Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  2.

  There were twenty-five separate tax parcels within Wildlake. That meant twenty-five mansions and all the infrastructure for each, or a hundred or so top-dollar houses for people who wanted a piece of the valley, and that meant roads, electricity, water lines, helipads, and, of course, vanity vineyards. As much as three hundred acres were readily adaptable to produce premium Howell Mountain cabernet sauvignon. They were close to the well-known Dancing Bear Ranch and worth at least $100,000 an acre.

  He consulted with his accountant and banker and discovered that he could borrow $5 million using Dunn Vineyards as collateral. He and Lori had never been in debt, paying out of pocket for almost everything. If they ran up a line of credit, they paid it off at the end of every year. This would be digging, for them, the deepest of holes. But bankers like to have you in debt, the deeper the better, so why not take advantage of this?

  Randy thought of it as creative financing. Give a note for $5 million to some nonprofit that agreed to buy and preserve Wildlake. He could write off, over five years, up to 50 percent of his gross adjustable income. It was manageable, but since he already owed money on Sentinel Hill in Angwin, it was a big risk, too. Dunn Vineyards Howell Mountain cabernet could carry the debt if the then looming Bush recession didn’t turn into a depression. Mike and Krissy would be paying it off long after Randy and Lori were gone. But they would be part of something bigger than all of them, and they could handle it.

  He went straight back to the Land Trust, not because he feared he couldn’t put together enough donors himself to buy the property, but because he was afraid someone would get wind of the sale and stab him in the back.

  John Hoffnagle picked up the phone, and Randy said, “Wildlake’s available for twenty million. Want to see it?”

  Hoffnagle was known for his rasping monotone and genuine enthusiasm for what his profession called “conservation values.” He could talk and talk about the redemptive value of undeveloped land of almost any kind: cleared, wooded, rocky, dry, swampy, beautiful, scruffy, road-worthy, inaccessible. But highest on the list of preservation prospects was agricultural land and wilderness.

  He had come to Napa in the late 1980s by way of the Yale School of Forestry and the Nature Conservancy, and was by now a thoroughgoing professional with an exemplary record. By the time Randy had met him, Hoffnagle had deep connections with those wishing to see the land forever free of concrete, condos, and, in some cases, vineyards.

  The Land Trust had secured protection for some fifty-three thousand acres, about 10 percent of the land in the county and a full percentage point above the number of acres in vineyards. The donors all had sufficient capital to assure that this happened and that someone would look after their donated property after they were gone, but that did not include Randy Dunn. Not to the tune of twenty mil it didn’t.

  The process of granting easements was rarely simple, or easy. Hoffnagle had to explain to everyone at least once that just turning land over to the Trust wasn’t enough, that in most cases some real money had to be put forward by the donors for continued management. He had brought about the acquisition of thousands of acres in the county in more than a hundred transactions of varying complexity, but he had never dealt with anything this large or, as he suspected, this impressive.

  The successful maneuvering that would be necessary for acquisition, if it was possible, would heavily depend on the selflessness of other donors moved by the beauty, strategic positioning, and existing wildlife. The Trust had never purchased a piece of property outright, and not everyone belonging to the Trust would be in favor. Some cared not at all about such things, and Hoffnagle had to continually juggle them with those who really believed in preservation—between 10 and 25 percent of the members, he reckoned—and those who wanted only big tax deductions. One donor habitually claimed deductions to which he wasn’t even entitled, and told Hoffnagle, “If I’m not audited by the feds every year, I know I’m not claiming enough.”

  These people included Andy Beckstoffer, owner of more vineyards in Napa, Lake, and Mendocino counties than any single individual. All the easements Beckstoffer had granted—and received tax deductions for—would never have been developed anyway, but such was the law. Here was a chance for Beckstoffer to really step up.

  * * *

  The hunting club’s longtime member Paul Woodworth had been granted sole negotiating rights, and he agreed to let representatives of the Land Trust into Wildlake. They traveled in separate cars—John Hoffnagle, Randy, Denis Sutro, heir to the wealth of Adolph Heinrich Sutro, mayor of San Francisco at the end of the nineteenth century, and another member. During Randy’s tour Hoffnagle sat on the edge of his seat, unable to stop saying, “Oh my God, look at this. Oh my God . . . Oh my God . . .”

