Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  About half the land in Sonoma County was still in farms and ranches, but they were fading fast, except for the vineyards. There were fewer chickens in Petaluma, fewer dairy cows in Valley Ford, and fewer Gravenstein apples in Sebastopol. Again, subdivisions were the culprit. Commuters who worked in and around Sari Francisco were buying into them and moving up from the city and from Marin County because they got more house for their money.

  Right on Old Redwood Highway, the new houses and condominiums were piled up one upon the other, often so close together that you could literally stick an arm out a window and shake hands with your neighbor next door. They looked hastily built, too, as though the developer had packed up and left in a hurry.

  As we went by one tract after another, I remembered a passage from Stendahl’s The Red and the Black and later looked it up. In speaking of Verrieres, a lovely town in the Franche-Comté, the novel’s narrator says that we might imagine that the inhabitants are consistently influenced by, and even enlightened by, the notion of beauty. In fact, though, every decision in Verrieres, down to the trees that were planted, was made according to a single principle, yielding a return.

  The hastily built houses, the sewage in the river, the frenzy in Santa Rosa—they were yielding a return.

  I pointed to a new home in an offensive color not yet named and said to Luis, “How’d you like a casa like that?”

  He surprised me. “Mas grande,” he replied. Too big.

  At the Greyhound station, he tried to give me three wrinkled dollar bills. I wished him good fortune in San Diego.

  “Will you come back for the next harvest?” I asked.

  All Luis could do was shrug, as though I’d raised a perplexing matter that could be answered only by the gods.

  IN CALISTOGA, a spa town at the northern end of Napa Valley, east of Santa Rosa, I went looking for traces of Robert Louis Stevenson, who had turned up there in May of 1880. He was almost penniless, tubercular, and madly in love with his bride, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a Californian.

  They had met at an artists’ colony in France, in 1876. Fanny was a married woman, but Stevenson had followed her to the states and pursued her from Monterey to her home in Oakland until she agreed to divorce her husband and wed him. They came to Calistoga for their honeymoon. Stevenson was apprehensive about the place. He felt that he had gone back in time, to an England of a century ago. There were outlaws about, he noticed, highwaymen who robbed the local stagecoaches.

  The Mayacamas Range runs through Napa Valley, and Mount Saint Helena, its towering peak at about 4,400 feet, is visible from almost anywhere in Calistoga. All around it, Stevenson discovered, were geysers and boiling hot springs. Miners had once worked the foothills for silver and cinnabar, but the mines had played out, and now there were many abandoned camps that were slowly capitulating to the usual ruin.

  On the advice of a merchant named Kelmar, the newlyweds elected to squat at a camp where the Silverado Mine used to be, about nine miles from town. The altitude would supposedly benefit Stevenson’s lungs, but he had an anti-Semitic streak and didn’t trust Kelmar, a Russian Jew. He was also doubtful about Rufe Hanson, their escort to the camp. Hanson was a dimwitted hunter given to demon bouts of poker playing that caused him to be undependable.

  Rufe Hanson put his charges on a stagecoach that went over the mountain to Lakeport, on Clear Lake. The Stevensons got out at the Silverado Hotel, an establishment on the brink of collapse. They were amused by its grassless croquet pitch made of hard-packed dirt. On foot, they climbed a trail that took them through an enchanting forest to their camp.

  As Kelmar had warranted, the camp was deserted, but it was also a shambles. The mineshaft was still there, along with some chutes and platforms, but a film of red dust covered everything.

  The Stevensons chose a trembly two-story building as their home. The ground floor had been an assay office and was littered with debris, part natural and part human, sticks, stones, straw, nails, and old bills of lading. This became the squatters’ sitting room and kitchen. Upstairs, they found a bunkhouse with eighteen bare-frame beds and transformed it into their bedroom.

  In the afternoon, Stevenson applied himself to making the camp habitable. He walked back to the hotel, got some hay, and spread it on two beds for mattresses. There was some fresh water dripping into a hole behind the mineshaft, and he deepened it with a pick and a shovel. He lit a fire in a blacksmith’s forge in the evening, and he and Fanny sat by it waiting for Rufe Hanson to deliver their effects, which included a cooking stove.

