Author’s Note: - FIRST VINTAGE



Chapter One

The Ripening

Every year nearly five million tourists travel to Napa Valley. At 6:00 a.m. on a Friday morning in late Summer, it’s a safe bet few of them are up yet. More likely they’re slumbering under puffy quilts at quaint bed & breakfasts, bellies still full with gourmet food and wine consumed the prior night at one of the region’s renowned restaurants. The owners of the mega-mansions speckling the forested ridgelines that flank this narrow, 25-mile-long valley are also a few dreams shy of their first café latte. But Tony Biagi, the twenty-eight year-old winemaker at Neal Family Vineyards, has been up since 4:30 a.m.

It’s the last day of August, harvest time in Napa Valley. In the vineyards, grapes hang from vine shoots in heavy bunches, swollen with juice, skins stretched taut over pulp. They’re a purple so deep it’s almost blue. Pearls of dew bead slowly off the skin down to the dust below and evaporate in the sun’s warming rays. Leaves in the overhanging tree canopies quiver in the breeze, but the sagging clusters barely move. To most people driving the wine country byways, the grapes look ripe. Yet, inside some of the fruit, the juice is still sour and the seeds are hard, green, and bitter. Ripe grapes would have crunchy brown seeds swimming in sweet nectar. Those are the ones Tony wants today.

Harvest is a delicate game with much at stake. If Tony picks his grapes too early, the wine will fail to achieve the taste complexities he desires. If he picks too late, overripe fruit may shrivel on the vine or fall prey to late Autumn rains that can dilute flavors. Ripeness is a moving target and both winemakers and vineyard managers anguish over the perfect moment to pull the trigger and pick. No other winemaking decision has as much impact in determining whether the ensuing wine will achieve greatness or slouch toward mediocrity.

Tony checks his fruit daily during harvest, spending mornings collecting samples from the vineyards whose grapes he purchases. This quest for ripeness sends him commuting through the region’s diverse landscapes; over the valley flats of centrally-located Oakville to the craggy eastern escarpments of Stag’s Leap; from the low, rolling Carneros hills in the south to the bulky mass of Mt. St. Helena bookending the north.

Driving a brand-new, hunter-green Ford Explorer that his boss, Mark Neal, gave him when he came aboard last month, Tony heads south on Route 29, the main thoroughfare of Napa Valley. From above, the valley looks like a long skinny ladder leaning leftward, narrowing at the top. Route 29 barrels up and down the west side while the lesser travelled, more picturesque Silverado Trail parallels it to the east. From the city of Napa at the southern end to the northernmost village of Calistoga, eleven cross streets form the rungs. Locals use these byways as escape routes from the traffic on 29. Even so, there’s always the threat of encountering the dreaded “Silverado Crawl,” when you find yourself in a no-passing zone behind a minivan full of tourists or a tractor trailer with a full load of grapes.

Tony’s eyes scan the valley, and he nods at the low-lying fog, nature’s nocturnal air conditioner. He’s glad to see the mist blanketing the ground because the best wine grapes are grown with an even balance of hot days and cool nights.

“We didn’t have that last year.”

As he drives, he explains one of his winemaking experiments back at the winery, which involves splitting a barrel of Chardonnay six ways and then added different types of yeast to each batch.

“Basically, winemaking is a lot of bucket chemistry.” He speaks quickly in the pre-dawn hour, surprising considering he doesn’t drink coffee.

“It all comes back to having the best vineyards. I remember some Merlot vines in Rutherford that were gone, totally written off by everyone. But they still produced great fruit. Great sites have a way of seeing through human error.”

Tony cuts east from Route 29 to the Silverado trail via Oak Knoll Road, one of the lowest cross routes, then turns south toward Napa. Passing the manicured green fairways of the Silverado Country Club, he takes a left up Atlas Peak Road, which climbs and twists to a terminus just shy of the 2,600-foot summit. Atop Atlas Peak the sun is shining, but a layer of fog midway prevents its rays from hitting the valley floor. Vineyards midway up the mountain normally ripen a couple weeks later than those in the warmer valley below because the fog belt’s cooler nighttime temperatures shut down the vines’ growth, extending the time it takes for their grapes to achieve maturity. The highest vineyards on Atlas Peak, above the fog, catch the morning’s first sun rays and the temperature warms up early. This inversion layer effect allows the topmost properties to ripen at the same rate as vineyards on the valley floor.

The road hairpins upward through creamy banks of fog cloaking the route. “I hope you don’t get carsick,” says Tony, as we drive past stonewall-flanked driveways leading to gated mansions.

The thing is, I do get motion sickness. And I’m not a morning person, either. The reason I ended up here in Napa Valley courting nausea at dawn is because I am a curious person who was both intrigued and annoyed by wine and its obsessive, cliquey subculture. Prior to meeting Tony, I thought wine country consisted of landed gentry contemplating glasses of Chardonnay while surveying their vineyard acreage from the comfortable vantage point of a wrap-around porch. Occasional weekend trips from my home in nearby Marin County - lodging at quaint bed & breakfasts and sipping wines at the myriad roadside tasting rooms - did little to alter the fantasy. At the same time, I found myself intimidated by cocktail party wine snobs who swirled their glasses and spoke of “legs,” “heavy toast,” “tannins,” and “cracked pepper flavors.” It seemed the more these people learned about wine, the more they excluded the rest of us from their knowledge. Maybe it was my competitiveness, maybe it was my shame, but I wanted to fight back. I wanted to learn as much as they knew, to crack the code and report back my findings for the benefit of all. I wanted to be able to shut up the wine snobs.

For this, I would need a tour guide. Someone in the know, someone respected by their peers for their talent and passion. To find such a Virgil for my wine country Odyssey, I canvassed every wine shop I could find between San Francisco and Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties, quizzing salespeople and store owners about the most interesting wineries and winemakers they knew. I came up with an impressive list of characters, but many of them had arrived in the wine industry on a cushion of first-career success. There were former doctors, stockbrokers, dot-com lottery winners, urban refugees, and even a professional race car driver. But the story of someone who had already ‘made it’ did not excite me. I wanted someone on the inside, but someone who was still on his way up.

Deep on my list was Tony Biagi, who had a just left an assistant winemaker position at well-respected Duckhorn Vineyards to take charge of winemaking for Neal Family Vineyards, an unknown upstart. The owner of the winery, Mark Neal, also happened to operate a vineyard management company which farmed more than 2,000 acres worth of other peoples’ grapes. It sounded like a recipe for success: a guy known for great grapes hiring someone with the talent to turn them into great wine. The new winery would be blank canvas for Tony’s art. Over beers, and perhaps after sizing me up as a source of free labor, Tony agreed to let me follow him around with a notebook for a year. By watching his every activity and eavesdropping as best I could on all his conversations, I would come to understand how life at a small winery was, at its roots, a combination of bucket chemistry and not-so-gentlemanly farming.

Back on Atlas Peak, the roadside scenery prevails over the churning in my gut. In adjacent fields, ancient volcanic boulders lie scattered at random like marbles tossed by the gods. The fog thickens as Tony continues to climb Atlas Peak Road. He’s only been to this vineyard four times and hasn’t yet memorized the driveway’s location. The grey mist doesn’t make it any easier, so he slows the truck. Finally, he takes a tentative left and triggers the motion-sensitive wrought-iron gates of Second Chance vineyard.

At the end of the steep climbing driveway, stone walls to the right mark the upper boundary of a vineyard that slopes down to a small pond speckled with white geese. Piles of rock pulled from the fields are strewn nearby. The air smells fertile: of hay, dried Scotch Broom, and sage basted with dew. The birds are waking; dove and quail songs punctuate the morning peace. Although the sun will burn through in a couple of hours, it still has a ways to go. The air is bracing, maybe fifty degrees. Breath is visible and hands feel best jammed deep in one’s pockets.

The only concession Tony makes to the chill is a fleece pullover. Underneath, he wears a t-shirt, olive khaki shorts and a pair of well-worn Blundstone work boots. His dark hair is cut short and he looks more like a linebacker than a winemaker. It’s not surprising to find out he was a star wrestler in high school, recruited by the University of California at Davis. There he studied in the famous Enology and Viticulture department, the equivalent of Harvard for winemaking. Not bad for someone whose father was a narcotics cop and whose mother still works as a Safeway butcher.

Standing next to the stone wall, Tony points out the bowl shape of the vineyard, the way the borders gradually funnel downhill into the pond at the center. The vines ripen at different rates depending on their location in the vineyard, so Tony needs samples from the flanks of the vineyard as well as the belly. An aerial photograph would show the lowest parts of the vineyard, those closest to the groundwater, as darker greener than the vines in the “wings,” or upper reaches. Ironically, the less fertile wings of the vineyard often produce better fruit for wine. With less water finding its way into the root systems, hillside vines struggle more and produce smaller berries. The low water content results in higher sugar concentration and better flavors. The trick is to supply just enough moisture to keep the vines going, but not so much that the fruit has an easy time of it. In the vineyards as in life, that which does not kill you makes you stronger.

Drip irrigation, an Israeli invention originally developed to facilitate desert farming, hydrates the grapes. The system trickles precise amounts of water onto the soil above each vine’s root system. At this point in the growing season, vineyard crews irrigate once every two weeks or so. If it rains, the time between waterings extends even longer. This “tough love” approach produces fewer grapes, but the ones that survive will be more complex and flavorful. From the Second Chance vineyard, a total of ten and a half tons of grapes will be picked, less than two tons per acre, a relatively low yield.

Tony grabs a cluster from the vine, pulls off a grape, eats it, then plops the rest of the cluster into the baggie he’s holding. As he bites through the crisp skins, the berries squirt sweet, clear syrup. He crunches the seeds between his molars then spits out the brown splinters. The nutty taste is just what he’s been looking for. Green, bitter-tasting seeds would mean the grapes are not yet ripe. Before the spit-out seeds hit the ground, Tony is off again, moving quickly down the vineyard rows, pulling clusters as he walks like a hurried shopper grabbing cans off a grocery store shelf. He makes sure to select a good mix of individual grapes from the shoulders, middle, and tip of each “V” shaped cluster. By taste alone, he guesses they’ll be 21-22 degrees Brix (the percentage measure of sugar content), but he’ll have to wait to take a spectrometer reading back at the truck to be sure.

Moving up and down the rows, Tony points out grapes that have been hit by winter frost. Next to the robust blue-blackness of a healthy Cabernet grape, the frost sufferers are a weaker maroon. On the ground under the trellises, stray grapes litter the dust like rabbit droppings. Dead and dimpled, they raisin in the sun, victims of crop thinning, a process where a certain number of otherwise healthy grapes are sacrificed in order to strengthen the remaining grapes. Too many clusters on each vine means too much competition. Quality gets diluted across too many grapes. Crop thinning lowers the yield and produces better flavors, but it also reduces the amount of wine produced. It’s an agricultural and economic tight-wire act; the better quality wine produced from a low yield crop must sell at a high enough premium to counteract the loss in volume.

Because his boss is Mark Neal, Tony has many great vineyards to choose from. Before constructing the Neal Family Vineyards winery up on Howell Mountain, Mark made a name for himself taking over his father’s company, Jack Neal & Sons, and growing it into one of the largest vineyard management firms in the region. Handling grape farming for 2,400 acres of both large and small vineyards, Mark possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of where the best fruit in the valley can be found. Furthermore, the relationships he’s built over the years with the vineyard owners ensures him access to the most sought-after fruit.

Filling separate bags from the wings and the center of the vineyard, Tony continues moving from row end to row end. In the middle of one section, Tony stops suddenly. He looks down and frowns. Dark circles in the soil surround the vine stems, evidence of recent watering. Tony didn’t think these vines needed any watering, especially so close to harvest. He’s afraid the excess water will weaken the unctuous, ripe flavors he’s counting on from Second Chance. If the fruit is good enough, it may be bottled separately with a single vineyard designation on the label. Typically, these bottlings command higher premiums because they express what the French call “terroir,” the synergetic effect of sun, earth, soil, and water unique to each vineyard.

Tony makes a final sweep through the lower central part of the vineyard. Closer to the pond, the canopies are much larger, over five-feet high, and they sway like tentacles in the breeze. As he finishes up his rounds at Second Chance, Tony drops the full Baggies of grapes into his mobile winemaker’s office, a plastic Tupperware box full of beakers and instruments. Although he can tell by taste alone whether the grapes are ready, further laboratory testing will give him exact readings on sugar content as well as acid and pH levels.

Tony hops into the truck and heads back down to the valley. On the way, he points to a meadow where mist smokes up from a pond. A dozen quail skitter above the field grass, making him smile. In the off season, he hunts them with his father. A couple minutes later, he spots a rafter of wild turkey marching across a lawn. Stopping the truck in the middle of the road, he gobbles at the birds. They look up for a moment and continue feeding, oblivious to Tony’s serenade. Halfway down the mountain, Tony slows down again. “Ooooh,” he coos as another covey of quail takes wing in an adjacent field.

Cresting the edge of the high plateau offers a panoramic view of the entire Napa Valley, from the wide estuary of the San Pablo Bay that leads south into the San Francisco Bay on the far left to the narrow gorge-like features at the northern end to the right. Straight ahead the Mayacamas range rises quickly. Beyond those peaks are Sonoma County’s fertile, rolling hills followed by coastal headlands. Then, the Pacific.

Napa Valley is a pull-apart basin, not carved by glaciers or rivers, but a product of continental drift and tectonic separation. This violent upbringing created tremendous amounts of rocky, hillside terrain with perfect drainage for Cabernet grapes. Shifflett Ranch, in the western foothills of the Mayacamas is one such spot. Not only does Mark manage the vineyards, he also buys some of their grapes for Neal Family Vineyards.

The landscape starts out flat at the entrance bordering Route 29, then climbs sharply up the slopes of Mt. Veeder. Tony first checks the Chardonnay, down near the gates. The prevailing temperature in this area is a bit warm for Chardonnay and Tony acknowledges that the fruit is not the best quality. “Then again, we won’t charge monumental prices.” $20 is the price they’re considering. Because Chardonnay takes less time to age, it will provide quicker revenues to the winery while they wait to release their flagship Cabernet, which for $45 a bottle will be expensive but not ridiculous for Napa Valley.

On a steep section of graveled driveway, Tony stops the truck and calls Mark on the cell phone.

“You want Cabernet Franc?”

“It’s on our list this harvest,” Mark answers, his voice projecting loudly enough from the earpiece that anyone inside the truck can hear. “But we don’t need it if you don’t want it.” He’s trying to cut Tony in on some of the decision-making.

Cab Franc (as Tony calls it) is primarily used as a blending grape to soften up an overly tannic Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. Although as much as 25% of a second varietal can be legally blended in, most wineries keep the percentage down in the low single-digits. Neal Family Vineyards is aiming for 100% pure Cabernet, the purest expression of the grape varietal Mark’s been farming for three decades.

Tony’s legs hang outside the truck, causing the “door ajar” indicator to beep annoyingly. Ding! Ding! Ding!

“Is that your brain working?” asks Mark.

Tony tells Mark that the vineyard crews need to make one more pass back at Atlas Peak. “They’ve got to knock off those Kool-Aid looking clusters, the ones that taste like root beer, from rows ten to thirty, down low.” Those grapes are overripe and Tony wants them off the vines.

“Okay,” agrees Mark, “and let me know if Wyckoff Vineyard’s watered, too.” In addition to giving his opinions on grape ripeness, Tony also helps Mark monitor his crews. Mark doesn’t trust many people, but he seems to trust Tony.

Tony hangs up and marches down a side hill through Cabernet Franc vines. Walking down the steep terrain, our progress deteriorates into a controlled stumble as the parched dirt gives way under our shoes. Tony points out a distant patch of scraggly vines stricken with Pierce’s Disease. The healthy green leaves have fallen off and only a few paper-thin brown wrinkles remain hanging from tendrils. Spread by flying insects called blue-green sharpshooters, the affliction impedes the transfer of water through the vine, much like clots can block up human arteries. Replanting is the only recourse for the vineyard owners.

Tony samples a grape from a healthy vine in front of him. “Okay, we can go home now,” he says, pretending to walk away. “That would be nice,” he laughs. “You can do that when you’re a consultant.”

He’s referring to consulting winemakers, hired guns who occupy the rarefied air atop the winemaking profession. In exchange for advising winery clients on critical aspects like harvest dates, fermentation, barrel selection, and blending, the best consultants earn six-figure fees per client, often working for as many as a half-dozen wineries at a time. They travel extensively, host wine tasting events, mingle with celebrities at charity auctions, and are treated like rock stars by wine collectors and writers. Only the best winemakers, after several years of consistent, top-notch performances, successfully make this transition.

Meanwhile, back in Tony’s real world, more vineyard blocks need sampling. He hops back in the truck and drives up a dirt road so steep he switches the gears into four-wheel drive.

“This is Cabernet country,” he announces with pride as we spiral upward around dust-covered vines. Peering out the truck’s window, Tony takes a drive-by visual sample of the hanging grapes. It’s tough getting good people to work these incredibly steep hillsides, he explains, but the grapes produced here are some of the valley’s best. “Rutherford is ‘King of Cabernet,’” he adds. Indeed, buying land here costs a king’s ransom, as much as $250,000 an acre. Such is the world in which Tony lives and works; a surreal realm where agriculture is treated like artwork, winemakers become celebrities, and the best wines attract cult-like followings.

Leaving Shifflett Ranch, Tony heads back north on Route 29 to the Oakville Grocery, where he pulls over for a drink. A purposefully rustic deli, wine store, and gift shop combination, the Grocery is a favorite stop for tourists who flock here for their fix of Napa Valley memorabilia, souvenirs, and tasty gourmet sandwiches like Black Forest ham and melted Brie on toasted sourdough. Inside, Tony nods to a guy with a baggy hanging out of his pants pocket, the telltale sign of a fellow grape sampler. They chat briefly about what they’re seeing in the vineyards and what they’re tasting.

Back in the truck again, Tony crosses the railroad tracks paralleling Route 29 and takes Bella Oaks Road to the Wyckoff vineyard. Again he heads down the vineyard rows, this time scuffing the ground to check soil moisture and evidence of watering. Heavy clumps of dirt give way under his feet as he walks. It shouldn’t be so wet.

“You want to tease ripeness out of the vines with quick bursts of water.”

He’ll ask Mark to cut back irrigation to make the vines work harder.

Back north on Route 29, turning left on Vallejo Street in St. Helena, Tony checks up on a well-located vineyard hit hard by Phylloxera, a louse that decimates vines by sucking nutrients out and injecting its waste back in. The owner of this potentially great vineyard is an eighty-year-old widow who hasn’t kept up maintenance over the years. Vineyards infested with Phylloxera can still produce good fruit for a couple years, but over time the quality diminishes and the vines die. Instead of waiting, Mark planted new vines next to the disease-damaged vines and tied them together. This way, the old vines serve as training wheels for the new vines. When the new vines grow to correct alignment and are strong enough to stand on their own, the old growth vines will be cut away.

Standing next to one of these vines-in-training, Tony pops off a grape and squeezes it open. The sticky juice oozing out onto his fingertips is clear. Both red and white grapes contain juice that is neutral in color. In the making of white wine, skins are removed before the fermentation process begins. With red wines, the skins remain in the tanks during fermentation. The alcohol produced acts as a solvent on the skin pigments, dissolving them into the wine to create the familiar burgundy color. The ever popular White Zinfandel is a white wine made from red grapes; the skins are removed immediately and the minimal bleeding of color from the skins gives leaves the wine pale pink.

At 9:00 a.m., fog still lingers and the moist air smells of woody vines. Barely visible in the western distance, a searchlight of sun beams down on a spot high atop the Mayacamas ridgeline. It’s here in the vineyards that Tony’s first vintage as head winemaker begins. Because great wine begins as a grape, Tony mingles with the fruit as early as possible to get acquainted with the vintage. He will get to know it even better over the next 18 to 24 months, the length of time it takes to shepherd Cabernet from grape to glass.

Although Tony has some preconceived winemaking strategies for the vintage, he knows to keep an open mind. He knows each vintage is unique, since each is the result of distinct growing seasons marked by unpredictable intervals of cold, hot, dry, and wet. He knows a myriad other obstacles lie in front of him: late grape deliveries, leaky barrels, spoiled wine, ornery bosses, cranky clients, pompous auction-goers, annoying tourists, enticing job offers, and the rigors of the road. But most importantly, he knows that adaptability and flexibility will the keys to his success. “The best winemakers don’t use the words ‘never’ or ‘always.’”

Chapter Two

Picking Time

On a mid-September day, around 6:30 a.m, I make my way up Howell Mountain for my first visit to the Neal Family Vineyards winery. The early morning roads rumble with eighteen-wheel trucks on their way to the vineyards with empty half-ton bins on their flatbeds. There’s a nip to the air and the sky is battleship gray. Perfect weather for picking grapes. If heated up too much by the sun, freshly harvested fruit can ferment prematurely in the bins on the way to the winery, so cool air is welcome.

Howell Mountain is not the first place a visitor to Napa Valley wine country would visit. A good twenty minutes from St. Helena, up snaking roads with missing guardrails, the ride is intimidating. Angwin, the closest town, is heavily populated by Seventh Day Adventists who don’t drink. But Howell Mountain’s hillside vineyards are also famous for producing mighty Cabernets. The views from the top are some of the valley’s best. This is the place Mark Neal and his new $3 million winery call home.

The winery itself resembles a golden-brown contemporary barn, impressively proportioned at 7,500 square feet. Narrow, vertically-hung cedar planks compose the exterior and an imperfect matching of lumber grains adds an authentic feel to the otherwise sleek newness. A rambling, windowless ground floor houses the winery operations while a small second floor with two dormers contains offices. At the peak of the roof, a rectangular section banded with small windows allows sun into the offices via a cathedral ceiling. To the eye, the building looks finished, but cosmetic details remain like doorknobs, light fixtures, cabinetry, and wall paint. Bags of potting soil sit on the driveway, waiting to become a part of the landscaping details. Japanese Maple saplings flank the parking area. A dry, rock-bottomed stream will someday empty gurgling water into a man-made fish pond. Piles of hefty, lava-pocked Sonoma fieldstones line the driveway, soon to stacked and formed into picturesque stone walls. Adjacent to the rock piles is the winery’s only working bathroom, a Porto-potty.

Across the driveway from the winery entrance, new vines grow, each at a height of two to three feet. In a couple years, these vines will provide grapes for the Neal Family Vineyards’ own estate label wines. It the fruit turns out great, it will be bottled on its own. Otherwise it will be blended into the Napa Valley label along with grapes from other viticultural regions of the county like Atlas Peak, Rutherford, Mount Veeder, and Howell Mountain.

The inside of the winery comprises three main chambers. Through the front door in the middle is a tasting room leading into an open, central foyer. A thick stone archway spanning double glass doors guards the entrance to the caves, ten-foot-high concrete tubes projecting back into the hillside another 7,500 square feet. From inside the caves, the open front doors of the winery provide a spectacular arch-framed view to the green vineyards slopes beyond.

The right side of the building houses the storage room, an open expanse with thirty-foot ceilings for keeping empty barrels and full cases of wine. The left side contains the tank room, an L-shaped space lined with a dozen temperature-controlled thirteen-ton aluminum cylinders. Pipes made of lustrous copper and sparkling stainless steel snake along the walls. Above the tanks, a steel scaffold structure provides access to the top openings. Some of the tanks contain freshly crushed wine, still fermenting, while others remain. An empty crusher/destemmer sits in the middle of the cement floor, waiting for the day’s grapes, which could arrive at any time. During harvest, this is where the action happens.

Tony is already at work, moving tank to tank checking sugar levels for the grapes crushed a couple days earlier. Countering the crisp morning air, he wears a fleece vest over a short-sleeved plaid shirt. He hasn’t shaven today and his khaki shorts already show dirt smears and grape stains. Personal hygiene is something he can worry about after crush. But for the next couple weeks, it is Tony’s job to babysit the wine in this room. Kicking off fermentation smoothly makes the rest of the winemaking year easier. Many of the tasks, like monitoring tank temperatures and taking Brix readings don’t appear strenuous, but that’s part of the art; knowing exactly what’s happening in the tanks, predicting potential problems, and figuring out solutions ahead of time. In his head, Tony constantly works through scenarios he hopes he’ll never have to experience.

Methodically walking the periphery of the room, Tony quietly draws samples and records the Brix readings. The scuffing of his boots on the concrete floor as he shuffles between tanks echoes through the airy chamber. It’s peaceful solitude; a tranquil intermission before the frenzy of another crush load. In a couple days, the young wine inside these tanks will move on to the pressing and barreling stages, freeing up tank space for grapes still out in the vineyards.

Gove Celio, the winemaker for Liparita Cellars, walks in. He’s worked at his winery for nineteen years. His hair shows specks of gray. Tall and wiry with a quiet, gentle presence, his most distinguishable feature is a gray mustache. Gove approaches Tony, looks at the sky, and wonders aloud if it will rain.

Neal Family Vineyards is performing “custom crush” for Liparita this year, letting them process grapes and store wine here for a fee. It’s a win-win situation; Liparita doesn’t have its own crush equipment and the still-growing Neal winery has excess tank capacity, empty storage space, and a desperate need for short-term income. Gove stops by regularly during crush to sample his wines and take sugar readings, but it’s Tony who handles most of the cellar duties.

Together, they walk back into the winery to do a pumpover. Circulating the wine lets in oxygen which helps the yeast kick off fermentation. Pumpovers also release any bad odors trapped inside the tank that might later taint the wine. The tank they’re pumping over today is filled to eleven of its thirteen-ton capacity. Space is intentionally left open at the top to accommodate the carbon dioxide that is released when sugars convert to alcohol.

Grape seeds at the bottom of the tank come out first, followed by the wine and the cap of skins that forms above. As the must pours out the spigot, Gove shovels back the growing mountain of skins and seeds off the strainer so the juice flows easily through the screen. “Oh!” he exclaims. “That cap smells nice!”

After twenty minutes of pumping over, the seed flow diminishes, and all that pours out of the spigot is a clean purple flow. Taking a berry out of the strainer, Gove presses it between his fingers, watching the sticky red juice drip down his hand. The pigment from the grape skins has begun to color the wine. He scoops up some grapes into a two-liter opaque plastic pitcher and admires the frothy burgundy liquid within. “Good juice!”

This year’s harvest looks promising. Although the grapes were picked relatively early compared to recent vintages, the buds on the vines bloomed a month early in the Spring, leaving the growing season its usual length. Continuing to shovel skins and seeds off the strainer into plastic buckets, Gove takes in the crimson effluent. “The color’s great,” he purrs.

Back outside the winery, Tony skillfully maneuvers the forklift, nimbly zipping around the pad dropping, picking up, and stacking empty picking bins. Although Tony has the crusher/stemmer ready, the grapes are late. Apparently, the pickers never showed up at the vineyard. During harvest, when competition for picking crews heats up, no-shows are not uncommon. Most of the pickers are seasonal employees trying to maximize their income over the three-month harvest period. Many of them return to their families in Mexico and Central America in the off-season. Loyalty is a nice concept, but it falls easily by the wayside during crush when self-interest rears its ugly head. Although late picking wastes his time and makes his job more difficult, Tony shrugs it off as just another reality of the wine business. “Hey, we’re all scrappers and fighters.”

When the morning pumpovers are complete, a stillness returns to the winery. Outside the sky is flat gray, almost somber. Off to the side of the crush pad, Mia, a yellow Labrador with a solid, square-shaped head, munches on discarded grapes and assorted rocks. As she roots in the dust, making pig-like grunts and wagging her tail constantly, Niko, an older German Shephard, pads over to watch. Crush is not a period of constant activity. Instead there are bursts of action punctuated with periods of tense idleness. Tony knows the grapes are coming, he just doesn’t know when. He spies an empty picking bin and decides it needs moving. Hands pushing against the sides and calf muscles taut, he slides the chunky plastic container effortlessly across the concrete pad like a football lineman driving into a blocking sled.

Mark Neal, Tony’s boss and owner of the Neal winery, finally arrives a little past nine o’clock. He’s been up since five, driving the vineyards, checking on crews, making sure what needs to be picked gets picked. Vineyard managers are essentially farmers and Mark dresses the part in jeans and a green, short-sleeved, button-down shirt. His face is sunburnt, evidence that careful applications of Coppertone don’t happen much during harvest. The license plate on his truck, a burly evergreen Ford Expedition, reads “Pro Ag.” His boots are hikers, powdered with tan dust. He seems relaxed chatting with Tony, but Mark rarely exhibits extreme expressions from either side of the emotional spectrum. If he tends one way, it is toward a frown. Despite a proclivity toward uncensored bursts of opinions about the wine business or the world at large, his conversational tone is laid-back and deadpan. He’s comfortable with silence and deals pleasantries sparingly. He’s got too much work to do and doesn’t care about making friends. With the high-end wine business heavily dependent on relationships, gregarious Tony is the perfect counterbalance to Mark’s gruffness.

Talk turns to the weather and its affect on harvest. Any real threat of sustained rain, say a few consecutive days worth, will have Mark’s crews rushing to get the grapes off the vines before their flavors get watered down. For early warnings, Mark consults several meteorological services. Right now a storm is brewing down in Baja, Mexico, but Mark doesn’t think it’ll make it up to Napa. As long as the rain stays away, he and Tony will let winery’s remaining fruit hang in the vineyards and gradually accrue those bold, ripe characteristics for which Napa Valley Cabernet is known and for which wine enthusiasts pay good money.

The sun finally breaks through, warming the two men’s faces as they talk. On the concrete pad, Tony sets up a basket press. Barrel-shaped, stained crimson from years of use, the apparatus is wrapped by vertical wooden slats spaced just far enough apart to let juice ooze out while keeping the pressed grape skins inside. Only with very small batches of grapes, say a half-garbage pail full, will Tony use out the basket press. Turning the handles on the top in a clockwise fashion, he looks like a bus driver steering a Greyhound. The grapes press easily at first and the juice pours down into the receptacle bucket below.

When the handles no longer turn easily, Tony wedges a small block of wood in between the crank shaft and the wooden disk that pushes against the grapes. Gradually, he increases the size of the wood blocks to press the grapes further and further down. The trick is methodical, gentle extraction, so Tony crabwalks in a slow circle with his hands on the crank, facing inward. It seems all those post-rugby match “Dizzy Keg” races – where he and his UC-Davis teammates would chug a full beer, race to a keg, grab onto the rim, and spin around as fast as possible – have trained him well for handling a basket press. But today, instead of foam from a cheap, warm beer, it’s the froth from fermented grape juice dripping down his chin. He looks like a messy little kid who just gobbled down a jelly sandwich.

Once he’s finished pressing, he removes the top of the basket press, revealing a thick round cake of pressed grapes. He cleans out the press, sweeping the grape skins and seeds with a push broom into a drainage grate running the length of the concrete pad. The drain quickly clogs, so he gets down on his hands and knees, removes the grate, and plunges his hands in up to the elbows. Fishing around with his fingers, he looks up and announces, “This is the glamorous part of winemaking.”

Walking back into the winery, Tony makes his way back to the cave tunnels and tells Juan, a Hispanic worker, to stain barrels with leftover red wine. Tony likes the look purple-painted midsections on his barrels. He thinks it makes the caves and the barrels look classier, like in Burgundy, France. From a practical standpoint, the staining helps hide the inevitable messiness that occurs while topping off barrels or transferring wine back and forth between tanks and barrels during the racking process. If the midsections are already purple, incidental spills and drips around the bungholes blend right in.

“Watch your hands this time,” he reminds Juan, referring to the time before when he left purple palm prints all over the unpainted parts of the barrel. Speaking to workers, Tony’s voice is calm, sometimes firm, but never condescending.

Continuing down the long tunnel, he jokes with another Hispanic worker who’s helping Juan paint barrels. “Mandalone!” Tony calls out, smiling.

The worker volleys back another Spanish curse word as he dips his painting rag into a bucket of wine. Laughter echoes through the underground chamber.

