The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley - Hardcover

James Conaway, the author of nine previous books, is a contributing editor for Preservation and a regular contributor to Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, and Food & Wine magazines, among many others.

Prologue

At the south end of the valley, the Carneros hills roll in great earth swells
down toward San Pablo Bay, and at the north end the lowering presence of
Mount St. Helena sits like a cork in a bottle of opaque green glass.
The Napa River between these two points covers just thirty miles,
and the valley floor is only a couple of miles wide at its most commodious,
yet here, under skies oceanic in depth and color — a blue impossible in
most of the world"s climes — there occurred over the course of the
twentieth century something truly remarkable: agriculture withstood the
assault of development that overwhelmed the rest of this coveted bit of
California, and the product of that effort — wine — was made into a symbol of
privilege.
Meanwhile the valley, as is often said, became the envy of the
world. But in the last quarter century some of the idyllic character has
disappeared, and the valley, like the rest of the country, felt the pressure of
opposing views about what it should be and what it should look like. In the
1990s those tensions came forcefully into play here, and I was drawn to the
struggle in the belief that it embodied rudiments of the American character
and held clues about the future of the American landscape.
I had already written a book about Napa Valley, from research
done in the late 1980s, entitled Napa: The Story of an American Eden. I had
not been back for several years. When I did return I was surprised to find
many additional vineyards, more traffic, new mansions high in the rugged
but not inviolable hills, and a heightened sense of glamour; I also heard on all
sides contending views and strongly expressed expectations that each view
must prevail. Some people wanted only material prosperity, others only to
capture the moment in time, and these were clearly on a collision course.
I moved back for a time, the highway drawing me in like memory,
past the outskirts of the city of Napa in the south, into those broad
expanses of vineyard like unfurled bolts of corduroy planted also with houses
and recent manifestations of the booming tourist trade. I actually live on the
other side of the continent but here felt, in a way, that I was home, too, or at
least in some approximation of it: more than a tourist, less than a citizen.
I knew something of the valley"s history and topography, having
hiked in the bracketing, north-south–trending mountains that to the
unknowing eye are secure in their ruggedness and isolation — the
Mayacamas range on the west, dense with redwood and Douglas fir,
separates Napa and Sonoma valleys, and the Howell range on the east,
droughty, with a denser mix of chaparral amid the conifers, walls off the
farther reaches of Napa County — and I knew that the valley supported
great biological diversity. In addition to some of the finest Vitis vinifera on
earth there was a good complement of California"s native oaks, steelhead
trout, deer, black bears, and a few spotted owls.
The valley"s story, like California"s, is essentially one of success,
but in my absence some volatile elements had been added to the human
mix, and they were potent indeed. The engines of commerce and
electronics had carried the country into the greatest hegemony in human
history, producing unimaginable new wealth, and a disproportionate amount
of it had found its way into the valley. At the same time, there had flowered a
school of protest with no roots in the commodity that had made the valley
famous and was in fact hostile to it. These two elements were new, and
already on the way to a showdown.
I found a place to live, in St. Helena, one of four "up-valley" towns:
a room with a bed and table, windows shielded by mock orange trees, a
sun-washed kitchen and a deck. There was a good restaurant just down the
block, but I used it infrequently. I listened to the sprinklers each night, and
awoke each morning to a fresh world, the exuberance of roses and mallows
lining the fence replaced by the smell of baked earth that is so Napan. A
few steps led to vineyards that surrounded the town and made available to
the lowliest visitor open, matchless vistas of mountains and sky.
The months I spent in that little house were happy and productive,
and I am grateful for them. It was the end of the nineties, that lost decade
so full of hope and opportunity, and it seemed to me, in that place, at that
time, that the future lay out there, just beyond the garden.
I still believe that what happened in Napa Valley is relevant to the
rest of the country, however altered now are our interior landscapes. How
people living in a contained, beautiful part of America dealt with threats to
established order is in large part what this book is about. The account is
factual, and it is important to note that the story isn"t over yet. In this new
century ideals share equal space only if they are lucky with hard global
reality; meanwhile, the valley"s fate is being fixed in the long weave of
ambition and desire, wealth and restraint, vines and the wildness of chosen
places.
I
A Vineyard of One"s Own