  Poker had apparently detained Hanson. He finally showed up about nine o’clock. He had brought the Stevensons’ stove, but he had forgotten its chimney, just as Fanny had forgotten the keys to the locks on the packing cases containing their books and their kitchenware.

  No heat, no food, no furniture, no plumbing, only a candle for light, and yet how tenderly Stevenson painted the scene in The Silverado Squatters, published in 1883. I read his book while soaking in a warm mineral pool at Roman Spa among some stout Baltic types who were playing chess on a floating board. The pools were fine by day, but they were truly wonderful at night, when steam rose from them in plumes, as though tension were evaporating from all the submerged bodies, dead cells and nagging worries burning away.

  Stevenson’s health did get better. His life at Silverado was simple, just Fanny and the lapdog Chuchu and an occasional visitor from such civilization as Calistoga could muster. He was the first to wake each day and made the coffee and the porridge, and then spent hours resting and reading, listening to the hum of insects and watching for the rattlesnakes that slithered through the chaparral.

  His residence, even after some repairs, was half-house and half-tent. The elements penetrated it at will, with sunshine flowing through a hole in the roof to illuminate the tattered floor. But that was all right with Stevenson—he was with his beloved in a wild canyon of blooming azaleas and calycanthus, high up in the clouds.

  Often as I soaked at Roman Spa, I’d close my book to look up at the buttes of Mount Saint Helena through a fringe of ornamental palm trees, thinking about Stevenson and Fanny. At Silverado, they must have experienced the same kind of seduction I’d undergone in Alexander Valley, the palpable splendor of California as a compliment to their romance.

  Stevenson had appropriated a broad platform to use as a deck, and he liked to pace it before going to bed, luxuriating in the near-total dark and gazing down at the Napa Valley, “to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards.”

  THE AGRICULTURAL COMMISSIONER OF NAPA COUNTY, Nate George, drove a car with grape clusters stenciled on its doors. He had an office in Saint Helena, from where more cases of premium wine are shipped than anywhere else in the state. He offered me a chair when I dropped in on him and gave me a copy of his annual crop report to look through.

  The report showed how essential wine grapes were to the county’s economy and listed some new varietals that growers were trying out, such as Grand Noir, Sangioveto, Flora, and Malvasia Bianca. They were still experimenting in the vineyards, just as Haraszthy had done.

  After that, our talk turned to real estate. There seemed to be no way to avoid it in California. You could begin by discussing deconstructionist theory or the San Francisco Giants, but sooner or later, inevitably, your sentences slid toward property values, and you were shamelessly throwing around phrases that you never expected to utter in polite company, such as “curb appeal” and “adjustable-rate mortgage.”

  George, a Napa boy by birth, had just bought his first house, so his interest in and depression about real estate was still strong. He hadn’t been able to afford anything in Saint Helena, of course, or in Yountville or even Napa proper, so he now lived in Angwin, up in the hills among some Seventh-Day Adventists, who had a college there.

  Saint Helena was the society town in Napa Valley. On the streets, I saw immaculate hairdos and thin lips and restaurants that prepared exuberantly priced me
als unrecognizable to most Americans. At its worst, Saint Helena could be as recherché as the old TV series “Falcon Crest,” which had been filmed not far away. I walked for three blocks downtown and went by seven real estate offices. They all had full-color photos of fetching country homes and vineyards for sale. Here was a plain house on 8.8 acres planted to Pinot Noir that was priced at a mere $1,350,000. Here was a nasty house for only $160,000—not a fixer-upper, the realtor told me, but a knocker-downer on a buildable lot.

  Napa Valley below Calistoga was Wine Country writ large, a Bruce Anderson nightmare, more than 250 wineries strung loosely together along Highway 29 and luring almost 2 million tourists a year from all over the world. The highway was bumper-to-bumper on most weekends and on most weekdays in summer. The wineries came in all shapes and sizes, from minuscule family operations where a geriatric crank doled out miserly thimbles of rank rosé, to baronial châteaus modeled on the grand estates of Europe.

