Napa at Last Light

by James Conaway

  CHAPTER TWENTY:

  2050

  1.

  Way back in 1980 a professor named R. W. Butler at the far-distant University of Western Ontario wrote an obscure paper entitled The Concept of a Tourist Area Cycle of Evolution. In it he quoted the German geographer Walter Christaller, who had used artists as an example of early discoverers of special places.

  If his research had been in Napa, he could as well have used aspiring winemakers instead who

  search out untouched and unusual places . . . Step by step the place develops as a so-called artist colony. Soon a cluster of poets follows . . . then cinema people, gourmets, and the jeunesse dorée [wealthy, trendy young people]. The place becomes fashionable and entrepreneurs take note. The fisherman’s cottage, the shelter-huts become converted into boarding houses and hotels come on the scene. Meanwhile the painters have fled . . . Only [those] with a commercial inclination who like to do well in business remain; they capitalize on the good name of this former painter’s corner and on the gullibility of tourists. . . . At last the tourist agencies come . . .

  Substitute Yountville, St. Helena, and Calistoga for “untouched and unusual places” which, in the 1950s and 1960s, all had similarities to the model. Butler imagined six stages of tourist evolution: exploration (relatively few tourists and no secondary attractions); involvement (locals get into the business and pressure government to promote it); development (tourist numbers increase; heavy advertising begins; local government control begins to slip away; external businesses move in; natural and cultural attractions are developed and marketed; and residents are increasingly affected against their wishes); consolidation (the economy is tied to tourism; major corporations and franchises move in, including resorts, creating defined business districts; discontent and opposition grows among locals); and stagnation (carrying capacity exceeded; tourism causes environmental, social, and economic problems; resorts are divorced from the geographic environment; artificial attractions supersede original ones; the area loses fashionability).

  Butler’s final stage, decline, is the most interesting. In it, upscale tourists are replaced by weekenders, then day-trippers, and finally by something even less desirable. Tourism facilities are replaced by other enterprises, and enhanced transportation routes are required. Hotels and resorts are converted to retirement homes and low-income housing. The last long-term residents move away, and the place succumbs, in the worst case, to a tourist slum with seedy venues and warehouses.

  Rejuvenation is possible only through a radical change in attractions, Butler concludes, which in Napa Valley’s case would likely mean the age-old siren of full-blown real estate development on the valley floor and the hillsides.

  With Butler’s model and the prospect of increased global warming, it’s not hard to imagine a nightmare scenario for a desperate valley lacking sufficient water and stripped of land-use regulations: carnival attractions in what was once countryside, mass-market “tasting rooms” (bars) for wine made elsewhere and anything else that sells, quickly built structures for storing and moving product, and mass entertainment. And adult entertainment theme parks at some wineries require reservations far in advance, calling to mind the waiting time once required for the French Laundry that in this scenario has moved north to Lake County’s less populated, still-quasi-rural landscape, while other amenities in Mendocino and Humboldt Counties draw increasing numbers of high-end tourists leaving the hassle and heat of Napa far behind.

  Caltrans builds the interstate up the middle of the valley that it has wanted since the 1960s, when the agency designed one and was thwarted only by the concerted efforts of Jack and Jamie Davies and other up-valley socialites. The Wine Train, too, has become a people-mover crowded with commuters to jobs elsewhere and for day-trippers from the East Bay with coupon books for various attractions, including the popular, retro Whack-A-Grape game.

  The hard-baked, droughty valley floor is sustaining fewer grapes than it once did, before the aquifer’s drawdown and spiking water prices. Some once-stellar resorts have been converted to condos, low-income housing, and a retirement home for animals left annuities by deceased owners. The hotel in south St. Helena built in 2018 has been transformed by 2060 into a minimum-security prison for overflow from the sprawling megalopolis of Napa/American Canyon. A few years later, the Auberge du Soleil is rededicated with fanfare as an isolation ward for sufferers of mysterious new medical conditions as temperatures continue to rise and authorities fear out-of-control epidemics.

  In east Napa County, a portion of the unincorporated town of Walt has succumbed to gravity, closing Monticello Road permanently. Some of the ranchettes have been abandoned because of lack of water, while over in St. Helena Bell Canyon Reservoir may still have water but the sediment rushing down after rare winter rainstorms is so prodigious and chemical-laced from development and pesticides and herbicides, and the standing water so algal and now toxic, that authorities don’t dare use it.

  The valley’s most exclusive mega-community, an eight-hundred-acre compound of baronial mansions with show vines west of Yountville, called Promontory, is surrounded by a ten-foot steel palisade fence and its private reservoir patrolled by armed guards. Water impoundment is in effect everywhere, and so competitive and difficult has the search for water become that restrictions on piping it directly from what were public sources to developments, vineyards, and private homes are lifted. An enormous price is charged by corporations that have taken control of most reservoirs and remaining wells, and still paid by a few very wealthy landowners.

  Physical conflicts over access to water continue, with gunshots heard constantly in the hills and the entire watershed dangerous for both people and low-flying drones used for surveillance and for fighting microbial vectors with the proliferation of new chemical brews. Less than a quarter of the vines that once thrived in Napa County survive, if barely, and lack the fruity fullness of old. Some quality has been maintained, however, despite the need to remove alcohol and enhance with additives no longer requiring identification on labels.

