Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  “Smallpox, erysipelas, measles, and scarlet-fever combined could not have imparted to my skin a more inflamed and sanguineous appearance,” he declared.

  His mood took a turn for the better when he paid a visit to General Mariano Vallejo, the town’s most honored resident. Vallejo was a gentleman of superior taste and acumen, and his house was “scrupulously clean”—no fleas or vermin. It had sofas, mirrors, paintings, engravings, and even a piano. Moreover, Senora Vallejo was a knockout, possessing “in the highest degree that natural grace, ease, and warmth of manners which render Spanish ladies so attractive and fascinating to the stranger.”

  Later in the afternoon, while talking with a Mr. Leese, who had a vineyard, Bryant was given some grapes “as luscious, I dare say, as the forbidden fruit that provoked the first transgressions. Nothing of the fruit kind can exceed the delicious richness and flavor of the California grape.”

  The grapes were a special treat. Vineyards were not yet a fixture in the Sonoma and Napa valleys. Cyrus Young had probably planted the first, in 1838, on his Napa rancho, but the grapevines were just a hobby and had no commercial impact. Not until Agoston Haraszthy de Mokesa, an affable, idiosyncratic Hungarian count, arrived in Sonoma County did wine grapes have a true advocate.

  Haraszthy came to California in a roundabout way, stopping first in Wisconsin, where he grew hops to make beer and got into trouble by trying to start a colony dedicated to free love. He fled to San Diego with his four sons, Attila, Arpad, Bela, and Geza, and reinvented himself, becoming the county sheriff and then a member of the state legislature in 1852.

  When Haraszthy later accepted a post at the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, he planted some vines at Crystal Springs in San Mateo County, south of the city. They did badly and so did he. His superiors at the mint charged him with embezzlement, and though the charges were false, he had to move again and chose to settle in Sonoma because the soil and the climate seemed perfect for wine grapes.

  He bought some property on the east side of town in 1857 and planted it with such select foreign varietals as tokay and zinfandel. In two years’ time, he had 85,556 vines growing at his Buena Vista Winery. Chinese laborers had dug a tunnel into a hillside, and five thousand gallons of wine were stored there, some of it in redwood barrels. Later, the winery added real stone cellars that were constructed with the rocks excavated during the tunneling.

  For the State Agricultural Society, Haraszthy wrote an article about practical viticulture that made him famous. Such information was difficult to come by, especially pertaining to non-native grapes. Readers from around the country besieged him with letters, pamphlets, cuttings, and vines, and, in a short while, Sonoma went from being a cattle boneyard to a clearinghouse for grapevines and viticultural information. Its nurseries were the primary suppliers of vines to farmers elsewhere in the state.

  Traveling to Europe as an emissary of the governor, in 1861, Haraszthy sent home about two hundred thousand cuttings, a sample that included every major species of rootstock still found in California today. His luck went sour again after the trip, and he lost his land due to business reversals and escaped to Nicaragua, where he planned to grow sugarcane. He endured his last bit of misfortune there, drowning while he tried to ford a river.

  Two of Haraszthy’s sons, Attila and Arpad, had stayed behind in Sonoma, and they married two of General Vallejo’s daughters, reaping the benefits of the superior breeding whose praises Edwin Bryant had sung.

  In Haraszthy’s global exchange of rootstock, there was a hidden menace—phylloxera, an aphid indigenous to the United States east of the Rockies. Phylloxera devastate grapevines by sucking on the new roots and inhibiting growth. Some phylloxera were accidentally sent to France with a shipment of cuttings in 1860, but they were not discovered for eight years and had entrenched themselves so completely by then that they decimated the wine industry. Many of the very best vineyards were lost, and the French were still recovering at the turn of the century.

  Growers in California were hurt, too, but they also reaped some benefits from phylloxera. The bugs killed off any inferior vines that had been imported from Europe and did in the old mission grapes that the Spanish padres had brought with them. Farmers adopted a generic rootstock that was aphid-resistant and grafted varietals onto it, and the quality of their crop (and the wine pressed from it) started to improve.