1

Something had happened, something momentous, something involving
money, lots of it — what didn"t at century"s end? — but more complicated
and subtle. It pervaded the lives of Americans considered blessed by any
standard, with houses close to some of the best restaurants on earth, the
value of their property on a near-vertically ascending plane, their views of a
gorgeous pastoral dream: mountains, agriculture as old as human history,
wild mustard blooming in the spring and, in autumn, the air perfumed by
fermenting wine as precious as that of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and
Champagne.
San Francisco lay just across a sparkling inland sea, but the
finest things could be had right here, too, at stations of the new cross —
truffles at Sunshine Market, demi-glace at Dean & DeLuca. Appetites were
enhanced by the best weather in a state famous for it, and the proximity of
visiting Hollywood and other sorts of stars imbued existence with a certain
frisson. And even if there were five million tourists a year to deal with, well,
those already here in the Napa Valley were the envy of all who weren"t.
Yet something was wrong. People disagreed over when "it" had
happened, and why, but not about the effect: a real, and growing, sense of
loss.
They felt it while sitting in a long line of cars on Highway 29,
looking up at once pristine slopes dense with conifer and chaparral,
studded now with "steroid houses," "muscle houses," "McMansions," all
contemptuous names for places built not to live in but as monuments to
finance, visited by absentee owners. The locals felt it overhearing
conversations about vanity vineyards, "cult" cabernets, and gardens
with "water features" to cover the traffic noise.
If they wanted to buy a house to actually live in, or to trade up,
they had to listen to sales pitches not about the valley"s illustrious history,
its neighborliness, schools, and churches, all the old-fashioned values, but
about the proximity of Tra Vigne and the French Laundry. If they owned a
house already, they had to wait for a carpenter or a plumber because these
tradesmen worked for the owners of the muscle houses or redone
Victorians, and then the locals had to pay fees often inflated by the presence
of so much outside money.
Worst of all, they had to listen to the stories. Many of these
featured limousines but were otherwise interchangeable. "I was pruning my
roses when this couple gets out," began one such account. "He"s got on
wraparound shades and a five-hundred-dollar shirt with not enough buttons,
bought in Beverly Hills, and she"s wearing haute safari from wherever."
The visitor might also be driving a new Lexus and looking nerdy in
pressed jeans and granny glasses, sure sign of a Silicon Valley weekender.
These were the young beneficiaries of the computer boom, and realtors
referred to them as "the children."
The procedure was much the same: "He says, "I"ll give you . . . ,""
and here the figure varied among the millions, but was never less than one.
"I tell him the house isn"t for sale. He doubles the price. I have to go inside to
get away from him." Later, the visitor calls and triples the offer.
The problem was, many of the stories were true, like the one
about the house that sold for one-point-three, already an amazing sum for
such a modest place, and then the new owners "tweaked" the landscaping
— added some exotics and a stone wall — and sent to France for a
containerful of furniture. They put the house back on the market for two-point-
nine-five and received three instant offers for more. During escrow, an
unsuccessful bidder offered the buyer point-five just to step aside — half a
million dollars to get out of the way.
There was the house listed for four, bought by a venture capitalist
who had seen it only once. Upon seeing it a second time, he decided he no
longer fancied it and resold the house at a half-million-dollar loss to a thirty-
five-year-old working in the acquisitions department of a major bank. And
there was the cottage in the town of St. Helena, listed for
point-nine-two-five, bid up to one-point-three. After that, everybody with a
three-room Victorian guesthouse with one and a half baths thought it was
worth one-point-three, and it was.
Houses that were not for sale were auctioned off without the
knowledge of the owners, who were presented with offers as faits
accomplis. Weekend guests bought their hosts" residences. One such couple
reportedly paid millions, first stipulating that everything had to be left as it
was, right down to the terrycloth bathrobes, since they didn"t want to be
bothered with purchasing their own things or didn"t know what was required.
Not that it mattered. Experts materialized to perform that function for the
newcomers, many of them living in San Francisco and tripping up on