  In tasting rooms, hearty lads and gals dealt courageously with a diverse stream of visitors who were capable of saying the most absurd things possible about wine. Maybe it was the Cabernet Sauvignon that I was sampling, but at one winery I started hallucinating and heard people conflating their real estate talk with their viticultural inanities.

  “Nicely herbaceous. Adjustable rate.”

  “Wonderful nose. Creative financing.”

  “Aged in oak yet affordable.”

  “A thirty-year fixed—buttery!”

  Thank goodness for the trailer-park dudes who rolled in off the tour buses in a daze, hitching up their slacks and having at their hair with a plastic comb. Dragged forward by their wives, they were your basic Doubting Thomases and not about to be impressed by the monumental casks at Beringer Brothers, or by the Beniamino Bufano sculptures at Robert Mondavi. They knew what they wanted, and it wasn’t wine.

  I watched a young wine waif pour some Sauvignon Blanc for such a fellow, who was pining openly for his Barcalounger.

  “Oh, I don’t much like that,” he said, making a face.

  “Let me pour you some of our Chardonnay.”

  “I already tried it down the road.”

  “Every Chardonnay is different.”

  “Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  There were moments in Napa Valley when I felt that I was in a budding theme park, where the activity was orchestrated by unseen wizards in far-off places. The crunch of businesses devoted to yielding a return was so stultifying that I soon became numb to the humor I might ordinarily have extracted while passing the Vintage Inn or the Chablis Lodge or, worse yet, the John Muir Inn, where the rooms looked out on Marie Callendar’s House of Pies.

  EARLY IN THE CENTURY, when Europeans began settling in Napa Valley, they were often from countries where the growing of wine grapes was a tradition, such as Italy and Spain, home of the great riojas. In 1914, John Piña, whose forebears were Spanish, had bought some valley land and built up a business in vineyard management, tending vines for other people or supplying the labor for a job. Piña had died at the age of seventy, but his four sons had kept the business going and now worked out of a family compound on Shellinger Road, near Saint Helena.

  John Piña, Jr., was one of the brothers. He was a bright, informed man, who knew about all the major trends in viticulture and liked the physical pleasure of being in the fields. He had played football in college, and though he carried a few extra pounds now, he still enjoyed hiking into the wilderness to hunt for deer and would pack out a carcass from the mountains even if it took him fourteen hours, as it had done on his last trip to the Nevada backcountry.

  “A lot of people would have just cut off the head for a trophy,” Piña told me.

  We were sitting in his office, a plain room on the home place that nobody had bothered to enliven. It had a phone, a typewriter, and some filing cabinets. Farmers always resisted the idea that they should have an office, no matter how complicated their business was, so they seldom made the space comfortable enough to tempt them to linger.

  Piña was a well-connected member of the community in Napa Valley and occupied a seat on the Farm Bureau’s board of directors. I had visited him to see if he could help me solve a puzzle. The valley appeared to be booming, but all the trade journals reported that the wine industry might be heading for trouble.

  The sales of wine had slumped, said the journals. Formerly hot items like jug wines and wine coolers had faltered. The start-up and production costs for a vineyard had gone off the board, and phylloxera were once again a serious threat. At the same time, the price of cultivated land continued to rise, up to $50,000 an acre in some areas. Grape prices were also rising. The best Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes were bringing about $2,000 a ton, a record for the valley.

  We had a paradox before us, but Piña could explain it. The first thing to understand, he said, was that Napa Valley land only seemed expensive. By any world criterion for fine vineyards, the acreage was a bargain. In Bordeaux or Burgundy, if you could find any vineyard land for sale, it would cost you $300,000 or $400,000 an acre, and up to nearly $1 million an acre in a famous appellation.

  On the other hand, the buy-in to the wine game around Napa was more costly than ever. The days of earning a profit on a five-acre hobby farm were over. The newest ventures in the valley were often funded by wealthy industrialists, corporations, and, naturally, real estate developers.

