For years she has helped newcomers dream of a wine of their own and navigate complex rules and regulations. These litter the passage through which all aspiring applicants must sail on an Odyssean voyage toward a label of their own. Ask and she will tell you that her record of accomplishments is quite good, thank you very much, as are her associations with the Chamber and other commercial interests in St. Helena. If people also ask—and they do—about the percentage of her successes, Donna Oldford proudly says, “I don’t do dead on arrival.”
She takes only those new winery applications she deems likely to prevail. Twenty-seven years of involvement have carried her across a political spectrum littered with issues, right and left, some still considered pivotal, some forgotten. In the process she became a confident, well-dressed, sturdy middle-aged woman with a full head of auburn hair who enjoys a glass of good Napa Valley cabernet in the evening.
“The town’s government has traditionally helped business,” she says. “But there is a big difference today. It’s that people who in the past fought against business development individually have decided to link hands. They’ve formed a daisy chain. Now there’s a Chicken Little atmosphere.”
She happily embraces clichés, ready tools of big-picture advocacy since they sum up human intercourse while eliminating all subtlety. “The opposition doesn’t have any skin in the game, they’re activists by nature. They do it for sport, they”—again—“have too much time on their hands.”
Potential clients who ask how much it will cost to start even a small winery are told a minimum of a million dollars, “and that’s just to get in. Then I ask them, ‘What’s your dream?’ They tell me, and I get to work making those dreams come true.”
Her career by definition involves shape-shifting in a place where conservation, free enterprise, citizens’ rights, and corporate privilege swim together in a particularly competitive pool, the issues forever malleable. Donna worked back in the 1990s for Jack Davies and Bob Phillips, another patrician, the basso profundo voice behind Vine Hill Ranch and husband to an heir to the Spreckels Hawaiian sugar fortune. Both men embodied Republican values of another age, yet both broke with class and party to oppose the Wine Train.
A city planner by profession, Donna got paid to write letters on their behalf criticizing the Wine Train’s environmental impact, all the while thinking, “You’re out of your minds.” The Wine Train had not been dead on arrival, and she had seen that coming. To the contrary, the linked green-and-maroon railway cars were soon noisily hauling tourists the length of the valley and serving them food and wine while they watched a big-screen alternative to Nature beyond the window and consumed what had been compared to upscale versions of TV dinners.
Phillips told Donna she was a natural advocate for wineries, and Jack agreed. “ ‘They’re just like little industrial parks,’ he said,” and that gave Donna a new way of looking at it. This turned into her profession, and though the two men were now gone, that early fight revealed to her just how democratic the valley was. Phillips and Davies, representative of the powers that be, made things happen. They may have failed in the Wine Train fight, but their type still ran the county, and that type was no longer freighted with the same concern for probity.
St. Helena isn’t the county, she likes to say, but “a textbook case of saying No to everything. No good deed goes unpunished. Hugh Davies was encouraged to buy the Chevy dealership for a winery. At the first hearing only one person stood up and spoke against it.” At the second hearing many did, and some criticized the family. The sight of Hugh’s wife, Monique, in tears struck Donna as a remarkable milestone: The Davieses, who had long been an example to other vintners of environmental concern, were now not green enough.
Schramsberg hired Donna because, in effect, “they had to go through the whole application process again, they hadn’t properly thought through their application,” asking for too much and now having to deal with the consequences of too much success. Their example would reach beyond the town, she feared, “making the county, too, more cautious in the future.”
She recommended to Hugh that $75,000’s worth of mitigation studies be done. They were, and revealed that less water would be used by the winery than had been used by the car dealership. This was a big plus. Also that the proposed number of visitors was comparable to those at Merryvale Vineyards just up Highway 29. And a traffic study suggested that vehicles going to and from the winery, including those driven by wine tasters, were of no particular danger to passing students. “I’m a lot more afraid of teenage drivers than of someone coming out of a tasting room” is Donna’s standard line.