For now, most of the barrels in the caves are empty, still awaiting an injection of wine from this year’s harvest. The woodsy smell inside the tunnels satisfies and comforts, evoking memories of freshly sharpened pencils in grade school, or of pulling a wool sweater over your head that’s been stored all summer in a cedar chest.

At the furthest reaches of the caves is Tony’s laboratory, essentially a folding buffet table covered with an assortment of beakers, canisters of chemicals, and a small weighing scale. Also there is the black and white speckled composition notebook into which he logs lab results, sugar readings, acid levels, and pH counts. Tony takes a seat, pours a sample from one of the fermenting tanks into a small plastic cylindrical container, and writes the picking date on the label. His own lab being somewhat limited, Tony sends his samples out to a third-party service called E.T.S. Laboratories for further analysis. Within a day or two, E.T.S. reports back the results. By taste and instinct, Tony has a good idea of what’s going on with his wines, but the laboratory testing provides backup.

On the way out of the caves, Tony stops by a barrel, pops out the rubber bung, and puts his ear to the hole like he’s listening to the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell. Instead of the sea, he hears the snap, crackle and pop of still-active yeast munching on sugars and turning them into alcohol. It’s music to his ears. To him, it’s the song of a metamorphosis, of grapes in a cocoon-like state progressing steadily toward their most poetic form; wine in a glass. He replaces the stopper and walks briskly out of the caves. It’s time to hit the vineyards.

Around eleven o’clock, Tony joins Mark at the Bella Rossa vineyard, not far from the winery down White Cottage Road. It’s a small property, a couple acres planted, surrounded by conifers. In the middle of the vineyards sits a house, a large, stucco affair with a pool, now covered for the season. The absentee owner is trying to recoup some of his mortgage costs by growing grapes in the backyard of his vacation home. Standing at one end of the vineyard, staring down the vine rows at the pickers, Mark surveys the scene. If he slid his hand inside the front of his button-down shirt, he’d look like Napoleon commanding an army.

“If you see one yellow leaf, pick it” he directs Pedro Rubio, his right-hand man. Excess foliage competes for nutrients that should be going into the grapes, so Mark wants the leaves off. While most vineyards have at least two grape clusters per vine shoot, the Bella Rossa property, lacking good sunlight, only supports single cluster shoots.

“I’m looking at this vineyard as a winemaker, instead of a grower,” Mark explains. Where a farmer generally tries to increase his yield per acre, winemakers are more concerned with the quality of grapes produced. Pedro repeats Mark’s demand in Spanish and signals to his crews which vines to pick. A handsome man with an abundance of curly, black hair, he wears a denim shirt and jeans. As the Vice-President of Operations for Mark’s vineyard management company, he serves as the liason between the picking crews and Mark. He must execute Mark’s orders while instilling loyalty and maintaining the respect of his crews. When Mark first saw Pedro in the fields as a young picker, he knew there was something special about him. He saw it in his eyes, that no-excuses work ethic. Pedro is one of the few men Mark knows who works harder than himself.

A group of pickers, all Hispanic, pile out of a van, each carrying plastic picking bins the size of dishwashing basins. All wear baseball hats and some hang handkerchiefs over the backs of their necks like members of the French Foreign Legion. They quickly strip the vines of fruit, yanking sharp, crescent-shaped blades back toward themselves with one gloved hand and catching the falling clusters with the other. It looks easy enough, but it’s not. One third-generation grape grower I spoke with told me he’s never seen a gringo last more than three full days of picking.

The best of the pickers have been hired on for the full year, salaried with benefits. Others prefer to work only the harvest season, after which they return home to Mexico and their families with enough money to last them the rest of the year. As they settle into their picking rhythm, they chatter quietly in Spanish. They’re close knit group, often relatives. Pedro lets his pickers select their own new hires, figuring they wouldn’t hire anyone who would hold back their crew. The foremen all have radios so they can keep close contact with Mark as their crews progress through the vineyards. Much of Mark’s job during crush involves juggling crew schedules and efficiently moving them between vineyards. Days are spent driving around to different properties getting updates from the foremen. Often he’ll conduct impromptu spot checks, making sure workers at all levels are doing their jobs, from thinning crop to watering vines. After five minutes of watching the pickers at work in the Bella Rossa vineyard, he repeats his earlier demand. “Not one yellow leaf! Pull all the yellows off!”

The pickers finish up the section at the top of the property, marching from the vineyard carrying full bins on their shoulders. They dump their grapes into larger half-ton containers on the bed of the hauling truck, where another worker pulls out any stray leaves making their way into the bins. In the bed of a nearby pickup truck are two large water coolers, the kind you’d see on the sidelines of football games. Hydration is important for these vineyard athletes.

The sun emerges from behind its foggy screen, toasting Howell Mountain with pent-up vigor, compensating for the cool morning. A few high clouds smear the sky and the air is filled with the pungent smell of pine needles. While some of the workers continue picking the uphill side of the driveway, squatting under canopies of leaves to get at the hanging clusters, others run to get a head start on the lower vineyard. Tony heads to the lower vineyard. He hoofs the length of a vine row, grabbing clusters and inspecting them with a quick flip of the wrist, like he’s making his way down a grocery store aisle, pulling cans off and reading the labels. He points one of the picking crews to the end of another row, and tells them, “You can go to the last two vines, here.” Beyond that point, the fruit is not as ripe.

Tony has significant input about which parts of the vineyard get picked and when. While Mark makes suggestions based on years of experience, if Tony makes a strong case otherwise, Mark is open for discussion. While picking grapes is the first step toward making great wine, picking the right winemaker is a close second. For the ’98, ’99, and 2000 vintages, Mark enlisted the services of Ray Coursen, a consulting winemaker, who would stop by the winery on a regular basis to make sure the interns, which Mark was expected to hire, were executing his winemaking program correctly. Coursen made his name producing top notch Cabernets, but with the overhead of a new winery weighing down the books, Mark needed someone who could also craft a quality Chardonnay. The white wine’s shorter gestation period from grape to glass means quicker contribution to the winery’s bottom line. Above all, Mark didn’t want to pay up for a famous winemaker; he’d rather build one in-house.

Mark had better things to do than babysit interns, so he had his General Manager and C.F.O. at Jack Neal & Sons put out feelers for a full-time winemaker. They were flooded with resumes from outside the valley. “Mostly from people who wanted to get into Napa.”

Next, he told a handful of people in the industry about his hiring plan, in confidence. Tom Alamano, a manager at the St. Helena Wine Center, recommended Tony as someone who was young, hungry, and took pride in his work. “I liked Tony,” Mark recalls, “because he was making great wines, but wasn’t getting credit for it. He’s got a memory that won’t quit. He remembers every wine he’s ever had and can tell you about it. I’m a grape grower, and that’s all I want to be.”

Mark does, however, want to learn more about the winemaking process, to be able to talk the talk at tastings, dinners, and sales calls. With all the hours he spends in the vineyards, however, he relies on Tony to operate autonomously at the winery.

Although Tony had heard about Mark’s tough, dictatorial ways, he was sold on the job by Mark’s promise of minimal intervention running the winery. For a winemaker to have this much influence in the vineyards is a luxury, Tony realizes. It’s also more work, but in the end it gives him greater control over the raw ingredients of his craft.

A couple minutes past noon, the pickers finish. Pedro’s crews have picked 1 ½ boxes in thirty minutes. Weighing in at roughly three-quarters of a ton, it’s a relatively small haul that shouldn’t take long to crush.

Heading back to the winery, Tony takes a call on his cell phone. It’s his wife, Paige, and she tells him they are now the proud owners of a house. It’s their first one, a two-bedroom, two-bath in the up-valley town of Calistoga and Tony is relieved it’s now official. But after hanging up he murmurs, “Too expensive…”

Really, Tony has little to complain about. While he now looks forward to a five-minute drive home, most of the Hispanic pickers face hour-long commutes to the more affordable outlying edges of Bay Area sprawl.

Outside the Neal winery, a cool breeze kicks up and the sky breaks into partly cloudy conditions. The sun reflects white-hot off the concrete crush pad, causing everyone to squint. With the help of a forklift, Tony dumps the grapes into the crusher.

A spinning augur inside breaks open the skins and separates the stems. As the crusher churns the grapes, Tony shakes in a measuring cup full of sulfur dioxide powder to inhibit bacterial growth. The pulpy mix of juice and skins known as “must” pours out the other end into a plastic fermenting bin. To prevent spillage, Tony holds the hose in place. The must quickly fills the bin – a little too quickly. It’s going to spill over in a few seconds and Tony has left the remote control on the other side of the room. He can’t reach it without letting go of the must pipe. If he lets go of the must pipe, it’ll pop out and spew wine all over the place. Showing the nimbleness and agility that won him accolades as a high school wrestler, Tony springs over, grabs the remote control, and leaps back just in time to catch the must pipe before it flies out of the bin. Potentially hellish A hellish cleanup narrowly avoided.

Tony wants to keep his winery as clean and sterilized as possible, but he isn’t obsessive. “A little funk in the winery is okay,” he concedes. “I mean, we don’t need our guys cleaning the floor with toothbrushes every day. At that point, you’re forgetting it’s about the wine.”

Crush is done for the day. The equipment and crush pad he’ll hose down later. “When the grape juice dries, you can see it better,” he explains. Knowing these kinds of time-saving tips is an underrated skill in winemakers. By efficiently handling the mindless tasks, Tony has more time to concentrate on wine. After the afternoon pumpovers and cleanup, he’ll head home. And then he’ll get up and do it again tomorrow.

Chapter Three

As Good as it Gets: Cult Wines

To those of us not well versed in the fine art of wine snobbery, the name “Screaming Eagle” might sound like another low-brow competitor to wino favorites Thunderbird, Mad Dog, or Cold Duck, the forgettable mass-market sparkling wine from the Seventies. Coincidentally, these brand names all describe birds or animals in some sort of agitated or uncomfortable state. Whereas $10 and a short walk to the corner deli is all you need to score that bottle of T-Bird or Mad Dog, you’ll likely pay more than $1,000 to procure a bottle of Screaming Eagle’s Napa Valley Cabernet, if you’re lucky enough to find it. Considered the leader of the pack of so-called California “cult” wines, Screaming Eagle is one of a handful of boutique wineries crowned as such. Collectively, the cult wineries embody a phenomenon that both captivates and frustrates wine enthusiasts.

As the economy boomed in the 1990’s, new-found wealth created a fresh breed of affluent wine drinkers who were willing to pay big bucks for the next big thing. These arriviste collectors began snapping up limited releases from tiny boutique wineries, driving up secondary market prices to astronomical levels, sometimes five to ten times the original price of the wine. It was not that the wine was actually five to ten times better in quality than top releases coming out of larger premium wineries like Robert Mondavi, Chateau Montelena, or Beaulieu Vineyards; rather, the astronomical price increases reflected the basic laws of supply and demand. Small, finite amounts of highly desirable wine commanded higher and higher prices as a growing population of wealthy wine drinkers could now afford to pay whatever it took to get their trophy wines.

An exact definition of cult wine is difficult to pinpoint, but there are several common characteristics. First of all, these rare boutique wines are expensive, at least $300 a bottle on the open market. Most cult wines also tend to be Cabernets, and the grapes are either “estate grown” within the winery’s own acreage or harvested from specific single vineyards. In addition, the wines are usually handcrafted under the direction of a well-known winemaker or winemaking consultant. Invariably, cult wines have received top tasting scores (94-99 points) from either The Wine Spectator magazine or Robert Parker, Jr., arguably the two most influential voices in the wine business today. Lastly, cult wines must be rare; most are produced in batches of 1,000 cases (12,000 bottles) or less. In fact, cult wines are usually so rare that few bottles actually make it into the retail marketplace. Those that do are usually found high on a shelf behind the cash register, locked behind protective glass, or hidden in some back room reserved for best customers only. Sometimes the hard-to-find bottles never make it onto the floor at all, instead becoming a welcome addition to the store owner’s personal wine collection. The majority of the rare releases are sold directly from the winery to its long-time mailing list members and to a few high profile restaurants.

Although the roster of cult wines is forever shifting and constantly open to interpretation by the wine press and others in the industry, there are several wineries that always seem to make the short list. Currently, collectors are scurrying to acquire any drop of grape flavored liquid produced by the following wineries: Screaming Eagle, Grace Family, Shafer Hillside Select, Bryant Family, Dalla Valle, Colgin, Araujo, Marcassin, and Harlan.

One of the most important prerequisites for a wine to be considered a cult member is affiliation with a big-name winemaker or winemaking consultant. Once a winemaker or consultant produces a hit wine, they seem to acquire a Midas-like reputation, leaving wine enthusiasts clamoring to buy any wine they’ve touched. Success at one is then attracts additional winery clients, each willing to pay as much as $100,000 for the privilege. For wineries, hiring an A-List winemaking consultant like Helen Turley, Tony Soter, or Heidi Peterson Barrett practically guarantees they’ll be able to charge $100+ per bottle and still sell out their wine.

Although consulting winemakers have been a presence in the wine industry since the 1960’s, only in the 1990’s could the best ones command six-figure fees, with those consultants usually handling up to a half-dozen clients each harvest. In a nutshell, their job involves advising winery clients on such key aspects of winemaking as harvest dates, fermentation, blending, and when to bottle the wine. Much of the “hands on” execution of these tasks is left to the wineries’ own cellar managers, who work closely with the consultant. For the most part, it is more cost effective for a small winery owner to hire a wine consultant for $2,000 to $5,000 per month than to bring on a full-time winemaker for $90,000 a year. Once a small winery has established itself, they will often pull the winemaking duties back in-house for better accountability and control. One of the major criticisms of winemaking consultants is that they spread themselves too thin across too many clients.

That said, having a top consultant on staff allows a winery to charge sky-high prices and still sell out its releases. In many cases, this represents a return on investment that more than justifies the $100,000 price tag for the consultant’s work.

A cursory glance at the current cult winery roster shows the same few preeminent winemaking consultants appearing multiple times. Some wineries count several consecutive prominent wine consultants in their short histories. In other cases, the best known consultants’ resumes include tenures at two or three cult wineries each. Heidi Peterson Barrett, for one, was responsible for the early successes of Screaming Eagle, Dalla Valle, and Grace Family Vineyards. Helen Turley worked on Colgin, Bryant Family Vineyards, and Marcassin, her own label. Tony Soter first brought Araujo to prominence, then picked up at Dalla Valle where Heidi Peterson Barrett left off, before finally parlaying those successes into the creation of his own label, Etude. These three consultants alone have been associated with seven of the nine top cult wineries.

In fact, the winemakers and consultants become brands in and of themselves, and once they are associated with a new winery, enthusiasts and collectors scurry to get in early. Although it is debatable when exactly the California cult wines really “popped,” prices reached a pinnacle in the late 90’s. At a Zachy’s/Christies auction in June, 1998, the winning bid for a case of Colgin Napa Valley Cabernet from the Herb Lamb Vineyard was $16,100, or $1,340 per bottle!

By the fourth quarter of 1999, only 1,700 bottles from all the cult wineries combined were available in wine auctions nationwide. Those that were up for auction attracted as many as 25 bidders at a time, and prices began surpassing those achieved by the most expensive French Bordeaux. And as the booming economy contributed increasingly disposable income, collectors were even more willing and able to pay whatever it cost to acquire the rare bottles of cult wine and the bragging rights and ego boosts that came with them.

So, how can you pick up a cult wine?

The easiest but most expensive way is to buy a bottle off the wine list at a five-star restaurant or bid on one at a wine auction. Beyond auctions and pay-through-the-nose prices at hot restaurants, the most affordable way to get your hands on a cult wine release is to possess incredible foresight and land a spot on a winery’s mailing list. If you’re one of the lucky few, you’ll get first dibs on the wineries’ latest releases for the relative bargain price of $100 to $175 per bottle. Although frustrating for those who are not on a list, the system is a basically fair one rewarding loyalty and seniority. Buyers who supported a winery in its earlier, pre-fame days may receive an allotment of six bottles instead of the two-bottle limit imposed on newer mailing list members.

Getting on a mailing list once a winery’s fame has been acheived, however, can be more difficult than landing a membership at Augusta National Golf Club. Colgin and Bryant Family Vineyards both have waiting lists of 4,000 oeniphiles. And if you think bribery works, think again. One wine enthusiast offered Ann Colgin a Mercedes SUV for an allotment of wine. Don Bryant turned down jewelry, cars and even a free liver transplant in return for positions on his coveted mailing list. A mailing list spot can even become a bone of contention in marital disputes, as Colgin witnessed when she was presented with papers from an ex-wife desperate to prove her claim to the allotment.

In a Wine Spectator article, Colgin talks about the awkward position she finds herself in each year, when she is forced to turn away people, many of them high-powered businessmen, who are used to getting what they want.

“It’s hard for them to understand that I have a huge waiting list and they may be waiting years before they ever see a bottle.”

Don Weaver, the director of Harlan Estate, puts it another way. “I’m in the position or disappointing people on a regular basis.”

Some of the winery owners seem almost embarrassed at the attention their wineries receive. The message one hears on the recording machine at Screaming Eagle winery is peppered with humble, almost apologetic pauses:

“Hi, this is Jean Phillips of Screaming Eagle,” she starts, “Umm, if you want to leave your name and number we’ll give you a call back. Uhh, the winery’s not open for tours and tastings. Umm, our fax number is… Thanks for calling.”

Phillips’ bashfulness is understandable, once you understand that Screaming Eagle’s position as the bellwether cult wine basically came about by accident. Phillips’ primary occupation is as a prominent real estate agent, specializing in Napa Valley estates and vineyard properties. It’s not surprising, then, that she should end up with some excellent vineyard property of her own, specifically 57 acres in Oakville. Saddled with debt from the investment, however, she sold her grapes to other vintners for the first seven years with the exception of eighty individual Cabernet vines that she looked after personally. From this tiny plot of vines, she produced homemade wine that she gave away as Christmas gifts to friends. Curious to get a third-party opinion of its quality, she took some of the wine over to the staff at the nearby Robert Mondavi Winery. To Phillips’ surprise, they liked it and recommended she bottle it. Phillips hired Richard Peterson as winemaking consultant, which led to her meeting and subsequent hiring of Peterson’s daughter, Heidi Peterson Barrett, as winemaker. Favorable word of mouth and a top Robert Parker rating later, the rest is history.

Phillips acknowledges her success as a vintner has a lot to do with the vineyard itself. Featuring rocky soil on a west facing slope, she considers it a perfect mix of the key elements of drainage and exposure. While the weather is hot enough to ripen the grapes to their potential, the fruit also receives cool afternoon breezes coming up from San Pablo Bay, twenty miles to the south. This change in temperature effectively shuts down the grapes at night, extending their growing season and creating more concentrated flavors in the wine.

While Phillips concedes Screaming Eagle could grow more quickly, she prefers a more gradual approach and is more than satisfied with the size of her tiny garage-like winery.

“All the wonderful things that have happened, well, I don’t want to think about it too hard,” she posits in an interview with The Wine Spectator, seeming to recognize the ephemeral nature of the cult wine phenomenon.“I don’t know all the why’s. I’m just enjoying it.”

Trying to buy cult wines can be like trying to pick stocks on the Nasdaq. In the late ‘90s, enticed by the extraordinary returns being realized by early investors in companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Yahoo!, new investors flocked to the stock market, buying up shares in the hot companies being touted in the business press and on the front pages of mass audience weeklies like Time and Newsweek. But an old saying on Wall Street is that by the time you’ve read about it in Business Week, you’ve already missed the window of opportunity. The same idea applies to cult wines. Once you read about a wine receiving a 90+ score in either The Wine Spectator or Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, your chance to buy it at a reasonable price, or secure a spot on the winery’s mailing list, is long gone. The wine disappears practically overnight from wine store shelves and what little remains now sells for hundreds of dollars.

As a result, wine enthusiasts enjoy trying to identify “up and comers” early, so they can then sit back and watch as the Johnny-come-latelies arrive at their local wine store with the latest copy of Wine Spectator in hand and a frenzied look in their eyes.

Before he became a winemaker, witnessed this phenomenon on an annual basis in his former life as a wine salesman at the St. Helena Wine Center in the early 1990’s. Because of its plum location in downtown St. Helena, the Wine Center sits in close proximity to dozens of small ultra-premium wineries and boasts one of the best collections of Cabernet Sauvignon in the country. As a result, the Wine Center attracts an extremely loyal following among wine enthusiasts both inside and outside Napa Valley. Part of an employee’s job at the store is sampling wine, allowing them to drink wines they could never afford on their own. Tony was among the first to taste the new releases coming out of the boutique wineries, and this afforded him a bird’s eye view of the birth of the California cult wine phenomenon.

Although 1990 produced one of the best vintages in decades, Tony claims that it was 1991 when the California cult wines really took off, kicking off a surge of what he calls “crazy prices.” That year, Araujo Estate’s Eisele Vineyard Cabernet had been sitting on the Wine Center’s shelves priced at $40. Tony begged his customers to try the exquisite wine from the tiny vineyard, but his pleas fell on deaf ears as everyone passed it up for a better known rarity, Caymus’ Special Selection. Later in the year, Araujo received a 96 rating from Robert Parker. It now sells for almost $300 a bottle.

In 1992, with everyone chasing the scant supply of Araujo, Tony touted a Cabernet from a newcomer by the name of Bryant Family Vineyards. A couple months later, Parker gave their wine a rave review and it, too, disappeared from the store’s shelves.

In 1993, the Wine Center had 50 cases from a then unknown winery called Screaming Eagle. Tony continually offered it to frustrated Bryant Family seekers, saying, “You should try this, it’s excellent!” But no one listened. Then Parker scored it a 99.

In 1994, with sightings of Screaming Eagle as rare as those of the Loch Ness Monster, Tony recommended Harlan Estate’s Cabernet to his customers. Another superlative score from the wine press. Aother “cult wine” was born. Soon, the wine press was writing articles about these tiny wineries that were producing hard-to-find lots, christening them “cult wineries,” and recording their progress.

In the third quarter of 1999, the cult wine “Class of ‘94” vintages hit record high price levels. Screaming Eagle’s 1994 Cabernet was valedictorian with an average auction price of $1,943 per bottle. Araujo, Harlan, and Dalle Valle all commanded more than $500 per bottle. Colgin, Grace, and Bryant Family all brought in at least $400, and Shafer and Marcassin’s best brought in nearly $300 a bottle. With the next quarter, as 1999 segued into the the millennium, the market softened a bit for cult wines, with the highest price wines, Screaming Eagle and Araujo, both dropping 43%. As often happens, the mainstream press finally picked up on the phenomenon after the prices had peaked, with running an article in May 2000 entitled “Small Vineyards Attract a Cult Following.”

Further confirmation of the cresting market came a year and a half later, when one of the country’s most respected wine writers, Frank Prial of the New York Times, titled one of his columns, “Reality Check, Please, for Cult Wines.” While the market for these high priced wines may waver, it seems there will always be someone willing to pay top dollar for wines that are hard to find. For collectors, the key is getting in early and landing a spot on the mailing list of a promising young winery before it becomes famous. Keeping an ear to the ground for whispers and rumors of the “next cult wine” is a hobby in and of itself. Although the phenomenon is based on hype and potentially short-lived, there are worse scenarios out there than being a winemaker on a cult label. At twenty-eight years old, it’s something Tony can dream about. But right now, in the middle of harvest, Tony’s can’t think about future fame and fortune. He’s too busy crushing grapes.

Chapter Four

Harvest Hustle

It’s dawn, early October. Fog lit silver under a full moon’s glow obscures roadside vineyards into dusky brown and green blurs. The tall oaks flanking the Silverado Trail pop out of the smoky vapor like skeletons, their branches eerie appendages looming overhead. In spots the mist dissipates, revealing intermittent glimpses of the Mayacamas mountains rising in hazy, impressionistic layers above the clouds to the west. Adding gothic beauty to a landscape is not the only reason fog is a frontrunner for most valuable weather pattern in Napa Valley. The cool mist is an essential ingredient in the region’s high quality wines. Its nocturnal cooling effect extends the ripening season and allows the grapes to mature gradually. Steady, consistent growth during harvest allows complex and robust flavors to develop in the fruit.

In a vineyard near the corner of Silverado Trail and Deer Park Road , a half-dozen Hispanic grape pickers await the arrival of a hauling truck. They stand with folded arms next to an assortment of decade-old American-made cars. It’s chilly down here at the foot of Howell Mountain, but halfway up the curvy road to Angwin an inversion layer kicks in. Above the fog layer, the sky brightens and the air is warmer.

At the winery, Tony busies himself with pumpovers and punchdowns, breaking up the thick layers of grape skins, or caps, that form atop the fermenting must in the tanks and bins. Caps help seal out oxygen during fermentation, but breaking them up and re-circulating the grapeskins with the juice produces richer colors and more potent flavors. On pumpovers, an electric pump sucks juice from the bottom of the tank into a hose and then pours it back over the cap from above. Punchdowns, on the other hand, combine human effort and a stainless-steel rod with handle bars called a puncher, which looks like a pogo stick with a flat, round, metal disk at the bottom instead of foot pegs and a spring.

Standing over the bin, punching down, Tony looks like a construction worker with a jackhammer.

“It’s actually more pulling than pushing,” Tony explains as he works into a rhythm.

It’s only 7:15 in the morning and Tony’s off-white shorts are already dirty in the seat. His white polo shirt remains pristine, a blank canvas awaiting grape stain brushstrokes. As he exerts himself, rising onto tip-toes for leverage, his calf muscles ripple and his upper back flares wide. He makes the work look easy. Until a few minutes later when he huffs, “Whew, that’s more of a workout than I wanted.”

So far, about 15% of the fruit Neal Family Vineyards plans to harvest this year has been picked, most of it the white varietal, Chardonnay, which ripens in late summer. Tony and Mark have been holding out for greater ripeness and more complex flavors before picking any Cabernet, the winery’s signature grape.

From the bin he’s been punching down, Tony takes a Brix reading and records the results in his harvest journal, a small grape-stained composition notebook. The batch in this bin is behaving well, he reports, but fermentation in a nearby tank is a bit sluggish. Early on during fermentation, Brix readings can drop as much as three degrees per day as the sugars covert to alcohol. After ten days or so, as yeasts reach their fourth or fifth generation of reproduction, fermentation naturally slows down. Daily decreases slow to less than one degree.

Reproduction tapering off too drastically causes “stuck” fermentation. When this happens, winemakers have to kick start another fermentation cycle by adding new yeast to a batch of freshly-pressed juice from the cap. Once the solution starts percolating, it is poured back into the larger tank where it kicks off a chain reaction. It’s a lot of extra work, best avoided.

Thankfully, Tony finds the Brix levels on the slow tank decreased one degree last night, meaning fermentation is still happening. “Looks like a good finisher this year,” he says of the young wine, sounding like a thoroughbred trainer discussing a promising colt. Winemaking and animal husbandry operate under similar principles. Often winemakers describe their job function as “shepherding the grapes” from vineyard to bottle. While trainers work with foals to instill good racing habits early on, they must eventually let the horses run on their own. Likewise, winemakers take control during fermentation, but at some point they need to back off and let the wines age. Wine is a fragile substance easily damaged by too much handling. So, smooth fermentation is critical because it means less fixing and meddling by the winemaker later on.

Tony moves over to a second bin of Cabernet and starts punching down. He moves the puncher like a butter churn, up and down with steady strength. The rhythm borders on monotonous. One of the big secrets of harvest is the amount of downtime spent doing tedious chores or waiting for grapes. And then, every once in a while, there’s a wake-up call.

Disconnecting a hose from a tank after pumping over, Tony gets a painful blast of wine in his face. “Damn!” he yells, squeezing his eyes shut, “it’s definitely acidic, alright!” Grape juice now covers the front of his shirt. “The bees are going to love me today,” he continues. “They’ll flock right to me.”

Mistakes like this happen from time to time at any winery. Tony’s worst career transgressions have so far been limited to running a forklift into a wall and overfilling a couple of fermenting tanks, both at his former winery.

The crunch of tires over gravel signals Mark Neal’s arrival. He drives his truck up to the concrete loading pad and tells Tony the grapes are held up. “They picked the wrong vineyard,” he adds quickly, frowning.

“You’re kidding me,” responds Tony, eyes widening.

Although Mark maintains his poker face, Tony realizes after a few seconds that he’s joking about the crews picking the wrong vineyard. But he’s not joking about the grapes being held up, however. A mechanic at Jack Neal & Son didn’t get around to fixing one of the rigs, so the picking truck didn’t show up to the vineyard as scheduled, meaning the pickers sat around waiting in the dark at four a.m. All forty-eight of them eventually took off to find work elsewhere, leaving Mark high and dry. It’s the vineyard manager’s job to keep picking crews busy. Since most pickers are seasonal workers who earn their entire annual incomes over a three-month period, they cannot risk missing a day’s worth of wages. One idle day during harvest means 1% of their annual income down the drain.

“We’re behind,” Mark admits, “but we’ll catch up.” With twenty-plus harvests under his belt, he’s not especially worried. Nothing longer hours and some creative crew scheduling can’t take care of.

It’s 9:30 a.m. and getting hot outside. Tony wears a big straw farmer’s hat for shade as he hoses out an empty tank. Job complete, he decides to work on some barreled Chardonnay picked six weeks ago. He heads back through the winery into the caves and their subterranean refuge of damp coolness and subdued light. The wine will age here in their wooden casks for twelve more months “sur lees,” meaning the dead yeast particles are left in the barrel to enhance the flavors. To that end, Tony inserts a “baton” - a metal wand with a curved blade at the end – into each barrel and scrapes away the sediment of dead yeast coating the bottom. Agitated wine, super-saturated with carbon dioxide, bubbles out of the bungholes like a shaken Coke freshly opened.

Once the carbon dioxide is released via batonage, Tony tops off the barrels with some Chardonnay from a filler barrel. “Chardonnay’s got a bad rap, right now,” he remarks. “People say it sucks these days, but it’s just because there’s so much bad Chardonnay out there, made with too much oak. At its best, Chardonnay has an almost oily quality.”

Whenever a winemaker starts talking flavors in close proximity to barreled wine, samples inevitably follow. Using a “thief” - a slender glass tube bent slightly in the middle – Tony extracts some Chardonnay from a nearby barrel. Sticking the thief into the bunghole, he lets the tube fill partway with wine, then plugs the airhole with his thumb. When he releases his thumb from the airhole, the wine pours out into his glass. Times when Tony needs more than just a glassful, like when he tops off barrels, he sucks air through the hole with his mouth to get the flow going.

“If you catch it wrong, the CO2 gives you a mean head rush.”

We taste Chardonnays from assorted barrel types. An old oak barrel offers up wine with a fruity, orange flavor which in the glass looks like pulp-free Tropicana. The sample has a sugary, cheek-puckering aftertaste, evidence that the wine is still in the early stages of fermentation. After a year of aging, this batch will develop a much dryer texture. Even then, not all the sugars will convert to alcohol. Most good Chardonnay doesn’t finish fermentation, Tony explains, so small amounts of residual sugar, less than one Brix degree worth, are common in the final product.

We try another sample from a new oak barrel that Tony inoculated with additional yeast. From the get-go, it feels dryer across the palate. Tony uses words like “earthy,” “brown sugar,” “truffle,” “baked apple,” and “pear” to describe the wine. When he throws out such adjectives, it becomes easy as a fellow taster to notice the complex flavors. While Tony esoterically describes specific fruit species in various stages of culinary enhancement, all my lowly palate and I come up with are common, ordinary words like “fruity,” “citrusy,” and “sweet.”

Our final sample is a batch of 2001 Chardonnay Tony’s been using to top off other barrels. In the mouth it feels a little hot, leaving little pin prick sensations across one’s tongue. The new oak used in the barrels and the richness of the lees left inside will eventually work their magic and mellow the alcoholic heat, Tony explains.

When he tastes wine, Tony gurgles the liquid over his tongue, letting the air from the bubbles rise up the back of his throat into his nasal cavities. The gradual, flat finish of this sample doesn’t please him.