  Foreign money was also making its presence felt, Piña said. The French had bought in and were going to produce sparkling wines by the champagne method, as Louis Roederer was doing in Anderson Valley. The Japanese were becoming important players. Sanraku had recently paid $8 million for the Markham Winery. Otsuka Pharmaceuticals owned Ridge Vineyards ($10 million), Kirin Brewery owned Raymond ($18 million), and Suntory owned Château St. Jean ($40 million). Heublein, the American liquor giant, had just paid about $300 million for two big wineries, Almadén and Mont La Salle.

  Piña attributed the escalating price of grapes to better farming techniques and higher standards of quality. The University of California at Davis, south of Sacramento, was a pioneer in viticultural science, and its researchers supplied growers with data on everything from the proper rootstock for a micro-climate to the effect of sunlight on various fruiting vines. Every advance in technology upped the ante for a farmer, however, so a beginner, whether an individual or a corporation, needed deep pockets to survive.

  I asked Piña how he felt about the growth in Napa Valley. It had been good for business, he said, and good for him personally. In harvest season, he was employing about eighty people, and his house was worth four times what he’d paid for it, in 1977. But with the boom had come new customers—gentlemen farmers. Some of them were the nicest people you’d want to meet, Piña thought, but some were merely arrogant.

  “They think they’re above you,” he told me.

  The new subdivisions that were encroaching on farms had caused him some problems too. If he went out to apply sulfur to some vines at two in the morning, for instance, when there wasn’t any wind, he could count on the new neighbors to protest. They understood nothing about the special demands of grape growing, and sometimes they didn’t care to learn.

  On balance, Piña did not favor stricter controls over growth. He believed that it was always the new people who wanted to shut the gate behind them. Somebody would move from Los Angeles to Saint Helena, say, and immediately start pushing measures to protect the town’s “rural” character.

  To a native such as Piña, the notion was silly. Napa Valley hadn’t been truly rural for decades. He had even written a letter to the editor of the Saint Helena paper expressing his opinion.

  “How did the letter go?” I asked.

  Piña looked bashful, but he quoted me a line from it.

  “ ‘Apparently, you have to have lived here for less than ten years to know what’s right for Saint Helena,’ ” he recited from memory, clearly pleased with the turn of phrase.

  AT BUENA
VISTA WINERY, I sat on a bench in the shade and fed three cloying cats who had sidled out of an ivy-covered fieldstone building in which Agoston Haraszthy had once made wine. The cats were cute and spoiled and had the well-fed look of pigeons working a blue-ribbon beat. They ate scraps from my turkey sandwich and begged for more, rubbing against my legs so insistently that I had to stamp a foot to drive them away.

  And yet what a perfect moment! A bench in the cool shade, the light-dappled trees along a creek, the violas and the pansies spilling from planters, and a picnic for one consisting of a turkey sandwich on sourdough bread, an apple and … a buttery glass of Buena Vista Chardonnay.

  Maybe you should never look too closely at anything in California, I thought. We had a paradox before us.

  Wine grapes on the Russian River, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, in Lake County, in Lodi, Stockton, Modesto, and Merced. Wine grapes down south in Temecula and Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez Valley. Wine grapes even in Yolo County, where speculators were buying up raw land in unfashionable Esparto, preparing the ground for goat cheese and second homes.

  More acreage in the state was already planted to wine grapes than to apples, olives, peaches, pears, plums, and prunes combined. If you added table grapes and raisin grapes to the total, you had a crop worth about $1.5 billion annually.

  In California, the gold, too, was subject to transformations and kept changing its shape.

  CHAPTER 10

  MY CAMP on the South Fork of the American River was in a grove of oaks. In the warm evening air, observed by squawking scrub jays, the yentas of the forest, I set up my tent. The river was swift and riffly, but I took two small, hatchery-reared trout in minutes and made them my dinner. With a heel of bread, I mopped up some pan juices from the skillet, buried the trout bones so no birds would choke, and finished the last of the Buena Vista Chardonnay, my back against a log and my thoughts in the big sky above.