Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  They ate together as a family most evenings at the new center island, in what seemed like a shiny new world. The oldest boy, Emrys, was playing soccer and occasionally getting roughed up. Nelson, the middle son, looked preppy in his Bermudas, and little Huey was already reading The Great Brain. No one looking at the boys that evening could have missed their resemblance to the generation before, nor the suggestion of great—and greatly varied—possibilities lurking within these harbingers of the future.

  Hugh had discovered, in venturing beyond the isolation of Schramsberg, that some people didn’t like his family. This had come as a surprise, one he was still trying to adjust to. But many others did like them, and had written and called over the months to say so, and this meant a lot to him and Monique.

  Hugh decided then and there that he wasn’t going to get involved in such a venture again, no matter how tempting. And he was pulling back from all commitments other than those to business, family, and the Jack L. Davies Agricultural Fund. Schramsberg’s defense against the appeal had cost $300,000, in addition to all the other costs, and if the judge ruled for Schramsberg and Citizens’ Voice then appealed that decision, it would cost the winery that much all over again. The fight was not over.

  Meanwhile Hugh, youngest son, now the steward of old Jacob Schram’s and his parents’ dreams, had to make money. He had to get it done.

  IV.

  ON HOWELL MOUNTAIN

  A rugged individual makes wine in the path of a raging natural force, then acts to thwart a wealthy interloper determined to have his way.

  INTERLUDE:

  The Sanctity of Stuff

  It could, except for the gasoline-powered four-wheeler, be a mining operation in the Sierra foothills a century and a half ago. Or, more aptly, a timber camp. In reality it’s a nascent vineyard very much in the present, which means scraped earth reaching for the sky from an encircling wreath of redwoods and Douglas firs. Dust and rock and implements for dealing with them provide the ambience, while the proprietor—heavy black beard, glinting green eyes, filthy straw cowboy hat, lumbering boots and a black Lab best friend unaccustomed to other humans—provides the action.

  His name’s Ketan Mody and if you haven’t heard of him, you well may. Gesturing past his one-room rough-hewn cabin toward the spot where it used to stand, he says, “A storm came through one night and a friend down in the valley got flooded out and called for help. I drove down”—way down—“and when I got back up here next morning the house was flattened.” The big Douglas fir fell across his bed, leaving long wooden splines in the pillow where his face would have been.

  The stump’s still obstinately there, but the rest went into the new house, for this is a work in progress in every sense of the word. Like the forty-niners once bent on a very different sort of success, he will utilize every object and advantage until he has what he’s seeking.

  “The problem in Napa Valley is that most people just can’t do stuff,” such as put in vineyards themselves and the thousand other tasks that go with self-sufficiency. “And no one wants to work. How many white guys do you know who actually do something in the vineyard? I see too many of them in their Audis with $2,000 bikes on the back. But if you’re not willing to put all your effort into this, you shouldn’t be here.

  “The only way I could afford it is to do it myself. I wanted a place to work and make wine to last my lifetime, but it’s so hard to get into Napa. Costs are so high, the projects so large there’s been no place for the small operator.”

  But he found one, much to the consternation of a neighbor who opposed him for a time. “You have to put your head down and work twenty-four-seven. You might lose perspective, but you’re committed.”

  First he worked in finance “and hated my life,” then in a winery in New Zealand. “I was interested in singularity, and place, and realized there’s no difference between wine and oysters,” each of which speaks to origins. “I came to work a harvest here, and didn’t want to like it, but the beauty was shown to me. And the understanding that to know one thing very well I would have to do it for the rest of my life.”

  With help from his father and others he bought this remote forty acres at close to two thousand feet in altitude. It took him four and a half years to get a vineyard permit. He did a voluntary environmental impact report, on principle, and even now, eight years later, there’s still no place to sit out of the sun atop this mass of rock, the sound of the earthmover is constant, the view of heavy Douglas fir stacked and waiting, and a lot of terraced raw dirt to be dry-farmed. The cabernet sauvignon rootstock is in, tightly spaced—“the magic stuff’s in the clone selection”—and small yields.