“I’m surprised how uninvolved the wine is,” he says, like a professor evaluating a lazy student with potential. There’s a frown on his face. Then something clicks within.

Returning to the topping barrel of 2001 Chardonnay, he takes a sample from lower down.

“That’s much better,” he announces, noting a dryer start and crisper finish than before. He pours the rest of the sample into a small plastic container and then slaps on an adhesive label. Later, he will take the sample to Enological Testing Services (E.T.S.), a wine industry laboratory down in St. Helena that will analyze the chemical components. They will print out a report and Tony will tweak his winemaking strategy accordingly.

Mark returns with an update from the vineyards. “The fruit is perfect. 99.9% for the growing, huh?” he boasts. He’s exaggerating the long-held belief that great wine is made more in the vineyards than in the winery. This estimation leaves a meager 0.1% of the credit for this vintage to the winemaker.

Tony responds to this affront on his profession with an appropriate gesture. He snorts.

Mark’s eyes follow Tony as he rearranges bins with the forklift. “Let me drive,” he pleads sarcastically.

“No.”

“C’mon!”

“Fine,” laughs Tony, “you want me to go do something else?”

“I’m sure you’ll find something,” says Mark. After a pause of a couple seconds, he adds, “Like golf.”

Their machine-gun banter is relentless, like the dialogue in a David Mamet play.

The rumble of a truck’s engine and the crunch of gravel announce the arrival of the grapes, 4.32 tons worth of Zinfandel. Some grapes in the bins have deep purple, puckered skins, while others possess a lighter red color and plump, taut skins. “That’s Zinfandel for you,” explains Mark.

He pops a couple of grapes in his mouth. “Oh, those are good! Tony, aren’t you glad I convinced you to wait until today, when they were ripe enough?”

Tony rolls his eyes. He knows if it were up to Mark, these grapes would’ve been picked weeks ago. As winemaker, Tony prefers letting the fruit hang as long as possible to get the boldest flavors. Mark, as grower, doesn’t want to risk spoiling the crop by waiting too long.

“I’m leaving,” Mark says finally, “My job is done.”

Nothing from Tony.

“You can’t blame me if the wine is bad,” Mark continues.

In a sense, what Mark says is true. Once the fruit is delivered to the winery, the winemaker becomes solely responsible for turning the grapes into wine worthy of someone’s glass. The vineyard manager moves on to worrying about next year’s grapes.

“Do me favor,” responds Tony, handing Mark the Chardonnay sample he took earlier, “Take this down to E.T.S.”

“Would it be bad if I forgot about it and left it in my car for three days?”

Tony ignores him.

Mark looks down at the vial of white wine, puts on his best poker face, and says, “This is the Cabernet, right?”

After Mark leaves, Tony chats with the truck driver who just dropped off the grapes. The driver reports that the pickers are tired. Most of the past week, they’ve worked sixteen hour days, from 12:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Although these kinds of hours are common during harvest, burning out the workers is never a good idea. Fatigued crews can slow down grapes getting to the winery in the freshest possible condition.

Crush moves quickly. Using a forklift, Tony raises each half-ton bin of Zinfandel and tilts it into the crusher. Juan, one of Mark’s vineyard management employees who’s on loan to Tony during harvest, stands atop a ladder guiding the grapes into a square-shaped stainless-steel funnel using a three-pronged claw rake. Inside the drum of the crusher, where slowly moving auger blades knock the fruit free from their stems, grapes bounce around like lottery balls. The resulting sludge of broken grape skins and juice, or “must,” is pumped via hose into fermenting tanks. The separated stems tumble out the butt end of the crusher into an empty picking bin for removal. It only takes a couple minutes for each bin of grapes to make its way through the crusher, but Tony doesn’t rest. He uses the short wait time to haul away discarded stems and spray out empty bins.

As Tony jockeys bins back and forth with the forklift, bees swarm his body. Other than a periodic swat, he seems unphased. He’s used to bees, but he has a healthy respect for them. His former boss at Duckhorn once happened to be standing near a tractor that was disking soil between vineyard rows when the machine’s blade sliced open an underground hornet’s nest. He and the tractor driver escaped the angry swarm by jumping into a nearby pond. Now, Tony’s former boss is seriously allergic to bees and carries a sting kit wherever he goes. After that episode, Tony and his co-workers decided to keep a tally. The guy with the most bee stings at the end of harvest won a free lunch. “I think the record was eight,” recalls Tony.

Crush complete, Tony drives down to the valley. He needs to meet Mark at Wyckoff Vineyard, check out the grapes, and decide a picking date. Located on the valley floor a couple hundred yards west of Route 29, Wyckoff occupies some of the most expensive and sought-after land in all of Napa Valley. “It’s redsoil wash terrain,” Tony explains, created by sedimentary deposits from an ancient river.

“Ah, if only I were a millionaire,” he sighs, panning the pastoral scene before him. “But, I’m not…in case you couldn’t tell.”

Since Wyckoff Vineyard is one of the biggest Cabernet sources for Neal Family Vineyards and will contribute the majority of the vintage’s grapes, Tony and Mark take special care arguing over the picking date. Timing is everything.

“Look, the leaves are turning yellow,” notes Mark. “We should pick ‘em now.”

“Next week,” disagrees Tony.

Mark looks at him, no trace of emotion on his face.

“Sunday,” Tony counteroffers, picking the first day of next week.

“Okay,” agrees Mark. “But only after we get massages.” The idea of a winemaker or vineyard manager taking time out for spa treatments during harvest is laughable, but Mark and Tony are having too much fun playing their game of deadpan give-and-take to smile.

“I’m confirming Tuesday,” says Tony, pushing the date and Mark’s patience even further.

“Next Tuesday, right?” yells Mark, playing along.

“Sunday,” concedes Tony.

The date is set.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to Mark’s comments. “Next week, we’re going to drive by and see this whole vineyard yellow,” he whines, looking back over the acreage. “Someone could drop a cigarette and the whole place would go up.”

“Easy picking, then,” replies Tony as Mark climbs into his truck and departs.

The grapes may be ripe enough to pick according to Brix readings, but Tony wants the fruit to taste ripe, too. With the Wyckoff Vineyard grapes, Tony needs a way to slow down the physiological ripeness and let the flavors catch up. Aggressive irrigation of the vineyard is one answer. “Maybe I’ll have Mark throw a lot of water on it,” he thinks aloud.

Using a pocket refractometer, which looks and works like a miniature, high-tech kaleidoscope, Tony takes a Brix reading of the Wyckoff sample he just picked. Splashing a dab on the slide and flipping down the cover, Tony holds the instrument up to the sunlight and peers into the lens. Inside the viewfinder, the sugars in the juice sample form a cloudy mass against a series of vertical hashmarks. How high the cloudiness rises on the scale determines the degrees Brix. Halving the Brix readings of the grapes at picking time provides a rough calculation for what the alcohol content will be in the ensuing wine (i.e. grapes picked at 28 degrees Brix result in an approximate alcohol level of 14%.)

“Have you ever checked Gatorade?” Tony asks, grabbing a bottle from his lunch bag. “It’s something like 6% sugar.”

He pours some onto the slide and sure enough, it’s 6.5 degrees Brix.

Tony gets a call from Mark reporting the progress of his crews at another vineyard. One-third of the vineyard has been picked. Mark tells Tony the weight of the fruit picked, so far. Based on this information, Tony figures the entire haul will end up coming at around eleven tons. Every day, he needs to know exactly how many tons to expect. Over the course of harvest, one of Tony’s toughest tasks is managing tank space at the winery, moving wine from crusher to fermenting tank to barrel as efficiently as possible in order to make room for the grapes that will be coming in next. Putting four tons of crushed fruit into a thirteen-ton tank is wasteful. Tony prefers having at least six tons in each tank. Eleven tons, almost enough to fill a tank, would be great.

“That makes me happy,” he says to Mark. “So then, I guess I’ll see you tonight at 6:30 when you come by to help clean up.”

Silence from Mark. After a few seconds, he adds, “Save me a video of it.”

Though their incessant razzing might suggest otherwise, they have a healthy respect for each other’s expertise. They try not to interfere with each other’s jobs. Tony doesn’t pick grapes and Mark doesn’t make wine. To work efficiently, they have to trust in the other’s skills. The combination of Mark’s grape growing pedigree and Tony’s winemaking talents seems a guaranteed recipe for success. All they have to do is stick together as a team for the duration of the vintage, from picking to release date. How hard can that be?

Chapter Five

Outstanding in the Vineyards

It’s 6:00 A.M. one morning in late October and still dark outside the Neal winery. Crystalline stars glint high above. A flag flaps lazily in the breeze, a rustling shadow in the predawn blackness. It looks like a clear day coming. Perfect for the last day of crush.

At 6:10 A.M., lights flick on in the Neal house upslope from the winery. One upstairs, then one downstairs. Minutes later, Mark’s truck rumbles down the driveway. He’s on his way to the vineyards to monitor the grape picking one more time. Rising early is easy for him. He’s been doing it for years. It’s in his blood.

In 1968, his father, Jack Neal, quit his job at the Oakland Tribune and moved the family up to the Napa Valley for a change in lifestyle. To make ends meet, his father performed odd jobs for absentee owners while his mother sold walnuts on the side of the road. Times were tough and they earned everything from scratch.

Growing up in the tiny village of Rutherford, between Yountville and St. Helena, Mark was the middle child between two brothers. From an early age, he mimicked his father’s relentless work ethic. He started driving tractors at age 8, knocking down prune trees to make way for new vineyards they were planting. “I didn’t have Tonka trucks when I was growing up,” he recalls, “I had real trucks.” By the age of eleven, he was helping his father dig reservoirs in vineyards.

High school years, he rose at 1:00 A.M., sprayed sulfur on vineyards before classes, then finished up the day working at a local winery. After high school, Mark skipped college and went straight into the family business. Like his father, he just wanted to work. His father was happiest when disking the fields, taking care of the books, or otherwise engaged in a productive capacity. Until 1994, when he died suddenly from a heart attack.

He was the only boss Mark has ever had.

When he died, Mark took over and never looked back, growing the business to more than 2,000 acres under contract. “There’s not one piece of ground in Napa Valley we haven’t touched,” he brags.

Jack Neal & Son Vineyard Management pulls in 40,000 tons of grapes each year, about 75% of it Cabernet. They count 42 current clients, including vineyard owners and the winemakers who buy grapes from them. In January, the slowest month in the vineyards, Jack Neal & Son employs about 200 total workers. The number swells to more than 400 during the eight-month period spanning March/April to the end of harvest in October/November.

Job titles at Jack Neal & Son are varied and specific. Vineyard managers are the closest thing to executives at Mark’s company. They brief Mark on conditions of any and all vineyards they manage. Viticulturists work under the vineyard managers and serve as another set of eyes in the field. They walk the vineyards frequently, checking overall conditions and looking for things remiss like broken irrigation drips. Mark expects viticulturists to know their vineyards as well their own children. Pest control managers advise Mark on organic farming issues such when to release predatory insects and when to spray sulfur dust. Equipment managers are responsible for keeping all of the machinery in tip-top working shape. The company even has an on-site welding shop, where highly-skilled iron workers fashion, among other things, custom-made wrought-iron gates for clients. If you’ve got the money, Jack Neal & Son can make your trophy vineyard dreams come true.

Mark’s own aspirations, on the other hand, are not satisfied by mere vineyards. Before his father died, he used to talk with Mark about someday making wine from the grapes they farmed. In building the winery, Mark makes those conversations reality, fulfilling the dreams of two generations in the Neal family. Making the move from vineyard manager to winery owner, Mark joins a growing movement in Napa Valley.

While fans of Napa Valley wines have long followed “rockstar” winemakers and recognized superlative individual vineyards like Martha’s Vineyard, Fay’s Vineyard, and Three Palms for their consistent quality, they rarely gave notice to the vineyard managers who farmed them. Wine drinkers are now realizing if great wine starts with great fruit, then equal attention should be paid to those responsible for growing the best grapes. Who grows the grapes is becoming just as important as where they are grown.

Propelled by an influx of new money into wine country, vineyard management has turned into big business. Someone has to plant those trophy vineyards. Because few absentee owners have the desire or capability to handle the less-than-sexy farming aspects of owning a vineyard, they outsource the agricultural details to a vineyard manager.

After decades of quietly digging in the dirt, top vineyard managers like Mark are putting their family names on the line, parlaying their extensive knowledge of vineyards and experience growing grapes into making great wines of their own. Whereas their job used to be done as soon as the harvested grapes were delivered to a client winery, now these vineyard managers are completing the cycle, shepherding grapes from mere buds on the vine all the way to the glass. For them, the progression from growing the best grapes to making great wine is no huge stretch, but a natural extension of showing what the fruit they grow can do in a bottle.

Vineyard management has certainly come a long way. In the old days, vineyards were farmed the same way every year. Spraying was done according to the calendar and picking took place automatically when sugars hit a pre-ordained Brix level. There used to be two different major rootstocks, now there are more than one hundred. The amount of information available has grown logarithmically and interpreting it more complicated. Winemaking styles are more varied and personalized because each winemaker seeks different ripeness, sugar levels and flavor profiles.

New tools have also changed the game. Combining aerial infrared photography and GPS technology, vineyard managers can now identify areas of heavy and light foliage in a specific vineyard. Based on this information, they may decide to harvest the grapes following a curved path that meanders across several different vineyard blocks instead of picking them in the standard, linear, row-by-row fashion. But for all the high-tech gadgetry and information available, Mother Nature still has a way of showing she’s the boss. When a heat wave this past summer left vineyards with green berries and ripe grapes side by side within the same clusters, Mark’s crews resorted to plucking out the unripe fruit with tweezers.

For their efforts, top vineyard managers can do quite well financially. Theirs is an unspectacular business that is quietly lucrative. Costs for planting a vineyard range from $20,000 per acre for a flat plot on the valley floor to well over $100,000 for tight vine spacing on a rocky hillside. That figure doesn’t even include the cost of getting necessary permits and hiring lawyers, which can run $50,000 to $100,000 before a shovel even hits the soil. Once the vineyard is planted, annual maintenance runs anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 per acre.

On the highest end of the cost scale is David Abreu, undoubtedly the most famous, or infamous of the vineyard managers, depending on whether you’re talking about his superlative wines (the lowest score he’s ever received from Robert Parker, Jr., the famous wine reviewer, was a 94) or his less-than-stellar reputation with environmental groups. While he brought unwanted negative attention to vineyard managers by ignoring Napa County’s notoriously tough hillside development laws in 1997, attracting the attention of Sierra Club lawyers, Abreu has also proved that hands-on knowledge of vineyards translates well into making great wine.

Winemakers rave about Abreu’s unbending commitment to quality, specifically his microscopic-level attention to detail that makes their jobs easier, like making sure there are no leaves or pebbles mixed in with the fruit when it is delivered to the winery at harvest. Despite his environmental transgressions, even his competitors respect what he has done to build the name and reputation of Napa Valley wines.

As a group, vineyard managers often find themselves lightning rods for environmental issues, caught between the wealthy landowners paying them to put in vineyards as quickly as possible and those who oppose hillside development. Ironically, planting a questionably-located vineyard and paying the ensuing fines can make more financial sense than spending the money and time necessary to hire an environmental consultant and wait for permit approval. At fault are the laughably small fines handed out by the county. As Mark puts it, “When you’re doing a million dollar project, what’s a $5,000 fine? The scale of the penalty is way off compared to the value of the end product. Ten cases of wine pay off the fine.”

With only two enforcement officers in Napa County, the odds of getting caught are small. It might be a case of a few “cowboys” spoiling it for the many, since most vineyard managers claim they do pay attention to environmental issues, taking care to prevent erosion, conserving water, and growing cover crops to encourage beneficial insects and reduce the need for pesticides.

Political issues like these, coupled with Mother Nature’s ever-changing whims, make vineyard management a tough gig best suited for workaholics. Ten hours, six days a week, is just the beginning. “There are days during frost time and harvest when I don’t even sleep,” boasts Mark. “I drive 60,000 miles a year in my truck and I never leave Napa Valley.” As grueling as the vineyard work might seem, many vineyard managers turned winery owners actually prefer farming to running a winery. They’ve found the complexities of marketing and selling wine make vineyard management look easy.

Since they’re on the front lines every day, vineyard managers are usually the first to tell whether a harvest is going to be great or simply mediocre and can act accordingly. Vineyard managers act as liaisons between wineries and vineyard owners, matching up buyers and sellers. Because they’re at the center of all this networking, they have access to some of the best fruit in the valley. This, of course, is a great source of confidence for the winemakers working on the vineyard managers’ labels.

Vineyard managers may be the unsung heroes behind Napa’s best wines, but now their own wines are getting noticed. After rating Abreu’s 2001 Madrona Ranch Cabernet a superlative 96, venerable wine reviewer Robert Parker, Jr. writes, “This is the wine of a genius who refuses to make any compromises.” He also gave vineyard manager Jim Barbour’s first release (1997 Barbour Vineyards Cabernet) a score of 93. Although Neal Family Vineyards has yet to be reviewed by the press, Mark expects nothing less than success. As the vineyard manager behind some of Napa Valley’s best wines, including Heitz’ Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet, Mark is ready for the spotlight. His multi-million dollar winery is nearly complete. He has a talented young winemaker on board. With his family’s name on the label and his reputation on the line, he can’t afford to fail. Others have gained fame and fortune as a result of his hard work in the vineyards. Why shouldn’t he step up and claim his share of the prize?

At 7:00 A.M., Mark pulls off the Silverado Trail into a dirt lot carved in the middle of the Pelosi vineyard, which is owned by U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s family. Through the gray fog comes a slow parade of cars and pickup trucks bringing pickers to the vineyard. A large pickup with a small trailer delivers some precious cargo; two green “Johnny-on-the-Spot” port-o-potties. Even during the frenzy of harvest, nature calls. In the parking lot, pickers congregate in groups of three or four, hovering around open car doors and trunks. Against the morning chill, they wear hooded jackets and sweatshirts, most colored Oakland Raiders black and silver.

Mark walks over to join Pedro at the edge of the vineyard block. For this last day of harvest, he wears a faded green Carhardt work shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers that may have been white in a former life. Pedro sports a canvas jacket against the cold and a neatly maintained beard. He wears a baseball hat and a belt buckle of impressive proportions, oval-shaped with a faux-ivory carving of a horse head. Gray specks in his sideburns and crow’s feet around his eyes are the only hints of age on an otherwise youthful and trim frame. Both of the men are in farmer’s shape, the occupational byproduct of an outdoor, active lifestyle that makes them look younger than their years.

Together, they sample fruit from the rows to be picked this morning. The grapes, Cabernet, are small, almost blue, and covered with fine dust. Mark grabs a whole cluster, holds it to his mouth like an apple, chomps out a bite, and then throws the rest off to the side like a gluttonous modern-day Bacchus.

The workers shuffle around, killing time by sharpening their picking knives, hook-shaped blades reminiscent of an eagle’s talon. When it’s time, the twenty workers milling in the parking area move to the vineyard’s edge to watch and listen as the vineyard supervisor shows them how Pedro wants the picking done today.

Picking may be the most critical task in vineyard management. No matter how great you are at growing grapes, if you pick them at the wrong time, the whole crop can go to waste. So Mark does whatever it takes to get the grapes off the vines on time, even investing in lights for night picking one harvest because conditions during the day got too hot. Each season, Jack Neal & Son hires twenty crews of twelve pickers each. Mark and his foremen watch them closely during harvest.

“I keep track who’s loyal and who’s not when the heat’s on.”

He’ll remember the best and worst performers when hiring time comes around next year.

Pickers work about six to seven hours a day and average $15 per hour in pay.

“Most of them want to work six days, ten hours a day,” Mark says. “The hardest thing is making sure they’re as busy as they want to be, otherwise they’ll go elsewhere.” From winter pruning through harvest time, Jack Neal & Sons can usually provide enough work to keep them satisfied. Whether it’s digging up sick vines or putting in erosion control mechanisms, there are always vineyard maintenance tasks to be done. The work seasonal employees perform between March and November earns them the equivalent of a year’s worth of wages in Mexico. Even with the promise of steady work, loyalty is far from guaranteed.

“Next thing you know, someone starts throwing them $10, $20, or $50 more per bucket,” complains Mark. “Ten years ago, it was easier to get 18-20 year-old Hispanics. Now, young Hispanics are more interested in being doctors, lawyers, and carpenters. The pool of labor is smaller today and there’s more wineries.”

All Jack Neal & Son workers receive health insurance, competitive pay, and occasional Friday lunches paid for by the boss during harvest. Even so, it’s tough holding on to good pickers, who get paid as a crew by the ton, with different prices depending on the grape varietal.

“They know how many vineyards there are out there and which ones are the best. They know that a certain varietal’s clusters weigh more, that a vineyard of Zinfandel or Chardonnay might yield three tons while the same size Cabernet vineyard might only give up one ton.”

A box of Zinfandel grapes is worth three full bins of Cabernet to them.

“For pickers,” Mark points out, “Zin is like candy on the tree.”

Most fieldworkers live down valley or in the outerlying communities of American Canyon, Vallejo, or Santa Rosa. Much has been made of the alleged substandard living conditions endured by seasonal vineyard employees. But vineyard managers argue this would be counterproductive to their business. Core and crucial to their companies’ successes are the hundreds of Hispanics they employ. “In vineyard management, it’s about the guy with the shovel, the shears, or the picking knife,” says Mark. “It’s easy to replace a manager, but not fifteen field workers.”

The best vineyard managers figure out how to bridge cultural differences and motivate their full-time and seasonal workers. Treating them with respect and paying them well seems the best way to keep these key employees happy and coming back every year. Some vineyard managers let their current crews pick their own new hires from their friends and family. Others take crews to dinner every year at Christmas time, loan money toward new cars, or even fly workers back to Mexico for family funerals. With a recently established self-imposed tax contributing to the construction of farmworker housing in Napa, it appears the valley’s wine industry is setting a new standard for other agricultural counties to follow.

“We’ve gotten a bad rap about guys sleeping under bridges,” Mark complains. Based on a poll of its workers, Jack Neal & Son found all of its employees claimed at least shared accommodations. Mark can’t speak for some of the other Hispanic workers, like the ones he sees hanging out at the St. Helena gas station pitching their labor to absentee owners for $15 an hour, cash-only to avoid taxes.

For the best field workers at Jack Neal & Son, there is room for growth and promotion. Former pickers have ascended to the top levels of the company’s organizational chart. Pedro is a perfect example, recently promoted to Vice President of Operations.

“My company is based on these guys, and on me taking care of them,” explains Mark. “People say, ‘Mark does a great job,’ but I say, ‘No, it’s them – they’re sweating the sweat.’”

This year, they’re all sweating more than normal, including Mark. Watching the pickers, he stretches back in his seat, takes a deep breath and sighs.

“Man, it’s been a long harvest!”

His crews started picking August 15th, so the harvest this year has been spread over more than two months. Bud break came early this year due to a warm, dry winter. “But then, we got a storybook spring and summer with the usual heat waves,” he explains.

Dry weather like this makes picking easier. “Other years, I remember picking in full on mud,” he says. In 1989, five inches of rain fell in early September just prior to harvest. Luckily, it was a mild harvest and the vineyards dried out in the nick of time.

This year, it’s rained only once in the past couple weeks and according to Mark, “That just cleaned up the dust.”

Weather also affects winery operations. The last few nights were cold enough up on Howell Mountain that Mark had to get up every two hours to manually warm the fermenting tanks. If they get too cold or too hot, fermentation will stop. All this worrying about his new winery falls on top of the usual vineyard management stresses like juggling clients’ conflicting picking schedules. The season’s craziness is something he has gotten used to over the years. “There’s always two hell weeks each harvest where everything backs up at the wineries,” he concedes.

Although he feigns unhappiness with his schedule, it’s clear Mark enjoys what he does. He gets up every morning excited to start working and he doesn’t need an alarm clock to wake him. “I just get up when I need to get up.”

For Mark, sleep is an overrated concept. Sometimes, he gets up at two or three in the morning to work on budgets because that’s when there are no phone calls or distractions. Other times, he’ll head to the vineyards and join the crews for night picking. “It’s a morale thing.”

In springtime, Mark works seventy to eighty hours a week, but summer months, before harvest, his average drops to sixty or seventy hours. Harvest is a different story. “Whatever it takes,” he says.

He doesn’t have much time for hobbies. Things used to slow down in July, he remembers, but there’s no real downtime in vineyard management anymore. After harvest, heavy equipment needs winterizing. Then, there’s erosion control projects followed by mid-winter pruning. Mark hope for some time off this year so he can take the family up to their ski house at Lake Tahoe. Last year, he skied one-million vertical feet. His wife tells him he’s supposed to be relaxing on the weekends, but sitting around doing nothing is, for him, most stressful. Instead he is up by 7:00 a.m., ready to hit the hill. A perfect ski run for Mark is picking a chair on the lift, memorizing its number, and racing it to the bottom of the mountain. Even in his downtime, he is most comfortable hurrying.

Mark uses his truck like a mobile office. With the engine idling, he sits behind the wheel like a CEO at his desk as clients and employees walk up to consult with him.

Gove Celio, the winemaker for Liparita Cellars, pulls into the vineyard and walks up to Mark’s driver’s side window. He buys 75% of his grapes every year from vineyards managed by Mark, but he also uses the Neal winery as a custom crush facility.

“What do you think?” Gove asks.

“Six tons,” Mark answers plainly.

“At most,” agrees Gove.

They’re quiet for a moment.

“Tony’ll like that,” Gove finally adds, his grin widening to the furthest reaches of his mustache. Tony is expecting a smaller load.

“It’s always good to give him some more of those white boxes,” Mark says, smiling as he imagines the look on Tony’s face when the hauling truck unloads his gift of a dozen full picking bins. “It’s good for his waistline.”

Gove mentions he tried to stop by after hours yesterday to check the Liparita tanks at the winery, but couldn’t get past the gate because he didn’t have the entry code. Mark hands Gove a clicker but warns him that they’ve had some problems with the gate. More specifically, with the worker who installed it.

“When you see the guy carrying a manual, you know you’ve got problems. He’s probably some high-tech chip maker who lost his job and now works for Door King.”

Through the windshield, Mark watches the workers as they pick. Moving in a graceful streamlined fashion, they look like movie characters sped up double-time. Grab, yank, drop. Crab hop to the next cluster. Grab, yank, drop. Crab hop. Repeat.

“One cluster per shoot is what you gotta go for,” says Mark. Gove nods and they commence verbal volleying in vineyard-speak.

“A cluster of 337 is the equivalent of Clone 6,” Mark points out authoritatively.

“Have you done any berry size comparisons?” Gove challenges.

Clients like Gove are easy for Mark to deal with. Gove has viticultural experience, so the two speak the same language.

Not all clients are this easy. Though he might have a good history with a winery, recently hired employees can put a wrinkle in the relationship. Like the time a new winemaker complained that Mark’s fruit was “crap” after the wine he made from it came out bad. Turns out the winemaker before him made Mark pick one month earlier than everyone else who bought grapes from the same plot, so it wasn’t Mark’s fault. He provides his opinion, but in the end, bows to the winemakers’ demands, for better or worse. On the other hand, Mark turns away vineyard clients if he feels there’s no possibility of ever growing good fruit on their property. He also tactfully steers away any potential clients he feels are “unworkable.” Most problem clients come from non-farming backgrounds and don’t understand how costs in the vineyards can fluctuate from year to year.

“You can’t predict frost prices, rain, thinning needs, and grape prices,” says Mark. “If I could predict weather, I’d be doing something else.”

With the pickers working at full speed, Mark heads into St. Helena for some breakfast. Driving Route 29, he stares past the steady flow of oncoming traffic into the vineyards beyond. In the middle of one vineyard, several blocks wide, a brown unhealthy tinge has taken over the vines. “That’s a potassium deficiency,” he blurts. “It’s okay to have some brown after harvest, but not the whole thing.” Healthy vineyards possess a brighter yellow coat of foliage. He can’t help but notice these things.

A drive with Mark includes running commentary on any client vineyards passed along the way. On the right are some of the Heitz vineyards, which he’s farmed since he was a boy. On the left are some of the Niebaum-Coppola plots, which Mark farms organically. Knowledge of organic farming techniques, using natural means instead of chemicals to handle agricultural problems, is de rigeur for today’s vineyard managers. Several vineyards under Mark’s watch have been farmed organically for more than four years. To be a certified organic, organic farming techniques must be used 100% of the time. While most of the Neal Family Vineyards estate acreage would qualify, Mark passes up the “certified organic” title, instead reserving the right to use chemicals as a last resort in dire situations.

After breakfast, Mark heads back to Pelossi vineyard, returning south on Route 29. A gray sky hazes over landscape details, obscuring the distinction between where the hillsides start and the valley floor ends. Ripped-out vines burn in a field to the right and fallen leaves carpet vine rows on the left as Mark takes the Oakville Cross back toward the Silverado Trail. Pointing to a pile of dead vines in an adjacent vineyard, he calls out, “Yep, pulling some old AXR’s up.”

Back at the Pelosi vineyard, a worker stacks a sixth full grape bin onto the bed of the hauling truck with a forklift. The pickers are halfway done. As he watches them ferrying grape from the vine to bin, Mark brags that he could probably pick 400,000 tons of grapes per year with the equipment and people he’s got. Mark is a man who’s incredibly good at what he does, and he’s not afraid to tell you.

After Pedro checks in, Mark watches him walk away.

“You don’t get better than that guy. I picked him out of a harvest crew. Saw in his eyes he’d do whatever he set his mind to. He gets along with everyone. He does everything, but that gets him into trouble because he ends up doing too much. He takes his job seriously and he educates the other guys as to why they need to do things a certain way, rather than just telling them to do it.”

He’s finally coming into his own, Mark adds proudly.

“Pedro doesn’t question anything, he just gets it done.” While Mark himself may be argumentative by nature and unafraid to say what he thinks, he doesn’t want the same attitude coming from his workers.

“It’s hard to tell Pedro to go home. Sometimes it’s so hard I get mad. He just doesn’t want to go.” Over the past few months, Mark has been training Pedro to delegate more so he can focus more on big picture issues on get less bogged down by vineyard minutiae.

It’s funny hearing a workaholic like Mark talk about someone else working too hard. Maybe he realizes that his proclivity toward work might not be so healthy for others. A few years ago, Mark himself found a reason to go home; his family.

At breakfast, in the thirty minutes he allowed himself to be away from the vineyards, he talked about his family. He met his wife, Marguerite, at one of the group dinners he and his wine industry friends put together on a monthly basis in an attempt to work their way through every one of Napa Valley’s top-shelf restaurants. Marguerite, dating one of Mark’s clients at the time, drove up from the East Bay where she was living. Her boyfriend talked big and enjoyed taking center stage. Her date preoccupied, and she being an outsider, Marguerite found easy conversation with Mark at the other end of the table. She found Mark’s quiet reserve refreshing. Mark thought they were just friends. Until one dinner at Restaurant Don Giovanni in Napa, when he brought a blind date.

“If I had known you had a date,” Marguerite pouted, “I wouldn’t have come up.”

From there, things moved quickly.

“We were both older when we got married, so…”

They now have three kids, Jessica, Zack, and Demetria; 5,4, and 3 years old, respectively. A fourth is on its way, due in February. He appears to be a very involved father. He knows which costume each child will be wearing for Halloween. He’s teaching his son to fish, but has problems with Zack letting go of the rod when the fish bite. Sometimes Zack drives the vineyards Mark, sitting on his lap, holding the wheel pretending to steer. Even though he himself took the wheel of a tractor for real at age 7, Mark doesn’t expect the same from his own children.

Whereas Mark attended public school, he enrolled Jessica, Zack and Dimitria in a local Montessori program where many of their classmates come from successful wine country families. Mark wants his children’s early years to be different than his own.

“I didn’t have a childhood,” he says. “I played with life-sized Tonka trucks.”

