr is the owner of The Wine Tailor at 8916 Foothill Boulevard in the building that sits on the site of the old cellar. The Wine Tailor describes itself as a boutique winery. Customers come in, select a grape must (the juice from crushed grapes), and then sprinkle it with yeast. They return five to seven weeks later to get their wine. Customers also design their own labels and bottle their own wine. The fact that the facility has ties to Tiburcio Tapia from 1839 is a selling point.
The California Wine Associati
on—Right before Prohibition the CWA operated fifty-two wineries and controlled more than 80 percent of the state’s wine. The organization recognized that temperance was coming and stopped making wine around 1917. It was able to sell 4 million gallons right before selling wine became illegal, but it was stuck with 6.75 million gallons at Winehaven when the Volstead Act became law in 1920.194 The company started to produce around 1,000 barrels of fresh grape juice in early 1920.195 The CWA was officially dissolved in 1935. It has mostly been forgotten. An antique dealer named Dean Walters has become one of the world’s biggest collectors of CWA memorabilia and has started a website that showcases the company’s beautiful labels. He hopes to build a wine museum one day. Another wine entrepreneur, Norman Hersch, recently acquired the trademark rights for the label of the California Wine Association, and is intending to revive it.
Mark Anderson is serving out his twenty-seven-year prison term in Terminal Island, a federal penitentiary near Los Angeles. He filed an appeal in 2012. Since then he has gone through three different appellate attorneys. The appeal was denied in July 2015.
APPENDIX: HISTORY OF THE OWNERSHIP OF CUCAMONGA VINEYARD196
1839
Juan B. Alvarado, the governor of California, then owned by Mexico, granted the 13,000-acre Rancho Cucamonga to Tiburcio Tapia.
1845
Upon Tapia’s death, his daughter Maria Merced Tapia Prudhomme and her husband Victor Prudhomme inherit the land.
1858
The Prudhommes sell the Rancho to John Rains, who does not put his wife’s name on the deed.
1863
The courts rule that Maria Merced Rains is the owner of the rancho. She deeds half the land to her five children.
1870
When Maria Merced Rains cannot pay the mortgage taken out by her husband, the rancho is auctioned at a sheriff’s sale. Isaias Hellman, a banker, buys the property and immediately sells off chunks for development.
Tangled Vines Page 26
