IN GENERAL, as you go north, almost anywhere in Europe or the United States, the climate becomes consistently and perceptibly colder practically county by county, sometimes mile by mile. There are a few exceptions—climatic eddies and backwaters, so to speak—districts such as the great wine-producing area north of San Francisco Bay, where, on a weatherman's map the isothermic lines and the lines of latitude form a patternless tangle of hot northern valley and cool southern plains, where the hilltops are often warmer than the lowlands and where, traveling due north, you can move from the climate of northern France to that or central Italy within thirty miles.
This whole extraordinary country, approximately sixty miles long and half as wide, consists principally of Napa and Sonoma Counties, plus perhaps a corner of Contra Costa. It is actually farther south than Washington, D. C., or Rome, and it is indebted for its long, fairly cool, dry summers and adequate winter rainfall to its proximity to the ocean and to the fog and damp winds that blow in over San Francisco Bay and up the Russian River Valley every evening nearly twelve months out of the year. The farther you get from the bay or the ocean, going north or east, the warmer it is, and whereas the village of Sonoma and the town of Napa, which are both practically on tidewater, have summer temperatures much like those of Burgundy, in France, Calistoga and Cloverdale, farther north in the same counties, are as warm as southern Italy or Spain.
All of the really distinguished table wines of California come from about five or, at most, seven counties which, in the order of their annual over-all production, are as follows: Sonoma, Napa, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Benito, Santa Cruz. Here we shall attempt to deal only with two, but with the two most important—Sonoma and Napa.
It may be just as well, however, to give in passing a few further words of explanation as to why seven little counties, which produce no more than 10 per cent of California's total annual gallonage, are responsible for over 90 per cent of the fine table wine made in this country. Climate, of course, plays a major role, as does the fact that most of the northern coastal vineyards are planted on hills, or at least on fairly unfertile, rolling ground which does not require irrigation. But the question of grape varieties is even more important. No fine wine, anywhere in the world, has ever been made from anything except wine grapes, and all the best of it comes from a dozen or so varieties, useless for making raisins and poor or, at best, passable as table grapes.
As I write these lines, in December, California wineries have reported a total crush, for the 1948 vintage, of 1,281,-495 tons of grapes (a ton of grapes yields from 150 to 160 gallons of table wine, or from 90 to 100 gallons of fortified wine). Now out of this total of 1,281,495 tons, 319,397, according to the reporting wineries themselves, were table grapes, 523,333 tons were raisin grapes, and only 438,765 tons (under 35 per cent) wine grapes. In other words, only about a third of the 1948 California wine that Americans will drink has been made from wine grapes to begin with, and only a fraction of this third from wine grapes of superior quality.
On the other hand, about 85 per cent of the wine produced in the north coast counties is made from wine grapes (as against 35 per cent for California as a whole), and these counties include almost every commercial planting of superior varieties on the West Coast. At the 1948 State Fair in Sacramento, all the gold and silver medals for table wines, without exception, were awarded to wineries in the north coast counties, and no really outstanding table wine has, to my knowledge, ever been produced in California outside of these counties. It is therefore hardly surprising that most of the best American wines carry on their label not only the name of a specific wine grape, but also the name of a north coast county as well. And now back to our subject.
Sonoma and Napa Counties form, in general, the northern shore of that rather considerable inland sea known as San Francisco Bay. They are not, by any means, exclusively wine-producing districts: the great naval base of Mare Island is in Napa Country, and there are as many pear orchards and duck blinds as vineyards. Sonoma is hardly more famous for its wines than for its chicken farms (the town of Petaluma calls itself “the egg basket of the West”) and its cheeses and its summer resorts. In neither county, as you travel through, do you get the impression that wine is the livelihood and lifeblood of the countryside. You can get good Napa wine, if you insist, in a few restaurants and lunchrooms in Napa and St. Helena and Calistoga, and good Sonoma wine, rather less easily, in Sonoma and Santa Rosa and Healdsburg. In both counties the waiters and waitresses are astonished when an outsider orders one of their local wines by brand name and seem surprised even when you ask for a wine from Napa or Sonoma. Yet the economy of both counties is to a considerable extent based on wine, and nowhere in the United States will you find so high a proportion of laborers who prefer a glass of red wine to a glass of beer or whisky.
Let us hope that before long some of the better wine producers come to realize what a remarkable asset they possess in the way of an extraordinarily lovely district. If they gave a little guidance and help and advertising to a few enterprising restaurateurs, they could make of Napa and Sonoma a second Cote d'Or and second Rhone Valley, loved and praised and remembered by thousands of tourists every year. As it is, to those who care to visit America's major fine wine country, I can recommend the St. Gothard in St. Helena, and the Sonoma Mission Inn, north of Sonoma, as places to sleep, and, with some reservations, Lena's Buon Gusto in Santa Rosa and Galli's, near Hamilton Field on Route 101, as places to eat, and I do so thinking nostalgically of the necklace of incomparable restaurants which awaits the traveler on his way south from Paris, by way of Saulieu or Beaune, and Lyon, Vienne, Valence, Chateauneuf-du-Pape—all of them featuring, I need hardly add, the wines of their own local vineyards. Perhaps in America, wine producers as well as prophets are destined to be without honor in their own country.