He pauses, shrugs his shoulders. He’s not complaining.

“It wasn’t work to me. It was fun.”

All the same, he seems to understand the tireless work ethic that came naturally to him might not be right for his children.

“I grew up and I just worked, so I want to get them into sports and other stuff.”

Back at Pelossi Vineyard, the pickers move full bins onto the mobile scale for weighing, kicking up ploofs of dust as they trudge back down the rows. It’s 9:45 now, and the low fog is breaking. Clear skies open to the west where mountain ridgelines recede in layers against a deep blue backdrop.

Mark heads back to the winery to be there when the grapes arrive. It’s the last load that will find its way into a Neal Family Vineyards bottle. The fact that they’re able to crush at all at the winery is cause for celebration, considering the construction delays. For the most part, the project has gone smoothly for Mark. Three decades of experience working with county officials while planting clients’ vineyards prepared Mark well for a time when he’d have to secure a winery permit of his own. He knew all about water source proximity requirements and minimum setback distances from county roads. Submitting drawings and attending planning commission review sessions were all just part of the game, certainly a small price to pay for a dream.

“I wanted to make sure the winery blended in,” Mark says about his architectural vision for the building. “I tried to use a lot of earthtones.”

The caves were easily approved because they were drilled invisibly into the hillside behind the winery. For fire protection, Mark opted for concrete inside the winery instead of relying on the property’s existing reservoir because going with the latter meant installing a filter.

“They’re high maintenance,” he says, pronouncing it “main-TAIN-ance.”

Filtering water is an expensive procedure, up to five times as costly as concrete fireproofing. Having worked extensively with drip irrigation systems in the vineyards, Mark has an intimate knowledge of filtering and its associated costs. But Mark’s biggest concern about the winery isn’t always money. “Worse,” he laments, “It costs a lot of my time.”

Up at the winery, Tony sets up the crusher/de-stemmer once more. As he pushes it into place with the forklift, Mark scolds him about scraping the top of the winery entrance the other day, pointing out dings and scratches in the new wood. They talk about lunch, about going down the hill to Tra Vigne, one of St. Helena’s finest restaurants, to celebrate the end of harvest.

“Hey, why don’t you just go bring us lunch?” Tony asks Mark.

“Man, first we were talking about Tra Vigne,” complains Mark, “and now we’re down to burritos?”

Tony doesn’t answer immediately. Instead he turns to Gove and Cary and gestures with his chin back toward Mark. “I’m not sure we’ll make it to Tra Vigne in time for lunch the way this guy picks grapes,” he says, a dig on the fact that the final load is late.

Then he launches into his impression of Mark.

“Oh, look at this cluster, it’s so pretty,” he says in a dreamy, effeminate voice, admiring a handful of imaginary grapes like Hamlet pondering Yorrick’s skull.

Gove laughs out loud.

Cary, the consulting enologist (a.k.a hired gun laboratory guy) for Liparita, busies himself by crushing a small batch of grapes. Stocky with Popeye-like forearms, he wears a green polo shirt with a Beringer Winery logo and a pair of navy cargo shorts. He reminds the others to add sulfur during crushing. Tony has it already measured out. Cary stands sentinel, monitoring the flow of the crushed grapes into the must pipe and staring intently at the mesmerizing spiral patterns of the slowly rotating augurs.

Gove moves a hose from one side of the winery to another. Instead of turning off the spigot, he kinks the end of the hose against itself to stop the flow. That, and the ability to create a perfect spray with your thumb over the nosel, are just a couple of the many underappreciated water control skills that come in handy around the winery.

Finally, the grapes arrive. Everyone mans a station. Tony tilts the forklifted bins into the crusher while Gove stands on a ladder and rakes out any grapes that get hung up in the bin. Tony drops the empty bin back onto the concrete pad, where Cary tips them sideways and sprays them clean. Tony carts away the full bins of discarded stems. They repeat the process eleven more times.

When the last bin of grapes tips into the crusher, Tony serenades the other guys with some Queen classics to highlight the moment. After a rousing rendition of “We are the Champions” to honor their teamwork, Tony segues into “Another One Bites the Dust,” his victory cry against the onslaught of grapes. Finally, Tony expands his repertoire beyond Freddie Mercury songs to lead everyone in chant of “Na-na, nah nah! Na-na, nah nah! Hey, hey, hey, Goooodbye!” Then he jumps off the forklift and runs around the concrete pad like a crazy man, slapping his ass, “riding the pony.” Gove and Cary cheer him from the sidelines with hoots, hollers, and yee-haws.

At 12:11 P.M., Harvest 2001 is officially done. Even the sky contributes to the celebratory scene, its blue crispness contrasting with the verdant evergreens of the surrounding forests. The sun shines unimpeded, save a few high whisps of distant clouds. A hawk cries in a nearby tree. Leaves flutter gently in the cool, dry breeze. A perfect fall day.

Gove sprays down the pad, clearing it of spilled grapes and stray stems. Tony breaks down the crusher and rinses it off. Cary coils hoses onto the wall inside the winery. He remembers a story about Peter Mondavi insisting that all hoses at his Charles Krug Winery had to be coiled to the right.

“Is that because Robert did it that way?” Gove asks, referring to the more famous Mondavi brother.

“No,” jokes Cary, “Robert probably did them all to the left.”

The brothers’ rivalry is well-documented, one of the great stories of Napa Valley’s coming-of-age. In 1966, after a quarrel with his brother ended in a fistfight, Robert left the family’s Charles Krug winery and built a place of his own in Oakville. At 51 years old, he constructed the first new winery in Napa Valley since the repeal of Prohibition.

Clean up complete, the guys head to their vehicles. Tony cheerfully chats with a couple of Mexican workers tending a flower bed in front of the winery.

“No mas!” he tells them happily. No more grapes. He lifts the back hatch of his truck and puts on a fresh golf shirt. Changing out of his grape-stained shorts, it is revealed - he’s a briefs, not a boxers guy.

There is a forty-five minute wait for lunch in the main dining room at Trav Vigne, so instead the group orders sandwiches at the “Cantina,” a more casual deli/café next door run by the same owners. The menu includes prosciutto and mozzarella on foccaccio bread, lasagna, and other gourmet creations. All of the tables are al fresca. Tony picks out the first bottle of wine, a Syrah from the Edna Valley area near San Luis Obispo. Reviews at the table are mixed.

“What are we drinking next?” asks Tony.

“I don’t know, but I’m not going to let you pick it!” responds Mark in his usual smartass, deadpan delivery. Everyone laughs, and Tony looks down, nodding.

They discuss the wine.

“It goes like this…,” Tony notes a spike in the middle of the wine’s flavor envelope by drawing a pointed rooftop shape in the air with his hand. “…Instead of going like this,” he continues, tracing a more gradual, turtleback shape. Translated into laymen’s terms, the flavors spike to intensity but then disappear abruptly. Tony would like to see more well-balanced profile, one where the flavors take a little while to get going, but then linger longer in the mouth.

It’s Gove’s turn to pick next and he returns with a bottle of Spanish Rioja. Everyone seems to like this one. Tony explains that the winemakers use 100% new oak and age the wine three years before bottling it.

Holding his glass by the stem, he swishes it around furiously and then quickly stuffs his nose into its depths while the aromas are still freshly agitated.

“Dusty, sandy,” he pronounces.

“Earthy,” Cary agrees.

Suddenly, Mark announces he has to leave.

“Oh c’mon,” complains Tony, just starting to have fun.

“You guys live a different life,” replies Mark, implying he works harder.

There’s a group scoff from Tony, Gove, Cary.

“Gove, you want to field that one?” Cary asks.

“No,” responds Gove calmly, pausing. “I’m comfortable with my life. I’m too old to live his kind of lifestyle.”

Not everyone can keep up with Mark on the work front, and not everyone wants to. A vineyard manager’s work is never done, even at the end of harvest. He’s already thinking about next year. Decaying vineyards need to be ripped up. New ones need to be planted. Tony, on the other hand, has just finished up the dirtiest work of the vintage. Now, he gets to hunker down with his wines and start working his magic.

Chapter Six

Pencil Shavings and Toast

It’s an early November morning in wine country. Hazy, but no fog. Yellow mustard grass flowers sprout between vineyard rows, watered by the late autumn rains. Fueled with moisture, the vine canopies grow thick and bushy. But Napa Valley’s landscape is not continuously verdant at this time of year. Every so often, open dirt fields indicate areas where entire vineyards have been ripped out, either victims of disease or an owner deciding to go with a more profitable variety of grape. Stripped of grapes, vines enter dormancy, a period of retreat, recuperation, and rejuvenation that prepares them for the next growing season.

Behind the parking area at the Neal Winery, flowers bloom, an explosion of orange, yellow, white, and pink. Wind chimes hanging from balconies at the Neal’s house tinkle and clang in the morning breeze. Down the driveway run the three family dogs, one a German Shepherd puppy with huge feet who Tony affectionately refers to as Ding Dong because he’s “not the brightest bulb on the tree.”

Just as vines need dormancy, the new wines inside the Neal winery need their own downtime to settle and age after all the manhandling during crush. Yet, one more winemaking task remains. The grapes forming the cap inside the fermenting tanks are still valuable, so they will be pressed for additional juice.

A batch of Liparita wine is scheduled for pressing today. Tony transfers freshly fermented Cabernet from one tank to another, running it through a strainer to remove grape skins. When all the wine is pumped out of the first tank, the grape skins left at the bottom and those collected in the strainer will be dumped into bins and forklifted into the press.

Tony is in a good mood, working alone, moving around the tank room like a captain preparing a ship for sail. He loves the autonomy. “Treat it like it’s your own,” Mark told Tony early on. “If we do well, you’ll do well.”

Tony is free to make mistakes, as long as he’s willing to face Mark and his heckling afterwards. Yesterday, when Tony was driving the forklift, a bin full of pumice slipped off the prongs and crushed the front left quarter panel of his Explorer. Mark, of course, was most worried about damage to the bin.

Tony steers the forklift, more carefully now, over to the press sitting inside the winery entrance. The machine, a large hulking metal cylinder hung horizontally above a ten-foot long drip tray, has wheels and can be moved in and out of the winery as needed. With a capacity of 4,000 liters, it’s a relatively small press. The ones Tony used at Duckhorn were much larger.

To extract more juice after fermentation, most wineries today use mechanical pneumatic presses which can apply extremely gentle pressure. The presses, themselves, are horizontal steel cylinders. Inside, a rubber membrane, when inflated gently, pushes the grapes against the inner walls of the drum until their skins break. The drums are rotated horizontally, like a pig on a spit, and the weight of the top grapes slowly forces the grapes in the bottom to break open.

It’s 8:20 and Gove is nowhere to be seen. Pressing was supposed to start at 7:30. First, Tony is surprised – Gove is always on time. Then, Tony becomes annoyed, even swearing a little. He lies down spread eagle on the concrete and pulls the lid of his baseball cap over his eyes. While custom crushing for Liparita Cellars provides the Neal winery with much needed cash flow, it also requires a lot of Tony’s time, time that cold be better spent doing paperwork or simply enjoying an easier day. When Gove finally arrives, he apologizes and offers up as a peace gesture details from a winemaker dinner he hosted in San Diego the week prior.

“How’d you do?” asks Tony.

“That dinner, we sold 27 cases of wine,” boasts Gove.

“Great restaurants down there,” nods Tony.

“Cute women, too,” Gove smiles. They’re both happily married, but they agree it’s hard not to notice the beautiful people.

“Ever look at the one of those San Diego tourist magazines?” asks Tony. “All the ads are for plastic surgery!”

Tony opens the door to a tank that has already been pumped and climbs inside, putting himself waist-deep in grapeskin muck. He shovels the three-foot deep pile of purple slop back through the porthole into an empty bin. As he digs his way out, Tony asks Gove about the press settings for today’s grapes, picked from the Pelosi-Skellenger vineyard.

The more gently the grapes are pressed, the better the quality of wine. The best juice comes from the band of pulp that is found between the seeds and the skin. The harder the grapes are pressed, the more bitter flavors from the skin and the seeds, called tannins, are released. Winemakers constantly tinker to achieve the perfect balance between creating high quality wine and producing enough volume to remain profitable and stay in business. While no one wants to waste wine, a vintage made too bitter can ruin a winery’s reputation.

Based on a quick taste of the wine in question, Gove thinks the wine too sweet. “It’s really ‘candy,’” Gove responds, “but I’m looking for more density.” He’s wants for more backbone, more structure. For this, he needs tannins. By cranking up the settings on the press, he can squeeze more tannins from the grape skins. Although the young wine will be bitter at first, the effect of barrel oak over time will mellow the flavors.

Tony continues shoveling grapes out of the tanks into bins.

“Where we going to lunch?” he shouts after a while.

“Carnitas?” suggests Gove hopefully.

“Carrrr-neee-tas!” Tony squeals back in a high pitched voice, excited by the prospect of Mexican food.

“Shut up, Tony!” yells Juan, a Hispanic employee of Jack Neal & Son who helps out at the winery during crush. He usually keeps to himself, so the outburst seems a little out of character. A quick, follow-up smile gives him up.

“I’ll kill you!” jokes Tony, feigning menace.

Juan laughs and looks down from his position high on a ladder above the press. “He wants to kill me…and take my carnitas!”

Tony turns on the press. A horizontal steel drum, approximately ten feet long and four feet in diameter, rotates slowly while an interior bladder inflates to gently squeeze the grapes inside. Juice drains through thousands of quarter-sized holes into the drip tray, like rain spilling from a length of clogged gutter. Now that the press is running, Tony sprays down the inside of the now empty tank, the stream of water loosening remaining bits of fruit. Juan pushes stray grapes off the floor with a broom and Gove and Cary talk about what they had for dinner last night.

Escaping his aluminum chamber, Tony shoots headfirst out the porthole like Superman, drops into a handstand, and then hops his legs down to the ground. His hair is now messy and gelled with sweat. “It’s time for some barrel tasting,” he announces, marching off to the caves like the Pied Piper with Gove and Cary following closely behind.

Passing rows of barrels neatly stacked, two high, Tony moves quickly down the main tunnel. The temperature is a cool 56 degrees and the lighting is dim. After handing out glasses, Tony starts with a barrel of Montrachet, a red varietal found in wines from the Rhone region of France. Gove and Cary huddle around the barrel with their wine glasses held out in front of them. They stare at the wine as Tony extracts it from the barrel with a “thief.” Releasing his thumb from the airhole of the baster-shaped utensil, Tony drops wine into their glasses. They gurgle the wine, letting it bathe every inch of their tongues, allowing the fragrant vapors to permeate their nasal cavities via the backs of their throats.

After a moment, Cary pipes in. “It’s a little hot.”

“Yeah,” concedes Tony. “I don’t know how to hide it.”

He rattles off the winemaking techniques used in making this particular batch.

“The barrel program is 40% old, 60% new, un-inoculated.”

Translated into laymen’s terms, this means the wine was fermented in oak barrels, some old, some new. New oak imparts a more powerful presence on the wine’s flavors, while old oak has little impact. “Un-inoculated” refers to the wild, naturally occurring yeasts used.

“Yep,” Cary pipes in a couple minutes later, “Still going like a house on fire.”

They move onto a Chardonnay. This one has “barky” flavors, they agree, the result of new oak barrels. Tony plans to blend this batch with some other wine that’s been sitting in old oak to mellow it out.

“Lean and austere,” Cary adds. “Nice length.”

“I hope it fattens up,” says Tony.

He spews out some pH figures, numbers only fellow winemakers like Cary and Gove could possibly understand or care about. “It’s 5.0, but I hope it’ll be 3.5”

As they taste, they often mention malolactic fermentation, a process by which the malic acids, responsible for citrus flavors like green apple, are replaced by lactic acids, resulting in rich, buttery flavor characteristics. In winemaking argot, it’s referred to as “mally,” as in, “Yeah, you can definitely pick up the mally in this one.”

Next, Tony guides them to another barrel of Chardonnay, this one from the Wykoff vineyard.

“I picked the grapes early because I thought they were shit,” Tony warns.

“It is a little tart,” says Cary.

“Tart as a Sourpatch Kid,” adds Tony, referring the mouth-puckering children’s candy.

Over a barrel of Cabernet from the Vallejo vineyard, Cary blurts, “Oh, Tony, this has definitely had enough wood!”

Cary is not the type to pull punches when it comes to pronouncing opinions on wine.

“The wood’s a little showy now on the back palate,” Tony concedes. “Pencil shavings.”

About another barrel of Cabernet, Tony says, “Slow heavy toast and the tannin wasn’t terrible.”

“That’s good!” hoots Cary.

When they finish swirling, gurgling, and tasting a sample, they either dump the rest of the glass back into the barrel or throw it down a floor drain. In the process of scribbling notes and trying to taste what they’re all tasting, I’ve been swallowing most of what was handed to me. “If you drink all the wine in the glass, you’ll be hammered by lunchtime,” warns Tony. It’s not the first time Tony’s put me in my place. As part of a self-designed crash course on wine appreciation, I had been buying and drinking as much Napa Valley wine as possible. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find anything that tasted good with pizza. A couple weeks ago, I asked Tony for his advice, imagining he’d suggest Zinfandel or another Italian-sounding varietal like Sangiovese. “You want to know what I drink with pizza?” he responded. “Corona.”

After a quick check on the progress of the press, Gove reports that the settings are fine. “Yep, 0.1 is enough,” He says, puckering his lips. The tannins taste pretty strong in the drippings, so further pressing would only bring out more bitterness. Liparita’s wine is now ready for the next stage of winemaking – barreling - where it will sleep on oak for the next 18 months.

Cary points his flashlight into the barrel of Cabernet he just tasted, checking the color, while Tony talks to the wine in his glass.

“Now you’re doing what I like. New oak and malolactic.”

After a couple minutes, he adds, “Little tannins, though.” He wants them bigger.

Adjectives roll off their tongues effortlessly. Possession of a full quiver of unique descriptors and the ability to spew them out speedily seems a key professional prerequisite. Good winetasters can capture the spirit of a wine with minimal consideration time, like Impressionist painters rendering visual moments accurately and quickly. Thinking too long about the flavors is almost against the rules. At times, the winemakers’ shop talk is exhausting for the uninitiated, and the difficulty of understanding it increases in logarithmic proportion to the number of winemakers involved.

The wine in the next barrel selected for sampling is still fermenting. Residual sugars remain, not yet converted by yeasts into alcohol. The effect is a spritzy texture and bold flavors.

“Beef roasty.”

“Fruit flyer.”

It starts again. Descriptions fly.

“I think you got a fructose one, here,” says Cary, the specialist in chemical components of winemaking, as he swirls the wine in his glass with an effortless, barely perceptible, clockwise flick of the wrist.

“Here’s the Shifflett,” announces Tony, after leading Gove and Cary back to the stainless steel fermenting tanks on the other side of the winery. The first time Tony looked at the Shifflett property, he was skeptical about its potential to produce quality fruit. Now, his mind is changing.

“It’s going down 0.1, 0.2 per day,” he reports. The sugar levels are decreasing and fermentation is almost complete. This lot, too, is almost ready for barreling.

“It’s got structure,” says Gove.

Stopping in front of Tank 5, Tony starts laughing maniacally. “You want to play? You want big wine?”

He’s talking about wine from the Second Chance Vineyard up on Atlas Peak. Tony had the grapes picked super ripe. Common descriptions for wines like this are “big fruit,” “fruit forward,” or even “fruit bomb.” You know it when you taste it, when that upfront burst of flavor hits your taste buds like a Mack truck.

“Oh yeah!” booms Gove in a gravelly, Barry White tenor. Cary usually gets the first word in, but the kick-ass Cabernet from Atlas Peak has moved Gove to speak.

“Been on skins for 35 days,” explains Tony. “Every time I drink that Tank 5, I get a headache. It won’t be able to stand on its own. I’ll have to blend it.” The wine might be distinctive enough to win blind tastings, but right now it’s too powerful to pair with most foods. Blending in some Merlot or Cabernet Franc will soften and balance the flavors.

The threesome returns to the press to inspect the Liparita wine drippings.

“Dull color,” says Cary, dismayed.

“Looks like bad pH,” says Tony, noting a sandy quality in the juice.

What’s done is done. Time for cleanup. Cary sprays down the catch tray while Tony moves bins of pressed grapes, or pumice, out of the way with the forklift, stacking them across the driveway. Inside the bins, pressed into clumps, the pumice looks a little like animal droppings. In one’s hands, the squashed, spent grapes feel like roasted coffee beans.

From the cab of the forklift, Tony yells, “What did you think of that Atlas Peak?”

“Good,” Cary shouts back, “It’s a monster, though, Tony!”

“I don’t think that wine will stand on its own,” Tony says again. “Too much tannins. Probably use it as a blend.” In the back of his mind, he’s already thinking about which other batches might soften up the potent Cabernet.

Finally, the Carnitas arrive. The guys set up a makeshift buffet on an upside-down picking bin. Handfuls of slow-roasted pork strips fill tortillas, with liberal dollops of guacamole and salsa as needed. Outside the caves, in the presence of meat, the men are once again understandable. They talk about softball, one of the best ways to network in Napa Valley, according to Tony. Nearly everyone in the wine business plays on a team.

After lunch, Tony runs a hose into the bungholes of some new oak barrels, swelling the staves and make them watertight before any wine is pumped in. If there are any leaks, Tony will find out now.

“Hey Tony, how’s the tryptosome?” yells Cary, referring to the chemical component in pork and turkey responsible for food coma.

“It’ssss goooo-ingggg a little slowww-ly,” slurs Tony, pretending to stagger across the crush pad.

A breeze picks up, its gentle coolness a palpable extension of the sky’s unbroken blue. The rest of the afternoon, Tony, Cary, and Gove soak barrels. Another mindless, repetitive winemaking task, but the perfect pastime for three guys with Carnitas hangovers.

Chapter Seven

Road Warrior

In December, wine country settles into its winter coat. Vineyards turn reddish-brown as the vines recede into dormancy. Rainy days coax to life cover crops, like mustard grass, which prevent erosion and maintain soil nutrients. Clear days hang crisp indigo skies over the emerald hillsides.

Activity in the wine cellar quiets down. The 2001 vintage sleeps safely in barrels where oak and time will work their collective magic over the next 18 months. In the storage room, cases of ’98 Neal Cabernet occupy valuable floor space. There needs to be room for the ’99 Neal Cabernet that will be bottled in two weeks. As any businessman will tell you, the preferred way to clear inventory is to have someone buy it. Which means it’s time for Tony to hit the road and sell some wine.

At 7:30 a.m. on a mid-December morning, Tony prepares for sales calls by hand labeling a few sample bottles of the ‘98 Cabernet. He’s comfortable presenting the merits of Neal Family Vineyards’ wines, but he knows the best sales pitch is the wine itself. Resting each bottle in a wooden cradle rack, he carefully rolls a glue-backed label across the front. Stepping back, he holds his hands out, palms up, and gives a few quick nods like The Fonz checking himself out in a mirror. Satisfied, Tony sticks the bottle into the foiler, which vacuum seals a black metallic wrap over the top of the cork and neck.

Mark walks in, accompanied by Mia, the family’s yellow Lab. The proud mother of eight puppies born Thanksgiving week, her gait is a post-partum waddle, milk-laden nipples flapping this way and that. The sire’s identity is anyone’s guess.

“Not me,” responds Mark dryly. “I’ve got enough kids already. If it were my dog, I would’ve sewn her up years ago.”

Tony looks down at his watch. He grabs a case of CD’s off the foiling table. He is wearing jeans, but goes business casual up top with a light-blue, subtly plaid dress shirt. His black shoes have been freshly shined and his black leather belt matches the attaché case he carries. Since it belongs to a winemaker, the briefcase doesn’t hold a laptop or sheafs of important documents, just a small folder of marketing material and three bottles of ‘98 Neal Cabernet.

From the winery, Tony drives down the backside of Howell Mountain into the rolling hills of the Chiles Valley. The scenery is a backdrop of farms and vineyards glimpsed through a filter of overhanging oak branches. Horses wander lazily in the fields. As he maneuvers the truck around hairpin turns, Tony talks excitedly about today’s calls. In his experience, the best wine stores are receptive to small, up-and-coming wineries like Neal Family Vineyards. “People like the stories. But eventually, you have to put it in the bottle. The honeymoon only lasts two seasons.” A boutique winery that charges a premium for their wine, then fails to produce great quality on a consistent basis, can experience a backlash. “If you grow from small to medium size revenues and still sell out your wine, that’s when you’re doing well.” explains Tony. “If there’s wine left over, you did something wrong.”

The boutique wine business has become crowded, but much of the competition does not worry Tony. “A lot of people came into the business in the past three years who didn’t belong in the business.”

The new money crowd has bought its way into Napa Valley, and the exorbitant prices they charge for their wines are more often a reflection of ego than quality. But it takes more than money to be the best. “These days, you’ve got to do something different. You’ve got to take risks. You’ve got to make great wine.”

At Neal, their focus is Cabernet. Mark’s reputation in the vineyards was built on that grape and Tony himself earned his stripes crafting Bordeaux-style reds for Duckhorn. Once Neal Family Vineyards is firmly established and solid cash flow is coming in, Tony would love to buy a couple tons of Pinot Noir to see what he can do with it. It’s a finicky grape, a real challenge for a winemaker. In a few years, Tony thinks he’ll be up for it. “But for now, Cabernet is king.”

Tony has two appointments scheduled in Sacramento today, and his goal is to sell two cases to each store. Across the whole of California, Neal will offer an identical allocation of two cases each to fifteen target accounts, all wine stores Tony believes do a good job at moving boutique wines. Many small wineries bypass the retail channel altogether, selling their wine directly to the consumer via a mailing list or to a few high profile restaurants, but Tony feels differently. With the economy bottoming out, restaurants don’t have as much money to spend on new wines. Healthy retail sales act as a buffer in tough times like these. “I’m not saying go with the Gas ‘n Sip down on the corner, but retail is important.”

It’s closing in on 11:00 a.m., the hour of his first appointment, and Tony is lost. The low foothills of the Vaca Range flatten into the low agricultural plains of the Central Valley, where arrow-straight roads carry strip developments through single-story suburbs into greater Sacramento.

Tony pulls into a nondescript gas station mini-mart to buy a map. He calls the wine store, Capitol Cellars, and reconfirms the address in Gold River, one of Sacramento’s wealthier suburbs. Although he knows the name of the street, Gold Springs Court, the store’s location is tough to pinpoint on the detailed map. Because of Sacramento’s prominent place in mining history, there are several dozen different gold-related street names peppering the same quadrant. Trying to read the map while driving makes it even more difficult for Tony. He isn’t worried about being a little late - he just doesn’t want to be too late. He’s excited to tell the Neal Family Vineyards story.

Fifteen minutes late, Tony finds Capitol Cellars in a clean, quiet, outdoor shopping center marked by single-story brick facades with tinted-glass windows and subtle signage. Well-manicured grass oases break up the black monotony of the parking lot. Tony puts on a navy sports jacket and his game face. It’s time.

Inside, the owner, Marcus Graziano, is on the phone.

“No problem,” says Tony, heading to the back of the store with a shrug. At the wine tasting counter, he opens up a bottle of the Neal Cabernet, pours a glass, and sets it out to breathe. Out of his black leather bag comes a folder full of marketing sheets about Neal Family Vineyards including a brief history of the winery, bios on Mark and Tony, and tasting notes for the wine. Tony arranges the papers meticulously, making sure they are in correct order and not overlapping. Although there are stools at the counter, Tony stands.

After five minutes, with Graziano still deep in phone conversation, Tony begins pacing. He circumnavigates the store, checking out the inventory, noting wines he’s familiar with. It’s not clear whether he’s really looking closely at the labels or just trying to look busy.

Finally, Graziano gets off the phone, excuses himself for the delay, and settles down behind the tasting bar. Tony compliments the store and Graziano gives a quick explanation of how and why he got into the business. Growing up, his family owned vineyards in Sonoma. His brother is a winemaker. With winegrowing and winemaking already covered, Graziano figured he’d go after the remaining piece of the puzzle, wine selling.

Tony relates the brief history of the winery, how Mark Neal’s grape-growing expertise and experience ensures Neal Family Vineyards’ access to some of the best fruit in the valley. Graziano listens politely, nodding at intervals.

As Tony talks, Graziano pinches his thumb and forefinger around the lower stem of his glass and gives it a quick tight swirl. Bringing it up to his face so that his nose is well inside the glass, he inhales deeply. He lets the aromas linger. He takes a sip. As he tastes, Tony doesn’t ask him how he likes it. The wine speaks for itself. Instead, Tony talks about Neal’s focus on Cabernet and their gradual approach to growth (5,000 cases maximum). Only then does he mention price. It’s $30 per bottle for retailers and $45 for consumers.

“I’ll take four cases right now,” says Marcus, nodding his head at the glass. “This is good.”

“Great,” says Tony, “I’ve got each retailer allocated for two cases. I can sell you your two now and I can probably get you two more, but I have to give the other retailers a fair chance at their allocation first.” Tony is trying to say no nicely; he wants to stick to his strategy of spreading the wine allocations as widely as possible over the winery’s fifteen “wish list” retail accounts, especially since he still has fourteen more to visit. “Chances are, someone won’t buy their allocation and I can get you some more.”

“That would be great,” says Graziano.

“He gets it,” Tony says later. A savvy retailer, Graziano understands how to work with small wineries. He seems to genuinely enjoy the wine and listens with interest to Tony. It looks like Capitol Cellars will be a great account. Tony is confident Graziano will do a good job relating the Neal Family Vineyards story to his customers.

When Tony mentions he delivers all the wine himself, Graziano smiles. He loves when winemakers do that. They walk around the store together and Graziano talks about his business. In addition to selling retail, he recommends and supplies wine for major players in the movie industry and even the State Department. Once, in return for leading several senior Navy officers and their guests on a tour of Napa Valley, Graziano was invited down to San Diego for a week-long stay at the base. He boarded ships and flew in jets. Then, with two days still remaining, he was suddenly told to pack his bags and be ready to leave within the hour. He figured they were kicking out all the civilians because something covert was going down. An officer arrived to pick him up and the next thing he knew, he was flying co-pilot in an F-18 over the Pacific. They circled an aircraft carrier and the pilot said, “Hey, let’s take her in.” They landed and Graziano was treated to a V.I.P. tour and an overnight stay.

While perks like this might be few and far between, Graziano enjoys his job. On a table at the front of the store, he rolls out architectural plans for a new combination wine store/French bistro he’s opening up on the other side of town. Decidedly upscale, the design plans call for the latest in wine storage technology. From the retail and restaurant spaces, arches of wood and stone lead out to a spacious al fresco dining area. He met the chef on a trip to Provence a couple years ago and convinced him to move to the States.

“I’m not getting rich doing what I do,” says Graziano. “But, I love the relationships I have with my customers, helping them find what they’re looking for.”

He seems as excited about his future plans as Tony is about Neal Family Vineyards’ growth. Two passionate professionals, they take pride in the stories of their businesses while downplaying the importance of monetary compensation.

Leaving Capitol Cellars, Tony is psyched. It was a great sales call. But now, Tony is running a couple minutes late for his next appointment at The Wine Consultant, a store on the opposite side of town. He phones ahead to reconfirm directions with the owner, Eric Stumpf.

“Hey, Eric, this is Tony Biagi from Neal Family Vineyards,” Tony starts. It’s as far as he gets before Eric cuts him off.

“Geez, how come I get more salespeople in my store than customers these days?” He claims he’s too busy for individual tastings today. “Just leave leave a glass on the back bar with all the other samples.”

After saying goodbye, Tony pushes the “End” button on his cell phone and starts muttering to himself. “I mean, what the fuck? I’m not a goddamn salesman, I’m the friggin’ winemaker. Show me some goddamn respect.”

Based on the phone conversation, hopes are not high for this sales call. But Tony is nonplussed. If this guy doesn’t bite, he can always give the store’s allocations to Capitol Cellars instead.

