(Not true, but points for enthusiasm.)
Our family was showing up to a party that had just gotten started. However, as we would learn, in spite of all the actual and meta phorical California sunshine, every setback experienced by those first Napa wine pioneers—economic downturns, killer bugs, bad weather, and fickle public tastes—would circle back and challenge us as well.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1972 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1973, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
2. Patricia Delaney, “American Wine Comes of Age,” Time, November 27, 1972, 81.
FIVE
Arrival—1973
We met my mom in San Francisco and drove into Napa Valley on a sunny January morning. The hills were vibrant green, and the air was warm enough that you could wear a T-shirt. For a Chicago native this was a jaw-dropping introduction to the season they called winter out here. We drove north on the two-lane Silverado Trail out of the town of Napa, passing walnut orchards, hay fields, and vineyards. Cattle chewed their cud and stared at us from hillside pastures.
About seven miles north of Napa, Dad turned on the blinker, and we made a right onto a narrow drive that jogged around the base of a forested hill. The road split on the far side of the hill, and we went left.
The arrow-straight drive was flanked on both sides by row upon row of nut-brown, skeletal grapevines in winter hibernation. The roadway ended at a collection of odd little buildings, dominated by the part-adobe, part-stone house with a red tile roof. The rest were creaky-looking outbuildings. Beyond these structures, however, was an incredible sight—massive green hillsides shot through here and there with craggy, thrusting bedrock. And blocking out nearly half of the eastern sky stood towering cliff s called the Stags Leap Palisades.
When I’d imagined California, I’d thought of beaches, dune buggies, and oiled, bronzed skin. This was like nothing I’d pictured.
The house looked as though it had started as a modest stone structure that was later expanded, several times, by builders with more vigor than skill. Its tile roof seemed like a Mediterranean afterthought. The interior was all crooked floors and doorways, and its oddly scented rooms echoed, since there wasn’t yet a stick of furniture in the place.
That first night, with the moving truck still several days away, we unfurled sleeping bags in the living room, stoked a fire in the fireplace—the house’s only heat source—and pretended we were camping. My parents were buoyant and energized by this new chapter in their lives, and my brother and I couldn’t help but become infected by their sense of adventure.
As I lay in my sleeping bag that night, I took in the foreign feel of this place. The sounds outside were like nothing I’d heard before—vast silences broken occasionally by the yelping of a coyote, the hooting of an owl, the rustle of oak leaves from the huge, shaggy trees just outside. With no streetlights for miles in any direction, the night sky out the off-kilter window was a rich, limitless blackness fogged with stars.
It wasn’t Oak Street, and it was light years from Malibu. But already this felt like it could become home.
SIX
Grapes
I landed at my new school, St. Helena High, pretty easily earning a position right away on the varsity basketball team—something that would never have happened back in Chicago, where the competition was unbelievably fierce. I’m still friends with fellow teammates Cyril Chappellet and Jeff Jaeger. We beat our “archrivals,” Cloverdale, in the first game, which was an auspicious start. Also, I was the new kid on campus, which had a little coolness attached to it, so life was good.
Not all the adjustments to country living were stress-free though. On my first night after basketball practice, I drove home from St. Helena and discovered that with no streetlights and very few cars out and about, Silverado Trail was pitch-black. I couldn’t find any signs or landmarks in my headlights to help direct me home, and I drove almost to Napa searching for the entrance to our driveway. Finally I had to turn around and head north again, slowing down at every break in the trees, every cattle guard, and every possible turn. In an era before cell phones, the only thing I could do was drive up and down the Trail in this way, with a growing sense of panic, until I finally stumbled on our driveway.
By contrast, sunny school mornings started with a bang. My brother Brad and I would pile into a beat-up 1955 Jeep pickup that had come with the property. I’d throw its antiquated “three-on-the-tree” shift system into gear and gun the engine, taking Brad to Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) Middle School in St. Helena before I’d head over to St. Helena High. Every morning he’d egg me on to “beat the bus”—a way of saying drive like hell down Silverado Trail to beat the school bus to RLS. Fortunately there were fewer cars on the road back then, which is probably the only reason we’re both still alive.
While I was off shooting hoops and risking my neck in various ways, Dad was coming to grips with the reality of life as a grape grower. With the purchase of our property, he had inherited a contract with the St. Helena Cooperative Winery (which everyone simply called “the Co-op”). By next fall our grapes would need to be harvested and hauled up to St. Helena to be crushed and fermented. Most of the juice from our property, and throughout the Valley, was sold to Gallo and became a jug wine called Hearty Burgundy (which Dad remembers as being pretty good back then. And no wonder, with so much prime Napa Valley fruit in the blend).
The work started right away. At that time of year, in winter, the vines were ready to be pruned. When spring warmed the soil, we’d get the first wave of weeds and predatory insects.
For the short term, he hired a vineyard management company run by Ivan Shoch, one of the original investors in Robert Mondavi Winery, and learned a lot by observing how this hired crew cared for the soil and the vines—when they tilled between the vines, when and how they pruned, and so forth. He also took viticulture classes at University of California–Davis and Napa Valley College.
Long term, Dad realized that all those vines planted back in 1922 needed to go. They were a mix of red grapes, Carignane and Zinfandel, and white grapes, Sauvignon Vert and Golden Chasselas (which today is typically identified as Palomino), that had been planted by an Italian immigrant named Batisti Scansi. Not only were they past their prime, but the world of American wine was changing fast. The future looked to be less in mass-market wines in fat-bellied jugs and more in fine wines that had a specific place and grape variety associated with them.
This meant that over the next few years we’d need to replace the 30 acres of aging vineyards, while at the same time expanding our vines up onto the surrounding hillsides, where Dad believed we’d get the best quality.
This forced him into the dicey task of deciding which new grape varieties we would stake our future on. First he needed to get a fix on where the wind was blowing in terms of the marketplace. What wines were consumers buying today? What wines were they likely to gravitate toward several years down the road when our new vines were reaching maturity? Those factors had to be balanced against an educated guess as to which types of grapes would grow best on our site.
In 1973 this was a world in which a grape called Napa Valley Gamay occupied nearly 1,000 acres of the 12,000 acres planted to red grapes.