Except in the fall, when the leaves are gone from the vines and the parched lowlands not yet green, Napa and Sonoma are both spectacularly beautiful. To one who knows Europe they recall southern Tuscany, or the hilly country behind Gibraltar, or the Valley of the Durance, east of Avignon. In every sheltered corner of the hills there are orange and lemon trees; the venerable live oaks and madrona trees stand alone in their fields like trees in a Poussin landscape, and the whole district has a sort of half-classical, almost Roman air.
As far as vineyards are concerned, Napa consists of the Napa Valley. Sonoma, farther west, includes not only the shallow little valley of Sonoma Creek, but the much more extensive and more important Russian River country, around Guerneville and Healdsburg and Asti, to the north.
The two valleys, Napa and Sonoma, some fifteen miles apart, run northwestward like parallel fingers from the marshy lowlands along the bay shore. Neither one, at its southern end, looks much like a valley—rather like a little depression in a district of irregular and rolling hills. But the hills, as you go north, become higher and more impressive, their upper slopes heavily wooded and covered with an almost impassable tangle of manzanita and laurel and California holly. The vineyards, few at first and scattered, become larger and more numerous, covering the whole narrowing floor of the valley, running back into the hills, forming a patchwork of lighter green among the firs and cedars of the uplands.
Together the two valleys, with the range of hills—known as the Mayacamas Mountains—which separates them, form one of the great viticultural districts of the world, capable of yielding with time and patience wines as fine as any that France and Germany have produced. Three-quarters of a century ago, it seemed that this promise was well on its way to fulfillment, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent some months near St. Helena, in the Napa Valley, could write:
“Wine in California is still in the experimental stage…. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for precious metals: the wine-grower also ‘prospects.’ One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. … So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. These lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; these virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under the sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.”
By 1900 there were at least sixty or seventy prosperous wineries in the Napa Valley; scores of little corners in the Mayacamas uplands had been cleared, in search of those “Bonanzas” of which Stevenson wrote; Napa wines had become famous, not only in San Francisco, but in New York; and they had even won medals and acclaim in expostions abroad. Over 18,000 acres in Napa County were planted to vines, a high proportion of the vines were of good varieties, and a high proportion of the vineyards were on the upland slopes, rather than on the flat, alluvial, too-fertile valley floor.
All of this peaceful, pictureesque, and industrious little world, which had been so laboriously created, mostly by French and German settlers and Chinese labor, over a period of six decades, was destroyed by national prohibition in a matter of months. The hill vineyards were abandoned to the tangled brushwood that surrounded them; the lower vineyards were replanted in tough, productive grapes that would stand transcontinental shipment to home wine-makers in the East; the wineries, one by one, fell into disuse and ruin. Only a few survived the holocaust and by making sacramental wine eked out a precarious existence until repeal. Out of more than threescore Napa producers in 1917, Inglenook, Beaulieu, and Beringer alone are still operating on a major scale and still in the hands of the families that owned them prior to prohibition.
The past fifteen years have undone a good deal, but by no means all, of the mischief worked by the Eighteenth Amendment. The wineries are busy and most of them prosperous again, even if some of the old buildings proved beyond repair. The rolling foothills are once more covered with the orderly regiments of newly staked young vines, and a few courageous pioneers are even trying to bring back into production the mountain vineyards that once were responsible for Napa's finest wines.
The shady and sleepy little town of Napa, at the valley's southern end, has never been much of a center of the wine trae—its major vineyard before prohibition was Judge Stanly's La Loma, which, southwest of the town, slopes gently down behind its enormous eucalyptus trees to tidewater. Napa Creek is really an estuary rather than a river, and a mile south of the town, as often as not, you can see the funnels and superstructure of an ocean-going ship rising out of what appears to be pasture-land, with no water in sight.
Two parallel roads and an unimpressive little single-track railway line run northwest from Napa into the vineyard country. One of these roads (the poorer, incidentally) is the picturesque, winding Silverado Trail, of which Stevenson wrote, in his silverado squatters, over sixty year ago; the other, less romantically named Route 29, skirts most of the major vineyards and passes within a few hundred yards of the important wineries. In Yountville, a dozen miles from Napa, is the old brick Groezinger winery, once the Valley's largest and at last active again under the name Mountain View. A little farther north, near Oakville, is To Kalon, where, fifty years ago, Hiram W. Crabb Used to make What was regarded as the best Burgundy of California. It is now owned by Mr. Martin Stelling and undergoing a major renaissance.
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.”
A ridiculous political dispute in the state legislature made it impossible for the good Colonel to distribute his imported cuttings in an orderly manner, as he had planned. Financial troubles ensued, and although the Colonel's sons, who had been sent to spend an apprenticeship in the vineyards abroad, unquestionably were the most competent wine men in California, Haraszthy eventually lost control of his cellars and vineyard. Indefatigable and undiscouraged, he set up a sugar plantation in Nicaragua in 1868 and a year later disappeared into a river “infested with crocodiles.”
