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In mythology the Phoenix was an immortal bird who would be destroyed by fire, and then rise restored from its own ashes. Napa Valley’s modern wine making history since the coming of the Europeans has that same quality. The first mission style grapes were brought here from the Sonoma Mission in the early 1800’s. They were similar to a concord, hearty, foxy in flavor and they, but they made a drinkable wine. Because they had neither coopers for barrels and potters for urns the first wines were made in pouches made from leather hides.
In the mid 1800’s the first European varietals were brought to California for the Buena Vista winery in the Sonoma Valley, and then those vines spread out into the Napa Valley. Here is where it gets interesting, because while the narrow Sonoma Valley has some very nice locations for the prestigious Bordeaux grapes, the big, broad, sunny Napa Valley absolutely shines. It is among the best spots on Earth for these wines.
Meanwhile, to the south, the combination of California becoming part of the USA and the gold rush caused a population boom in San Francisco where lots of people were thirsty. Wine and brandy makers flocked to wine country to plant vineyards with these European Varietals. They also built state of the art wineries based on the gravity systems popular in upstate New York.
The growing conditions were ideal, Chinese labor for vineyards and caves was plentiful and cheap, business was great and the wines wonderful. This is where the music from Jaws starts playing in the background because under the surface of the ground a predator was a lurking. There is a nasty, tiny root louse that lives in American soils and unfortunately, did not live in those European vineyards, so those vines didn’t have any resistance to it, the way the American vines do.
About twenty years after being planted the leaves on the vines began to curl up, and the production dwindled as the vines lost their ability to turn sunlight into liquid magic. The predator spread, as plants taken to Europe unleashed the louse there. Worldwide vines died, every attempt to kill the little beasts failed and Napa’s fledging industry fell into the flames.
Napa’s two favorite states are New York and Texas because these are the two biggest purchasers of Napa wines, outside of the thirsty Californians. But Napa has another reason to love Texas, because a botanist from the town of Grapevine, midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, worked out which American vines the European stock could be grafted onto, to lend them their resistance. The soils of Texas and Florida are jam packed with that little louse, and the local vines successfully resist the little louse. As the root stocks were distributed vineyards replanted.
Kicking the ashes off of its feathers Napa rose up and got back on the path of prosperity again. At the turn of the century California had only been a part of the USA for fifty four years and a state for fifty. While Napa was replanting their vineyards, far away in the rest of America the prohibition movement was gaining steam. The wide availability of grain alcohol was wrecking havoc on American families and mothers were fighting back. Meanwhile, the First World War resulted in the demonizing anything German, including the great German American beers. The combination of politics and church led to banning hard alcohol, beer and since it was in the neighborhood, wine. Just when the wineries of Napa were recovering from that damned louse their business was outlawed.
A small number of wineries got the permit to make church and medical wines, but the larger amount of vineyards were ripped out and replanted with fruit trees. The only place where old vines survived was in the north part of the Valley, where Italian American families grew grapes to ship to the east coast for home winemakers. While you couldn’t sell wine, you could still make enough for your family. Finally, thirteen years later, prohibition was repealed, but growers couldn’t afford to uproot fruit trees that were producing income. For the next forty years Napa was a sleepy farming valley with about twenty wineries producing mostly jug wines.
In the 1970’s it became very trendy for well to do San Franciscans to own a vineyard in Napa. At the same time that the expansion into the Pacific Rim and the dot.com surge was bringing a great deal of prosperity to the area. As people concentrated on the vineyards and focused on better techniques they produced better wines. This crested in the 1976 Judgment of Paris where a handful of American wineries, including two from Napa, wiped up the floor with the French. This inspired a surge of planting and innovation. The Phoenix was flying high. Watch out below.
Since the beginning of the century growers had grafted onto a small number of dependable root stocks. With their greater optimism the vintners were funneling research money to U.C. Davis, and companies were creating products for the booming industry. The growers were sold on a new root stock that promised bigger production. The most successful wineries used it as they expanded their holdings. Then, twenty years into the new vines life that Phoenix smelled smoke. The new root stock wasn’t as resistant as they thought and the vines began to die. The Phoenix plunged into the flames.
Many of the vineyards needed to plant again, but there wasn’t enough money. But, those past twenty years had proven the value of these vineyards to the corporate world; they came in and bought up the most successful properties wholesale. Some others went public as a way to raise money. The most conservative growers, mostly the Italians, had never trusted the new root stock, preferring their tried and true, and they sailed through those years without losing a vine.
The Phoenix emerged from the ashes again. Many of those original owners took their money and started new wineries, producing very high quality wines. The corporate owners planted too. The surge of planting over the past several decades had taught the vineyard managers a lot about the land. Now, as they planted they took what they learned and applied it in their choices. Varietals were matched more perfectly for the land, terraces were cut, clones were improved. The kind of vineyard improvements that would normally take place over many generations developed in a couple of decades. There are more vineyards and wineries than ever in Napa, and as the demand for fine wines blossom world wide the Napa brand is flying high.
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