Walking into The Wine Consultant offers an entirely different experience from Capitol Cellars. Where the floor plan at Capitol allowed clientele to acclimate and browse a few racks before seeing the cash register, customers entering the Wine Consultant are immediately confronted with the check-out area, a much more intimidating and claustrphopic first impression.

Stumpf stands with a customer, hawking some Italian reds. A stocky guy, he wears his wavy hair combed back, slicklike. Tony heads to the back of the store, giving appreciative nods to various bottles on the wall, acknowledging quality and his familiarity with the winemakers for each label. A small, but noticeable scowl gives away his impatience.

Product merchandising at The Wine Advocate appears limited to placing individual bottles atop matching, unopened cases. With so many cardboard boxes, the store could be easily mistaken for Mailboxes, Etc. The walls are white and the feeling is sterile compared to the comforting dark wood of the shelves and racks at Capitol Cellars.

Hanging underneath many of the bottles on the shelves are Xerox copies of wine reviews tear-sheeted from newspapers and magazines. This is a store that sells wine based on scores, which means Stumpf will probably wait until Neal Family Vineyards receives a high rating from a wine magazine before he’ll stock their wine. By then, though, he’ll have a tough time getting a good allocation from Tony. What Graziano seems to realize, and Stumpf doesn’t, is if you want to be a retailer known for carrying labels from the best small wineries, you need to support them early on before they become famous. Relationships count, and winemakers have long memories.

The Wine Consultant’s nod to small California wineries is limited to a “trophy” closet in the back of the store containing a couple bottles each of Bryant Family, Dalle Valle Maya, and a dozen other cult wines. Stumpf doesn’t appear to take many risks on newcomers or place many bets on little guys with a good story. He’s not making much of an effort to pick out the “diamonds in the rough” of the ’98 California Cabernet class. Instead, he dismisses the whole lot to focus on the ’98 Italians, an overly safe bet considering the year marked one of the country’s best harvests ever. It’s the easy way out.

The first thing Stumpf does when he joins Tony at the back of the store is launch into a dismissive tirade against California Cabernets. “I hate them. They’re too expensive.” He doesn’t let Tony tell the Neal story, cutting him off every couple sentences. Tony moves away from selling his own wine and starts evangelizing the entire ’98 California vintage. A fair number of wineries picked late, reduced yield, and were able to produce great Cabs in ’98, he argues. His efforts fall on deaf ears.

Stumpf has already moved on, complaining now about not having enough help to take weekends off and visit Napa. Stumpf’s bitter whinings, piling up by the minute, have a grating effect, a far cry from the pleasant conversation and respect Tony received just a half hour earlier at Capitol Cellars.

Nevertheless, Tony keeps the dialogue cordial. He’s not about to burn any bridges. He keeps at it, whipping out some color pictures of the new winery. Stumpf flips through them quickly. Then he lines up Tony’s sample glass with six others on the tasting bar. He says he prefers to taste them all at once at the end of the day. Back at Capitol Cellars, Graziano not only drank the wine as soon as it was poured, but he carried the rest of the glass with him while walking Tony around his store.

Stumpf does not buy any wine today. As Tony heads out, Stumpf hands him his card. Doughnut-shaped, with a slit, it doubles as a marker for wine glasses at crowded cocktail parties. There’s even space on it to write one’s name. Stumpf thinks they’re just about the coolest business cards he’s ever seen. Tony agrees that the glass tags are helpful, but once safely outside the store, he laughs at how gimmicky they are.

Reflecting on the two sales calls, Tony says. “There’s a reason one has a second store opening and one doesn’t.”

On the way back to Napa Valley, Tony detours through Davis, his old college town. We stop by his favorite pizza joint for lunch. Heading to the restroom, I make the mistake of leaving my notebook on the table. In the truck later, I flip the page to find he’s written cryptically, “I like little boys. Call Enya!!!” He likes to write random things like that on other people’s schedules, just to mess with them.

Between mouthfuls of mozzarella and pepperoni, Tony tells an abridged version of his life story. He’s an only child whose parents divorced when he was six. “I heard them yelling and stuff, but I didn’t really process it at that age,” he recalls.

By his own admission, he was loud and boisterous in school. He channeled those energies into sports. At Junipero Serra Catholic High School in Belmont, California, he played three seasons worth; wrestling, baseball, and football. He still holds the team record for career takedowns in wrestling and received the school’s top athletic honor, getting his name sewn into the “Banner of Fame” alongside Barry Bonds, Lynn Swann, and Tom Brady, some of the school’s other athletically gifted graduates.

Because he loved the ocean and excelled in the sciences, Tony considered pursuing a Marine Biology degree at Humboldt State in Northern California. But thanks to his stellar athletic achievements and a solid 3.5 grade point average, Tony was recruited by U.C. Davis’ wrestling coach. When Tony got to Davis, the demands of college athletics began to outweigh the pleasure of competition. When his wrestling coach told him he couldn’t carry a full course load while competing, he quit the team.

After accidently missing freshman registration, Tony ended up in an “Introduction to Winetasting” course taught by Dr. Ann Noble, a legend in the wine world for inventing the Aroma Wheel that standardized the most common scents detectable in wine. Tony received A’s and B’s in the Viticulture and Enology department, but in his own words, “floated through college” the rest of the time. He played rugby and joined a fraternity.

Wine rejuvenated Tony’s work ethic. In 1992, his sophomore year, he took a semester off to work crush at Dry Creek Vineyards in Sonoma County. The next year, he took a job at the St. Helena Wine Center, working weekends and Friday afternoons after class. Saturday and Sunday mornings, he stocked boxes and cleaned floors until noon. The owner, Dick Graham, would buy lunch (which, of course, was Tony’s job to fetch). Afternoons, he got to work the floor selling wine. Saturdays, the store held tastings where employees got to sample as many as thirty wines at a time. Tony was a quick study and soon developed a reputation for having one of the best palates in the store. Eventually, his tasting notes were used verbatim in the store’s quarterly newsletter to customers.

Connections at the Wine Center led to a job at Duckhorn, where he put in six hard years of work, first as a cellar rat, then as an assistant winemaker. An interminable wait for the top winemaking spot there softened him up for Mark’s overtures. The chance to run sales and marketing in addition to being head winemaker was too good to pass up.

After lunch, Tony shows off some of his old haunts in Davis, pointing out important landmarks of his college years. The railroad tracks where his buddies would jump onto slow moving trains and ride them all the way to Chico, some two hours north. A noodle shop Tony calls “the best in town.” A park that used to have a great Farmer’s Market.

“Didn’t eat much there,” he says. “If it didn’t say ‘polyunsaturated fat’ on the label, I didn’t eat it.” He dismisses the park and any memories of fresh produce with a backhand wave of his right hand. “Yep, not too much hanging out over there.”

Passing the field where he used to play rugby, he points across the street to his fraternity and his wife’s sorority. Next, he drives by a non-descript ranch house where some of his buddies used to live. It’s not hard to picture several large guys drinking beer on the porch at dusk, watching traffic, waiting for the night’s festivities to begin.

The straight roads and uniformly developed neighborhoods of Davis gradually segue into Yolo County farmland. Soon, the scenery once again includes sloping foothills and Lake Berryessa. The route back up Howell Mountain is rustic. Trailer parks rest under umbrella-like branches of old-growth oaks. A wobbly wooden sign announces, “Senior Center Crab Fest,” which could be referring to either the food being served or the grumpy conversations of the septuagenarian attendees.

Tony doesn’t notice any of this. He’s talking stocks. Mostly telecom. A little high tech. Which ones he got screwed on, which ones are working for him. Having grown up close to Silicon Valley, Tony speaks high-tech fluently. He sometimes wonders what it would be like to work at a start-up software company for a few years, save up a bunch of money, and then buy his own winery. He’s not sure he’d want to, but it’s something he’s thought about. It’s ironic, because lots of people working in the high tech industry today would trade spots with Tony in a second. Winemaking is a sexy job, at least to people who aren’t winemakers.

As he drives, Tony cranks heavy rap music, a curious accompaniment to both his investment theories and the rustic wilderness outside. The next CD on the pile is a John Coltrane album. The facility with which Tony switches back and forth between rap music and jazz, from winemaking to high-tech stock tips, embodies a quality essential for success in today’s Napa Valley; an appreciation of history and tradition blended with adaptability and acceptance of things new.

Even after a long day of sales calls, Tony’s adrenaline is still racing, no doubt spurred on by the blaring tunes. He’s glad to be back in Napa Valley. As exciting and challenging as sales calls can be, he can’t wait to get busy doing what he loves best; making wine. He’s willing and able to play road warrior, but he’s happiest at home presiding over a comfortable Howell Mountain dominion of barrels and bottles.

Chapter Eight

Bottling Poetry

Important in the art of winemaking is an ability to juggle vintages. At the Neal winery, Tony works concurrently with wines from four different harvests, each at different stages in their product lives. Imagine a college professor working with freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, all at the same time. As soon as the ’01 Cabernet is safely barreled, Tony starts pushing the ’98 Cabernet toward the door. While the ’00 Cabernet still has a full year left of barrel aging, over the next couple months Tony will figure out the final blend. That leaves the ’99 Cabernet.

Five days before Christmas, the winemaking equivalent of wrapping gifts is taking place up at the Neal winery. It’s bottling time for the ’99 Cabernet. Because it is a small operation without an in-house bottling line, Neal Family Vineyards outsources the task to Ryan-McGee, a mobile bottler. Backed up to the side opening nearest the loading pad is a large freight truck, its payload a self-contained bottling line. The right side of the truck pops out like a camper to provide additional working space inside. Storage compartments flank the sides of the truck at wheel level. A metal canopy juts out from the top of the open back, protecting a conveyor belt leading down to the winery floor from the rain that pours down this morning. With its clean, shiny white exterior and tricked-out custom features, the truck resembles a rock band’s tour bus.

Andy Ryan, the owner of Ryan-McGee, gets busy preparing equipment. Everything needs to be in order because once bottling begins, it’s costly to stop or slow the line and difficult to restart. Andy wears jeans, a baseball hat, and two layers of t-shirts, short-sleeve over long-sleeve. In his early 30’s, he exudes a pleasant, calm, knowledgable air when talking about his business. Tony has great respect for him and considers Ryan-McGee the best mobile bottling company in the valley.

Andy happens to be married to Shannon O’Shaugnessy, who worked in marketing for Duckhorn during Tony’s tenure there. This year, her family is opening a new winery, with Shannon heading up the effort, financed in large part by the fortune her father made running a leading window glass company. Even though he married into some money, Tony believes “he’s still a great guy who works hard.” Not all moneyed people are bad in Tony’s mind. What he really hates is the sense of entitlement that often accompanies nepotism. Respect from Tony Biagi gets dealt out in direct proportion to how hard you work.

Andy earned a degree in winemaking before discovering that bottling, while not a sexy operation, is a lucrative business. He now has seven years experience, owns two bottling trucks, and handles 800,000 cases a year for various wineries, including high-end cult brands like Grace Family Vineyards. Things have been going so well these days, he’s had to turn away business. He prefers paying close attention to his best customers and doesn’t want to spread his company’s operations thinly across too many clients. To ensure quality control, Andy keeps the company owner-operated and its growth gradual.

Most wineries bottle twice a year, with peak bottling periods occuring during summer and the month of December. “Tony wanted to bottle the Cabernet back in August, but since he’s a new client, he had to fall in line behind the charter clients,” Andy explains apologetically.

In the back of the truck, Tony and Andy converse as Andy tweaks and tightens up equipment. Tony explains that Mark is pissed off because this bottling setup can’t accommodate both standard size bottles and larger format magnums at the same time. Mark wanted ten of the 360 cases scheduled today bottled as magnums. The problem is that Mark selected a taller-than-normal bottles for this year’s magnums. Unique and classy, but a bottling nightmare.

Prior to turning on the bottling line, case boxes filled with empty bottles are handed up to the truck. There, the empty bottles are removed and the boxes are placed on a shelf lined with rollers. Once bottling starts, workers refill the boxes with full bottles coming off the line. At the beginning of the line, empty bottles are placed onto a narrow conveyor path that detours through several stations; sterilization, filling, corking, foiling, and labeling. The bottling line is not actually a straight path, but more an up-and-back road with several cul-de-sac “rest stops” along the way. At the cleaning and sterilization station, the bottles circle a machine that vacuums out air and pumps in nitrogen, preventing any oxygen from sneaking back in. After the precious purple product is injected into the bottles at the filling station, a cork is popped immediately into place. The bottles finish their clockwise rotation around the filling station, return to the main line, and then take yet another detour to the foiling station, where a decorative, shiny maroon seal is vacuum-packed over the top of the cork and the neck of the bottle. Yet to be used coils of foil rest on a rack above the line like hot dogs on a roller cooker in a 7-11 store.

“I wouldn’t eat hot dogs that color,” says Tony.

After foiling, the bottles are labeled, stuffed back into case boxes, and rolled down to the winery floor via conveyer belt. There, another Neal Family Vineyards label is slapped onto the outside of the box. Finally, the boxes are glued shut, stacked onto wooden pallets, and transferred to the other end of the winery for storage.

Sheets of cold rain fall out of the flat, gray winter sky and the temperature struggles to stay above forty degrees. At the back of the truck, eight Mexican employees of Jack Neal & Son stand waiting on the sidelines, their breath visible clouds. With hands in pockets, they linger, heads protected from the rain by sweatshirt hoods or wool hats, all featuring NFL team logos. Mark leans against a pallet of empty cases, hands jammed into the pockets of his red and black plaid flannel lumberman’s jacket. Tony works the forklift, loading cases of empty bottles into position. Then, he walks inside the truck to check up on the bottling line.

Andy looks up from a kneeling position and gestures back toward Mark. “Is he helping, too?”

“Fuck no!” laughs Tony, shaking his head. The vineyards keep him busy enough. The winery details are all Tony’s.

Today, he might not have enough workers. The line is set to run at a rate of 60 bottles per minute, with Andy slowing it down, if necessary. But Tony wants to keep on schedule because the longer the bottling takes, the more expensive the job becomes. In an attempt to keep adjustment times to a minimum once bottling starts, Tony has spent the past two hours prepping everyone and getting everything in order. Once Andy flips the switch, Tony does not want the line to stop running until every last bottle has been filled.

As they wait, Tony walks over to Mark and says, “You’re really mad about the magnums, huh?”

“Yeah.” Mark answers, lips pursed.

Tony returns to the bottling truck. Andy offers to explain to Mark why he can’t handle both the 750-milliliter bottles and the magnums concurrently, but Tony tells him not to worry. Tony’s pretty good at “managing his manager,” knowing when things are truly an issue. This one he’ll get over, Tony decides. He exits the truck and heads back over to Mark. Pointing to a stack of window glass leaning against a wall in the tank room, he tells Mark they’re made by the O’Shaugnessy’s company. In a conciliatory gesture, he offers Mark one of the practice bottles, fresh off the bottling line, for inspection.

“If it looks good to you, I’m fine with it,” Mark nods. “Would’ve been great to have those magnums, though…”

Tony gives a half laugh and shakes his head. He just wants to move on with the day

“I would have gotten different magnums yesterday if I’d known,” Mark complains.

Suddenly, there’s no more time for quibbling. It’s 8:30 - bottling time. Tony marches around, assigning workers different stations in the queue, delivering his orders in both Spanish and English. Short a couple people, he recruits a handyman working in the winery and enlists his services as a box gluer. Grabbing a small paint roller out of a glue pan, Tony rolls it under the top lids of a case box and then slaps them shut.

“There,” he says with satisfaction. “Like that.”

The glue is sloppy and sticky – dirt quickly collects on the worker’s hands like flies on flypaper. Soon, full cases are sliding down to the winery floor along the conveyor wheels, sounding like a bunch of kids on roller skates. When the pallets have been stacked full with 44 cases, Tony moves them into the storage room with a dolly lift. At a cost of $45 per bottle, each pallet carries $23,760 worth of wine. Which means if you’re asked to move one, you’d better be damn careful.

“Mark’s hella pissed about those Magnums,” Tony says, jacking the dolly up under a full palate. “Did you see how quiet he got?”

As he pulls the pallet through the tank room, the edge of a box in the middle of the stack snags a support column. A full case tumbles onto the floor. Red wine bleeds through the cardboard and fans across the concrete. The remaining cases rock precariously.

“Fuck!” swears Tony as $270 of wine literally goes down the drain.

Mark’s wife, Marguerite, stops by a little while later, looking for her husband. Although she has been in the United States for over ten years, her Swedish accent lingers. The designer ski jacket she wears is a patchwork of textures including corduroy, herringbone tweed, and suede. The St. Moritz-ean look is finished off by a pair of black bellbottom stretch pants. Finding out that Mark is off in the vineyards, she quickly leaves.

The bottling line is now operating full bore. Like glass soldiers in a single file formation, the bottles move along in an orderly fashion. The tinkle of glass hitting glass fills the air. As each bottle is corked, a pumping sound like a chugging locomotive provides rhythmic backbeat. Andy wears a pair of fluorescent green ear plugs to muffle the racket.

Mark returns to the winery with sopping wet hair.

“Serves him right, going out without a hat,” mumbles Tony. They’re still bickering about the magnum miscue.

“Any good collector would tell you to go with the large magnum,” argues Mark.

Tony shakes his head and smiles. “We don’t even need magnums.”

There’s a minute or two of silence. “I’m not the boss here,” Mark finally concedes. “I just give out the presents.”

Another couple of quiet minutes.

“Well, I’ve guess I’ve got to go take out my aggressions on these guys,” Mark gestures toward the workers. “Should be on you, though,” he says, pointing back to Tony.

Mark starts talking about bringing the bottling in-house someday, building a bottling line into the winery.

“Yeah, but you’d never do a good job like these guys,” Tony says, waving his hand toward Andy’s truck.

Tony moves over and says something in Spanish to the Mexicans. He calls them “Amigo,” then some other names that make him laugh.

“All I know are the dirty words,” says Tony.

At this, the workers cackle. With a big grin, Tony lets out a loud “Wa, Ha!” That gets them going even more.

The bottling line stops for some adjustments and a couple of the guys take mock sparring jabs at each other to keep warm in the miserable 43-degree rain. One of them points at Tony, then takes a Neal Family label and pretends to stick it over his lips, inferring that Tony’s loud mouth should be sealed shut.

“Mariposa,” Tony hisses back.

Juan holds his hands up and flutters them like a butterfly. Apparently, the Spanish word for butterfly, “mariposa” is also Hispanic slang for “homosexual.”

Tony moves into storage room on the east side of the winery to stack wine. Mark comes in, muttering. “Everyone should just slow down.” He’s pissed off about some marks on the doorway connecting the two sides of the winery, and he wonders why the workers can’t simply tape up cardboard inside the door frame when they’re moving large things back and forth.

Tony admits he has scraped the doorway, himself, while dragging hoses through to fill barrels. “This winery is tough,” he tells Mark. “With one person moving stuff back and forth, this happens. Shit, I’ve seen forklifts go through winery walls, for Christ’s sake. This is nothing.”

The forklift only has a couple inches leeway on either side as it passes through the doorway in question, but Tony deftly maneuvers the heavy piece of machinery back through the frame.

Mark is silent.

“I promise it’ll get better,” tries Tony. “It’s just crazy right now.”

Mark stares at Tony. “Juan says, ‘Tony hits doors all the time.’ How am I supposed to answer that?”

“Well, that’s a personnel issue,” Tony fires back coldly. “He shouldn’t be saying that.”

Back outside on the loading pad, the bottling line comes to a halt. Andy releases a sigh of relief and satisfaction. It’s his last bottling session for the season and he’s looking forward to spending some time up at his wife’s family’s Lake Tahoe cabin.

Standing in the winery, surrounded by stacks of barrels and pallets of freshly bottled wine, the guys talk business. Andy asks Tony how much winemaking influence he had on the ‘98’s, which were bottled before he started at the winery.

“None,” Tony answers, “I just sell it.”

With the ‘99’s, Tony arrived in time to handle the final blending and “just made sure it was okay.” With the 2000 release, he finally gets to play around with different barrel oaks.

Andy and Mark eventually take off, leaving Tony to his forklifting chores. As he works, he talks. Having spent much of December on the road with the ’98 Cabernet visiting wine stores across California, Tony has developed some definite opinions about the retail environment. Although he himself enjoys dealing with wine store owners, he understands why so many small upscale wineries avoid retailers altogether. “They’re a bunch of Pavlov’s dogs, waiting for Parker,” he blurts, referring to the annoying habit of stores not buying from a winery until they’ve received a superlative score from a top wine reviewer. At the same time, retailers are also scared not to take their wine because they risk losing the allocation for the next year, which may end up being a great vintage. The worst retailers according to Tony are the ones who agree to take their allocations and then never end up following through with an actual purchase. “They say in person they’ll take it, then they never end up picking it up or writing up a purchase order.” He’s not a big fan of hypocritical antics. “Just tell me to my face you don’t want my wine.”

“Good retailers don’t give a shit about a bad vintage. They sell wine,” he says, explaining that the best merchants can find diamonds for their customers in any rough harvest. Marcus Graziano is a perfect example. Although 1998 was labeled a horrible winegrowing year, Marcus ordered four cases of the Neal Cabernet mere seconds after tasting it. Because he’s earned the confidence and trust of his customers, he’ll be able to sell the wine despite its supposedly bad vintage.

The St. Helena Wine Center, where Tony used to work, is another case in point. They’ve already moved 18 cases of the ‘98 Neal Family Vineyards Cabernet this year and have included tasting notes for the wine in their Holiday 2001 newsletter:

This release is exactly what our customers have been asking for, dense black cherry, chocolate, vanilla bean and toasty black olive combining with currant, pipe tobacco, cocoa powder and hints of cassis on the rich and voluptuous finish. If you are like us and can’t wait to drink this gorgeous wine then decant for a while and enjoy. Will age gracefully for 4-5 years.

Dan Moberg, a Wine Center salesperson, thinks Mark and Tony are smart for putting the Neal Cabernet out at $45 a bottle. With the economy tanking, wine priced above $100 per bottle is sitting on the shelves. High-end offerings from large producers like Mondavi, BV, and Opus One are getting hit the hardest. “They keep raising prices every year without doing anything different to the wine.” Eventually consumers will catch on and the brands will suffer a backlash, thinks Moberg. “Keeping it under $50 puts it in a less competitive pricing bracket,” he explains. “There’s not too many in that bracket. Neal Family Vineyards can build a name for themselves this way and then offer more expensive Reserve releases later on.”

If Neal Family Vineyards has priced their wine right, it will sell out. If they make the wines great, they’ll leave people wanting more. Fans of the winery will make sure to call well ahead of time next year to score their allocation. For wineries, it is all a delicate dance. Tony calls it “managing scarcity” and it’s something all great boutique wineries do well.

Things will get tricky if the Neal wine receives a 90+ score from the Wine Spectator or Robert Parker and their wine starts selling out as soon as it hits wine store shelves. In order to capitalize on laws of supply and demand, they would then have two choices; either charge more per bottle or make more wine. For now, Tony and Mark talk of strictly adhering to a maximum production of 5,000 bottles and not charging exorbitant prices. But sticking to these principles is easy for a winery still in obscurity. Once a label becomes a hot commodity, priorities change and egos come into play.

For now, Tony’s just trying to keep things in perspective. However passionate he is about winemaking, however intriguing the intricacies of his job, Tony understands his profession isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. He’s realistic about the product he makes. “We’re selling a product that no one needs. No one’s life is any emptier without a $50 bottle of wine.”

To some, it is bottled poetry, but Tony makes wine for people to drink, not worship.

Chapter Nine

Clients, Collectors, and Cabernet Combinations

It’s the start of another week in wine country, a February morning marked by cloudless skies. Distant pockets of low fog lick into the Carneros region from the bordering San Pablo Bay. By Oakville, the fog is gone. In a field east of Route 29, a hot air balloon bobs a few feet off the ground, still tied down, preparing for flight. Another balloon, already airborne, hangs above Spring Mountain to the west. The balloonists start their days early in order to catch the thermals rising from the valley floor as the land heats up in the morning sun.

In the vineyards, tiny yellow flowers are budding on the mustard grass growing like weeds between rows. The hillsides to the east have shed their dry, sandy-brown summer skins, the winter rains watering them to a rich dark-green hue. The large houses crowning the highest ridges and hillsides are especially visible today, provoking aspiration, envy, and for lovers of nature unblemished, disdain.

At the winery, shortly after eight o’clock, Jeffrey Shifflett, Mark Neal’s former partner on the Neal-Shifflett label, arrives to supervise the loading of 35 barrels of wine he’s been storing there. They formed the co-branded partnership for the 1997 vintage, but Mark has been farming grapes on the Shifflett property for years. The Neal-Shifflett Cabernet was made by Ray Coursen, a consulting winemaker, using Neal-farmed grapes from the Shifflett Ranch that were crushed and barreled at the Neal winery. Though the partnership ended when Mark decided to start a winery of his own, Shifflett remains a vineyard management client and Mark continues to farm his Mt. Veeder property in the southwestern foothills of the Valley. As part of the exit terms of the deal, Mark agreed to store existing barrels of Shifflett wine until they were ready for bottling.

Short, with liberally-gelled graying hair, Shifflett wears a fleece vest and a bright red corduroy shirt tucked tightly into his jeans. The collar of the black polo shirt underneath is turned up. He speaks quickly, not surprising considering his primary profession as a lawyer. He tells Tony he’ll return in an hour, once the barrel transport truck arrives.

After he leaves, Tony putters around the winery, sanitizing hoses and performing other housekeeping duties. The previous week, he was down in Los Angeles making sales calls. At Spago, a restaurant as famous for its celebrity patrons as its food, he scored an audience with the wine buyer. Although he didn’t win any business, yet, it was a start in the right direction. The buyers wants to support Tony, he told him, but they will wait for wine that Tony himself has worked on. The ’98 Cabernet, made by Ray Coursen, was bottled before Tony’s arrival at Neal Family Vineyards. Although he didn’t have a hand in its creation, as General Manager, he is still charged with selling it. The ‘99s should be an easier sale for Tony, since he helped select the final blend and can talk up the winemaking decisions he made in that process.

Because restaurants are taking a hit with the poor economy right now, many establishments are narrowing their focus and simply maintaining “backbone” wine lists of well-known customer favorites like Dalle Valle, Duckhorn, and Chateau Montelena. In such cases, there’s not much room left for newcomers. But Tony knows he needs to keep at it, get out on the road, and continue to tell the Neal Family Vineyard story. He needs to find bolder buyers who are more willing to take chances. One of his favorites is Larry Stone at San Francisco’s Rubicon.

“There’s a wine buyer with a good list,” says Tony. Stone carries wines that sell well consistently, but he also makes sure to carry some newer, smaller names to add variety.

In the 90’s, when restaurants were packed with money-flush patrons, their wine buyers bought everything.

“Let’s buy crazy wines!” Tony yells, doing his impression of an overexuberant restaurant buyer. “Next thing they know, the economy goes south and they’re stuck with huge inventories of quirky wine. No one wants to try that Mondeuse from Slovakia now.”

Although he’s had interest from several key retailers and restaurants, Tony concedes the possibility that the ‘98s might not sell out. Still, he doesn’t seem too worried.

“Mark’s pretty cool about it,” he explains. “We only made 350 cases, so we’re not talking about a lot of wine. We can sell it out of the tasting room for the next five years. Plus, we can always market it as a “reserve.”

The downward shift in the economy over the past two years has changed the way wine is marketed. “You have to be price sensitive, now” says Tony. At $45, the Neal wine is considered a reasonably priced Cabernet. They only made 350 cases from the ’98 vintage, so they don’t expect to have much excess inventory to worry about. This will change as they gradually approach their annual production goal of 5,000 cases. Their market sensitive pricing will pay off when space gets limited in the winery and inventory management becomes increasingly important.

Conversely, many other boutique wineries took advantage of the booming marketplace in the 1990’s and cranked up their prices.

“It was the exact opposite of everything I’d ever been taught,” Tony recalls. “If they charged more for the wine, it sold. Their thinking was, ‘I’ve got to charge more to keep up with the Joneses, got to keep up with the other hot wines.’”

He shakes his head.

“I could charge $70, but we wouldn’t sell it out.”

Pricing is a common topic of conversation between Tony and Mark. Originally, Mark wanted to sell the Neal wines at higher prices, but Tony pushed back.

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” Tony argued. He thought they needed to price for long-term and not simply capitalize on a short-term bubble situation. Ultimately, Mark came around.

In Tony’s opinion, even the big wineries will feel the effects of the shrinking economy, when margins get squeezed on their high volume, mainstream Chardonnay and Cabernet labels.

“There will definitely be a shakeout.”

When the economy slows, restaurants take the hit before retailers, leaving retailers as the last stronghold against plummeting sales. But if a winery expects to rely on retailers in tough times, it needs to cement solid relationships with wine store owners well ahead of time. That’s why Tony makes as many sales calls himself as possible.

The barrel hauling truck finally arrives out front and Tony greets the driver cheerfully.

“Hey, how you doing?”

“Good,” responds the driver, a friendly young Hispanic, as he shakes Tony’s outstretched hand.

“You still picking up for Duckhorn?” asks Tony, recognizing his face.

“No, not so much now.”

Tony frowns. In his view, Duckhorn relied too heavily on in-house employees to haul barrels instead of outsourcing the menial task. “Stupido!” he mutters.

The driver used to live in Vallejo, a bayside city south of Napa, but he got sick of his truck getting broken into all the time. With the extra income he earned working weekends as a carpet installer in Marin County, he bought a new house in a safer town, American Canyon, closer to Napa.

“Who you been driving for the most these days?” Tony asks the driver.

“Been hauling William Hill to Atlas Peak.”

“That’s a rough drive,” Tony sympathizes, picturing the twisty, ravine-flanked mountain roads.

Tony jumps into the forklift and starts loading the first of six four-barrel racks onto the flatbed, maneuvering the machine back and forth between the winery and the truck.

Loading barrels, Tony talks about what it takes to be successful in the wine industry these days.

“Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and don’t rock the boat with your opinions. Just do your job”.

Then, he quickly switches topics and starts raving about Baja, Mexico, where he and his wife vacationed in early January. Looking at pictures upon their return, Tony was disgusted at how big he thinks his belly has gotten.

“Man, I’m so fat. I’m like ‘Jabba the Hutt,’” he thought after seeing the photographs. “I’m ‘Biagi the Hutt!’”

He’s being overly self-critical, but it’s fun hearing him rant.

In other news, he and his wife just bought a cat, a rare breed of Siamese. They drove eight hours to Oregon to pick it up. He realizes how ridiculous this sounds.

“You know what I’m talking about. There are certain things you do to make your wife happy. Because when they’re happy, you’re happy. You know what I mean?”

After lunch today, at Paige’s request, he will stop by the house to check up on the new kitten, named Miles. It’s a perfect name considering how far they traveled to get it.

It’s now 9:30, and the air outside is pleasant. It’s mid-February, but feels like spring, making it even harder to believe five inches of snow fell on Howell Mountain a couple weeks ago. A warm breeze circulates. Crows caw in the distance over the reservoir. Occasionally, the eery shriek of a hawk perched in the tall evergreens behind the Neals’ house pierces the calm. In front of the winery, the manmade stream is now working, burbling pleasantly over a bed of smooth, round rocks into a manmade pool, ten-feet in diameter. In the surrounding gardens, flowers repose. Wrinkled orange pedals hang off the stems like dried apricots, further evidence of nature napping. Wispy, distant clouds are a casual brushstroke of white across a canvas of crystal blue sky.

Tony makes the job of loading the racks of barrels onto the flatbed truck look easy. Occasionally, though, he lowers a rack too close to the edge and has to come back with the forklift to realign its position. “When you drop a barrel, it’s just like a watermelon splattering.”

Tony leaves a rack of three barrels on the ground next to the truck. They need to be topped off. Shifflett, who has the jugs of topping wine, still hasn’t returned from Napa. Tony’s pissed. “C’mon, Jeffrey!” he yells to no one.