  To Robert Louis Stevenson, a visitor to the Napa Valley in the 1880s, phylloxera was an “unconquerable worm.” He bemoaned the situation in France and cursed the fates that had deprived him of a chance to taste a great Châteauneuf-du-Pape or a true Rhône. He had been interested in wine all his life, he said, even in the raisin wine that a childhood mate had kept in his toybox.

  Stevenson observed the farmers in and around Napa Valley and saw the same assiduous experimentation that had put Haraszthy on the map. They were always switching their vines from one spot to another, giving them more light or less water, searching like alchemists for the secret formula that would create a noble vintage. That would take time, Stevenson thought, but he felt confident enough about it to make a prediction.

  “The smack of California earth,” he wrote, “shall linger on the palate of your grandson.”

  IF, AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, Agoston Haraszthy were to come into Sonoma County as I did, following Highway 101 to Cloverdale, he would have been overwhelmed by the spread of vineyards. Along the Russian River, grapevines covered every inch of ground and were putting out a tendrilly tangle of lush, green leaves that had begun to obscure the trellises that supported them. They had crept up from the flatland onto the hillsides, capturing territory where sheep had always grazed. Prune, pear, plum, and apple orchards, once the agricultural mainstays of the county, were almost gone. Grapes had taken over.

  This was a landscape I knew well—the pungent bay laurels and the smooth, reddish-trunked madronas, the many seasonal creeks almost dry now in mid-June, the pink-gilled mushrooms that sprouted each winter in a meadow on Chalk Hill Road, and the pair of Bullock’s orioles, bright yellow, who used to set up housekeeping in a big black oak tree on our property at the start of every spring.

  For five years, early in our marriage, my wife and I had lived cheaply in Alexander Valley, not far from Cloverdale, so that I could try to write. For two hundred dollars a month, we rented a double-wide mobile home on a fourteen-acre estate that was for sale. It had shag carpeting and walls so thin that twice I punched holes in them after being rejected by yet another editor impervious to my genius, but it sat on a hill above the Russian and often gave me, curiously, a feeling of peace such as I’d never had before.

  In the valley, I felt that new eyes had been sunk into my skull. The processes of the natural world were inescapable, unfolding all around us in vivid slow motion. I saw things in brilliant outline, in Technicolor, and learned the names of plants and wildflowers and kept logs and diaries and lists that could be embarrassing in their simplicity when somebody stumbled on them. A friend once turned the pages of a birding guide, looked at the checklist at the back, and said, “It must have taken a lot of nerve to check off ‘Robin.’ ”

  I was not dismayed. To address the yawning gaps in my education was a gratifying experience. I understood that I would never be able to buy a piece of the valley, so I took to owning it in the only way I could, letting it penetrate my being and become an integral part of my California, of what California meant to me.

  As for the writing, it went slowly, slowly, but I had lucky days when I was patient. Something of the calm, nurturing rhythm of farming sustained me, I think, and it didn’t seem so terrible, while surrounded by grapes whose growth was barely perceptible, to work on a paragraph all morning, crumpling up page after page. My patience ran out sometimes, though, and when I reached my limit I would step outside for a head-clearing trip to the river. I walked its margins so many times that you could no doubt find my footprints imbedded somewhere, the fossil remains of a novice.

  The Russian, too, had
its moods. For much of the year, it ambled at a leisurely pace, but the winter rains made it swell in tumult and brought it to the tips of its banks. Flooding was not uncommon, and the land below our hill, an untended orchard where a few relic trees yielded some mottled, bug-bitten apples and pears, would vanish beneath the rush of muddy water. Then the storm would quit, the water would recede and clear, and the orchard would return.

  The first warm days in May got the bass jumping in the river, and the fishing could be quite good, but it was the pursuit of steelhead that became my obsession. The steelhead had to make it past a host of threats, from sea lions to drift nets, to reach the valley, and the difficulty of their journey, the long, mysterious miles that echoed the progress of sperm, gave them a sleek, bright, undefeated quality. In the Russian, they were not very big, maybe six or eight pounds on the average, but if you hooked one, you felt the sudden shock of being connected to something wild.