Schramsberg held a public meeting and brought along fourteen employees to answer questions. Hugh explained that he had talked to the school’s principal and that the principal had no problem with the winery. He started a program in which high school students could learn how to make wine, pick grapes at nearby Salvestrin Vineyards & Winery, and ferment them in Schramsberg’s new facility, getting academic credit in the process.
He offered to reduce the number of visitors to less than the number that was already allowed at Sattui and HALL wineries not far south of the Davies Vineyards site. But no one was impressed. The opposition had hardened.
2.
Geoff Ellsworth assumed he could defeat the Davies winery with a referendum, then learned that, no, it had now become a legal issue and so had to be appealed through the courts. At the last minute he pulled it off the city council’s dissent calendar; he and his allies were learning on the fly.
Then he called Andy Beckstoffer, and a couple of other prominent families, and asked for financial help. Citizens’ Voice needed money and it needed it now if it was going to appeal the city’s decision. Beckstoffer said he would think about it, but the idea that he might even consider being involved was empowering. Then Hugh Davies called Geoff up. They had been friends, though not as close as Geoff had been to John Davies, but now the voice at the other end sounded to Geoff both cold and unyielding. In close to an hour of talking Geoff was unable to get in more than a few words and he hung up convinced that Hugh was uninterested in his arguments.
Geoff had become a fan of the British fictional character Inspector Morse, because he, too, did crosswords. Meanwhile Geoff spread his communications net wider, and increasingly the phrases “alcohol tourism” and “binge tourism” punctuated the arguments. His contacts included several groups in Mendocino, Marin, San Francisco, and beyond. Sometimes he couldn’t recall exactly where some ideas had come from, things were happening so fast.
He began to see similar struggles everywhere in the state and the country. Like fracking. In the American West and upper Midwest this had come about through the early advances made by agents of Big Oil who used zoning boards in little towns to change what was allowed, the people living in those towns unaware until it was too late. The same thing had happened in St. Helena. The city council was allowing Schramsberg to go forward despite the fact that the neighborhood was zoned for local service, not tourism. Schramsberg claimed it would create jobs, which wasn’t really the case, but as soon as that argument was heard, other businesses applied for similar zoning variances.
Then Robin Daniel Lail, daughter of John Daniel Jr., inheritor of Inglenook, wrote a letter to the St. Helena Star under the headline DAVIES PROJECT THREATENS OUR CHARACTER AND CULTURE. The piece continued in that vein. “This is an interesting facility which morphed from a production facility into a major entertainment center . . . [T]hink about the impact of 66,000 visitors going into and coming from the winery in cars, limos and buses. . . . The proposed entertainment component of the winery is stunning.” That letter, Geoff told people, definitely bumped the argument up a notch.
* * *
Hugh Davies, rereading Robin’s letter in the Star, reminded himself: “Don’t take things personally. People have differences of opinion. Reason with them, talk on the merits, be polite. Also steadfast. But get it done.”
That’s how his
father would have handled it.
The irony inherent in this particular criticism was that it emanated from a bona fide Napa Valley grand dame whose father had been the embodiment of unfettered free enterprise. Like others in his day who inherited great wealth, John Daniel Jr. hadn’t accepted even the possibility of being deprived of anything by the upwardly mobile then moving into the valley. A kind but private man, John had been no friend of the so-called exciting wave of the 1960s, dreamers and would-be vintners like Ric Forman, Warren Winiarski, and Jack and Jamie Davies.
Hugh remembered the story of his father’s call on Daniel in his beautiful white Victorian under the spreading oaks that now belonged to Coppola. Jack Davies had dropped in on Daniel hoping to get advice and maybe the blessing of the proprietor of the grandest and what then seemed the most durable Napa Valley family estate. But Daniel had received him coolly and made plain he didn’t approve of outsiders coming to the valley and upsetting the established order. Jack had driven back to Schramsberg with the knowledge that he and John Daniel would never be friends.
