| It is completely appropriate that Charles Sullivan's monumental Companion to California Wine should be, in the main, history based. Since my first own visit to the California wine country, and that was forty years ago, its extraordinary patina of history has always given me goose bumps. I can't even say the names of Calistoga, or the Silverado Trail, or Russian River Road, or even Oakville Grade, without their romantic swagger tipping me off balance. |
| It doesn't happen when someone says Pessac-Lognan, or Clos de Vougeot (though I admit Romane-Conti has a certain ring). It can't just be the savour of the wine. Perhaps it is simply the closeness of even ancient historyby California standardsthat makes the past so palpable and the present so richly textured. In northern California history is just two biblical lifetimes longand none of the bravura of the first of those lives has been forgotten, or allowed to die. |
| For modern purposes it is easy to divide the story of California wine into two. Pre-Prohibition we can call Pioneer. That's what it looks like from herealthough such monumental establishments as Greystone or Inglenook or the vast Kohler & Froehling wine warehouse that was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire certainly didn't feel that way to the armies of cellarmen and clerks who manned them. A century ago they were already working in a mature and hugely successful industry. |
| Post-Prohibition sounds, on the face of it, like the steady buildup to what is now called state-of-the-art modernity. Again, that is not at all how it felt to be a struggling vintner in the 1950s, when the whole industry boasted only a score of wineries and the highest price was $3 a bottle. To their generation the legacy of the past was largely an embarrassment: big buildings dwarfing the present. True the oenological scholarship that started with Eugene Waldemar Hilgard was a cornerstone. But they were pioneers all over again: Lee Stewart at Souverain, Fred McCrea at Stony Hill, James Zellerbach at Hanzell, the Taylors at Mayacamas, and above all Andr Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu Vineyard, doing the frontier work that prepared the ground for modern times. I suppose the Gallos had just about reached the Thunderbird stage then. So when did modern times start? Some say with Joe Heitz in the early 1960s; others with the Robert Mondavi winery in 1966. Let's say thirty-five years ago. |
| This is pretty much where I came in, as a curious observer, first introduced to the roster of B.V., Martini, Inglenook, Charles Krug, the Christian Brothers, Italian Swiss Colony, Paul Massonthat was about itas a Cambridge student with pickier taste buds than most. It seems to me that modernists are often inclined to be patronizing about the wine California was making before the drums started to roll in the sixties. Of course it is very hard to remember just how good a wine was that you drank so long ago. But with the help of friends' collections, above all of Bob Thompson's astonishingly vertical St. Helena cellar, and a few treasured relics of my own, I have tried to keep |
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