  Wildlake, if preserved, would create a contiguous wilderness corridor that could eventually link up an expanded Robert Louis Stevenson State Park and comprise thirteen thousand acres. It contained some of the most diverse plant and wildlife in the United States, a bona fide Mediterranean-type floristic province with its eastern-most population of redwoods and a crucial area of study for those tracking the effects of global warming. If preserved, so also would be the striking view from the valley floor for people who mostly had no idea what they were looking up at, but loved and were inspired by it nonetheless.

  But somebody had to lead on this, providing not just an argument but also an example, to inspire others to give. The Land Trust would contribute, and manage the transaction, but it had other financial obligations already. And Hoffnagle wasn’t at all sure the Land Trust could bring it off in just six months. If so, it would be a record.

  They got out of the cars deep in Wildlake and stood around an ancient fire pit, near the ruins of the homestead. Sutro asked Randy, “If the Land Trust is going to take this step, what’ll you do to help?”

  Randy said, “I’m in for five. I’ll take out a loan and hand it over to you.”

  “Come on, Randy.” Sutro was annoyed. “Five what?”

  “Million.”

  And John Hoffnagle muttered, “Holy shit.”

  It was insane, he thought. Floored by both the generosity and offhand way Randy had said it, he got back in the car with Sutro. He could tell that he, too, was moved, and they rode back to the entrance in stunned silence. Hoffnagle wasn’t given to superlatives, but Randy Dunn had just become, with one deft move, his hero: the perfect donor.

  Randy locked the gate behind them and came over and tapped on Hoffnagle’s window. He lowered it.

  “John,” Randy said, “if I give you five million dollars, do I get a key?”

  3.

  Marc Mondavi had been out of town and when he finally heard about the pending sale he “hit the ceiling,” according to a participant in the many conversations that followed. He also threatened to sue individual club members for “messing with his rights.” The real clash, though, was yet to come.

  A dinner was scheduled at Tre Vigne, the still-fashionable restaurant in St. Helena owned by Bill Harlan, to bring club members together with representatives of the Land Trust board. When John Hoffnagle arrived he noticed that both Marc Mondavi and Paul Woodworth had been drinking wine and that a dispute over Wildlake had already begun between them. It turned into a full-blown “dustup,” got even worse—and louder—and Hoffnagle decided it was time to go home. The goodwill breaking of bread among members of the hunting club and the Land Trust never took place.

  * * *

  Randy started approaching people he knew who could afford to donate, and some he didn’t. They surprised him with their generosity. An outspoken denizen of Howell Mountain, Betty O’Shaughnessy, resisted at first. She owned a house and vineyard on the road that led to Wildlake—her name had been cut into the steel gate with a laser cutter—and Randy and his friend and tennis opponent, Mike Hackett, another pilot, “two-timed” Betty, first one calling her and then the other, until finally she told Randy, “Okay, two-fifty.”

  “Two hundred
and fifty dollars?”

  Betty laughed. “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  Koerner Rombauer, a pilot and the son of Irma Rombauer of cookbook fame and fortune, owned a winery down on the Silverado Trail and was a member in good standing of the GONADs, the acronym for the exclusive eating club otherwise known as the Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory. His oaky chardonnay had made a lot of money, but what he and Randy really had in common was flying. Rombauer agreed to let Randy show him around Wildlake in an all-terrainer, and without ever leaving the vehicle said, “I’m in.”

  “Don’t you want to walk around?”

  “Naw, I get it.” And he did—to the tune of a million dollars.

  Yet another pilot and close friend of Randy’s, Gordon Burns, owner of a wine analysis lab down in St. Helena, gave half a million. Then Larry Turley of zinfandel fame, brother of cult winemaker Helen Turley, vinous consultant to people with very expensive wines like Jayson Pahlmeyer and Bill Harlan, took Randy’s call. He listened to Randy’s pitch, which went on until at last Turley said, “Okay, Randy, I’m going to sit down right now and write a check.”

