Californian vineyards
The great wine rush
Harry Eyres
From Peter Newton's winery 1300 feet up in the hills you get a Condor's eye view of the Napa valley. It is small and narrow — twenty miles long by five wide, hemmed in by rocky blue ranges crested with Douglas fir and redwood — and the valley floor is awash with vines glowing fluores- cent green in the sun. The vine-flood of the valley floor is a recent phenomenon, like most things in this born-again wine region. 'Before Prohibition, all the vines were planted on the hillsides,' explains Newton, a tall, pigeon-chested Englishman of a certain age, who wears a cravat and a cardigan under his corduroy jacket, despite the 80-degree heat. 'The Italians and Por- tuguese who grew the grapes here thought that flat land was too valuable to waste on vines. So we are returning to tradition by planting on hillsides. Hillside vineyards also produce better wine.'
We are standing in the courtyard of the winery, which has elements of both a Buddhist shrine and an institute of contem- porary art. It was designed by Newton's Chinese wife, who is a Professor of Marketing (sic) in San Francisco. We pile into Newton's battered jeep and tear up a dirt track with a gradient of about one in three. 'So you're a journalist?' Newton asks, engaging four-wheel drive as we head up an even more precipitous slope among the trees. 'I used to be a journalist myself — wrote the Lex column in the FT, in fact. Then I got the FT to post me out here, on a sort of roving assignment, and I ended up in the wine business. I created Sterling Vineyards here in Napa, starting in 1964, when there were very few other wineries around, perhaps ten or twelve, compared to 150 before Prohibition and 200 odd now. Then I sold out to Coca-Cola and was able to buy this place.'
`My original interest in wine was in bordeaux reds, so I decided to plant the classic bordeaux varieties, cabernet sauvig- non, merlot, cabernet franc and petit verdot. We have 600 acres of rubbish forest — scrub, with a few Doug firs and mad- rones — of which 100 are planted to vines. The exciting thing is the variety of soils at least five different types.'
Peter Newton may not seem the most obvious representative of the Californian wine industry, but he is not as atypical as he might appear. Everyone is doing every- thing in California wine, and all at the same time. Planting on hills, planting in the valley; planting dense, planting far apart; loving merlot, hating merlot; prefer- ring American oak, abhorring American oak — you name it, somebody is doing it, somebody else is doing the opposite, and both can tell you exactly why the other guy is barking up the wrong oak (Limousin or Nevers, light toast or heavy, château staves or export staves . . .).
What is the motor driving all this manic activity? Why, the usual one, though in a somewhat unusual form. The money that has flowed into the Napa valley has come largely from people who have made a pile in other fields and want to, plough it back is not quite the term, but simply divest themselves of a chunk of it. Money has a mind of its own though. Vineyard land is now changing hands for about $50,000 an acre, five times as much as it cost eight years ago. Or rather, was changing hands. John Thacher of Cuvaison, who makes beautifully refined chardonnay, has been scouring Napa for suitable land for 18 months without success, and money is not the problem. 'The champagne firms, first Moet, then Piper-Heidsieck, Taittinger, and Freixenet from Spain, have all bought land. The Japanese have bought two wineries. It is becoming impossible to find land to buy.' The consequence of the inflation of land prices has been an infla- tion of wine prices.
All this may help to explain why Peter Newton has gone up into the hills (cheaper to buy, though more expensive to work). It may also explain why he needs to charge around $15 a bottle for his cabernet,. I am not sure if it is worth it, because the '86 is still raspingly tannic. A barrel sample of Petit Verdot, a rough diamond of a wine, did, however, suggest that the mountain- men might have a point.
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