When Shifflett finally does drive up in an old white Nissan pickup, Tony mumbles, “Here’s nimrod!”

Shifflett is actually only a half hour late, but Tony doesn’t appreciate having to wait. He’d rather be working on the Neal wines. Nonetheless, he musters up cordiality for Shifflett face-to-face. This customer-is-always-right attitude will come in handy days when Tony has to deal with know-it-all tourists in the tasting room.

Once the topping is completed, Tony starts on the paperwork. First, he needs Jeffrey’s bonded winery number, which by law, must be recorded whenever wine is transported. Jeffrey has no idea what his bonded winery number is and doesn’t seem to care. Tony gets impatient, then acquiesces. “We’ll let it go this time, but I’m going to need it for my records.”

Jeffrey looks at his watch. “So we’re out of here early. That’s good!”

“Yeah, well, umm.” Tony looks down. “Actually, I would’ve liked to have finished this up earlier…”

While trying to top off the barrels, Jeffrey spills wine onto the driveway.

“That’s okay,” says Tony. “We’ll get the dogs to lick it up.”

At that moment, a Jack Neal & Son worker wearing a “No Fear” brand hooded sweatshirt walks by. “Shit, I’ll get down there on the ground and drink it,” he offers, apparently an early fan of Neal Family Vineyards wine.

Tony returns the forklift to the winery, leaving Shifflett at the truck with the driver.

Shifflett worries about the barrel plugs. “So the tops’ll stay in, huh?”

The driver assures him they will be fine.

Back inside the winery, It’s time for another session of “The Wine Biz According to Tony.”

There are a lot of “wannabe” wineries these days, Tony laments. He went to a charity event recently, but thought the winery seemed more concerned with presenting themselves as a cult winery.

“It’s all I-me-me-I-me-me-mine,” he sings.

Some vintners see auctions as marketing opportunities dressed up with a “charity” label. A good buzz about your wine at the Napa Valley Wine Auction pretty much guarantees your winery an immediate 300-person mailing list. To be a featured winery at the auction, you must first join the Napa Valley Vintners Association. As much as he doesn’t agree with all the vintners involved in the auction, Tony knows Neal Family Vineyards needs to play on that field.

“I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist,” says Tony. The thing Tony hates most about the auctions, though, are the poser wineries.

“Don’t think you’re something you’re not. Don’t try to be a cult wine. Just try to be a successful winery that makes your customers happy.”

At 11:45, Tony heads down to meet Mark for lunch in St. Helena. Winding down Howell Mountain, he cranks Live 105, a modern rock station from San Francisco. In Napa Valley, it’s hard to escape the city’s influences; its far-reaching radio frequencies, its suburban sprawl, and its wealthy inhabitants who take second homes here.

In the back of Tony’s truck lies a golf bag, evidence that things have quieted down a bit since harvest. He’s actually had time to hit a few buckets at the practice range lately.

Tony parks across from Villa Corona, home of the best burritos in town.

“Watch him try to park that thing,” he says as Mark struggles to squeeze his king-size Ford Excursion into a tight space on Main Street.

Finally successful, Mark gets out and greets Tony with a middle finger. Cell phone glued to his right ear, he marches across the street to the restaurant, forcing traffic on Main Street to stop for him. Suddenly, Tony sprints to beat some people also heading toward the restaurant. Due to its popularity, getting seating at Villa Corona can be difficult. And when Tony is hungry and Mark is in a hurry, there is no room for pleasantries.

Inside, Gove from Liparita is already seated near the front, reading a book. After ordering from the wall menu above the back counter, Mark and Tony join him. As usual, talk turns the wine business. Gove thinks restaurants are marking up wine too much.

“They can’t move $100 bottles anymore,” Gove reports. “Need to be at $70. They’re charging too much. They’re scaring customers from ordering wine. If they just dropped margins a bit, they could move the wine.”

While restaurants are struggling, the wineries themselves are still doing okay.

“They’re still packin’ em in,” says Gove. “Shit, I was driving down 29 the other day, BV [Beaulieu Vineyards] was packed, Mondavi was packed.”

Someone mentions hearing about a Napa Valley winery buying some grapes this harvest for $12,000 a ton. It’s an amazing price. For a winery make money on wine, the rule of thumb is to price each bottle at 1% of the cost of a ton of grapes. Using this equation, the winery that bought the $12,000 ton will have to charge $120 a bottle just to break even.

Gove, who is recovering from chemotherapy for thyroid cancer, announces he is doing much better. “Finally, my taste buds are coming back,” he says, relishing a mouthful of fine Villa Corona burrito.

After lunch, Tony makes a quick delivery of wine to 55 Degrees, a wine storage facility tucked away on a St. Helena side street next to a State Farm Insurance office. The company’s name derives from the perfect temperature for storing wine. Customers rent lockers and storage space for their wine in 55 Degrees’ strictly controlled environment because they don’t have a wine cellar of their own or they’ve outgrown their existing one. If they live in a state that doesn’t allow direct shipments from out-of-state wineries to consumers, customers can have a local winery deliver wine into their locker at 55 Degrees, and then arrange for Fedex to ship from 55 Degrees to their out-of-state home. Using this loophole, wine lovers can circumvent some of the archaic alcohol distribution regulations left over from Prohibition days.

55 Degrees recently featured Neal Family Vineyards in their monthly newsletter where they offer clients limited release wines from up–and-coming Napa Valley wineries. Offering dibs on allocations to 55 Degrees’ customers is a great way for Neal to get their wine in the hands of some of the most avid collectors around. Not only do the clients of 55 Degrees tend to buy a lot of wine themselves, but they set in motion the word-of-mouth domino effect. For a small winery, this is the cheapest and most effective form of marketing.

Standing in the open doorway of the back loading area, Tony strikes up a conversation with two employees. One of them, Miles, sports a bushy beard and gets visibly upset when he doesn’t receive a firm handshake.

“I hate soft, wimpy handshakes,” he says.

Watching Miles load six cases of wine onto a dolly,Tony’s eyes light up as he recognizes the venerable names on each case. All French wines from Burgundy, they are some of Tony’s favorites; Francois Raveneau, Granges des Peres Chablis, and Gevrey Chambertin.

“Whoever this wine is for has some serious connections,” Tony says. Even though they are only Premier Cru, the second best designation in France, they are still difficult wines to find.

“Why do you know so much about French wine?” asks Miles.

“Because they’re our guide,” answers Tony, still staring at the boxes, practically drooling.

Miles asks him about some of the other wines he’s seen come through here recently and Tony comes up with an answer for almost every question thrown his way.

“You sound like you know a lot about wine,” Miles says, impressed.

“Well, when you go over [to Burgundy] and stand there in the middle of it, it all makes sense. You get it,” Tony explains as Miles listens intently and nods.

On each of the six cases, in black magic marker, is written the name “Hearst”. Everyone wonders if it is the Hearst family.

“Why would he keep his wine here, though?” Tony wonders. “You think he’d have a wine cellar of his own. Maybe he has a house up here or something.”

Miles leafs through the pages of his clipboard and points his finger to an address. “It says here ‘c/o Kleiner Perkins.’” Although Miles mispronounces it “Cleaner Perkins,” Tony recognizes it as the name of the venture capital firm that made a killing taking companies like Sun Microsystems, America Online, and public. William R. Hearst III, or Will, as he is commonly called, happens to be one of the principals at Kleiner Perkins and a grandson of the original William Randolph Hearst.

On top of a storage locker to the right sits further evidence of Internet wealth. Scrawled across a case of Arrowood Cabernet, which Tony says is pretty tough wine to find, is the name “Barksdale.” That would be Jim Barksdale, ex-CEO of Netscape, who took that company public.

The other employee takes Tony on a quick tour of the facilities, leading him deep into the wines of the rich and famous to the heart of the Hearst stash. Tony peers up at cases locked behind wire mesh.

“Holy crap! No wonder this guy gets what he wants,” he exclaims, pointing his baseball hat at case upon case of $250 per bottle French wine.

The cool, temperature-controlled aisles are like the halls of a contemporary wine museum, if there were such a thing. Cases of Viader, Harlan, Turley, Silver Oak, Nickel & Nickel, Dalle Valle, and Abreu beckon while boxes of Screaming Eagle taunt.

This Wonderland of rare wine has been an interesting field trip, but soon it’s time for Tony to get back to the realities of his own business. He and Mark need to decide the final blend for the 2000 Neal Napa Valley Cabernet, so Tony heads down to the JNS headquarters a couple blocks off Route 29, south of St. Helena.

Driving down 29, Tony points at a passing car.

“That’s Joel Gott,” he says, referring to a fellow vintner who also owns Foster’s Freeze, a throwback drive-in restaurant that is a town favorite. Here in Napa Valley, locals recognize each other by their cars and trucks. Besides speaking to the amount of time people in the wine business spend driving their vehicles around the valley, there is something familial and neighborly about this kind of car spotting. It’s one of those quirks that can only happen in a small town.

Located in a commercial development of low slung office buildings and garages surrounded by vineyards, the Jack Neal & Son headquarters occupy a two-story, mustard-colored, contemporary concrete and glass structure. Out front, large two-story windows hang down the entire left half. Eight more smaller square windows make their way across to the right side of the façade. Wooden cantilevered slat shades cover the top of the windows like visors, providing shade and breaking up the textural monotony. Far right, three twenty-foot Italian cypress pines stand sentinel near entranceway, like spears stuck in the dirt. Out back is a large garage full of farming machinery including earthmoving equipment, sprayers, all-terrain vehicles, and tanker trucks.

Inside headquarters, glass-windowed offices look out unobstructed into hallways. Walls are covered with neatly framed topographical maps of Neal-farmed vineyards, each one color-coded to indicate the varietals being grown. At the end of the first floor hall is a large conference room marked by floor-to-ceiling windows and rows of tables formed into a square. Besides the fact that the carpet is covered with muddy streaks and occasional clumps of dirt, this could be just another corporate meeting room. Sun pours in through the western facing windows and heats up the room just beyond comfortable.

Tony doesn’t seem to notice the stifling warmth as he sets out four half bottles, labeled “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D,” respectively. Roughly the same size as restaurant ketchup bottles, each is filled with a different blend of the 2000 Napa Valley Cabernet. Tony created the blends by mixing separate lots of wine from individual vineyards. Each of the four samples in front of him contains different percentages from each vineyard, and Tony hopes one of them is noticeably better than the others. He will taste the blend samples first. Mark will offer his opinions when he arrives in a couple of minutes.

Tony pours the first blend into his glass and samples it, slurping intermittently and smacking his tongue to spread the liquid and aromas over as much of his palate as possible. He writes down some quick impressions on a piece of paper. “Simple, hot, complex, bright, Bing cherry, spicy.”

He tastes sample “B,” and jots down more notes. “Candy, smoke, black cherry, cola, sour, no richness, pH low, 3.5 range, nice middle, very narrow finish.”

After sample “C”, the third glass, Tony announces his thoughts aloud. “Hard, very lean and austere.”

Then, he scribbles more comments. “Classic Rutherford, smoky black cherry, thin - want more density, not bad but again very low pH, want more richness in wine, does not seem to have richness.”

Finally, he tastes “D”and records the following: “Rutherford dust, candy, Sweet Tarts, very acidic, rich and dense or more so than others, like density a lot, much better than first three.”

When he’s done, there is a page full of stream-of-consciousness tasting notes written neatly in all-caps. Sample “D” is his favorite, followed by “B”, “A”, then “C.”

Mark comes in and pulls up a seat. He crosses his left leg to rest on his right knee and leans back. He takes his first taste and feigns spitting it over his shoulder. Then, staring straight ahead, poker face, he swishes the wine over his palate. “B is flabby in the middle,” he blurts. Tony liked B and had ranked it second.

Mark tastes the rest.

He points to the glass into which he’s been spitting the samples and pouring his leftover wine.

“That’s the best one.”

Tony, looking down at his notes, misses the joke. “Which one is that?” he asks.

“Mark’s blend.”

Tony is asked which one he liked. He answers “D”.

“That’s the only one I liked,” agrees Mark.

“Good,” responds Tony. “D is what we’ve got most of.” They could make roughly 1,300 cases of the blend, made from grapes harvested from the Manley and Ackerman vineyards as well as the Neal estate ranch. The Ackerman wine is the limiting factor because they don’t have many barrels worth.

“B, to me, is like a big void,” Mark continues, shaking his head.

D it is. Or so it seems.

The more they talk about it, the more they realize even the best sample is not great. They agree to talk more on the subject later, but within minutes they’re taking it head on. Mark and Tony both agree that a significant percentage of the wine produced from the 2000 harvest is not up to par with the quality of wine they want to make, leaving them two choices. They can either release the wine as a secondary label to differentiate the lower quality product from the flagship Neal Family Vineyards brand, or they can sell the mediocre barrels off to the bulk wine market and simply put out less wine with greater quality. They can make more money with a second label, but they would risk their reputation by going for the quick buck. Mark doesn’t want a second label – he wants a high quality Napa Valley Cabernet to be the winery’s starting point, followed by even more upscale single vineyard designations and reserve releases. From a long term business perspective, the decision seems smart. They are still in the process of building the Neal Family Vineyards name, and if the brand’s image gets watered down with a reputation for mediocre wine, they might never be able to reestablish a perception of high quality.

Tony agrees, but wants to make sure Mark is okay with the negative short-term effects this decision will have on the winery’s cash flow situation. While Mark gives him full autonomy to make these kinds of calls, Tony remains uncomfortable with the idea. It’s not his money to play with.

“I can’t make decisions affecting the bottom line” Tony tells him.

“It is what it is,” says Mark, borrowing Tony’s favorite catch phrase. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

Tony nods.

“I want it out of there. Otherwise, it’s like having to keep going out with a girl I dated but don’t like anymore,” Mark explains.

After selling most of the wine off to the bulk market, they will be left with 1,400 cases of the 2000 Cabernet, still a nice uptick from the 350 cases they produced in 1999.

Winemakers and grape growers try their best with what the weather and seasons give them. But in the end, Mother Nature doesn’t care much about a winery’s sales goals. The turn of events with the 2000 Cabernet is no surprise for Mark and Tony.

“Hey, man,” says Mark, “our whole careers revolve around a single-celled organism.”

Chapter Ten

Cellar Dweller

The annual growth cycle of a vine begins with pruning, which takes place during winter dormancy and is usually completed by late February. Old growth and meandering shoots are cut back to control vine vigor going forward. In pursuit of the highest quality wine grapes, growers try to concentrate the energy of a vine into a few buds rather than spreading it thinly across a mess of sprawling shoots. Pruning is best done in dry weather, because rain increases the risk of Eutypa, a fungal disease affecting the fresh cuts.

Despite the fact that his vineyard management crews have been preoccupied with pruning for the past month, it seems Mark Neal can’t get enough of the chore. One Saturday afternoon in late February finds Mark sitting in a cherry tree next to the winery, trimming branches while his daughter, Dimitria, stands below, craning her neck to watch.

Tony is up at the winery, too, somewhere back in the caves. Tony likes to taste his wines once a week, even though once a month would suffice for most winemakers. Most weekends, the winery is a quiet place, the caves a sanctuary of tranquility and solitude.

As he works his way through a Zin, several Cabs and a couple Chardonnays, Tony makes mental notes to himself about what can be done to improve each batch. After taking a sip from his glass, he pours the dregs right back into the bunghole.

“In France,” he explains, “some winemakers just spit the wine back into the barrel.”

In typical fashion, Tony acquires a rich vocabulary of adjectives as he tastes, describing samples as having “rambunctious,” “pepper steak,” “roast beef,” or “vanilla bean” flavors.

Over the past few weeks, the 2000 Cabernet has been the focus of Tony’s efforts. He continues to experiment with blends in a last ditch effort to salvage the mediocre vintage. On the plus side, they have a lot of wine to work with. For each individual vineyard there are subcategory barrels made using different winemaking techniques. For instance, Tony might rely on naturally occurring yeasts to kick off fermentation for half the wine from Vineyard “X,” then add manmade yeasts to the other half. Then, he might put age half the natural yeast batch in new oak barrels and the other half in old. And so on and so forth.

The first blend Tony creates every vintage is a “pro rata” blend, which replicates, in exact proportions, the inventory of wine in the winery for that varietal. If the Second Chance vineyard accounts for 15% of the 2000 Cabernet sitting in the winery, then Tony’s pro rata blend will include 15% Second Chance Cabernet. Going pro rata for the winery’s Napa Valley label would be most efficient, since it would require using all the wine in the winery. Rarely is it the best tasting blend. Tony includes it in any tasting of blends as due diligence. If it were a close race, he might lean toward the pro rata. Tony hates compromising on quality, but he recognizes that winemaking is a business.

There are many other wineries, however, where turning a profit isn’t as big a concern.

“There are those that come into the business armed with money and there are those who treat it like a business. The people with the money are the ones hiring expensive wine consultants. They want to see their name on a label and say, ‘Aren’t I great?’ It’s an ego thing.”

Mark risks being perceived this way, with his spanking new $3 million winery and his family name adorning wine labels. While it’s true he has money, there’s no doubt Mark looks at the winery as a business, says Tony. That’s why he was hired – to bring a full-time winemaker’s undivided attention and accountability, attributes that fall by the wayside when a consulting winemaker takes on too many clients or starts coasting on their reputation.

“This is the only industry where you get your reputation before you actually do something,” says Tony. “In any other business, you first have to become CEO or something like that, and then you get a good reputation.”

Tony offers some samples of the 2001 Second Chance Cabernet. He likes this batch well enough to consider bottling it as a single vineyard designation, putting the name of the vineyard onto the label to distinguish it from the catch-all Napa Valley release. Most vineyards sell their grapes to a winery and don’t care what happens as long as they get paid, but others pine for a mention on someone else’s label. For a winery, the decision to offer a vineyard designation can backfire if the vineyard owner suddenly decides to open a winery and keep his fruit for himself. A famous example of this occurred when Grace Family Vineyards, a former single vineyard designate on the Caymus label, decided to fly solo and became one of the most sought after cult wine labels. As a result, wineries only offer vineyard designations to vineyard owners with whom they expect to have long term relationships.

While sampling grapes at Second Chance Vineyard earlier this fall, Mark and Tony got spooked when the owner’s wife let slip that she’d like to build a winery and make some wine themselves someday. Mark and Tony love the fruit and want to give it a single vineyard designation for the 2001 release, but not if they’re going to lose the fruit source a year or two down the road. If Neal is going to spend time, money, and resources building the vineyard’s brand, they want compensation over the long term. Their solution is to approach the owners of Second Chance and ask for a fifteen-year guaranteed contract on their grapes in exchange for a single vineyard designation on a Neal label.

A half hour into the tasting, Mark arrives in the back of the caves with his two youngest kids, Zack and Dimitria, tailed by Mia, the wiggly yellow Lab. Zack is five, with blond hair and brown eyes. Dimitria is three and with the same flaxen hair, but her eyes are blue like those of her Swedish mother. Jessica, at seven the oldest, is back up at the house with Marguerite, who’s pregnant with a fourth child. In addition to a steadily growing human population, the Neal household also counts among its members three dogs, two cats, and a cockatoo. The two children run up and down the cave halls, fascinated themselves with echoes made by high-pitched screams. Tony winces as the shrieks pierce his eardrums.

“Going over to Mark’s house is the best form of birth control.”

Mark jokes about adding babysitting to Tony’s job description.

“Imagine eight hours of this?” Tony rolls his eyes.

Mark is surprised his kids have so much energy left. He put Zack to work earlier picking up the smaller branches from the trees he trimmed. “Thirty I did, in all,” he boasts. Even days off Mark keeps busy. Idleness is not an option. Looking at five-year-old Zack, it’s hard to imagine him driving a tractor in two years, like Mark did when he was seven. His kids are having a different kind of childhood. Meaning, they actually get to have one.

Zack peeks out from his hiding place behind a row of barrels, surprising his little sister who squeals with excitement.

“Let me see all the bungs you pulled out,” accuses Tony.

As much as they’re enjoying themselves now, the kids still won’t go into the caves without an adult. A year ago, when the unfinished floors were still dirt, one of Marguerite’s nieces locked them in by accident. It took six months before the kids would go back at all, even with their parents.

Zack grabs the dog by the scruff of the neck and puts her in a headlock. True to her gentle breed, Mia just wags her tail, pants a little, and accepts the boy’s rough attention. Mark brings Dimitria up onto one of his knees. She squeals and wriggles when Mark invites the dog over to lick her face and give “free kisses.”

Zack picks up a plastic scrub brush and starts brushing his sister’s clothes with it. Then he bangs it against an empty metal bucket. Tony can’t wait for them to grow up, especially the girls, so he can watch Mark’s reactions when they start dating.

“Jessica, she’ll cry for months after her first breakup,” predicts Mark. Then, with one of his characteristic machine-gun, staccato, off-the-top-of-his-head declarations, he completes the thought. “Dimitria, on the other hand, she’ll be more resilient. She’ll come back saying, ‘He says he broke up with me but really I broke up with him, crashed his car, then burnt down his house. All in all, I had a good day.’”

Finally, Mark, Tony, the kids, and the dog make their way out of the caves to the front of the winery. Mark and Tony exchange goodbyes, but they’ll see each other later tonight at Tony’s house, where Tony will continue his mission of exposing Mark and Marguerite to good French wine.

Outside, clouds fill the sky, softening the light. A hawk cries. Maybe it’s the bald eagle that lives behind the winery in the cliff crags of the towering Palisades. Probably not, but he pauses to imagine the possibility. Saturdays spent hanging out at the winery in the off-season can’t really be called work. For Tony, it’s fun. It’s his life and it’s his passion.

One week later, in the tank room of the Neal winery, nine barrels of the 2000 Chardonnay are ready for racking. Although winemakers try to disturb their wine as little as possible when it’s aging in barrels, a controlled amount of exposure to oxygen is actually good for the wine. During the racking process, wine is pumped out of barrels, the barrels are rinsed out, then the wine is pumped back in. With red wine varietals like Cabernet, racking is done quarterly. But with the more sensitive and fragile white wines, winemakers often might not rack at all until just prior to bottling. Tony understands the thinking behind the “hands off” approach. Sometimes, he likes to see what the wine can do on its own, too.

Once the wine is pumped out via hose into a waiting stainless steel tank, the barrels need to be cleaned out. The lees, solid waste that forms when yeasts die, must be flushed off the inner walls. To do this, each barrel is tipped onto an apparatus that looks a like a stubby, four-legged footstool turned upside down. In the center of the four legs is a cylindrical metal prong that fits inside the bunghole of the barrel. The legs hold the barrel in place while water is pumped up through the metal prong into the barrel, spraying the insides clean. Rotating the barrel on the prong creates a sprinkler effect inside.

As Tony plays “spin the barrel,” custardy chunks of dead yeast ooze from the barrels like lumps of bad yogurt, releasing a powerfully fecund odor. Dead grape skins collect on the cement. They feel slimy and look like greasy, pale, broken olives. The sheer number of skins is evidence that too many full berries got through the crusher during the 2000 harvest. If Tony had been there at the time, he would have used a screen to better control the amount of grapes.

He walks over to a large, chrome industrial machine sitting under a separate roof adjacent to the winery. It’s the chiller, and it’s not working right. “Piece of shit. Fuckin’ pissin’ me off!” he swears at the inanimate object. The chiller’s main function keeping tank temperatures constant, very important with Chardonnay, since white wines are more delicate than reds. He storms back and forth mumbling that when he really needs the chiller to work, like today, it never does. It’s almost seventy degrees outside, and if the wine heats up, the whole batch is at risk of going off course.

In terms of a Chardonnay style, Tony likes to make his with luscious hints of butterscotch. He achieves this by putting every barrel through malolactic fermentation, a process by which the malic acids and their green-apple flavors are converted to lactic acids and a subsequent buttery richness. Tony prefers using new oak barrels for Chardonnay because they impart more toasted flavors. Think buttered popcorn. The 2000 batch was fermented in 60% new oak, meaning that if there were ten barrels in total, six would be fermented in brand new barrels and four would be fermented in barrels a couple years old.

There is a glut of over-oaked Chardonnay being sold right now, according to Tony, and the wine press keeps reporting that people are sick of it. “But it still moves the best in the marketplace,” argues Tony as he watches wine being sucked from barrel into tank. “People tell you they don’t want heavily oaked Chardonnay, but that’s what they end up drinking.”

Jose, the cheery handyman who often helps Tony around the winery, walks by on the far side of the driveway.

“Mia? No Mas?” Tony asks with a mischievous grin. Mia, the yellow Lab, finally gave birth to puppies conceived with an unknown male suitor. Accusing one another of being the father has become the winery’s inside joke de jour. Jose shakes his head and laughs.

A little while later, in the storage room on the opposite side of the winery. Tony fingers through the Yellow Pages looking for a phone number. Not finding it, he picks up the phone and dials directory assistance. He spells out the name for the operator. “C, like Coocamunga,” he explains, stretching hard to find a word beginning with a “C.”

Jim, the lead carpenter, walks by with one of his workers. The weather stripping hasn’t been put back up yet and won’t be for another day or so. “Just letting you know so you don’t get pissed when you don’t see it up,” he tells Tony.

“I won’t,” answers Tony. “But, I’m sure my boss will.”

In the front foyer of the winery, the tasting room is starting to take shape. New light fixtures have been installed high on the walls at even distances, opaque glass valences set into green bases of weathered copper. Almost all of the tasting bar cabinetry and paneling has been installed. This time, next year, full glasses of Neal Cabernet and Chardonnay will supplant the random pieces of wood that presently lie on the bar. Where the carpenters now mingle chatting about their next project, tourists will be discussing how the Neal wines pleasure their palates.

Just before lunch, Tony loads four half-cases of wine being shipped to a mailing list customer into the back of his truck, along with cardboard and packing foam molded to fit a bottle. Amidst the disarray beyond the tailgate rests a copy of Jack Welch’s autobiography, Straight from the Gut. You never know when you’re going to need some good business reading.

A couple minutes before noon, Tony heads down Howell Mountain to meet Mark for lunch in at Green Valley Café in St. Helena. Mark will be there at noon, on the button, as always. As Tony drives the lower part of Deer Park Road, the valley opens up in front of him, offering a clear shot to the solid granite heft and steeply pitched roof eaves of Greystone, west coast headquarters of the Culinary Institute of America. White cirrus clouds smear the sky, interrupted by openings of oceanic blue. At the bottom of the hill, in the vineyard on the corner of Deer Park and the Silverado Trail, workers prune tall, spindly, shoots off the vines.

After speeding a few miles down the Trail, Tony shoots right onto Pope Street, slowing only slightly over a narrow stone bridge to squeeze by oncoming traffic. Approaching downtown, Tony bangs a quick right onto Edwards Street to avoid the stoplights and lookie-loo traffic of Main Street, St. Helena, at lunchtime, and parks in a lot behind the restaurant.

Lunch is nearly always at Green Valley Café because it’s Mark’s favorite place to eat. If you’re looking for Mark between the hours of twelve and one on a weekday, your best bet is a front table at Green Valley.

“If it wasn’t closed Mondays, Mark would eat there every day,” claims Tony. “Sometimes he even does breakfast and lunch the same day.”

Inside, Mark sits at the bar waiting for a table. He’s having a meeting here in a couple of minutes. In addition to being a great local cafe, Green Valley Cafe serves a satellite office for Jack Neal & Son.

Green Formica covers the countertops and surrounding tables. Behind the bar, bottles of locally-produced wine sit on shelves in front of a mirrored wall display. Some are stacked horizontally in X-shaped racks, while others enjoy more prominent, upright positions, their labels thrust outward like robins’ breasts. Mark’s patronage of Green Valley is not lost on the owners; the ’98 Neal Cabernet has a highly visible position on Green Valley’s wall of fame, between a Raymond Cabernet and a Beaulieu Vineyards Rutherford Cabernet.

A waitress approaches Tony.

“You’re sitting at the bar?” she asks. Then, nodding to Mark and his empty table, she adds, “Not with knucklehead over there?”

“No, knucklehead’s got a friend coming,” Tony explains.

In addition to providing additional opportunities for Mark and Tony to trade insults, lunch at the Green Valley Café is an important ritual for Neal Family Vineyards. It’s the closest thing they have to a corporate cafeteria. The fact that Mark always takes lunch, even on the busiest of days, provides structure for Tony. He knows he can find Mark here at noon if he needs him. Sometimes lunch is all about business. Other days, like today, they sit at separate tables and don’t discuss a thing. Mark isn’t too concerned about the details of racking. The cellar is Tony’s domain.

Chapter Eleven

Filtration and Frustration

It’s a cool and sunny March morning, with temperatures rising pleasantly into the sixties. Tony is busy up at the winery putting the 2000 Neal Chardonnay through filtration to removing impurities. Without filtration, excess bacteria and yeast can do damage, clouding the color or breeding instability by facilitating additional malolactic fermentation in the bottle. Still, filtration is a winemaking process many winemakers perform with reluctance. The more wine is played with, the more it risks getting ruined. Some varietals can handle more meddling than others. Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance, is more durable than Pinot Noir or Chardonnay. Winemakers normally hold off filtering until the wine is ready to bottle, minimizing the possibility of any post-filtration bacteria growth.

During filtration, the wine is pumped horizontally from one holding tank to another through a series of membranes. The membranes themselves, two-foot square sections of particle board, allow wine to pass freely while blocking out the unwanted bacteria. Like slices of bread in a toaster, the membranes are inserted into 38 slots separated by rubber spacers. Underneath the membranes is a catch tray for spillage. The setup looks a bit like a large accordion.

Tony turns on the filter. Soon, the wine completes its voyage into the receiving tank. Tony peers into the side porthole hatch of the original holding tank and grunts. There’s still some wine in the bottom, beneath the level of the outtake valve. “That’s the problem with filtration,” he grimaces. “You lose a lot of wine.”

Up a ladder he climbs to the top of the tank. Peeking in the top hatch, he squints down at the liquid below. “Yeah,” he guesses, “I lost about sixty gallons.” That represents nearly 10% of the wine. In the name of quality, a certain amount of quantity must be sacrificed.

Around the winery lately, things have been fairly quiet Some racking here, a little barrel topping there. The highlight of the prior week for Tony was when Mark took him to lunch at The French Laundry, the most expensive restaurant in the valley. With their meal, they tasted Araujo, Harlan, and some other cult wines as part of Mark’s continuing education in wine tasting. It’s a win-win proposition; Mark gets a tasting coach and Tony gets to drink great wines he can’t afford.

When it’s slow up at the winery, Tony has time to worry about other things, like the stock market. He talked to his broker yesterday. He doesn’t know what to do. His portfolio is taking a beating, but thankfully he hasn’t been hit as hard as some of his friends who went heavy into high-tech and telecom. On the homefront, things are going well. Last night, he grilled up a snapper on the barbecue for Paige and himself. Their house is finally starting to feel lived in. Life seems good at the Biagi ranch.

Then, he drops a bomb. After careful consideration and internal deliberation, Neal Family Vineyards will not release a 2000 Cabernet at all. Instead, they will sell the wine to the bulk market, where it will be likely be bought by larger wineries who will blend it into their mass production, lower quality labels. Short term, it’s a huge hit to the Neal Family Vineyards revenue stream. They’ll be lucky to make back what they paid for the grapes. It was their only option.

“The wine sucked,” Tony admits. It was already in barrels when Tony came on board and there was not much he could do to save it. Considering Neal Family Vineyards is trying to establish itself as a card-carrying member of the ultrapremium niche, it would have been a death wish to release substandard wine into the market. They can’t afford to water down the still nascent Neal brand. Thankfully, Mark’s financial successes at Jack Neal & Son can tide over the winery’s operations until the 2001 Cabernet is released. It’s the first Cabernet vintage that Tony will have worked on from grape to glass, and it should put Neal Family Vineyards on the map. It has to. Now that he doesn’t have to work on the 2000 Cabernet anymore, Tony can put more effort into selling the 1999 Cabernet. Better yet, he can spend more time making sure the 2001 product is rock solid.