  Soon John Hoffnagle was receiving a fax from Turley at the Land Trust office. The paper had dark blotches on it that Hoffnagle realized was spilled wine, and it affirmed the fact that Larry Turley, too, was donating a million dollars.

  Hoffnagle was doing the same thing among his contacts, and writing grant proposals to organizations that might chip in. He got a pledge of five million each from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and two million dollars from the California State Coastal Conservancy. Some days brought as many as thirty checks, mostly small ones. The total rose, but the fund was still in touch-and-go land.

  Then Paul Woodworth telephoned Hoffnagle with bad news: He had only six votes among hunting club members, and he needed eight for a majority if the sale was to succeed. Holdout members wanted more, but there wasn’t more to offer. So Hoffnagle offered to raise the price a symbolic $100,000, and throw in an additional five years of hunting rights after the sale went through. That did it.

  People had said they couldn’t put together a $20 million campaign in six months, and they had. Sterling Vineyards created a special Wildlake label—merlot—in celebration, and offered to donate profits from its sale to the fund. Sterling also staged a gala, in midsummer 2006, and most of the donors came.

  From the deck of Sterling’s monastic white winery you could see Wildlake on the far side of the valley, high above, a vision half terrestrial, half celestial. “What the Land Trust has been able to do is go above and beyond the call in preserving all this land,” said Napa County supervisor Diane Dillon. It was to be called the Dunn-Wildlake Preserve. Then she and another supervisor, Brad Wagenknecht, declared this a “Land Trust of Napa County Day.”

  Lori and Randy looked on from their seats at the head table. John Hoffnagle rose to praise them both, and to recognize Randy as the force behind the creation of the largest contiguous protected landscape in Napa County. Others stood to thank the Dunns for the single most generous conservation act in the valley’s history, and the setting aside of the largest single wilderness parcel.

  Some response was called for, but since Randy couldn’t do it without crying, Lori stood up. She told of her husband’s riding in Wildlake with Jenny, and of how much the memories and the place meant to them both. Randy just sat there with his hands folded on the white tablecloth, sun-braised cheeks slick with tears, grinning.

  * * *

  One morning, in the grass beside the horse paddock, Randy found a young bird. It was either a crow or raven, he couldn’t tell which, and had fallen from a nest. He put on work gloves and picked it up. The noise the bird made seemed certain to bring angry parents, but didn’t. So he took it back to the house and called a wildlife expert he knew, who told him to mix oatmeal, pablum, and egg yolks. The bird gulped it from the spoon.

  Randy called it Raycrow and very soon it was flying to their bedroom window every morning to wake them up, and then around to the back door for breakfast. Later, Randy led Raycrow out into the field and showed it how to dig for worms and insects. Most days Raycrow perched high in a Douglas fir beside the house, and when Randy appeared would swoop down at tremendous speed, flare at the last moment, and land on Randy’s shoulder. Raycrow loved to fly, as Randy did, and he admired Raycrow’s agility.

  Once Raycrow joined a flock of crows at the bottom of the property. When all the birds took off, Randy whistled and Raycrow peeled off and returned and landed on his shoulder. Late that same afternoon Randy saw the bird standing placidly on the back of the big quarter horse, Velvet, in the middle of the paddock. Randy went in to dinner and to bed, and the next morning Raycrow was gone.

  Randy walked in the woods, whistling, to no avail. He put notices in neighbors’ mailboxes asking if they had seen the bird, but no one had. Whenever crows passed over, Randy looked up and whistled, to no avail. He never saw Raycrow again.

  Velvet was a horse the girls had often ridden double behind Randy. Sometimes he thought about that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  The Death of Shame

  The pastoral idea of America had . . . provided a clear sanction for the conquest of the wilderness . . . But no one, not even Jefferson, had been able to identify the point of arrest.

  —Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

  1.