  “This is my day job: I’m the plumber, janitor, check signer, cheerleader. I love it, putting in a vineyard with a light hand—no deep-ripping, no soil-smearing. Come at it from a love of place. It’s totally fulfilling.”

  Many vintners in Napa Valley are caught up in what amounts to a parody of viticulture, elaborate dramas of money and celebrity far removed from the dust from which hope springs eternal. “I believe in Napa Valley. There’s a sense of community not found in other wine regions. I see more reasonableness now, as well as more insanity. More little site-driven wines, more good information about them finally getting out.”

  He points due east, toward Howell Mountain across the valley. “Randy Dunn is the model for young guys like me,” he says, primarily because Dunn does stuff. “If you’re willing to do more than cut checks, Napa is one of the best places in the world to be, with people who share the unifying experiences in a semi-mystical glass of wine.”

  CHAPTER TEN:

  Waiting for Fire

  1.

  Smoke hangs in the branches of Douglas firs massed atop Howell Mountain. Years of drought have weakened them, and now a forest fire has reached the south end of Lake County and is moving into Napa County. Most days Randy and Lori Dunn, who live just below the ridgeline, can see the ragged palisade clearly, but today the trees are indistinct and recede farther as the day progresses. By 7:00 P.M. it’s dark, and although the fire is still a dozen miles away, the smell of smoke is inescapable.

  The Dunns close the windows, turn on the air conditioner, and go to bed. At 2:30 A.M., they wake up to flashing lights in the driveway: The sheriff has arrived to tell them that a fifty-mile-an-hour wind is blowing the fire their way, and White Cottage Road is being evacuated. Since Lori has recently undergone shoulder surgery, this news means putting on a sling before she can place framed photographs of children, parents, grandparents, and friends into a cardboard box with one hand.

  That she has to choose which faces to save and which to discard does not seem fair at such a lonely hour. Randy taps his iPad to track what is being called the Valley Fire—not for Napa Valley, but the valley to the north, in Lake County, where forty thousand acres have burned already. It is safe to say the fire is out of control despite a score of fire engines, two dozen dozers, and a thousand people laboring to contain it.

  If the fire comes farther south, it might well climb Howell Mountain’s northern flank, race along the ridge, and come down through the firs and ponderosa pines that extend into the very midst of their lives. Then it could consume things as precious to the Dunns as their photographs: house, outbuildings, a couple of million dollars’ worth of bottled cabernet sauvignon, and the new 2015 vintage still on the vines; also a vegetable garden, the huge fig tree dropping more fruit than they and the birds could eat, and nearby Wildlake, three thousand acres of wilderness high on the eastern perimeter of Napa Valley. The Dunns have saved it once before.

  Lori takes off her sling in frustration and carries the box of photographs out the kitchen door, past a sign that reads GRANDMA AND GRANDPA’S HOUSE: MEMORIES MADE HERE, and down the outdoor stairs to the little cave where some Dunn wine is stored. She leaves the box there and goes back upstairs for her sewing machine and quilt collection. Then she hugs Randy and, still in her pajamas, gets into their white SUV to drive to the relative
safety of St. Helena, a vertical half-mile below.

  Randy—in Levi’s, boots, and a T-shirt bearing the silhouette of his turboprop Commander parked a mile away at the Angwin Airport—now has to decide what job to do first and the order of all those that follow.

  * * *

  On the phone the next morning he is laconic, even on such a day, for that is Randy. Yes, he says, the fire’s close, likely to get closer and, sure, he could use another pair of hands. I’m at the bottom of Napa Valley and I put on hiking boots and drive the twenty-odd miles north with a water bottle and a hat, not knowing quite what to expect.

  Cars are coming down Howell Mountain, but a few are going up, too, and I join them, topping out on a country road overlain with low, scudding clouds pierced by intermittent sun. The way into the Dunns’ property turns from tarmac to dirt, and at the end of the road an ancient Caterpillar D4 snorts at its labors, flaking yellow paint with rust showing through. The machine seems too simple to be effective, yet Randy has built a firebreak, trenching the edge of the sunflower field and pushing up windrows of dirt, rock, and dry pine needles blown from the big trees.