More telling had been Daniel’s opposition to the creation of the agricultural preserve in 1968. The supervisors, all Republican, had seen the wisdom of requiring a large minimum acreage for building a structure on agricultural land, thus preventing the whole from being converted to another bedroom community as had happened to the beautiful Santa Clara Valley. The fiercest critic of the ag preserve had been John Daniel, who accepted no restraints on land owners. He teamed up with other wealthy men in opposition and descended upon the county supervisors in a fury, abetted by his unlikely friend Louis Stralla, the only mayor in St. Helena’s history with reputed links to organized crime. They and their allies waylaid supervisors outside the meeting, grasping lapels like those belonging to Don McFarland and issuing threats. Stralla shoved one supervisor up against the wall. But in the end the supervisors defied them, voting in the preserve that would soon be hailed as the valley’s savior and the first toll of the death knell for the old order.
Daniel’s disappointment at the altering political landscape added to the burdens of a difficult later life and may have contributed to his tragic death. Had Daniel still been alive, Hugh wondered, how would he have come down in this fight over the makeover of the Epps Chevy dealership? History suggested that John Daniel would have defended Davies Vineyards as an example of a successful business hampered by local tampering.
Daniel’s daughter Robin Lail was yet another St. Helenan who owned a boutique wine of her own and was using the same arguments evinced long ago in defense of legally preserved ag lands outside of town. Now she seemed in favor of limitations on the aristocracy her father had represented and of which she was still a part.
Harder to take for Hugh was criticism emanating from Andy Beckstoffer, who had also written to the St. Helena Star to say his concern wasn’t the winery project, but its location. Beckstoffer’s name elicited powerful reactions across a broad political and commercial spectrum. It, too, was tied up with the ownership change of Inglenook and the rise of the corporate class, yet Beckstoffer had maintained his independence from both the clamorous gaggle of rich vintners and the intertwined, often warring factions of the environmental and grower communities.
It was Beckstoffer money, Hugh learned, that pushed Citizens’ Voice beyond the limitations of piecemeal contributions and might well enable it to fund an appeal of Schramsberg’s permit that would end up in court. With this in mind, Hugh telephoned Beckstoffer at his farming compound down in Rutherford.
Few in the valley wouldn’t take a call from Hugh Davies. Beckstoffer came promptly on the line but as soon as Hugh began to explain the proposed mitigations and compromises for his new winery, Andy cut him off. “I don’t care about the particulars,” he told Hugh. “It’s the wrong place for a winery.”
Hugh hung up thinking Andy would oppose any new winery near Highway 29, from Calistoga to the outskirts of the city of Napa. It was a remarkable position for a man who depended on wineries to buy his very expensive grapes, and an indication that something had moved Beckstoffer in late middle age off the neutral ground and into the ranks of the rising objector class.
What Hugh didn’t know was that Beckstoffer considered the whole Davies family elitist and the late Jack Davies one more example of bad corporate mentality. From the beginning Jack had brought grapes into the valley from other counties, thereby putting his narrow interests above those of the community, in Andy’s view. This tended to undermine local agricultural interests and in its way discredit the Napa Valley Appellation. This conclusion would have stunned any Davies who heard it, since the family had founded and continued to maintain the Jack L. Davies Agricultural Fund and support the agricultural preserve as a sacred covenant.
* * *
Another source of money for Citizens’ Voice, Hugh learned, was Leslie Rudd, a partner in St. Helena’s Dean & DeLuca and the owner of a winery and vineyards in the valley. Rudd had donated a million dollars to the high school to build an auditorium. The late discovery that his new edifice was to have what Geoff Ellsworth was calling “an alcohol entertainment center” almost directly across the street didn’t please Rudd, nor did the fact that school officials told Rudd, in effect, thank you for this auditorium but we’ll make our own decision about Schramsberg. And that decision was not to oppose.