  Since the United States Geological Survey never formally recognized the Howell Mountains, they should have fallen off maps of Napa Valley long ago. Other names—the Vacas, a lesser chain bordering the Suisun Valley in what’s now Solano County, and in Spanish times the interchangeable Sierra de Suscol and Sierra de Napa—were also in common use. But the Howells hung on, maybe through the force of personality of their namesake, John Howell, a shadowy figure who started the valley’s first blacksmith shop in St. Helena in 1856.

  The Howells hook up at the top of the valley and form a vortex with the southwest-trending Mayacamas, a lusher range that still outshines its droughty eastern cousin in social cachet, if not in terroir, lofting the eye and the imagination toward Sonoma and the Pacific Ocean.

  The Howells are the last wall between the valley proper and the vastness of the rest of the United States. Its soils are mostly silica found in rhyolite tuffs and breccias—broken rock segments cemented together by heat or pressure—and there’s also basalt lava, serpentine, sedimentary rock, and volcanic gravels washed down in the stream beds. But few nutrients, which means it isn’t suitable for many crops other than vines. It stresses them, and their fruit is said to evince more character and depth of flavor than grapes grown down in the loamy valley. This has led to the outsized popularity of Howell Mountain cabernet sauvignon at the end of the twentieth century, and of vineyards on the steep slopes even though the viticulture’s arduous.

  The confusion of terrains is greatest at the northern end, just shy of Mount St. Helena, where plunging canyons, obsidian cliffs, hillsides too steep for any ATV, and impenetrable, protracted stands of mixed chaparral and manzanita overhang gin-clear seeps. Creeks flow in the dense shadows of rock, oak, Douglas fir, and redwoods, often inaccessible except on foot and occasionally horseback, when the rider is pitched forward in the saddle and keenly aware of exposed geology and the proximity of the mostly unseen: the bears, deer, coyotes, and mountain lions Lori Dunn worried about during the fire.

  The northern boundary of Wildlake remained inviolate for years. Some vineyard development occurred on the road in, removed from the wilderness boundary and in another watershed. But at the same time, with the number of Napa wineries now approaching five hundred and the valley floor planted out, new vineyards were going in anywhere legal, and sometimes not—on mountaintops and strips of land deemed plantable by vineyard managers and their consultants. These all worked for aspiring wine squires who might once have considered this too backcountry but now couldn’t seem to live without it, particularly when th
eir right to do with land whatever they pleased was challenged by neighbors and, increasingly rarely, by the county itself.

  Ironically, Howell Mountain was significant in part because of the hardscrabble success Randy Dunn had wrought as far back as the 1980s. Then vineyards were few and distant enough from each other to fit into a harmonious whole, viticulture being just one adjunct of rural life. But now it dominated. The monied desire for coveted grapes at any cost clashed openly with communities interested in preserving a semblance of traditional landscapes and community values, and manifestations of this clash were also being felt far from Howell Mountain.

  Some days, driving to the gate, Randy could see a haze of dust in the air from new construction or vineyard work south of White Cottage Road, similar enough in appearance to smoke from a nascent fire to make him pause. But it was far enough away from Wildlake so that it wouldn’t disturb the enduring wholeness of a former hunting camp still functioning more or less as it had before Europeans arrived two centuries before.

  That, however, was about to change.

  * * *

  Mike Davis grew up in San Mateo where, as he liked to tell people, “I had the genetics to succeed as a discus thrower.” This he did at Indiana University Bloomington before he got into industrial marketing—sweepers, forklifts—a natural big-rig guy with pale, sleepy Jackie Gleason eyes under a big white cowboy hat.

  He “liked people and still finds them fascinating”—helpful if you’re selling something, including digital equipment. This led him to found Applied Computer Solutions and then “bet the farm on distributive processing when floppies and desktops had to talk to each other and Cisco and Sun Microsystems were just coming along.”

  Davis made a fortune from turn-of-the-century interfacing without having to know everything about everything he sold: “A great chef doesn’t make the tomatoes or the steak. He just puts it all together. I’m not smart enough to write code,” but smart enough to carry Sun’s and others’ products, “and when the Internet came along, we were ready.”