Big Dreams (22 page)

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.

E
ARLY 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.

A
T 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.

M
Y 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.

It felt good to be out in the country again, real country, after the bustle and the congestion of Wine Country. This piece of Placer County, toward its western edge, was in the Mother Lode, where the Gold Rush had burst forth and changed the course of history in California.

The Mother Lode was the single richest mining region in the days of ’49. Many miners believed that it was an unbroken vein of quartz studded with gold that ran from Georgetown to Mariposa, near Yosemite, a distance of about 120 miles, but the vein was actually cracked and splintered and snaked haphazardly through a mineral-strewn band that was 2 miles wide in some spots and 200 miles wide
in others. Gold was deposited in placers, too, in the gravel and the sand of riverbeds.

Traces of the earliest road to the gold mines could still be picked up around Folsom, northeast of Sacramento. It was nothing more than a pack trail before James Marshall’s discovery, but the Argonauts had rapidly turned it into a superhighway. Men walked it on foot, thousands of them. Stagecoaches carried passengers and mining supplies. Mexicans trod it with flyblown, heavily laden mules, while Oregonians hitched themselves to teams of horses pulling covered wagons.

To get to the South Fork of the American, I had followed the modern roads that skirted the old one, starting near Folsom State Prison, a cell-type institution surrounded by stone walls, where about 6,741 inmates battled for 3,796 beds. I went past Mormon Island to Green Valley Road, and at Rescue I traveled north toward Four Corners. The foothill earth was an orangey-red, and the dry grasses caught and held the sun.

Then the river came into sight, and I pitched my tent, ate my dinner, and rested a bit. Now I was ready to face the dishes, washing them in a plastic bucket while a long-forgotten verse from an old miners’ song about a drowned girl bubbled into my head:

As I worked, I imagined how the foothills must have looked in 1849, throbbing with the energy of all the wistful souls pursuing the
Vast Unknown, men as avid for experience as they were for gold. The Gold Rush, as in adrenaline rush, was something not to be missed. In the mining camps and in the sudden, new cities that exploded into being like flares, the world’s biggest party was going on, and the boldest, baddest, wildest, most free-spirited people around couldn’t resist the invitation.

Those who made it to the mines and staked a claim often returned home with nothing to show for the trip but experience, their pockets still empty, but many of them seemed to have accepted their failure with equanimity. Tapped out and rueful, they’d shrug and say, “At least I’ve seen the elephant!”

The phrase was borrowed from a folk story about a farmer who was carting his vegetables to market and diverted his team to watch a circus parade. His horses were spooked by some circus animals, and they bolted and dumped his produce into the street, where it was trampled, but the farmer refused to cry over his loss. He appeared to be oddly happy, in fact, and whenever anyone asked him why, he shouted, “At least I have seen the elephant!”

So it was, too, with the forty-niners.

T
HE GOLD IN CALIFORNIA
was whispering to dreamers long before 1849. Padres at the Spanish missions knew that it was around, but they discouraged their Indian charges from digging for it. Robert Jameson, a Scot and a mineralogist, published a report in 1817 that described an alluvial plain in the west where gold was scattered, but he gave no clues about the precise location.

In the late 1820s, a trapper named Black supposedly had a huge strike on the San Joaquin River, but some Indians killed him. His partner Smith, the only person in on his secret, vanished into Arkansas without telling anybody anything—shades of The Lost Cabin, all over again.

In Placerita Canyon, in what would become Los Angeles County,
Francisco Lopez pulled up some wild onions in 1842 and noticed flecks of gold clinging to the roots. Within days, miners from Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Sonora, Mexico, had descended on the canyon, but the deposits were shallow and scarcely worth the work. They were played out in less than a year.