Haraszthy, however, had provided the momentum for the take-off; the rest was comparatively easy. Two itinerant German musicians, Kohler and Frohling, parlayed a little vineyard near Los Angeles, which they purchased in 1854, into a wine empire which included vines in Sonoma, ten great “wine vaults” in San Francisco, a resident agen in New York, and an export trade, around the Horn, to Denmark, England, and northern Germany. Arpad Haraszthy, who remained in charge of the Buena Vista Cellars after his father's departure, produced California's first successful champagne, Eclipse, which became famous. Emil Dresel and the Gundlach-Bundschu Wine Company planted, along the lower foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains near Vineburg, the Riesling, Traminer, and Sylvaner grapes which even today, in their old age, yield some of the best Rhine type of wines of California. The whole fertile little valley was rimmed with vines by 1900.
Most of these, alas, are overgrown today and gone. It is a disheartening sight, as you drive northward from Sonoma to Santa Rosa, to see, on acre after acre of what could and should be some of America's best wine-producing country, the faint patchwork squares of abandoned vineyard. A few hardy farmers continue to grow grapes—they sell them, for a good deal less than they are worth, either outside the Valley or to one of five or six bulk-wine producers in Sonoma or kenwood or Glen Ellen.
Back in the wooded hills west of Glen Ellen are the fire-scarred ruins of Jack London's once celebrated home. And near Glen Ellen is the one winery that offers anything of interest to a thirsty lover of picturesque and ancient buildings. Most of us who are not Californians or who are of more recent vintage are inclined to forget that the great earthquake in 1906 did not stop at the city limits of San Francisco but devastated a whole countryside. Charlie Pagani's Glen Ellen Winery, being as durable as they come, suffered a minor casualty—it was bent, not broken, by the tremors and survives today, incredibly and magnificently sway-backed but as solid as ever.
The little chain of hills that forms the western slope of the Sonoma Valley peters out after a few miles, and once you cross the low saddle at the head of the Valley, you still have the Mayacamas Mountains on your right, but a wide plain on your left. With one exception, in this fertile country of orchards and hops round Santa Rosa, there are no vineyards of consequence. The exception is Fountain Grove.
It is true, of course, that in a country where Germans and Italians and Frenchmen, Finns and Chinese and Russians and New Englanders, counts and trappers, musicians and colonels were all numbered among the original settlers, the extraordinary becomes commonplace. But even in such company, the history of Fountain Grove is unusual. For a number of years it was one of those curious “cooperative commonwealths” that sprouted up like mushrooms, under the guidance of self-appointed “prophets,” all over America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The “prophet” of Fountain Grove was one Thomas Lake Harris, whose disciples included members of some of the most distinguished families of England and whose principal acolyte was a prince of the Royal House of Japan, Kanaye Nagasawa. It was Nagasawa who created Fountain Grove as it now exists; toward the end of his life, proud of the rolling vineyards that he had planted to Cabernet, Zinfandel, Riesling, and Pinot Noir, he became known as one of the best judges of wine of the West Coast. The vineyard is owned today by Errol MacBoyle and is one of the few in Sonoma which, in grape varieties and cellar equipment and general all-round quality, deserves to rank with the elite of Napa.
This northern half of Sonoma County, from Santa Rosa to Asti and Cloverdale, is, incidentally, the only important part of California's fine-wine country which lies outside the basin of San Francisco Bay. It is drained instead by the Russian River, a picturesque, meandering little stream which rises in the north near Ukiah, flows south parallel to the coast, and then, at Healdsburg, cuts abruptly west through the magnificent redwoods of the Coast Range to the Pacific. Its valley, between Healdsburg and the ocean, is thick with summer cottages and picnic grounds, and there is only one winery of consequence—the old stone champagne plant of the Korbel family, at Guerneville. The Korbels, originally from Bohemia, made a fortune in the lumber business, and some of the gigantic stumps of their original redwoods are still to be seen among the vines.
A high proportion of the early vineyardists in the Sonoma Valley were Germans, and French settlers were largely responsible for the development of Santa Clara, but the Russian River Valley, from Healdsburg north, is a sort of little Italy. Even the Countryside, with its rolling, irregular, reddish hills, looks surprisingly Italian and recalls nothing so much as the Monferrato, the classic district of fine wine southeast of Turin. The wines, too, are much more like those of Italy than of France—strudy, full-bodied, heavy in tannin and rich in color—though it would be hard to say whether this is due to a combination of soil and climate, or to the grape varieties used, or to traditional Italian methods of vinification. In any case, northern Sonoma has always specialized in red wines and concentrated on the production of something sound and honorable and inexpensive, rather than of something rare. Most of the small growers sell their wine in bulk, and almost all those who bottle, like the Italian-Swiss Colony, for example, do so on a very large scale.
Of Sonoma County's 20,000 acres under vines, about 9,000 are planted to Zinfandels, 3,000 to Petite Sirahas, and 2,000 to Carignanes. These, of course, are not varieties likely to produce a Chambertin or a chateau Latour. What they can and do produce, in gratifying abundance, is something that we can all afford to drink, and drink with enjoyment, at our daily dinner table.