Times like this, Tony know he’s lucky to have an owner like Mark, someone who understands the kinds of sacrifices that need to be made in the name of quality. Likewise, Mark is lucky to have a winemaker like Tony on board. Not everyone can work as well with Mark as Tony can.

“He burns a lot of bridges,” Tony says. “A lot of people have a problem with him. He can be very brusque.” Tony’s way of dealing with this is assuming the role of front man and good cop whenever necessary. He’s got Mark figured out, and so far their relationship works fine for Tony.

Today for lunch it’s Tomatino’s, an upscale Italian cafe and pizzeria at the south end of St. Helena. Tony is perplexed that the “Meat Lover’s Special” isn’t on the menu anymore. Chagrined, but unwilling to admit defeat, Tony cobbles together a carnivorous creation that would send any vegetarian running. Chunks of pepperoni, sausage, ham, and meatball crowd onto a pizza crust with only token bits of cheese and a splash of tomato sauce.

Taking breaks from his meatfest, Tony ruminates on the wine industry. The sad truth in today’s Napa Valley is that only the super-rich can afford their own wineries Although he would love a winery of his own someday, Tony seems surprisingly okay with the fact he may never have the chance. At least, not in the near future. “I’ve got 25 years to make my own wine,” Tony says after wolfing down a mouthful of pizza. “When it comes time, I will.”

In the meantime, he’ll continue to watch life in the valley change. For every by-the-book winemaker like Tony, who studied winemaking, then spent post-graduate years slogging away as a cellar rat, dozens of newcomers in search of second careers head to Napa Valley each year armed with tons of money and equal amounts of ego.

“When I was at Davis, I came up with a saying to describe what’s happening here. I call it the ‘Burgundianization of California,’” Tony recalls. “Everyone is making wine.”

Next, he talks about his sales skills. “Different people want to deal with Tony differently,” he says using Bob Dole-ian self-reference. “One type is a know-it-all and the other type wants Tony to explain things. I need to deal with both.”

He reads a lot about business, books like “Good to Great,” and has developed some strong opinions. The overall sales strategy he’d like to implement for Neal Family Vineyards involves keeping a lot of irons in the fire. Although the easiest, most efficient route might be limiting sales to mailing list members only, Tony always wants to include select wine stores and restaurants. He also wants to spread distribution across the nation.

“It goes like this,” he says, pulling a sheet of wax paper from under the pizza tray and covering the table with it. The greasy paper is supposed to represent a map of the United States. “You’ve got some accounts here,” he says, pointing to the side representing the west coast, “and some here,” he adds pointing to the east coast side. Then, he gestures toward areas meant to represent Chicago and Texas, which also figure importantly. Gradually, he spreads the winery’s allocations further across the wax paper nation. Finally, he rips out small circles from each metro area to signify bottles being sold.

“Which would you rather be? This?” he asks, fanning his hands, palms up, over his makeshift model of broad geographic distribution. “Or this?” He balls up the sheet and shakes his paper-filled fist out above the table. The metaphor is a bit unclear and tough to follow, but his point seems to be about not putting all your eggs in one basket, or limiting a winery’s distribution to one region. To be sure, spreading allocations across the country has its drawbacks. For one, there is more travel involved, since key accounts like to meet winemakers in person. In addition to the amount of time it takes winemakers away from the winery, flying around the country is expensive. But for Tony, it’s all part of the game. He’ll do whatever it takes.

It’s not that wineries haven’t tried to change the rules.

“In the mid to late ‘90s, people backed off using marketing events to sell their wine and just raised prices instead. The idea was that if you priced your wine at the same level as someone like Opus One, the market would simply say, ‘Hmm, $80 a bottle? Must be good!’ And the sad truth is that people did just that. Soon, other small wineries followed suit because everyone else was doing it.”

Before this phenomenon of “me too” pissing matches between neighboring wineries, boutique brands were built more systematically. “Duckhorn did well because, with the exception of some limited high-end releases, they kept the majority of their wines under $50,” says Tony. “They’ve been able to grow gradually to a mid-size winery while maintaining a good brand franchise. Not many people know, or care, that Duckhorn’s production is up to 60,000 cases a year.”

He’s touched on one of the most difficult challenges in the high-end wine business - how to grow a winery’s revenues while still maintaining a boutique, ultra-premium, “hand-crafted” image. Tony calls the phenomenon “perceived scarcity.”

Perhaps the winery that pulls this off best is Silver Oak. Producing over 80,000 cases a year, hardly within the accepted definition of a “small” winery, they’ve convinced loyal consumers that their wine is a rare find. Each year, they hold elaborate release parties where they limit allocations to two bottles per visitor. If one of the sales people pulls you aside and offers you three bottles, you feel special. What you don’t know is how many others get similar treatment. So successful is Silver Oak at maintaining this air of exclusivity that they were named one of Forbes’ Top 50 Cult Brands a few years back.

Real cult wines like Screaming Eagle can’t let themselves expand much at all. “They hedged their bets on scarcity,” says Tony. “The minute you find that wine in Visalia, they’re dead.”

Boutique wineries tend to mature their brands more quickly, then tire out. Tony uses Dalla Valle as an example. “Their brand is already mature after only fourteen years in the business, while Spottswoode is still selling out after twenty. That’s why I always tell Mark it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”

After the lunch bill is settled, the waiter clears the ball of waxed paper from the table. Tony is quiet for a moment. “One thing we can’t do is forget who supports us,” he finally adds. When and if Neal Family Vineyards gets a 94 from Robert Parker, restaurants like Martini House and retailers like the St. Helena Wine Center will always get a nice allocation from Tony. Both establishments made room for the Neal wine in their already crowded inventories, and Tony hopes someday to repay the favor. If he ever does achieve rockstar winemaker status, Tony Biagi seems like the kind of guy who would remember the people who helped make it possible. Only time, and that future superlative score, will tell. The problem is, with the 2000 Cabernet gone from the picture, any rave reviews or high scores from the wine press have now been pushed out at least another twelve months. This will test Tony’s patience. A year is a long time to wait for recognition, especially for someone so eager to prove himself.

Chapter Twelve

The Barrel Doctor

It's 6:30 in the morning in late April, and a silvery frost reflects sunlight off the grasses and flowers carpeting the vineyards of Wine Country. In Spring, the landscape of Napa Valley undergoes a seasonal reversal; vineyards turn green while the hillsides yellow, each terrain trying on the other’s November complexion. On some of the vines, tiny oval buds start to appear, signifying the commencement of another growth cycle in the life of a vine.

The phenomenon offers picturesque scenery to passers-by. But bud break is an anxious and critical time for the people whose livelihoods depend on the vineyards. Their actions now set the stage for the entire growing season. Grape growers and vineyard managers walk the vineyards to see which blocks are budding and they keep a close eye on the weather, hoping above all else that a frost won't come tonight.

When vines are dormant, cold weather is not a problem. But once buds and leaves begin to appear on the freshly pruned vines, frost protection becomes a matter of utmost importance. Grape growers and vineyard managers walk the vineyards to see which vineyard blocks are budding and keep a close eye on the weather, hoping above all else that a frost won’t come that night.

Frost can ruin a crop before the season gets started, and the effect on the vine’s canopy is not pretty. The leaves become limp and translucent, with no turgidity, and then turn brown like a piece of lettuce left in a freezer. It doesn’t take Jack Frost long to do his damage. Even a half hour of exposure can zap a vine.

Once warm Spring weather arrives, the risk of frost diminishes. But in late March and early April, frost is an issue that grape growers lose sleep over– literally. When temperatures drop into the mid-thirties, invariably in the middle of the night, frost alarms alert the vineyard managers via cell phone and pagers, sending them driving bleary-eyed in the darkness to the vineyards.

Through the 1960s, petroleum blocks were lit in the vineyards, warming the air but soiling it with greasy, black smoke. Some landowners even burned old tires. Fortunately for the environment, vineyard managers now have adopted newer, cleaner frost protection strategies like wind machines and sprinklers.

Wind machines - giant propellers mounted on towers in the vineyard - circulate warmer air above with the colder air at soil level. Sprinklers are the most effective means of staving off sub-freezing temperatures, but demand ample access to water via nearby reservoirs or high-powered wells. Using water in near-freezing temperatures might seem contrary to good sense, yet a byproduct of the ice formation process - the heat of fusion - insulates and protects the fragile buds inside the icy capsules.

Frost protection demands not only the ability to function sleep-deprived in the wee hours, but the endurance to handle consecutive late nights and the long days between. Mark himself once survived a stretch of 22 frost nights in a row peppered with grueling days in the vineyard operating heavy machinery.

Outside the winery, later in the morning, clouds hover above in grayish-white stratifications. Wildflowers bloom yellow and purple between in the vineyard rows of the Neal estate. Things are moving along nicely inside the winery, too. The tasting room is almost fully operational now, boasting newly-installed granite countertops flecked with yellow, cream, gray, and black. On the middle shelf behind the bar sits a series of three Neal Cabernets, a ‘99 magnum flanked by standard-size bottles of the ’98 and ’99 releases. On the counter is a black leather-bound guestbook. Even though the winery’s not officially open to visitors, three tours have taken place over the past couple months.

The first visitor was Erik Gibson from Alameda, California, on January 28th. “Great tour, Great wine,” he commented. The other lucky tour recipients seemed equally enthusiastic about Neal Family Vineyards:

1/28 Norman M. Golden San Francisco, CA “Big. Love it!”

1/28 Dean Bernheim Redwood City, CA “Yummalicious.”

2/27 Randy & Michelle Hendershot Roseville, CA “Great tour, Bring on the ‘99”

3/4 Bob Kruger San Mateo, CA “Very impressive!”

3/4 Pat Prudel San Mateo, CA “Perfect. Great job.”

Asked about the guests’ comments later, Tony laughs. “No, I didn’t get a 94 from Parker, but I did get a ‘Yummalicious!’”

He remembers the guy who wrote that entry. “Queer as a three dollar bill,” Tony recalls. “It’s a great market, though. Dual income, no kids…”

Although they would love to do more tours, Tony is under orders to limit the number of visitors to the winery. Mark is concerned that some of the handicapped-accessible features of the winery are not yet in place. He has been hearing stories about a handicapped man whose personal mission is travelling the state to bust restaurants and other public places for not being up to specification. Having to hold off on tours costs the winery money, but Mark would rather be safe than sorry.

A rhythmic tap-tap-tapping from deep within the caves announces a master cooper is at work repairing leaky barrels. Tony is not sure why the barrels are leaking, but he thinks it might be from the prior winemaker putting wine into them cold, which may have contracted the staves, leaving spaces between. In the tank room, Tony stands on a topping keg, filling second-tier quality wine into barrels to be sold off to the bulk market, along with the 2000 Cabernet. Other wineries have different ways of dealing with sub-par wine, like adding Color Pro 5000, an additive of concentrated must that makes the wine sweeter and gives it a darker red color. Some wineries add it to their good wine in an attempt to score higher with certain wine reviewers. Tony knows for sure that one of the most famous cult wineries engages in this controversial practice, although they would never admit it. It doesn’t seem like something Tony would ever do. Yes, out of desperation, facing a nearly undrinkable ’99 Cabernet when he first arrived on the scene at Neal, Tony added concentrated color to “fix it.” He’s embarrassed about it. “I will never use it in any wine I’ve taken care of from harvest onward,” he promises.

When Tony is asked what he thinks of winemaking’s perception as a “sexy” job, the keg on which he has been standing becomes a figurative soapbox. Heloves his job, but finds it funny that winemaking has such a romantic association these days. He’s glad it’s well-respected career, but the whole lifestyle thing has gotten out of hand. Just last week, Tony and Paige were watching an episode of “Sex in the City” in which the main character’s boyfriend, “Mr. Big,” decides to leave New York City to buy a Napa Valley winery. Tony looked over at Paige and said, “See, everybody wants to do it, now.”

Making wine and owning vineyards has become hip, a cool thing to do. Ironically, while Tony can’t afford to drink regularly the kind of wine he makes, second career arrivistes can’t make the kind of wine they so easily afford. What they lack in basic enological and viticultural know-how, they make up for by tapping seemingly endless streams of capital to hire highly qualified people that can do the work for them. While they spend whatever is necessary to buy into the lifestyle, Tony had to study and work his way into it. The fact that winemaking is now “hot” provides a mere dribble of recompense, considering the grind.

“The problem,” explains Tony, “is that 30% of your pay as a winemaker is ‘it’s a cool job.’”

The wine industry’s growth has created a situation where lots of people were hired into jobs for which they lacked qualification. Specifically, Tony remembers one winemaker who had an annoying tendency of always telling him how he should be making his wines. His know-it-all attitude suggested years of experience. His winery’s marketing material listed his former occupation as “Exercise Executive”.

“Turns out, he’d only been on the job six months when I first met him,” Tony reports. “He wasn’t an executive. He sold Bowflex machines!”

Shaking his head, he mutters his credo, “It is what it is.” Although he holds a basic belief in kharma and subscribes to the idea that what goes around comes around, Tony is realistic. “Some people never get a visit from the reaper. They don’t earn what they have and nothing bad happens to them. You just have to let it go. It’s just life.”

This starts him reflecting on how hard it was getting to where he is today. Back in 1994, when he graduated Davis, he couldn’t even find a cellar job. He went 0-for-10 with his first cover letter/resume campaign before bugging Cosentino Winery into taking him on as a $10-an-hour cellar rat. Breaking into the industry is a lot easier these days. “Now. they hand out Assistant Winemaker titles fresh from college.”

After Tony parlayed his St. Helena Wine Center experience into an assistant winemaker position at Duckhorn, it got a little better. Tony made $26,500 his first year. They didn’t pay him overtime until after he’d been there two years, but Tony didn’t care. He worked hard, ten hours a day, and didn’t take vacations. He asked a lot of questions. Like a sponge, he absorbed every possible facet of winemaking. “Now,” he laments, “people come into the industry with a sense of entitlement.”

Looking down from his kegtop pulpit, he says, “So, when I get 98 points in Parker and start acting like a dick, let me know.”

Douglas is the name of the master cooper repairing leaky barrels in the back of the caves. His employer is Seguin-Moreau, known for making the best and most expensive oak barrels on the market (think the Rolls-Royce of oaken casks). One of the few coopers holding the “master” title in Napa Valley, he descends from a long line of barrel makers including a great-grandfather, grandfather, and father who all won top honors building and repairing whiskey barrels in their native Scotland. Before coming to work for Seguin-Moreau in the States, Douglas earned his stripes in Cognac, France. Sadly, he reports there aren’t too many master coopers left. “The wine industry’s a little short in the arm for it,” he adds in lilting brogue.

His open toolbox sits near the entrance to the caves. Inside is a collection of ball-peen hammers, chisels, and wooden plugs and wedges of different sizes. Sandpaper sheets of varied grade lie on top. There are potions which make wood fibers spread to fill in cracks and an assortment of fancy glues, too. Armed with a leather tool belt filled with chisels and hammers, Douglas demonstrates his skills. Since most leaks are caused by wine seeping through the wood grains, the first thing he does is locate the leak. Telltale drops of blood-like crimson on the rims gives the leaks away. Next, he figures out the direction of the grain. Running his fingers over the wood’s surface as if reading braille, he feels which way is rough and which is smooth. The smooth texture gives away the direction of the grain. Next, he chisels a small hole “upstream” from the leak and hammers in a tiny wooden wedge. Like a dam, the wedge blocks the wine’s seepage down the grain. Beneath each barrel being repaired is a small pile of curly-cue wood shavings, remnants of chiseling. From a distance, the sawdust mounds look like anthills.

Coincidentally, the Seguin-Moreau salesman is due at the winery any minute. Tony heads upstairs to his office on the second floor via the main stairway leading up from the main foyer. From his office, a second door leads out to the metal-grated deck that accesses the tops of the tanks. The only window in the room overlooks the fermenting tanks, as if to remind Tony that while business affairs are important, his primary duty is winemaking. In the middle of the room sits a heavy oak desk, adorned with a Toshiba laptop wirelessly connected to the Internet. Scattered across one side of the desk is a Palm Pilot, a speaker phone, a wine glass, an empty plastic “Big Gulp” cup, a navy Polo baseball cap, a stainless steel pipe clamp from the winery, and various notebooks and harvest journals. On the other side of the desk is a stack of papers, including a printout of key accounts and a topographical map of one of the Neal vineyards. A color code on the map shows the varietals planted in each vineyard block. Behind the desk, on the floor, is the March copy of “Wine Business Monthly.” In a corner, an empty file box serves as a temporary garbage can.

Taking a seat on a green plastic patio chair behind his desk, Tony kills time checking his emails, quickly monitoring his stock quotes, and scanning wine-related web sites. A messageboard on announces, “Screagle mailer arrives!” Apparently, this is how people “in the know” refer to the cult wine, Screaming Eagle. Tony rolls his eyes. He scans the names of those posting messages and recognizes a few. “They’re all talking about the same thing,” says Tony, “raving about all the great wine they’ve tasted in the last week.”

On another site, “The Gang of Pour” (), he reads a profile of winemaker Sean Thackray, a winemaking maverick who vints his wine in the unlikely locale of Bolinas, California, a Marin County beach hamlet better known for its high concentration of aging hippies. “He says some good stuff,” Tony says, nodding as he scrolls the web pages.

When the salesman from Seguin-Moreau finally arrives at the winery, Tony leads him back into the caves. For someone in sales, the Seguin-Moreau rep has a calm demeanor, absent the expected pushiness and proclivity toward false compliments. His slightly graying hair is parted in the middle and he sports a mustache. He is neatly, but casually dressed in black jeans, green polo shirt, and a lightweight windbreaker.

Tony and the salesman discuss some of Seguin’s competitors, with Tony offering opinions on the distinctions between them. One brand in particular, called Saury, he considers an acquired taste.

“It’s like chewing on pencils early on, but after racking a couple times, it comes together nicely…after sixteen, seventeen months.”

Seguin-Moreau he likes for its “heavy toast” flavor, created by torching the underside of a barrel’s lid. The effect is harsh at first, but mellows with time.

“The charcoal turns to crème brulee in the end,” Tony explains.

He picks up a thief and starts pulling barrel samples for the salesman.

“Wait’ll you try the Wykoff,” Tony says, grinning.

“It’ll kill you. It’s 15.5,” he adds, referring to the alcohol percentage. Next, they take on the Atlas Peak, which Tony introduces as “The Monster.”

“It’s a little too tannic,” admits Tony. “I want to wait at least twenty months in barrel before bottling this.”

They talk about this year’s crop.

“We’ve already thinned once this year,” says Tony. “It’s going to be a big year.”

“Yeah, everyone’s hoping for a frost almost,” agrees the salesman, knowing excessive crop growth can dilute a vintage’s flavor. On the retail front, the fact that high-end labels are doing poorly is affecting his business. “Barrels just aren’t hopping off the shelves.”

Out comes the Rutherford Zinfandel, which Neal will sell at $25 a bottle. It’s got 19% Petit Syrah blended in for color, which Tony thinks might be too much. 10% would’ve been better – as it stands now, the tannins are too high for his liking. “It doesn’t have that over-the-top black raspberry that I like, but I’m not sure the vineyard is up to it, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” the salesman argues, “I’m still getting some of that cracked raspberry in it, Tony.”

“Real high pH, no yeast, no malolactic,” Tony blurts, detailing his winemaking formula for the batch. “It’s gonna be a nice wine. I’m the toughest critic and I’m okay with it. Gonna turn a lot of heads. It was picked at 26 [degrees brix]. It shows nice.”

He sticks his nose into the glass again. “Really kind of grabs your palate.”

Tony runs through the list of different barrel companies in the Neal Winery’s barrel program and finishes with a bit of encouragement for the salesman.

“Seguin will always be a part of it.”

For the next year, however, Tony ordered a large shipment of barrels from Terenceau, a Seguin-Moreau competitor. He and Mark bought them on futures, locking in rates as a hedge against what they feared were rising prices. In all, Neal works with eight different barrel manufacturers. According to Tony, few wineries ever use one company exclusively.

“Most people are mixing it up these days,” the salesman agrees. “I can respect that.” The Seguin Moreau difference is consistency, he pitches. “That’s the most important thing. What’s the barrel going to do next year, and the next year, and the next year?”

Tony has been buying a lot of new oak for use after he cycles out the old barrels purchased prior to his arrival. As winemaker, Tony needs to know where the barrels have been and how they’ve been cared for. He wants to minimize the amount of unknown variables or surprises in the winery. Old barrels, he doesn’t trust. By buying fresh barrels, he can watch the new oak turn into old oak before his own eyes. Fortunately, the 2001 harvest bore wine bold enough to face new oak without getting overpowered by it. Being patient and waiting to pick ripe fruit was the key. Ripe fruit goes well with new oak.

The one thing you don’t do as a winemaker is to go cheap on barrels, says Tony.

“You can bargain shop for glass, foils, and labels, but if you bargain shop fruit or barrels, you shouldn’t be in the game.”

Tight budgets are no excuse. “If you have to, cut ten tons of fruit and buy good barrels.”

Barrel costs, ranging from $380 to $600+ each, are the Seguin-Moreau salesman’s biggest challenge. He finds himself always having to justify his brand’s higher prices.

“As long as they perform well, it makes my job easier.”

The two men walk over together to see how master cooper Douglas is doing. He’s hammering away at a particularly leaky barrel that now has five tiny wedges driven into it. Tony invites Douglas to lunch, telling him not to worry about sweeping up the piles of wood shavings. Tony will do it himself later this afternoon. For now, he hurries everyone out of the winery explaining, “Mark gets a little cranky when I’m late for lunch.”

Chapter Thirteen

Vineyards in Bloom

Another glorious May morning in Wine Country. Vineyard rows pattern the green hillsides like corduroy. Hot air balloons hang in the sky just north of Napa, a regular sight in Spring. Also in the air is a smell distinctive to Napa Valley. A palpable scent of fertility, almost a salty dryness, of dust and dew baking in the morning sun. While frost is less of an issue now that warmer Spring weather has arrived, other problems replace it. A host of predators ranging from microorganisms to large mammals threaten the grapevine as it attempts to grow tiny, fragile buds into mature, marketable fruit.

Mildew, which can rot the fruit, is a big worry. Once the young shoots reach four to six inches in length, vineyard managers start spraying the vines with fungicides like sulfur and continue to do so through harvest.

Pest control is a constant concern. The Blue/Green Sharpshooter, a flying insect, transmits the dreaded Pierce’s Disease, which can plug up a vine’s vascular system until it completely dries out. Once a vineyard is infected, the only recourse is a complete replanting. Reserving pesticide spraying as a last resort, today’s more environmentally-responsible vineyard managers deal with the Sharpshooter by releasing natural predators like ladybugs and wasps into the vineyards. Another member of the species, the Glassy-winged Sharpshooter, also threatens the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma. Although the counties have largely avoided the pest to date, some egg clusters have been discovered in nurseries. Jack Neal & Son employs a worker whose sole 60-hour-per-week responsibility is checking traps for Sharpshooters.

The roster of vineyard troublemakers also includes a variety of smaller insects like mealy bugs and nematodes, termite-like insects that feed on the roots. Cutworms, nocturnal pests who come out of the ground to feed on the smallest buds, are kept at bay by spraying or being picked off by hand. Mites that suck nutrients from leaves do their damage during hot, dry weather. The release of beneficial, predatory mites helps control the number of bad mites.

The smallest enemies of the vine exist at a microscopic level. Leaf roll, a virus that affects vines, causes the foliage of white varietals like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc to curl up. With red varietals like Cabernet, the leaves turn a brilliant crimson when infected. Behind every picturesque postcard of a red vineyard is an anxious grape grower.

No list of vineyard nuisances is complete without mention of some pesky members of the mammal class. Cover crops, which provide essential nutrients to the soil and reduce the need for tilling between rows, serve as the perfect habitat for gophers and moles who feast on vines and their roots. Gopher tunnels are a natural conduit for water from drip irrigation systems, creating erosion issues in hillside vineyards. The more organically-oriented solution involves placing nesting boxes in the vineyards to encourage populations of natural rodent predators like barn owls and red-tail hawks. While raptors keep the population in check, traps take care of the existing animals. Sometimes, vineyard managers resort to flooding the tunnels with propane gas and lighting a hole. Rabbits can be a problem because they like to eat the tips of new vines. Lopped-off milk cartons at ground level protect the vines until they grow above a rabbit’s grazing height. Perimeter fences keep out most deer. Others are chased away. Sometimes, they mysteriously disappear, victims of target practice or a vintner’s venison dinner.

Despite the myriad threats lurking in the background, the life of a vine proceeds. By late April or early May, the flowers on the vine have been pollinated and the crop is considered set. If there are too many non-pollinated flowers, a “bad set” occurs, resulting in clusters without berries and a lower yield. Work in the vineyard begins to focus on canopy management and growers start thinning the number of shoots per bud. This process, called suckering, also helps eliminate some of the next year’s pruning needs ahead of time.

In late May, the critical phase of “bloom” arrives. Buds have fully flowered and clusters begin to lengthen. It’s the most delicate time of the growing season. Vines that grow too quickly during bloom can experience “shatter,” resulting in berries that fall easily from the bunch and a much smaller crop. In addition to shatter, heat affects the quality of the wine. The grapes develop high sugar content without flavor, similar to a Coke gone flat. For this reason, vineyard managers hope for consistently mild weather. In a perfect world, a cool ripening period would be followed by warm, even temperatures and with zero rain until harvest.

Monitoring the vine’s health during bloom is key. Leaf samples are tested to make sure vines are getting appropriate nutrients. Soil moisture levels are checked and drip irrigation systems are adjusted accordingly. More attention is paid to the canopy. Stray vines are tucked back into trellis wire and vineyard crews start pulling leaves, removing some of the foliage to increase the sun exposure that adds color to wine grapes. The process of leafing also makes it easier for fungicides to penetrate the vine canopy.

In the parking lot outside Jack Neal & Son headquarters, half the spots are taken up by company trucks, a collection of pickups all bearing the company’s dark green color. Scratchy voices call out from CB radios inside each truck, escaping through open windows, competing with the songbirds in the trees across the street.

Inside, Mark and Tony finish up their weekly update meeting, where Tony reports the goings on of the winery. Mark hasn’t spent much time up there lately, now that growing season is in full stride. The two say hurried goodbyes and Mark jumps into his immense pickup truck, a Ford F350 Super Duty Series Diesel with a V-8 engine. It’s the tricked-out Lariat edition, complete with full leather interior, LED compass, and an outdoor temperature thermometer above the rear view mirror. Once on the road, he simultaneously works his cell phone while monitoring the CB radio in the background.

Heading south, he zips the truck hard left off Route 29, into the parking lot for the Heitz Cellars tasting room. Although the Heitz winery itself is situated on the opposite side of the valley off Silverado Trail, the tasting room has been strategically relocated here to attract tourists driving up wine country’s main thoroughfare. Out front in a section of earth the size of a courtyard, bordered by stone walls and flanked by two young palm trees, is an experimental vineyard that serves as an exhibit for tasting room visitors. Planted by Mark, the special-order vineyard contains every clone used across all the Heitz properties. A brief look is all Mark gives the vineyard before jumping back into his truck.

On the road again, he talks about what it takes to grow great wine grapes.

“It’s all about soil, location, and having balanced vines. You’ve got to have the right varietals growing in the right soils, too. All that other stuff is bullshit. You can grow Cab in shitty soil, but I guarantee you’ll get shitty wine.”

People who don’t pay attention to these basics will not succeed in Napa Valley. According to Mark, you either make high quality wine, or you’re dead. The region can’t compete on volume alone.

“Gallo could crush all the fruit in Napa Valley in a week. If you’re not in the ultrapremium market, you’re screwed. You have to compete with Gallo and Modesto fruit, and that’s impossible.”

Now heading north on the Silverado Trail, Mark turns right onto Taplin Road, up a hill, past Joseph Phelps Winery, to the end of the road. An open gate leads into the Heitz Cellars estate. An old stone building sits to the right and a cream-colored renovated clapboard farmhouse greets visitors on the left. The lawns are decorated with teak chairs and chaise lounges. Tables with canvas market umbrellas adorn the patio out front. Straight ahead, further down the drive, are the estate vineyards.

“I’ve been farming this land since ’71,” says Mark with a sweep of his arm across the property. “I’m their oldest employee.”

He points to a row of especially bushy young vines and explains they are bench grafts, meaning the rootstock and budwood sections are grafted ahead of time at the nursery, then planted as a whole unit. A field grafts, on the other hand, join budwood from another vineyard to existing rootstock. Bench grafts are sold in myriad combinations of rootstocks, varietals, and budwood, presenting many variables to consider. “So you better know your shit when you order,” says Mark.

Pulling a “while you were out” message slip from his pocket, he calls back a woman who called his office complaing because one of Mark’s workers started up the chainsaw too early this morning in a vineyard near her house.

“Wait ‘til he gets the chipper going,” Mark laughs.

He gets voicemail. He’ll try again later. The worker had to start early, Mark explains, to beat the heat that’s in the forecast. For the same reason, Mark only plans to work his crews a half day today.

He gets on the radio and tells Pedro, his right hand man, to pull all the guys out of the fields when the temperature hits 100 degrees.

“No thinning or suckering. They can tie vines, plant vines, and do shoot positioning.”

He’s concerned about the workers disturbing the plants’ natural ability to cool themselves down. He doesn’t want to stress the vines any more than they already are.

“It’s like, if you were out there working in the fields, and your kid started bothering you, you’d get annoyed,” is his explanation of how the vines feel.

Pedro asks for more crews, so Mark tells him to take some men from Enrique, another Jack Neal & Son vineyard manager. A big part of Mark’s job is managing manpower, making sure the foremen have the right men at the right time.

He reminds Pedro that if his guys are going to be weeding, to make sure they’ve got their fire extinguishers.

“Oh, right, in case they hit a rock and it sparks up a fire,” agrees Pedro. Dry grass makes great kindling.

Based on past experiences with extreme weather patterns in Napa Valley, Mark expects the 100-degree days to work themselves out within a couple days, to be replaced by the cooling fog once again.

With the vines are just finishing up bloom, the vineyard crews have been doing a lot of crop thinning, keeping the fruit yield down and the flavors up. It’s time to trim back the leaf canopies, too, but that will have to wait until the heat subsides. Leaf stripping during extreme heat can burn out young grape clusters by removing their sun protection.

“It would be like going to the beach with pale skin and no sunscreen. Better to do in a fog series. Then, the grapes can adapt to the weather on their own time.”

In vineyard management, it’s all about dealing with the curveballs nature throws. Today it’s heat. Tomorrow, it could be hail beating up the young clusters or heavy rains causing mildew. Last year, it was frost. Mark’s crews ended up stripping entire vines, forcing them to grow back anew in time for harvest.

“Some clients freak when they hear about stuff like that, but I’ve been there before.”

Soon, we’re headed back south on the Silverado Trail toward American Canyon to inspect some vineyards down at Hess Collection. Hess is a large winery that produces three labels; Hess Collection, Hess Estate, and Hess Select. Hess Collection is their highest quality label and Hess Select is their low-cost brand. Mark farms the good stuff.

Driving through the city of Napa, down Soscol Avenue past car dealerships and fast food restaurants, Mark explains how his role as a vineyard manager expands beyond farming to that of dealmaker. He often ends up negotiating agreements between vineyard owners and wineries for grape contracts. He doesn’t make any direct commission on the deals, it’s just another way he keeps his clients happy and adds value.

“I can drive down any of the vineyard rows I manage at twenty miles an hour and tell you what variety it is without getting out of my truck. I can tell you, for any vineyard block, who buys it, what they like with their farming, and how it’s farmed. I’ve been doing it so long. Too long, maybe. But then, I don’t think it can ever be too long. That’s how you have to look at it.”