commission. They advised on the creation of cunning archways, the buying
of period settees or Mayan urns, the planting of herb gardens "with a culinary
bias," the buying of wines from the Oakville Grocery, the joining of
Meadowood Country Club, the ordering of cut flowers from Tesoro"s, the
hiring of chefs and the vetting of maids and valets and the planting of the
ultimate symbol of success, more important even than a house — a vineyard
of one"s own.
Everybody who mattered suddenly had to have one. This link to
ancient tradition was the latest, best way of transforming money into
status, though what the newcomers really wanted was a vineyard and "a
cabernet" made from its fruit that would be highly ranked by the critics and
set them miles ahead of other merely wealthy people. The locals couldn"t
afford these wines but had to listen to weekenders talk about them.
And they had to listen to the story about the woman with a
vineyard of her own who sold her mauve Bentley because it had no rack for
holding lattes, and the story about the couple building a glass house
containing smoke machines, and the story about another couple with
monogrammed toilet paper, each square resembling an illuminated
manuscript. You laughed at the stories, but they had an effect.
Life began to feel like a lottery, or like Renaissance Spain, the
gold ships coming in and their sails overshadowing all past custom and
convention. Their modern equivalent was the stretch limo, the pilot fish of
the nouveau riche lurking in restaurant parking lots and in the shade of olive
trees on landscaped lawns. Much of this bullion had been mined down in the
Santa Clara Valley, once lovely orchards since paved over and rechristened
with that unlovely moniker Silicon, symbol of the greatest economic
expansion in human history, a chemical that transmitted electronic impulses
and churned assets, changing the world, spinning off money to computer
whizzes and venture capitalists, dot-commers, "IPO sluts," entrepreneurs,
investment bankers, retailers, media- and consumer-related accumulators of
capital, all belted to the marvelous economic engine of the fading American
century. And not a few of them were disciples of personal gratification, and
self-serving.
And there were the speculators, a category to which every winery
owner and, in fact, many householders now belonged. That fact alone was
galling. With the acceptance of it came another realization, even sadder,
that in a few short years many longtime residents had gone from being
members of a community to serving as its adjuncts. So many of the big old
houses now belonged to outsiders the locals were unlikely to get to know,
and so eventually, it seemed, would all the valley. These old-timers would be
performing some service for the new people, if they weren"t already, even
though the locals were relatively rich on paper. If one of them sold a house
or a little vineyard, he couldn"t afford to buy another, not "up-valley." He
couldn"t compete at the wine auctions that raised money for the schools and
hospitals, couldn"t get a new kitchen countertop put in, couldn"t get a table
at Bistro Jeanty or even at Green Valley Café because of all the tourists
drawn by the celebrity.

Things were out of whack, not just in the real estate offices but also in the
hills. Out of sight, larger muscle houses were being built, and caves dug to
gargantuan dimensions to contain activities not related to wine, and
outlandish embellishments put in. There was the persistent story of a canal
built on a high dry ridge, complete with an operating lock and a barge that
could be boosted up and down, this in a fragile place where water was
scarce. Some people thought this a charming diversion, and others thought
it disgusting ego gratification and bad taste, but they didn"t say so because
for the most part people in the valley were accepting souls, polite, reluctant
to criticize.
This was just another story, no worse than the one about the
woman who moved from the Midwest to a house in the hills costing millions
so she could make cheese and sell it to the CIA — the Culinary Institute of
America. Thus a substance once the byproduct of mere agriculture had
been elevated to a symbol of culture. For the first time in human history,
people were spending fortunes to make chump change and in the process be
associated with the most basic sort of enterprise — agriculture — which in
this incarnation had become glamorous. It made no more economic sense
than the muscle houses and vineyards on steep land where forest had
stood, and people marveled at the cost of it all. Planting those steep slopes
cost upward of a hundred thousand dollars an acre just to get the vines in,
not counting the purchase price, unjustifiable on the economics,...