By Karen MacNeil
This is the story of small plot of land. It may seem like a story about people, because many of the people here have become famous.
But it’s the land that that holds the real power. The land has waved an invisible ancient hand over these people. And, knowingly or not, they do what she says.
On the face of it, this land, Napa Valley, looks rather unassuming—a peaceful valley slouched between mountains on each side. It’s not as dramatic as the Douro or as magnificent as the Mosel. It isn’t, as Bordeaux is, bejeweled with dazzling châteaux around every corner. Here, in this place, they once grew prunes.
And yet, this 30-mile sliver of land has become the most prestigious viticutural land—and the most expensive agricultural land—in the whole country. How can that be? How did Napa Valley become wine’s Camelot?
Here is the valley’s story:
Before the calm, there was violence. One hundred and fifty million years ago the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust were in chaotic motion, shifting and grinding against one another, driven by the 10,000-degree (Fahrenheit) molten core beneath. A giant volcanic arc rose up—the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And onto the edge of the North American continent, a landmass was plastered—a landmass that would become California.
By 25 million years ago, the plates were in brutal conflict. As the North American plate crashed into the Pacific Plate, the two slid past each other forming a giant fracture, the San Andreas fault. By 3 million years ago, under the enormous force of compression, California would be squeezed and sheared into crumpled coastal valleys running along the fault lines of the plates themselves. One of those valleys was the tiny Napa Valley.
Although volcanic by birth, the valley was, at times, covered in water fed by a giant inland sea (today’s Central Valley). When those waters receded, the sediments left behind were threaded into the tapestry of volcanic rock and ash. The land was creating herself—a geography unlike any other on earth. It must have been magical. Brilliant sun by day. Cooling sea air sweeping in off the Pacific by night. Can you be in a place and sense such magic?
I often ask Napa Valley winemakers that question. Can they stand in a vineyard—sometimes before it even is a vineyard—and know, by intuition, that the wine will be great? Remarkably, many of them say yes.
If there was a single event that jump-started the Napa Valley’s modern era, it was the Gold Rush. In the two years from 1848 to 1850, San Francisco alone went from 800 inhabitants to 25,000.
Many of the men who had come to strike it rich were poor. Most never became wealthy. But with no money to return to the East Coast or Europe, many turned from prospecting to the only occupations they knew—farming and grape growing.
In a stroke of immense luck and virtually overnight, Northern California had the two entities you needed to start a wine industry: a large pool of skilled viticultural labor and an enormous market of people desperately happy to drink the wine that was made. Napa Valley was perfectly poised—just about half way between the Gold counties to the north, and the saloons, bars and boarding houses of San Francisco to the south.
From the 1860s through the late 1880s, Napa Valley experienced its first golden age. After the founding of Charles Krug (1861), Schramsberg (1862), Beringer (1876), and Inglenook (1879), more than a hundred other wineries followed. Napa Valley wines were showing up in top restaurants in New York, London and Paris. But a dark period was about to follow. And it would last half a century.
The insect Daktulosphaira vitifoliae—better known as phylloxera-- had been destroying the vineyards of Europe for two decades by this point. No one imagined it would circle the globe and come to California. It did.
But phylloxera, plus a deepening national financial crisis, were just the beginning. World War I began in 1914, Prohibition began in 1920. The stock market collapsed in 1929. World War II started in 1939. Even the Napa Valley Railroad went out of business, and the rail tracks fell silent.
By the end of the 1930s, most of Napa Valley’s wineries were insolvent. The few that survived did so by making sacramental wine for priests and ministers (a rash of new religious sects had formed) and by making nonprescription medicinal wine “tonics” (blends of salt and beef broth in a wine base) for the infirm and convalescent (whose numbers greatly increased).
From the 1940s to the mid-1960s, the Napa Valley, like the rest of California, made mostly cheap sweet jug wine. In fact, nationally, it wasn’t until 1967 that dry wine out sold sweet wine for the first time. The leading white grape in the valley was French Colombard; the leading red was Petite Sirah.
Still, there were glimmers of a reawakening. The Napa Valley Vintners Association had been founded in 1944 with just seven men, including a young Robert Mondavi, who pledged to “exchange ideas and solve business problems.”
Then came the late 1960s, and Napa Valley entered its second golden age. Robert Mondavi had founded his own winery, and the Chappellets, Trefethens, Heitzs, McCreas (of Stony Hill) and Davies (Schramsberg) all arrived. Many of them had never grown so much as a tomato, but undeterred, they moved ambitiously forward, confident that their determination and business acumen would win out in the end.
By the mid-1970s, the valley was bursting wide open with a critical mass of talented dreamers. The Duckhorns, Cakebreads, Phelps’s, Shafers, Duncans (Silver Oak), Novaks (Spottswoode), Barretts (Chateau Montelena) and scores of others all arrived within five years of each other. When, in 1973, the French luxury company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy bought nearly 1,000 acres of Napa land (for $1,100 an acre), and began Chandon California, the sense that Napa Valley was about to spring onto the global wine scene was palpable. You could almost taste the rise in property values.
Many know the heady days and decades that followed. The Judgement of Paris tasting; the emergence of the American critic Robert M. Parker; the rise of the consulting winemaker; the establishment of the Napa Valley as an official AVA (only the second American Viticultural Area in the entire country); the first bottle of Napa wine to break the $100 a bottle ceiling (a Diamond Creek “Lake Vineyard” 1987), followed by the first to crash through the $500 a bottle barrier (Harlan 2006). And so many other pivotal successes.
And now? Where is Napa Valley now? The days of driving up to the winery and finding the owner pumping over a vat of just-picked grapes are gone. There’s NASA technology in the wineries and fully electric self-driving smart tractors in the vineyards. The vintners who call this place home now come--not just from the United States and France--but from all over the world. They’ve all come, drawn by the valley’s gargantuan appetite for life.
And yet, in the dizzying spiral of successes that swirl around the valley, there remain the vines themselves. Testaments to the land. Bearing witness and bearing wine--the silent music of Nature. In every sip taken in the present we drink in the past. It is the lesson, conscious or not, that unites us all, wine drinkers as well as winemakers:
We must be guardians of this precious realm.
Karen MacNeil is the author of The Wine Bible and WineSpeed and conducts tastings for companies nationally. She can be found at karenmacneil.com. This essay was printed in The Realm Way, Third Edition.