  The dozer was army surplus, rebuilt in Okinawa after World War II and later put up for sale. Randy bought it in the town of Tulelake decades ago and drove it home on a borrowed flatbed truck, anticipating his future as a successful and, as it turned out, highly individual maker of fine wine in the modern heart of American viticulture.

  It’s 9:30 A.M., and Randy’s Levi’s and T-shirt are already filthy, a fitting match for the dilapidated straw hat sitting crookedly on his head, his white mustache a gleaming brushstroke in the brim’s shadow. Behind him is a dusty horse paddock, a stand of apple trees, and a sprawling woodshed and machine shop, its bat-winged corrugated iron roof held down with heavy stones. Mounted on the gable is a neon sign shaped like a bottle, made by a friend from vintage bits of salvaged tubing. It will announce, the next time it’s switched on, WINE!

  A pickup comes barreling in from White Cottage Road, loaded with all-terrain bicycles. The beefy driver brakes and leans out the window. It’s Mike, Randy’s stepson and Dunn Vineyards’ official winemaker now, involved in all aspects of the growing and rendering of cabernet sauvignon. Unshaven, smiling crookedly, he seems the picture of affability. But the conversation is pointed: The fire’s said to be moving in on the Aetna Springs Golf Course, in nearby Pope Valley. Then Mike asks, “Did the horses get into the vineyard?”

  They did not, but if they have to be let out of the paddock, they know their way around the property and will have a good chance of surviving. “They’re hungry,” Mike adds. “I think I’ll go get them a bale.” And he’s gone.

  The landscape has been exhausted by years of drought, and the understory of the tall oaks and conifers is bleached. In the distance, tree trunks stand out as dark slashes in brittle blond stubble, the madrone branches and pine needles as dry as dust. What has always been comforting to the eye is now vaguely threatening.

  Waiting for fire inspires an almost easeful fear, as if the threat can be banished at any moment—a lessening of the wind, a bit of rain—but it’s an edgy gamble. Whether the fire will appear suddenly and ruin their lives, possibly even claim them, or turn and consume the next ridge over, is impossible to foretell. Information about a fire’s progress is not often available—the official Cal Fire website is busy and difficult to navigate—and fire is a constantly mutating menace that only those in the middle of it can truly know.

  By 10:30, the smell of smoke is stronger. Though the barely detectable breeze is southerly, a big fire can create its own dynamic. Low clouds presumably have kept the bombers from flying in with their loads of liquid fire retardant. No one knows for sure what’s going on, only that Angwin Airport is closed and people are fleeing. Randy went there earlier to move some fuel away from his plane in its hangar. Now he starts up the D4 again and mounts it, headed for a last line of windrow between the flats and the hill.

  A quarter-mile up a steeper dirt road and just over the crest is the Dunns’ estate vineyard. In thirty-odd years, it has earned a reputation for wines of longevity, tannic density, and beautiful bottle bouquet after a decade or more of age. Lean, intense fruit is part of that reputation, in direct contradistinction to the upfront jammy embrace and riveting alcoholic follow-through of many popular high-end Napa Valley cabernets.

  Vineyards are good at thwarting flames, providing little fuel, but this one would make a very expensive firebreak indeed. Wine from its fruit paid for the Commander and its lesser predecessors, including a secondhand 1946 drag-tail Aeronca Champ, in which Randy once courted Lori. It also paid for the Diemme grape press, the tunnels in the mountainside, and countless French oak barrels. This was before Randy, in the final rigors of earning his PhD in entomology at UC Davis, took an elective course in enology. He started making the stuff in a plastic barrel in the back of his used Ford Econoline van, sloshing nascent wine onto the floor as he circumnavigated Lake Berryessa between Davis and Napa Valley, where he worked for Caymus Vineyards.

  2.

  Her face drawn, Lori returns from church in St. Helena midmorning. “The fire will get to Wildlake before it gets to us,” she says, her voice breaking. “There’re mountain lions up there. And deer, bobcats, bears.” She hurries up to the house to collect more valuables.

