A Vineyard in Napa. Doug Shafer
Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2008), 25.
4. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters (London: Chattus and Windus, 1893), accessed June 20, 2011, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Stevenson/SilveradoSquatters.
5. William F. Heintz, California’s Napa Valley: One Hundred Sixty Years of Wine Making (San Francisco, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1999), 121.
6. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, pp. 27 and 28.
7. Stags Leap District Appellation Committee (John Shafer, Chairman), Petition to Establish the Viticultural Area of “Stags Leap,” August 22, 1985, private archive, Stags Leap District.
8. “Napan Hurt When Horse Strikes Car,” Napa Register, January 2, 1973, 2A.
9. William F. Heintz, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Site History: Parker Hill, 1984, client-commissioned research project, William F. Heintz Collection, p. 39.
FOUR
The Pendulum Swings
Home winemakers were allowed to produce as much as two hundred gallons a year for their own consumption during Prohibition. Selling wine grapes to these winemaking operations in basements across the country helped create a decent living for some growers in the Valley. There was a pretty lively illegal alcohol trade as well. According to our neighbor, Frank Perata, who lived on our property as a boy in the 1940s, there is an old moonshine that is still buried somewhere along the creek behind the winery. In addition, when Frank’s father was tearing down a decrepit outbuilding, he found a secret storage area for wine barrels under the floorboards.
Slowly the stars began to align for Napa Valley with the end of Prohibition in 1933. Wine was still almost solely of interest to German and Italian immigrants. This continued to be a beer and whiskey country, so no one here was getting rich but at least making wine couldn’t get you thrown in the slammer anymore.
Toward the end of World War II, the government built a prisoner of war camp along Silverado Trail (near where Conn Dam is located today) complete with barbed-wire fences and a guard tower. Perata remembers that the German POWs were rented out to local growers to tend walnut orchards and vineyards here in Stags Leap.
The war had a bigger effect here than providing cheap labor from the Third Reich; it sparked several things that helped create favorable conditions for a Napa resurgence. The postwar period saw big national economic expansion—the importance of this can’t be underestimated. The gunpowder of every boom is money.
This creation of wealth coincided with an upswing in American interest in wine. Many military men and women who had been stationed in Europe returned home bringing new Mediterranean-inspired food and drink cravings with them.
By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, residents of San Francisco, movie stars, Bay Area connoisseurs, and others started visiting in the Valley in greater numbers to try wines at Robert Mondavi’s new winery and at other places, such as Sutter Home and Louis M. Martini Winery.
By the early 1970s, Napa Valley wine was on the cusp of a very different era. The 1972 harvest garnered the highest prices anyone had ever seen for grapes. The overall crop value was $19.4 million, nearly $2.5 million more than the previous year.1 According to an ebullient Time cover story on California’s soaring wine industry, Napa Valley had “run out of vineyard land.”2 (Not true, but points for enthusiasm.)
Our family was showing up to a party that had just gotten started. However, as we would learn, in spite of all the actual and meta phorical California sunshine, every setback experienced by those first Napa wine pioneers—economic downturns, killer bugs, bad weather, and fickle public tastes—would circle back and challenge us as well.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1972 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1973, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
2. Patricia Delaney, “American Wine Comes of Age,” Time, November 27, 1972, 81.
FIVE
Arrival—1973
We met my mom in San Francisco and drove into Napa Valley on a sunny January morning. The hills were vibrant green, and the air was warm enough that you could wear a T-shirt. For a Chicago native this was a jaw-dropping introduction to the season they called winter out here. We drove north on the two-lane Silverado Trail out of the town of Napa, passing walnut orchards, hay fields, and vineyards. Cattle chewed their cud and stared at us from hillside pastures.
About seven miles north of Napa, Dad turned on the blinker, and we made a right onto a narrow drive that jogged around the base of a forested hill. The road split on the far side of the hill, and we went left.
The arrow-straight drive was flanked on both sides by row upon row of nut-brown, skeletal grapevines in winter hibernation. The roadway ended at a collection of odd little buildings, dominated by the part-adobe, part-stone house with a red tile roof. The rest were creaky-looking outbuildings. Beyond these structures, however, was an incredible sight—massive green hillsides shot through here and there with craggy, thrusting bedrock. And blocking out nearly half of the eastern sky stood towering cliff s called the Stags Leap Palisades.
When I’d imagined California, I’d thought of beaches, dune buggies, and oiled, bronzed skin. This was like nothing I’d pictured.
The house looked as though it had started as a modest stone structure that was later expanded, several times, by builders with more vigor than skill. Its tile roof seemed like a Mediterranean afterthought. The interior was all crooked floors and doorways, and its oddly scented rooms echoed, since there wasn’t yet a stick of furniture in the place.
That first night, with the moving truck still several days away, we unfurled sleeping bags in the living room, stoked a fire in the fireplace—the house’s only heat source—and pretended we were camping. My parents were buoyant and energized by this new chapter in their lives, and my brother and I couldn’t help but become infected by their sense of adventure.
As I lay in my sleeping bag that night, I took in the foreign feel of this place. The sounds outside were like nothing I’d heard before—vast silences broken occasionally by the yelping of a coyote, the hooting of an owl, the rustle of oak leaves from the huge, shaggy trees just outside. With no streetlights for miles in any direction, the night sky out the off-kilter window was a rich, limitless blackness fogged with stars.
It wasn’t Oak Street, and it was light years from Malibu. But already this felt like it could become home.
SIX
Grapes
I landed at my new school, St. Helena High, pretty easily earning a position right away on the varsity basketball team—something that would