  Wines made from these grapes are more curiosities than classics, but some are highly prized in China, where collectors pay upwards of $75,000 for a single bottle of To Kalon cabernet sauvignon. That heavily guarded vineyard stands as a de facto historic exhibit in the midst of dwellings next to the interstate, its runty grapes clinging like Ozymandian reminders of a forgotten past, gawked at by day-trippers and at night pilfered by armed bootleggers. The long, illicit supply chain is reminiscent of the one during Prohibition, though the percentage of Americans still drinking wine instead of spirits and beer has dropped precipitously with the increasingly heavy use of cannabis and the ever-proliferating variety of designer drugs.

  2.

  The foregoing is fanciful, some of it preposterous. But all is still possible, increasingly so with time. And none of the industrial groups supposedly overseeing rural Napa’s health and prosperity today has looked deeply into this subject. One reason is that honest studies tend to suggest that the only way to survive as a grower and a winemaker is to move farther north, or high into the Sierra or the Rockies. Dwelling on such possibilities is to imperil the sale of wine futures, glamour, and the prospect of eternally growing success that has been the subtext of promotion for more than a century.

  The Napa Valley Vintners did look some years ago into the future of the thermal inversion that keeps cool air pumping into the valley from the bay, but nothing much came of it. Neither the Grapegrowers nor the Farm Bureau has done anything similar, and the Winegrowers of Napa County doesn’t study. To find informed vocal concern about Napa’s future beyond the loose ranks of environmentalists the county must turn, ironically, to a neighbor over in Sonoma County.

  High on the windward side of the Mayacamas and east of Santa Rosa is an exemplary scientific redoubt called the Pepperwood Preserve, founded with money from the Bechtel family and dedicated to monitoring the effects of climate change on the biome, wildlife, air, water, even
fog. The president, Lisa Micheli, did significant work in Napa on the Rutherford Reach Restoration Project and the lower Napa River’s augmented wetlands and has proven herself both knowledgeable and continuously engaged. She’s willing to discuss the possible effects of climate change on Napa by midcentury with the proviso that it is simply informed speculation.

  The population of California is expected to rise by at least a third in 2050, to sixty million people. Temperatures should be between 4 and 7 percent higher than today. Part of the difficulty of predicting is that the effects of this rise vary according to how much rain falls each year, but a conservative estimate is that water shortages will be severe, and certainly so by contemporary standards.

  The effect of climate change on the watershed itself will be more alarming, with sequential tree die-offs due to the increasing heat, and rain deficits. A significant increase in the number and intensity of wildfires will be due to much more fallen, incendiary timber. The scarcity of water will likely hamper firefighting efforts, and most properties will not be judged worth the effort to save them.

  As for the river itself, flooding is likely to continue due to rarer but more intense storms, which means that mid-valley the water will continue to inundate vineyards and residential spreads. The city of Napa won’t be much affected since a three-foot sea rise could be accommodated by the wetlands to the south. But sedimentation will continue upstream with increased vineyard construction and because both river and streams continue to cut into steep, scoured-out hillsides.

  Tree clearing in the hills will mean ever-increasing runoff and sedimentation, and a greater loss of water that would otherwise soak into the ground and replenish pockets of water in the valley’s vast subsurface of broken rock which feed the aquifer. Houses and other structures are and will ever be a still-far-worse fate than vineyards, however, because they prevent water from being absorbed by the earth and exacerbate all other environmental problems.

  Water will remain the biggest concern. In the end, she says, “It could come down to who gets it—people or grapes?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:

  Jefferson’s Ghost

  1.

  The trailer court is off Soscol Avenue, on the northwestern edge of the city of Napa. Single- and double-wides have been cladded to look like real houses, with driveways and even some trees. The cars are clean and bright in the sun, the speed bumps effective, and the small, meticulously kept lawns as devoid of people as those in more affluent subdivisions.

  Halfway around the loop a little-noticed lane leads south, then west. Follow it between two long lines of makeshift fencing and suddenly perception is bent and an alternative life appears in the gap between reality and fancy: fruit trees, a couple of middling redwoods, a yellow farmhouse with a tin roof and an old, steep-raftered, swaybacked barn, all suggesting—if you ignore the solar panels—not 2016 but 1904.

  Stroll past the old head-trained merlot vineyard where tiny marigolds grow amid native grasses. A narrow-gauge tractor bakes in the sun, near a defunct, one-armed pump for Go Further gas. Beyond the knife-edged shadow of the barn is a spraying tank, stacked rebar, a pile of jacks and plastic cans, a little Caterpillar, and a pastiche of old tools and artifacts rivaling Randy Dunn’s.

  A pickup pulls in and a slight young man gets out, wearing a T-shirt and jeans but looking decidedly more metrosexual than redneck: short, receding hair, an open if watchful demeanor, blue eyes. His name’s Steve Matthiasson and this place has survived largely through inadvertence and discovery by his wife, Jill, while reading the Napa Valley Register.