Hugh Davies and Geoff Ellsworth both longed for a statement in support of their positions from one of the two most respected wineries within town limits, Spottswoode on the west side, and Salvestrin to the south. The former provides a view of immaculate vineyards for those contending personalities on streets named for grapes, an exemplary neighbor; the latter is a modern-day contender for the Jeffersonian ideal, a modest wine estate employing mostly family that fit unobtrusively into the community. These two viticultural captives of surrounding growth were allowed only a fraction of the visitors the new Davies Vineyards would enjoy. Both were staunch environmentalists and an expressed opinion from either could have made a difference in Schramsberg’s urban imbroglio.
3.
The dirt driveway, within St. Helena town limits, passes through an old gate bearing the name Salvestrin. Trees partially obscure a white-frame farmhouse built in 1879 by Dr. George Belden Crane, whose original vineyard nearby was planted in 1879. Here past and present run together like the tendrils of historic vines feeding an enterprise practically timeless.
You can easily miss it, and most visitors do, although Crane represents a latter-day superhero in the valley since he was the first to plant Vitis vinifera, not George Yount down in Yountville, as is commonly believed. The Crane house is little changed, lived in today by three generations of Salvestrins, including the one in charge of a small winery and a twenty-six-acre vineyard.
Rich Salvestrin is blue-eyed, burly, burnished by the sun; he wears boots and jeans and a blue work shirt with rolled sleeves. “My grandparents bought the place in 1932,” he will tell a visitor on the little patio adjacent to dusty grape leaves. “My grandfather came to the United States through Ellis Island, straight from northern Italy. He went west, worked in mines and on the railroad, married, and then heard about Italian families living in Napa. They came here, and they thought, ‘This is just like home.’ ”
Some of the original Crane furniture came with the house and what was then twenty-three acres. “My grandfather helped neighbors with their vines, and bartered his labor for the use of a horse. My father took over, and in 1950 bought a tractor.” That same year St. Helena High School next door had to expand. It took some of the family land but left enough vines to provide a living. “I’ve been tied to this land for as long as I can remember. I loved playing in the dirt, I learned pruning from Granddad and Dad.”
He worked in the vineyard all through school and afterward. Salvestrin is a useful case study of the opportunities and difficulties of small vineyards in Napa Valley today. If put in today, it would cost at least $30,000 an acre, and maintaining it, too, is expensive. So the
financial stakes for anyone starting out are great.
Rich began to make wine in 1994. “When I got my hands around all aspects of it, we went into the wine business.” The Salvestrins built a winery “because it added value to the crop,” but there construction stopped. No nascent event center. The acres support his family, including three daughters and his parents, who still live in the house. A top bottle of Salvestrin cabernet costs seventy dollars, very reasonable for a wine made from fruit of such provenance. “Now the fourth generation will get its hands on the place.”
As for current tensions between development and agriculture in the county, Salvestrin has the sunny agrarian’s view: “The valley will go the way of reasonableness. We’re at the tipping point again, not the hillsides now, but the number of wineries. This place should be about the wine. We shouldn’t be selling T-shirts or wine that’s not from grapes grown here. People will just have to come to their senses.”
* * *
The hearing for the Citizens’ Voice appeal of the winery permit was heard by a judge from neighboring Solano County in late spring 2014. He had little experience of wineries but plenty having to do with commercial zoning, and he listened to all the now familiar arguments, from many of the same people. He then announced that he would take the documents with him, think about the case, and make a ruling within ninety days.
After the hearing Hugh and Monique returned to Schramsberg. They had finally moved into the big house, all five of them living on the second floor while the attic served as a miniature landscape of childish delight strewn with toys of every description. Many of the paintings that had once hung in the hall and living room downstairs had been taken by Hugh’s brothers. The rug now in the dining room had been found rolled up in the barn.
The kitchen bore no resemblance to the one in which Hugh and Monique had shared a glass of bubbly with Jamie toward the end. The old photographs of family and friends gazing down from lacquered pine paneling were all gone, too, as was the bed of calla lilies outside the window. But the view of the pond was the same.
Napa at Last Light Page 13