Another mile or two and you are in Rutherford, with Inglenook's venerable, ivy-covered stone buildings set back under live oak trees on you left, and Beaulieu's winery like a windowless fortress on your right. The former was fouded in 1879 by a Finnish sea captain, Gustav Nybom (or Niebaum), who had made an early fortune out of Alaskan furs. The chatelaine of Beaulieu is Madame Georges de Latour, whose husband for nearly forty years was one of the leading viticulturists of northern California.
From Rutherford north, through St. Helena and Calistoga, there are almost as many wineries as houses. A great many of these producers, of course, sell their wine in bulk; of the fifty bonded wineries listed by the Wine Institute, eight or ten, at the outside, put out bottled wine that can be purchased in Chicago or New Orleans or New York—the others, to the average consumer, can have little more than an academic interest. A tourist, however, will not want to miss any of the following plants, some of which bottle, and some of which do not. From south to north:
Inglenook. Very Old-World, baronial, and impressive.
Beaulieu. You can't miss the vineyards. The winery is an interesting combination of traditional and modern.
Louis Martini. Admirably efficient and modern. Impressive.
Beringer. Famous for its old tunnels cut back into the stone of its precipitous hillside.
Souverain. A small-scale family winery, and a good one.
Cresta Blanca. The largest operation in the Napa Valley.
Charles Krug. A historic old place, regaining a good deal of its ancient fame under the direction of the Mondavi brothers.
Freemark Abbey. Picturesque and interesting.
California Champagne Company. Originally the celebrated Schram vineyard, home of the Schramsberger of 1890's fame.
Tubbs Winery. Supposed to be a replica (it is not a very accurate one) of Chateau Lafite.
As far as wines are concerned, medals were won at the 1947 and 1948 California Sate Fairs by Napa wines from the following producers: Beaulieu, Inglenook, Martini, Beringer, Souverain, Krug, Larkmead. And just for the record, it might be a good idea to keep your eye on the following, who have so far not entered the commercial market:
The Draper vineyard and winery in the hills west of St. Helena.
The Mayacamas Vineyard, high in the hills west of Napa.
The To Kalon (Martin Stelling) vineyard, which has one of the largest young plantings of superior varieties in California.
The Souverain Cellars, which have won several medals for Zinfandel and Pinot Noir and will probably win more.
In the Napa Valley, as almost everywhere else in California, there is a direct and generally predictable relation between the quality of any producer's wine and the varieties of grapes that he grows in his vineyard. In this respect, Napa still has the unhappy legacy of the dry years to contend with—acres of Alicante Bouschet and Carignane and even Mission on the bottomland, all too few Pinots, all too few Cabernets, all too few Rieslings, and, as a whole, too few vineyards on the hillsides, too many on the flat. But, especially in the new plantings, the proportion of better grapes is extraordinarily high, and it seems probable that the name of Napa will fully regain its old luster, especially if it is safe-guarded and restricted and advertised (as it deserves to be but at present is not) by a strong association of local growers.
The fifteen years since repeal have been less kind to the Sonoma Valley than to Napa. For this little district, birthplace or at least cradle of the fine wine industry in California, where, over ninety years ago, General Vallejo made twenty thousand gold dollars in a single season out of his vineyard of five thousand vines, seems to have fallen on evil days. There are still a few good vineyards, but there is not a single bottler of superior wine in the Sonoma Valley. Most of the fine grapes go elsewhere—those from the Goldstein Ranch, now known as Monterosso, over to Louis Martini's winery in St. Helena; the Rieslings and Traminers from the old Bundschu place, south to Almaden in Santa Clara County; the Cabernets from the Kunde hillsides, in most years, to Fountain Grove. And yet, all the way from Vineburge to Glen Ellen and from the bay north to Los Guilicos, this can and should be, has been and will be again, almost another Cote D'Or or another Rheingau.
The Sonoma Mission, California's northernmost and last to be established, was founded in 1823 and christened San Francisco Solano. A year later, the mission vineyard consisted of over a thousand vines, and it seems reasonable to suppose that by 1825 or 1826, wine of a sort was being made in Sonoma by the Franciscan padres.
Sonoma's Golden Age, however, began in the 1850's, and it owed its development in large part to the activities of one extraordinary individual, Count or (as he later chose to call himself) Colonel Agaston Haraszthy. Forced to leave his native Hungary on account of his liberal leanings, he made his way, after a remarkable series of adventures, by way of Sauk City, Wisconsin, and San Diego, to San Francisco; in 1858 he purchased a farm, or ranch, known as Buena Vista, on the low hills southeast of Sonoma. In the following decade, making and losing a couple of fortunes en route, he completely transformed and modernized the wine industry of California and traveled through Europe as the governor's special agricultural delegate, bringing back with him over 100,000 cuttings of “1,400 varieties,” a good many of which, on the basis of present evidence, would seem to have beem mislabeled. He found time, meanwhile, to construct a series of “champagne tunnels” at Buena Vista, to write an outstandingly interesting book, to build a villa in the Renaissance style, to make what was called California's best brandy, and a “Tokay worth eight dollars a gallon.”
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