  So I would stand by the river, often in a chilling drizzle, and cast my line and hope. Hope was about all I had back then. In my mind, the hope of writing a tolerable sentence and the hope of catching a steelhead were of a piece, joined also to a grower’s hopes that his grapes would be blessed as they ripened.

  I loved Alexander Valley as well as anywhere I’d ever lived, and when it came time to go, I left it reluctantly, with the same sorrowing heart that marks the conclusion of any romance. More than a decade had gone by since then, and I was eager to see what had happened to the valley, if the sort of changes I’d witnessed elsewhere had touched it in any way.

  ALEXANDER VALLEY IS AMONG THE MOST HIGHLY regarded viticultural regions in California, where about three-quarters of the wine made in the United States is produced. It runs roughly parallel to Highway 101 between the towns of Asti and Healdsburg. A strong walker can hike it in a day. Quite narrow at the top, it broadens considerably in its lower third, and on maps it bear’s an odd resemblance to South America.

  The climate in the valley is ideal for almost any type of grape. The Coast Range to the west blocks the heaviest fog and the rawest weather. Winters are wet and sometimes cold, but frosts are rare. The summers are very hot but never humid, thereby keeping Botrytis cinera, a destructive mold, from forming on the vines. An unbroken string of dry, fiery days helps to raise the sugar content of the crop—a major advantage. In the wine business, sugar equals alcohol, and alcohol equals money.

  Geyserville, where I left the highway, lay toward the middle of the valley. I crossed some old railroad tracks and drove over a bridge on the Russian River, surprised by how shallow and sluggish it looked. A canoer would already be scraping bottom in a few sections. It seemed too early in the season for the water to be so low, but then I realized that I was seeing the river from a new perspective. My journey had showed me where it fit in the great scheme of water distribution in the state.

  Now when I thought about the rivers in California, I pictured them all flowing from a single tap that was turned on full force up in the mountains of the Far North, pouring out in a gush that lost some of its power in the foothills. In the Sacramento Valley, the water flattened out, and the Russian was its final trickle. All along the line, people were dipping into it with cups—farmers, ranchers, subdividers—more and more cups every year, taxing the resource beyond its ability to deliver.

  In Alexander Valley, happily, the grapevines were still there. June was a quiet month on the vineyard calendar, a month of subtle growth, so the fields were largely absent of workers. The fruit on the vine was just beginning to bud, and when the buds flowered toward the end of the month, every farmer would cross his fingers against a damaging heat wave or a fluke rain.

  After a couple of weeks, the crop would be set and not quite so fragile anymore. The main job in summer was to guard against anything that might hamper the grapes from developing—weeds, pests, too much or too little water. The harvest began in late August and continued into October, and it was then that a farmer earned his keep.

  I could recall the first harvest that we’d lived through. One morning, with the dawn light, the vineyards around us filled with Mexicans, both men and women, working in teams. It was as if a secret signal had gone out while we were asleep. The workers used sharp knives with curved blades to sever the grape bunches from the vines. Then they put the grapes into plastic buckets and dumped them into the trucks hauling gondolas.

  The valley roads were never busy, but during the harvest they bristled with traffic right through until dusk. From the fields came a rich smell of fermentation, slightly acid—a bloody ripeness. At the close of each day, tired fieldhands collected at the Jimtown store to replenish their vital fluids with copious cans of Budweiser, and Budweiser alone. Everywhere you heard the same refrain. “Crush is on,” people said in Jimtown and at all the Healdsburg markets and saloons. It was a strangely volatile time, one that alternated between frustration and celebration.

  Selling your grapes could be a tricky business, in fact. Naïve growers sometimes chose to deal with small, boutique wineries where the craft of wine making was revered. They wanted their own hard work to be reflected in the bottle, but the boutiques, while well intended, were occasionally slow to pay their bills. It was not unusual for one of them to go belly up, leaving cartons of elegantly designed labels to molder.