  Their daughter, Kristina, and her daughter Taylor live just down the road, but they spent the night with relatives in St. Helena and will stay there tonight, too. The nagging ambiguity of the day is shared by the hundreds who have fled Lake County and flocked to the Napa Valley Fairgrounds in Calistoga, having lost their homes. Many are bunking with friends, family, or employers on the Napa Valley floor: pourers, waiters, barkeeps, forklift drivers, flower arrangers, pruners, punchers-down of the floating caps of grape skins in stainless steel fermenting tanks, and caterers who often have to cross a mountain range on two-lane roads twice a day to get to and from work.

  Randy walks up the sloping drive to the house, past his Ford F-250 loaded with a ladder, wrenches, gas cans, rope, and an all-terrain vehicle that could get him back up here if he has to evacuate but finds the road to Howell Mountain blocked. Houses lost to fire often don’t have to be. A person on the scene can preserve them, but it’s risky. On Randy’s backseat is a lemon-yellow flame-resistant fire suit, a helmet, and a gas mask.

  Next on the to-do list is cleaning the house’s gutters, which are full of fir needles lofted there by wind the day before. The roof is metal, but an ember in a gutter can destroy even a concrete house if conditions are right—and the Dunns’ house is made of wood. He drives the forklift up to the back door as a tethering point and fetches a climbing rope for belaying.

  His son-in-law, Brian, has shown up to help, and Randy presses both of us into service: Brian is the gutter man, and I’m the belayer. Wearing aviator shades and shorts, Brian clambers up the ladder, dons the safety harness, and applies the furious leaf blower, walking crabwise with one hand on the rope down to the far edge of the roof. He’s a professional firefighter in Sonoma County, and he will have to go back there before day’s end.

  We then clean the gutters at the winery office, a house built in the nineteenth century by Italians who used the cellar for winemaking. A full century later, Randy Dunn would use it, too, climbing over casks on a dirt floor, employing a tool called a wine thief to draw long vials of cabernet from bungholes into antique glasses, raising them speculatively to his nose. The house had belonged then to Charlie Wagner, owner of Caymus Vineyards down the mountain. Warren Winiarski, winner of the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, had also lived here with his wife, Barbara, and their small children, in what was then deemed a backwater unsuitable for grapes, being too far removed from the vaunted valley floor. Now this land is as sought after by potential growers as any terroir in Napa. The old viticulturists’ redwood stakes are still sometimes found in the woods.

  Randy made Charlie Wagner’s wine for him in the 1970s and 1980s. In those days, Randy lo
oked a lot like Robert Redford—same beard, same abundant strawberry-blond hair. Charlie allowed Randy to press his own grapes at Caymus and bring the juice back up to White Cottage Road, where it was transformed into the first versions of what would become the distinctive, surprisingly successful Dunn cabernet sauvignon. The praise it received then was the beginning of Dunn cabernet’s steep critical climb, and he and Lori soon bought the house.

  In Randy’s early days of ownership, the house had swaybacked floors, streaked walls, and Victorian sash windows with wavy glass. After he and Lori built their own rancher next door, this place stood empty. One night a mountain lion saw the moon’s reflection in a window and leaped through. The next morning, Randy found shattered glass, the curtains in shreds, and a single drop of blood on the floor, shed before the big cat leaped through another window and was gone.

  Brian comes down the ladder and drops the leaf blower and harness. He has scoped out the fire from bits of news he has picked up, but even professionals like him have trouble getting good information. “It’s probably going to jump to the next canyon,” he says. “If it does, it’ll come straight through Wildlake.” After that, it’s anyone’s guess, but the fire will move quickly through the chaparral. “The real problem’s going to be blowing embers.”

  Everyone congregates in the kitchen to eat Lori’s chicken salad sandwiches and drink cold grape juice made from a mix of Ruby Red grapes and unfermented Dunn cabernet. Brian says, “If it happens, a brush unit will come through to save what they can and move on.”

  The brush units put out spot burns, essentially pushing the fire around a house. But not if the owner hasn’t made any preparations, or if there’s no water and it looks hopeless. Wildfire triage.