  He worked then for a vineyard service company, she ran a nonprofit out of their house in the heart of Napa city, both yearning for a place in the country to which they could move before their two boys were ten years old. They had long searched for what was no longer supposed to exist: an inexpensive remnant of the vanished past affordable to a young couple without inheritance or stock plays. And yet here one apparently was, right on the county line, right in front of everybody’s eyes but too shabby to be noticed.

  Jill sent Steve to investigate. He couldn’t find the house. There wasn’t anything in the GPS data bank, but he finally stumbled upon what was clearly a teardown, called the old Bruno Ranch, which had subsisted for a long time on chickens, walnuts, prunes, hay, and merlot before the place went vacant. “They couldn’t sell it because of the trailer camp. It had only three electrical plugs, blankets over the windows. Plaster was falling off the walls, and the Wedgewood stove was full of trash.”

  He brought Jill back to look at it, and she started crying. They made a low-ball offer anyway, and to their surprise it was accepted. So they sold their house in town and bought this misery trove on five hardscrabble acres, too close to a revamped trailer court to ever be chic. Steve’s mother, visiting at the time, stripped to her underwear and started spackling, setting the pace for a long-term effort.

  To a stranger the place seems to embody both the Jeffersonian ideal of self-sufficiency and the incessant labor of vineyard life that Jefferson questioned later on. Both Jill and Steve still have day jobs, and he has three or four, depending on the number of viticultural clients. Born in Winnipeg, Steve spent time on a family farm in North Dakota and ended up in San Francisco, his biography already dense with the stations of the millennial cross: philosophy student, punk rocker, bike messenger, community gardener, UC Davis student, and a partner committed to a reordering of an old American agricultural dream.

  Jill worked for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and organized field days and community food box deliveries. Steve wanted to make wine, and he saw Napa as “a marquee region equivalent to Bordeaux, Tuscany, Rioja,” based on wines he had tasted, all made before the cult wine phenomenon. He thought those of the 1970s and 1980s could be made in that style again, in Napa. Even some of Napa’s signature cabernets made in the early 1990s had great appeal. “The Mondavi Reserve blew me away,” he recalls, when asked for an example. “I was waiting for the pendulum to swing back again.”

  He worried about the Napa brand “maintaining relevance.” Like Bordeaux, it wasn’t as exciting as at an earlier time, yet he found himself defending it. Then he got a job offer in the valley and accepted: “I felt like we were getting out of the bush leagues.”

  He had given up on buying a farm and began making wine at a custom crusher from purchased grapes, “the most environmentally sound way,” leasing small plots owned by people who shared his tastes and farming values. “We found we could pay modestly and farm our own vines on their land. There was so much going on in this valley, much of it under the radar.”

  With the barter of time and expertise he got advice and the use of others’ equipment. “You could figure out how to get things done, and there’s always somebody you can borrow from. It was like doing a startup in Silicon Valley.” Meet somebody at a school drop-off during harvest who has extra grapes and make a deal. Chat with someone who’s not happy with her corks and realize you can help her, all counter to the corporate model.

  Then the old Bruno place came along. “It’s still a tumultuous time in Napa,” he says, “like the 1960s” but far from Aquarian. In fact it’s the opposite, instead of drugs and free love “you challenge the system from the inside, and accept hard, cooperative work.”

  The story evokes memories of early Napa adventures like those at Schramsberg, Stag’s Leap, Newton, Forman, Dunn. They all found the valley a relatively unspoiled place where the future of farming was a spiritual pursuit with its own scriptural texts in the Williamson Act and the law establishing the agricultural preserve. Newly arriving inhabitants of white elephants seemed to accept inherent limitations on what they could do and share a concern for overall well-being.

  “Eden” is a figurative stretch for what the valley once represented, but all vestiges of that early innocence are lost. The remnant fig leaf kept in place by the wine and hospitality industries grows more tattered every year, revealing more schemes to transform a way of life i
nto a marketable experience as or more valuable than the thing itself. Napa isn’t Disneyland, but it is a “destination” for the enjoyment of the “other,” farming’s savvy cousin out there creating envy in the vineyard.

  Steve used stuff he found in the old barn and still does. It’s an unreproducible resource as only some implements of former toil can be. In what would now be called a “heritage vineyard” he grafted other vines onto the merlot rootstock and kept making wine. In a few years people started writing about his subtle flavors and low alcohol. Some were made of the usual suspects, like chardonnay, while others were made from grapes few had heard of, including Ribolla.

  Then Jon Bonné wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, “and sales really kicked in,” Steve remembers. His wines weren’t cheap, but neither were they expensive by Napa standards. There’s something ineffable there that big, fruity blockbusters lack, not shock and awe, integrity.

  The Matthiasson brand fit nicely within the farm-to-table movement, “less about technique, more about impeccable fruit. Young people started seeking out new brands. The old success path was still Parker and the Spectator, but we didn’t take it.” He pauses. “The hundred-point scale’s ridiculous—they wouldn’t put carrots on it, for instance. A good score still helps, but a ‘bad’ score doesn’t necessarily hurt now.”