  Other growers belonged to co-ops that marketed grapes to a variety of sources, but the biggest buyers in Alexander Valley and all of California were the Gallo brothers, Ernesto and Julio, whose headquarters were in Modesto. The Gallos could be counted on to pay promptly, but they played hardball. To get top dollar, a farmer had to bring his grapes to a Gallo winery outlet in Sonoma County when the sugar content was exactly right, up to a high standard. Sugar was measured on a Brix scale, by degrees. It happened that farmers sometimes hit the Brix just right only to have their trucks turned away at the winery because so many other trucks were lined up ahead of them.

  We knew such a farmer in Alexander Valley, a cautious, serious-minded man who was proud of his grapes. After being turned away one afternoon, he parked his gondola at home, and the grapes kept ripening through the night and became sweeter and sweeter. At the winery the next day, his crop was downgraded to distilling material, or DM, the inferior stuff that went into cheap brandy and such fortified Gallo wines as Thunderbird and Night Train. It cost him thousands of dollars.

  After the crush, farmers could relax a bit and watch the vineyards go through their autumnal show of color, the leaves dying in shades of red and gold. Starlings migrated through the valley in dense flocks and patterned the sky like buckshot. Pruning started around Thanksgiving, with workers shearing away the old canes and burning them in piles. In winter, the vines were dormant, but they leafed out in March, and the dance was on again.

  Along Chalk Hill Road, there were a few new wineries whose architects had exceeded the boundaries of good taste, and a few new estates for weekending attorneys and dentists, but the valley had not changed very much in a decade. It was still a rarity in California—a place where the land was valued for what it might produce and not for what might be built upon it—and so it had retained its integrity.

  ON OLD REDWOOD HIGHWAY, where the redwoods are few and far between, I stopped for a hitchhiker, Luis Martinez, who had a small Samsonite suitcase at his feet that was bruised in many spots. A decal was stuck to it, like the old decals from grand hotels that travelers used to glue to their steamer trunks. It showed some palm trees against a blue sky, a picture-perfect image of what you might see while floating on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool in Los Angeles.

  Luis, a carefree man in his early twenties, was going to the Greyhound Station in Santa Rosa to catch a bus to San Diego. He had a huge gap between his two front teeth and a little curlicue of a scar beneath his right eye. He couldn’t have been much taller than five-foot-three, but he looked tough and durable, reminding me of certain Mexican boxers, bantamweights and flyweights who could always be counted on to last ten rounds.

  He sp
oke some English, and I had a bit of Spanish, so we could communicate after a fashion.

  “Do you like boxeo?” I asked him. “Julio Cesar Chavez?”

  On hearing the great champ’s name, Luis lit up and seemed to take a new comfort in his surroundings. He relaxed and told me that he had come north from a village about sixty miles from Tijuana for the grape harvest the previous autumn. He had two cousins in Sonoma County, and they had helped him find a job, but he’d been idle for a few months now and missed his family back home.

  Luis liked my car. He liked everything Californian. It was a joke to him, all the wealth around.

  “Muy bonita,” he said, touching the dashboard and letting a low whistle escape from his lips.

  I could see that he was working on his memories, refining the sensations and descriptions of life north of the border that he would retail to his village friends back home. Hesitantly, not wanting to scare him, I asked if he had his legal documents. No, not really, he said—but he had thought about getting them. Mere intention held some valor for Luis.

  Anyway, he believed that he would have no trouble sneaking into Mexico. The only hot spot would be the San Diego bus station, he said, where border patrol agents sometimes were on the prowl.

  Santa Rosa was the county’s big city, although it didn’t look like one. Instead, it resembled a gigantic shopping mall with various subdivisions inside it. The population had doubled in the past ten years, leaping from fifty to a hundred thousand or so, and Santa Rosa, once a slow-paced country burg, had become a frenzied spot, with everybody rushing around trying to outwit the circumstance of being among the overpopulated.

  The growth in Santa Rosa had been almost entirely unplanned, so the city had traffic problems, water problems, and serious problems with its overburdened sewage system. When the city’s treatment plant was pushed beyond its capacity, the untreated sewage had just been pumped into the Russian River—a lackluster solution and one for which the appropriate state agencies had inflicted penalties. Downstream, in late summer, swimmers had risked colliding with tampons, condoms, and scraps of toilet paper.