The way his busy mind works, Mark often talks in circles and goes off on tangents. It can be tough to keep up since he barely stops for a breath on his way to the end of a thought. By the time he does finish a thought, another one, sometimes related, sometimes not, is already out of his mouth.

The focal point of the Hess Collection property is a large, freestanding red barn. Several giant two-story frost fans, resembling modern windmills, stand in the vineyards. Mark continues past the barn down twin-tracked dirt road that splices the vineyards, one hand on the wheel, the other clutching the CB mouthpiece. At the end of the road, he takes a left to survey the far perimeter of the vineyard. Down the hillside in the distance, a green tongue of freshly-watered fairway lolls over the otherwise sunburned landscape of the adjacent Chardonnay Golf Club. Mark coasts along, three feet from the vine rows, his head poking out of the open window. He stops the truck and stares at some Syrah vines. Some of the leaves are brown. The winter was so mild, the vines never got the signal to go dormant, he explains. As a result, the nutrient bled out when they were pruned. Weakened thus, the vines aren’t handling the heat well.

Mark grabs a shovel out of the back of the truck and digs into the dirt underneath the vines, checking for evidence that the irrigation emitters have been turned on recently.

“You tell you manager to do it, they tell someone to do it, and somewhere along the way it doesn’t get done. So, sometimes I spot check.”

It’s ten a.m. and the temperature is still only 73 degrees. The idling diesel engine of the big pickup throbs in the quiet morning air. A turkey buzzard circles overhead – it’s been following Mark’s truck since he arrived. Mark notices gopher tunnels in the dirt between rows. He calls over the CB to one of his workers, most likely a pest control specialist.

“I’m over here at F-Block. You’ve got some activity right near the emitters. They’re pretty fresh.”

The worker promises he’ll get right on it.

Between the vineyard rows, the dusty soil has a texture like cocoa powder. Blossoming young fruit, or “bloom,” hangs off the shoots in spiky clusters that resemble toy jacks. If everything goes well, these BB-sized oval nubs capped with tan husks will evolve into ripe grapes by harvest time.

Mark gets back in his truck and heads up a steep hillside. In a vineyard block that’s supposed to be getting irrigation, he doesn’t see any watering going on. The guys in charge will hear about it.

“I like to push. No one likes that,” he says. When not yelling, he speaks in a quiet, mellow voice, borderline shy.

At the top of the highest hill on the property is another barn, this one a more forgettable olive green color. What the building lacks in character, the panoramic view makes up in beauty. Immediately west, the lower Napa River snakes through an expanse of marshland toward San Pablo Bay. From this perch, it’s a clear shot forty miles to the peaks of Marin County’s Mt. Tamalpais, whose low, rolling silhouette was thought by Miwok Indians to resemble a sleeping princess. Lower down on the horizon, a layer of darkening brown haze has settled, the byproduct of nearby Bay Area metropolises.

In front of the barn stands Enrique, a short, taut, twenty-year employee of Jack Neal & Son. He and Mark exchange quick words, get back in their pickups and return to the site of the gopher infestation. To get rid of the gophers, they’ll “bomb” the tunnels with compressed propane gas. Think Carl the Greenskeeper in the movie “Caddyshack.” What appears to be a dead mouse hanging off some trellis wires turns out to be a rabbit’s foot with part of the leg bone still attached. Enriques says an eagle killed it. Mark looks at it and barely nods. He is angry about the weeds growing under the vines in Block 8. They sap energy, rob water, and steal nutrients. Now, they’ll have to inject calcium nitrate in the soil to make sure the vines get their proper diet.

Leaving the Hess estate, Mark points out clusters growing straight off the vine arms. They’re supposed to be growing at the ends of the shoots coming off the vine arms. He gets out of the truck, walks over to a vine, and snaps off one of the rogue clusters.

“Look at this,” he says. “These vines are just throwing clusters. I’ve never seen it like that. It’s like having big balls and no dick. Who wants that?

Mark might not have a way with words, but he definitely knows his vineyards.

The return drive up valley from American Canyon gives Mark a chance to air his opinions about the effect of vineyard development on the land. Environmentalists feel that vineyards pollute rivers and ruin hillside landscapes.

“Farmers are mostly environmental,” counters Mark. “But a few are bad apples”

Urban development is the biggest problem, as he sees it.

“The worst enemy in Napa Valley is people. Forget about the glassy-wing sharpshooter. All those asphalt parking lots and driveways don’t absorb water. Vineyards do.”

On Route 29, at the north end of Napa, he points out a monotony of prefabricated ranch houses a half-mile long.

“This all used to be grasslands and Christmas tree farms. Now it’s three to four-bedroom houses that all look the same. That’s what the environmentalists say about the vineyards. ‘They all look the same.’ What’s the difference?”

He shakes his head.

“That’s why Napa Valley has to produce the best wine. If we don’t, the investment firms that own a lot of the vineyards will just put in more houses.”

Another complaint residents have is the tourist traffic. Mark’s solution would be to get rid of the traffic lights and make both Route 29 and Silverado Trail one-way roads, one heading north and one heading south.

In the meantime, he crosses over two-lane Route 29 and stops in at Shifflett Ranch. Halfway up the drive, he finds Jeffrey Shifflett sitting on a four-wheel ATV, cradling a colander of lettuce in his lap.

“Lunch,” he explains.

The temperature is much warmer up valley, but a stiff breeze keeps the stifling air moving. Mark drives over to one of the lower vineyards. He notices that some new irrigation hoses were installed in the wrong order. Seconds later, he’s on his cell phone scolding a worker named Carlos.

“Better come back to D-Block…No, I’m not going to tell you where…The hoses are screwed up…”

Carlos continues to dig for information. Mark distractedly rolls a vine shoot between his fingers.

“No,” he laughs into the phone. “I’m not giving you any hints. Consider me your worst nightmare. Put a picture of me over your bed to keep you up at night.”

The phone call ends.

“These new guys, they’ll figure me out eventually.”

Driving the vineyards of Shifflett Ranch, Mark is constantly in and out of his truck. Walking the rows with a hand held out, brushing the leaves, he checks for shatter caused by frost. When he hits an affected cluster, dried-out bulbs the size of ball bearings fill his hand.

Next, he drives uphill to the high vineyards. A hawk spirals overhead. A scrawny wild turkey struts away from the truck engine’s loud purr. Mark looks up from the index card on which he’s scrawling row numbers and fertilizer recommendations.

“A baby,” says Mark. “They’re the best kind to eat, like Cornish game hen.”

Just below the main house, Jeffrey pumps rainwater off a sagging tarp that covers a small concrete reservoir. He stands with his hands on his hips, wearing another preppy polo shirt tucked tightly into jeans. His stylish small-lensed eyeglasses look suspiciously urban for wine country. He explains to Mark he’s pumping water.

“Gold, according to this ranch,” says Mark.

“Well…,” Jeffrey balks.

“Only five wells for Fifty acres. It’s gold,” insists Mark.

“It’s water,” says Jeffrey.

Mark mentions the wild turkey he saw earlier and talk moves to hunting.

“This weekend,” suggests Mark, eyes lighting up. He and Jeffrey have parted ways on their wine venture, but they still remain friends.

It’s 11:20 and the temperature is 84 degrees. By 11:30, it’s 88 degrees, rising steadily toward triple digits. Mark’s wife calls to ask him about some flowers she’s planting. She also mentions her one-month postnatal OB-GYN appointment is schedule for later today.

“That’s when you find out if you can have sex, right?” says Mark with a glint in his eye. “Let me know, and I’ll be home by one. Seriously.”

Things are going well up at the winery, according to Mark. The owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team called to buy a case after having been given a bottle by Robin Williams. Mark fielded the call personally. “It was pretty cool!”

He seems to enjoy his winery’s newfound fame.

Lunch, no surprise, is Green Valley Café at high noon. It’s one of the few places that doesn’t give Mark food poisoning. His stomach is still weak from gastro-intestinal problems suffered five years ago as a result of mistakenly drinking industrial grade water from a reservoir.

Tony is already in the restaurant seated at a table by the front window, diligently reading the most recent issue of Red Herring, a business magazine focused on high technology. The cover story is “Top 100 Companies for the Future.”

“I love reading this stuff,” says Tony.

“Are we listed?” asks Mark.

Tony laughs, then asks Mark if he’s seen the ad in this month’s San Francisco Magazine for the Napa Valley Wine Auction. The biggest social event of the year is less than two weeks away and the organizers are still trawling for wealthy wine lovers willing to pay the steep $2,500 per couple entrance fee.

Halfway through lunch, an elderly woman tries to slide out of her booth seat and accidentally bumps Mark. She apologizes profusely.

“As long as we don’t tell my wife, I think we’re okay,” Mark blurts back. But his smile isn’t big enough for the poor woman to know for certain that he is joking. She laughs nervously and heads out the door.

Maybe it’s time for Mark to get back to the vineyards.

Chapter Fourteen

Playing to the Crowd

It’s Saturday afternoon on Memorial Day weekend. Traffic crawls up Route 29 toward St. Helena. At the Oakville Grocery, cars spill out of the parking lot onto the flanks of Route 29. A greater-than-normal concentration of late-model Ford Mustang convertibles means tourism levels are high. What better car to rent for a Spring drive through wine country? The tops are always down and at least a dozen sit in front of the Robert Mondavi Winery, one of the biggest attractions in the valley.

If you’re not in a hurry, rolling slowly in traffic from Napa to St. Helena allows time to appreciate the sunny haze hanging over the tan dusky hills of Stag’s Leap across the valley to the east. Sporadic trees and chaparral bushes pepper the distant slopes like quick brushes of dark paint across a light canvas.

It’s one of the first really hot days this Spring. It’s the kind of heat that catches

everyone unaware and makes them move a little slower. In St. Helena, the action is on Main Street, but the pedestrian pace is leisurely. Halfway down Main Street, it is quiet inside the St. Helena Wine Center. A couple of customers peruse the racks at their own speed. In the back of the store, on the left, is a ten-foot by ten-foot tasting room with a small, L-shaped, yellow granite counter. Tony stands behind it like a bored bartender. In front of him are four bottles of the Neal ’98 Cabernet and several wine glasses. The store often hosts tastings by small local vintners, so from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, Tony be offering free samples of Neal wine to Wine Center customers. Hopefully, the tasters end up buying a bottle or two. A case would be even better, but Tony would settle for each customer telling a dozen friends about Neal Family Vineyards. This tasting event has special significance because Tony is one of the store’s own alumni. Working weekends here during college, Tony honed his palate sampling wines he couldn’t afford to buy.

Killing time while waiting for people to trickle in, he scans the latest issue of Stephen Tanzer’s wine newsletter, The International Wine Cellar. A small color television hangs overhead, broadcasting the first game of the NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the New Jersey Nets. On the opposite wall hangs a picture of the Beringer Estate, a nod to the fact that the Wine Center is owned by members of the Beringer family. In the photo, a rare blanket of snow several inches thick covers the Tudor-style mansion, its surrounding oaks, and the expansive lawn. On the section of counter that wraps around Tony sits a bottle of Caymus Special Selection Cabernet, an offsize, 1000-milliliter etched bottle of Grace Family Vineyards Cabernet, and a box of Veuve-Cliquot Grande Dame champagne. The Neal Cabernet sits in good company today.

A middle-aged couple wanders into the tasting room and Tony offers a glass to each of them. The woman sneezes. Tony asks if she’s got allergies. Then, an awkward silence. The man watches TV, not saying anything, and then finally asks Tony to recommend some small, uncrowded wineries for them to visit.

Tony exhales. “Gonna be tough this week.” It’s high tourist season, he explains, but then manages to come up with a few suggestions.

A man in a blue polo shirt and khaki shorts approaches. He looks to be in his middle to late thirties and seems genuinely curious about Neal Family Vineyards, like he might actually be interested in more than just a glug of free wine. Tony offers him a glass of the 2000 Chardonnay. The man thanks him, pauses, then swirls the wine around the glass.

“Interesting,” he says. “I’m not very good with attaching words to what I’m tasting, but it’s interesting.”

Tony smiles and pours him a glass of the ’98 Neal Cabernet.

The man sniffs it, swirls it, and then sticks his nose over the glass once more. He’s into the smell.

“Good color,” he says. “For what that’s worth.”

He breathes in the aromas once more. “Whooo!”

To Tony, he is a rare and welcome breed of wine enthusiast, possessing the requisite curiosity and passion minus the annoying, self-important, know-it-all characteristics of a wine snob. He is enjoying the wine in his glass, not trying to impress people with an encyclopaedic vocabulary of descriptive adjectives. He’ll leave that to professionals. Like Tony.

But then, he decides to give it a shot. “Intense. Coffee…or anise?” he guesses after taking another taste.

“I call it coca powder,” says Tony, nodding.

“This really would stand out in a tasting,” says the man.

Tony slides effortlessly into his sales pitch, which is really just telling the story behind the Neal Family winery and describing the backgrounds of the people involved. He talks about how they hand select the best grapes from all over Napa Valley and how his boss, Mark Neal, supervises the farming in all the vineyards.

The man asks about the percentage Cabernet used. By law, wineries can blend in up to 25% of other varietals like Merlot or Cabernet Franc and still call the wine Cabernet.

“All our wines are 100% Cabernet,” Tony answers.

“Except their Chardonnay,” pipes in Jack, one of the Wine Center’s employee who happens to be walking by. A retired surgeon keeping himself busy by working in the store, Jack also happens to be writing a novel about wine country.

It turns out that the man tasting the wine is General Counsel for Ebay, the online auction site. He’s been with the company for several years, which means he is definitely a multimillionaire. Some might label him an “IPO slut” or “Dotcommer,” two socio-economic categories that Napa Valley locals love to hate. But somehow, this man seems to rise above the stereotype. It’s not all brash, new-money cockiness, but a more reserved, polite, self-deprecating, “wow-I’m-lucky” attitude he presents. While he admits it’s tough not to buy wine based on magazines’ scores, he tries anyway. He is a member of the store’s wine club, where staff-selected bottles are sent to him on a monthly basis, giving him first crack at great new labels before they’re rated. After he provides feedback on the wines sent his way, the Wine Center staff refines their selections for him. Apologizing that he already has too much Cabernet in his Palo Alto wine cellar, the man thanks Tony for the tasting and buys a bottle of the Chardonnay.

A woman with frizzy black hair and ample makeup steps up and listens to Tony explain how Mark Neal knows all the best vineyards in the valley and is able to secure premium grapes. Then, Tony repeats the mantra that all great wine starts in the vineyard.

“Yeah, but all the vineyards are the same,” argues the woman. “It’s the same dirt. It’s just the winemaker that makes the difference, right?”

It’s a good thing Mark is late today. He’d have something to say about that comment. Or maybe he’d just laugh. As much as Tony would love to agree with the woman about winemakers being all-important, he bites his tongue and explains that in Burgundy, vineyards only twenty yards apart can produce vastly different wines under the same winemaker. The woman stares at Tony, unconvinced.

A trio of fashionable middle-aged women, two blonde and one brunette, comes over to investigate. Picking up a bottle of the Neal Cabernet, the brunette looks at the mailing address printed on the back label.

“Where’s Angwin?” she asks in a tone suggesting she does not believe there is such a place.

It’s a small town up on Howell Mountain, Tony answers.

“Oh,” she nods. She and her friends taste the Chardonnay.

“Wow, that’s very interesting,” says the brunette. She lives down in Aptos, an upscale seaside community outside Santa Cruz. She is pretty, but her makeup doesn’t completely hide the crow’s feet that are a natural consequence of her sundrenched beachside existence. Sunglasses perch atop her head, ready to drop back into position on her nose the minute she walks back outside.

“That’s nice,” says the blonde next to her after taking a sip. She hails from Los Altos, a wealthy suburb south of Palo Alto. The other blonde remains quiet.

“Very nice,” agrees the brunette.

“What’s that flavor?” the blonde wonders. “I might have to buy a bottle.”

The brunette nods. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

As Tony passes a couple bottles to a Wine Center employee to ring up for them, the brunette asks Tony one last question, staring into the remaining Chardonnay swirling in the bottom of her glass.

“Now, I apologize, but where’s Howell Mountain?”

Mark Neal finally arrives at the Wine Center wearing a short-sleeved buttoned down shirt and jeans, speaking a mile a minute. He rifles through Tanzer’s Wine Cellar, scoffing when he reads about Helen Turley, one of Napa Valley’s most renowned winemakers.

“I don’t like her. I’ve never bought off on it.” Her hard and fast opinions about vineyard management techniques are not quite in sync with Mark’s philosophies and practices.

“I thinned fruit this year before bloom. People thought I was crazy. But they haven’t been doing it as long as I have.”

Mark reads the score for a winery called Barbour.

“89! That sucks…for a $100 bottle.”

He takes special interest in the label because it is owned by another vineyard manager, Jim Barbour, a long-time competitor of Mark’s.

“It pisses me off that people who spent 30 years building a brand charge $100, then these new ones come along and charge $200 after only five years in the business,” he grumbles, scanning down the pages with a pointed finger.

Last night, Tony took advantage of the fact his wife was spending the weekend with friends in San Francisco by hanging out at Mark’s house drinking wine.

“I got housed,” Tony admits sheepishly. He claims he started drinking too soon after a kick-ass workout on the exercise bike at the Meadowood Club. It wasn’t so much the bottles consumed at Mark’s house that did him in as much as their late-night decision to head down to the caves and barrel sample some 15%-alcohol Cabernet lots. At some point in the wee hours, conversation turned to deer hunting, with Mark offering Tony a moonlight demonstration.

“I left when the weapons came out,” Tony says.

Tony serves another couple some Chardonnay. They sip, thank him, and leave.

“You’re welcome,” says Tony, taking back their glasses.

“You’re welcome,” mumbles Mark without looking up from his reading

Mark tells Tony he needs him to pull petioles on Monday. Petioles, or leaf stems, are tested in the off-season to monitor the health of the vines.

Tony shakes his head. “I can’t pull petioles on Monday,”

“Why not?”

“It’s vacation.” Memorial Day, Tony reminds him.

“It’s a work day for us,” Mark barks back.

“If you want, I can do it tomorrow,” Tony says, offering up his Sunday.

Mark waves him off. He’s just been playing the asshole. Sometimes, it’s hard for Tony to tell the difference.

Tony’s mother and stepfather arrive. She hands Mark a pink and blue bag containing a baby gift for his new son, Alexios. It’s a baby blanket.

“I sleep on the couch now,” jokes Mark. “I’ll use it.”

“It’s a nice color,” he adds, thanking her.

Tony’s mother is sturdily built, cocksure and jovial, and when she laughs her soft blue eyes become more noticeable. She wears her curly, slightly graying hair cropped short. Propping her elbow on the bar, she leans in as Tony pours her a glass of Chardonnay.

“Ooh, I like that,” she coos after tasting it.

His stepfather sits down on a barstool, smiling quietly. He works as a director of human resources for Sutter Home winery. He and Tony’s mother live down in Napa. Tony calls him “dad” because he’s the guy who really raised him. His “father” is the guy who was married to his mother when he was born. As his mother explains it, divorce is never a good thing, but because his father and stepfather have totally different interests, Tony never had to choose between them. “You can never have too many people loving you,” she always told Tony.

“Tony always tries to please. He’s been that way his whole life. Sometimes too much so.”

Jack, the older store employee, jokes with Tony’s mother about her son and the Neal wines.

“The thing that sells it is the personality. The wine’s horrible.”

Tony’s stepfather walks out onto the floor with a glass of wine in his hand. Tony’s mother stops him, explaining that the Alcohol Bureau would bust him if they saw it. The basketball game drones away on the television set above. New Jersey is killing Boston, so the game is only of passing interest. Tony and his parents look out the front window and comment on the traffic rolling down Main Street, comparing today’s flow to normal times, midweek without tourists.

Tony’s mom looks up at the television. “I always say that the Celtics have never recovered from Len Bias’ death.” It’s an astute observation coming from a middle-aged woman.

“I’ve gotten great mileage from that statement without knowing what the hell it means,” she says, cracking a smile. “Guys are always like, ‘Wow!’”

The game switches to a commercial featuring a room full of monkeys. Dressed in business suits, they jump around a conference table, screaming.

“Look,” says Tony, “It’s a Jack Neal & Son board meeting!”

Everyone cracks up. One of the primates clutches a wad of money and shakes it in the air.

“Look, Mark, there you are, smiling with all that cash.”

“I would be smiling if I had that kind of money,” Mark agrees.

A buxom woman with an English accent comes over. Her hair is blonde, but probably not naturally so. She wears a low cut v-neck top, accentuating some other possibly unnatural features. A friend joins her and together they taste the Chardonnay.

“Mmm, that’s big!” She gushes. “Chocolatey.”

“Vanilla,” suggests Tony.

“They’re both desserts, I guess.” Gold jewelry adorns her neck, wrists, fingers and earlobes.

“Oh, we’ll certainly take one,” she tells Tony.

He hands her a bottle and a fact sheet on which he has printed winemaking details like alcohol percentage, degrees Brix at which the grapes were picked, whether or not the wine went through malolactic fermentation, and what kinds of barrels were used. At the bottom are Tony’s tasting notes. Not wanting to bother with her reading glasses, the blonde woman hands the sheet to her friend.

As the friend ticks off the impressive list of tasting adjectives employed by Tony (“vanilla,” “chocolate,” “coffee,” etc.), the blonde squeals, “Ooh, more desserts!”

Mark jokes that it’s really just Tony’s grocery list. He imagines Tony walking up and down the aisles looking for foods to use as flavor descriptors. Jam. Cookie dough. Bacon. Black raspberries.

Tony looks up and sighs. “You know, you never know how bad it sounds until someone reads it out loud.”

Tony’s mother says she first knew he really wanted to be a winemaker after he finished his first viticulture class and decided to take six months off to work crush at Dry Creek Vineyards in Sonoma County. In addition to not receiving academic credit, he had to pay rent. He’d always been a hard worker, even delivering ice for his father’s business as a kid, so his diligence didn’t surprise her. She realized he was serious about winemaking and decided to do whatever she could to help make it happen for Tony, eventually mortgaging their house. The fact that Tony works in the vineyards with Mark when things are slow at the winery is a good thing, she thinks. “It shows him what other people’s priorities are, which is good because he’s an only child.”

Mark has to step out for a while, he needs to fix a pump out in some vineyard. But first, he gives Tony’s mother a hug.

“Have Tony go out and fix the pump,” she says. “It’s good for him to get dirty.”

Mark shakes his head. “No, I want the pump to work.”

After he leaves, Tony’s mother leans over and says, “Mark’s rough on the outside, but he’s got a kind heart on the inside. I know, as a mother.”

Tony’s mother remembers a conversation she had a while back with her son, when she was trying to build up his confidence.

“But Tony, you make fantastic wine!”

“Mom, there’s a lot of fantastic wine out there,” he responded, ever aware of market realities in the wine business.

She thinks about his words, now. “It won’t fail because they don’t work at it.”

She has seen the hard work being done, the passion applied.

Someone notices that with 45 seconds left in the game, Boston has somehow tied it up with New Jersey after being down 25 points. The tasting room fills up with suddenly interested sports fans.

An older man, 50’s, walks in unsmiling and Tony asks if he’d like to try some wine.

“Are you selling it for a special price?” The man asks.

“For you only,” Tony jokes, keeping a smile.

The man takes a sip. He leaves without a word, not even a thank you.

The game ends in a miraculous Boston victory. Everybody clears out. The store is quiet again. Now, a commercial for California cheese comes on the screen.

“Check this one out, it’s hilarious,” Mark tells Tony, pointing to the screen.

In the commercial, two talking cows in a barn agree they’re going to “sleep in” that morning. One cow tells the other to “hit the snooze button” and a crowing rooster is suddenly kicked out the barn window.

The farm humor cracks Mark up. “I love that!”

A middle-aged couple sidles up to the bar. Tony finds out they’re from Brussels, and starts talking excitedly about the Northern Rhone and Burgundy regions, not far from their home country. Excusing himself, he runs over behind the cash register on the other side of the store to grab a copy of Hugh Johnson’s Wine Atlas. Tony refers to the hefty volume as “Huge” Johnson. He opens it up for the couple and points out some small towns they should visit the next time they’re in France. The husband takes down the information on the back of a business card and thanks Tony.

For every time Tony has to bite his tongue when a cheap tourist tastes his wine and walks away without a thank you, for every time he fakes a laugh after hearing another bad joke from a potential customer, thankfully there are moments like this when he gets to share his love and knowledge of wine with an appreciative audience. Every time Tony hosts a tasting or makes a sales call, he helps raise the winery’s profile. The more exposure he gets, the more he becomes the public face of Neal Family Vineyards, which is great for Tony, but might not be in Mark’s plans.

Chapter Fifteen

The Auction

Over a four-day weekend in early June, the Napa Valley Wine Auction descends upon the valley. A charity function that raises funds for local hospitals, low-income housing, and youth projects, the auction also serves as a showcase for Napa Valley’s best wines. Wineries posture for record bids on the special lots they donate, attendees compete to see who can spend the most, and the press reports gleefully on both. The Napa Valley event consistently brings in more money than any other wine auction in the world.

The auction festivities kick off with Thursday barrel sampling. Attendees, who pay $1,250 each for access to the weekend’s events, get to sample limited-edition blends created specially for the auction by member wineries of the Vintners Association. Those with especially deep pockets can bid on any one of the ten cases of wine that will be made from each barrel.

Thursday morning at 9:15, Tony’s mind is not on the wine auction. He sits in his Explorer in the parking lot at Jack Neal & Son headquarters, cell phone to his ear, looking relaxed and listening intently. The voice on the other end belongs to a wine industry headhunter. After asking Tony how things are going at the new winery, he gets to the point. Would Tony be interested in the head winemaking position at William Hill?

Owned by international beverage conglomerate Allied Domecq, William Hill is a huge operation, producing over 100,000 cases of wine a year. Management is looking for someone new to come in and rebuild the winery’s reputation which has slipped a bit over the past few years. The job would pay $200,000 a year, nearly double Tony’s current salary. The recruiter likes that fact that Tony travels frequently on sales calls; in his new capacity, he’d be expected to spend 15% of his time on the road.

Tony’s initial response is that he’d more interested if he were still stuck in an assistant winemaker position at Duckhorn. Now, that he’s got a new job with an expanded title, things are different.

“So, I would say I’m not interested,” he tells the recruiter. He turns the offer down, but he’s got his shmooze voice on, trying his best to say “no” nicely.

“I like turnaround projects, but I know there are good and bad things about working for a publicly traded company, like being bottom-line focused,” he explains. “The wine industry is not made for public ownership. I saw it going on with Tom Rinaldi, [his mentor at Duckhorn], all the cost cutting, people telling him, ‘we can’t afford to use those barrels.’”

Tony recommends some other winemakers who might be interested, including someone he knows at Chateau Montelena who’s especially talented. He suggests to the recruiter that William Hill should hire that guy plus a consulting winemaker for backup. Now that he’s turned down the offer, Tony tries to back out of the situation gracefully. He doesn’t want to burn any bridges. Just because he doesn’t want a new job now, doesn’t mean he won’t be in the market for one, someday.

“William Hill wants someone whose hire makes a splash,” Tony says. “So, I’m not sure I’d be such a good fit. I’m not scared of the size, but….hmmm…I’m trying to think…”

“Keep your mind going,” says the recruiter.

“My mind works better when I’m thinking about other things,” Tony finally tells him, “I’ll be at the wine auction later. Maybe I’ll think of some other names while I’m there. Thanks again, but I see too much potential here at Neal.”

Around 10:30, Tony, Paige and Mark carpool to the barrel tasting event, with Tony driving. Tony lies and tells Mark he saw a copy of the seating chart for the Friday night dinner, thanks to an old friend at Duckhorn. They will all be sitting at the Acacia Winery table, meaning they’ll have to drink wine from Acacia, which is heavy on Pinot Noir. Mark hates Pinot. Somehow, Tony keeps a straight face.

“Shit,” says Mark, his eyes scanning the vineyards flanking Route 29.

Tony points out a vineyard and asks, “Hey Mark, we’re getting fruit from them this year, right?”

“Nah,” says Mark, “I’m giving it to Joel Gott instead.” Owner of the local favorite drive-in restaurant, Gott also owns a winery and buys grapes from Mark.

“Oh, man,” whines Tony.

“Hey, he gives me free hamburgers and no shit,” says Mark.

As they drive, Mark tells a story about young guy, fresh out of U.C. – Davis, whom he eventually had to fire. Told to burn some old vines, the rookie dumped a tank of gasoline over the pile. The other workers refused to set foot anywhere near the combustible heap fearing they’d be blown to bits when it was lit. In the end, they lobbed a flare onto the pile from a nice, safe distance. So ended the kid’s career at Jack Neal & Son.

“Typical Davis story,” Tony laughs. “No common sense, all theory.”

After parking in an open field off Silverado Trail, the threesome boards a shuttle bus to the winery. Walking toward empty seats in the back, Tony hears a half-dozen “Hey Tony” greetings from fellow riders.

Perched atop a 300-foot knoll like an island in an ocean of valley-floor vineyards, the Sterling Winery is a hilltop homage to the Greek Isles. The stark, whitewashed façade, blinding in sunlight, seems better suited to a temple in Mykonos than a winery in Napa Valley. Another distinguishing feature at Sterling is the tram visitors must take from the main parking lot uphill to the winery. So much for blending in with the natural surroundings.

Tony, Paige, and Mark arrive at the back entrance, so their tram ride will have to wait. Inside the winery’s cellar, people make their way past rows of two-story stainless steel tanks and immense wooden vats to a couple of large rooms in the back that house the red wine barrels. Auction boards occupy the middle of each room and barrels from the 51 participating wineries circle the peripheries. Like the exterior of the winery, the interior is cold and monochromatic, its wall surfaces broken up at irregular intervals by small windows with panes tinted in primary colors. Keeping with the Cirque du Vin (Circus of Wine) theme of this year’s auction, the floor has been painted with stars, jacks, and rings against a burgundy background.

The auction boards look like scoreboards at a golf tournament. Ten wineries are listed vertically while horizontal columns holds a wooden placard representing one of the ten cases that will be made from each vintner’s barrel. Being red wine, the custom blends will not be bottled for at least a year, Bids are written on thin wooden boards which slide into grooves on the corresponding winery’s row. There is only room across the board for ten bids at a time, so each new bid physically pushes an earlier bid’s block off the end of the row, sending it slamming into a metal catch bucket below. Sometimes, the blocks get stuck, so auction volunteers use rubber mallets to whack new bids into position.

In terms of strategy, the idea is to be the 10th highest bidder, scoring the cheapest case of wine out of the ten winning bids. It’s a risky position to hold, however, because a last-minute bid can send your block off the board, leaving you out of the game or forcing you to bid high to get back on the board. Bidding starts today, but the final bell doesn’t sound until noon, Saturday, an hour before the live auction event at the Meadowood Resort.

As the bids come in, loud bangs and subsequent cheers echo through the cavernous rooms. For the most part, everyone dresses casually; a blur of shorts and khaki pants, straw hats and baseball caps. Vintners man their barrels armed with glass thieves for filling glasses. Next to each barrel is a conveniently located spit jar for excess wine. Excited auction-goers wander from barrel to barrel conversing and sampling wine. Tony makes his way around the rooms, chatting up the winery owners and employees he knows, which, of course, means he does a lot of talking. He delivers on his earlier promise to the recruiter, mentioning the job opening at William Hill to another winemaker.

Mark stands at the Far Niente Winery’s barrel, talking to the woman serving samples. They discuss vineyards. She says she’s excited to try the Neal Family Vineyards wines, then jokes with Mark about him being too hard on Tony.

“What? I’m not a tough boss!” Mark says with a grin. “The grapes start at a hundred points, and if the wine gets anything less, it gets docked off his paycheck.”

By 11:30, bidding is in full swing. The barrel lots from D.R. Stephens, a small winery, are up to $725 a case. “The real bidding doesn’t start until Saturday,” Tony explains. Heavy hitters don’t waste their time this early on. The wineries that habitually garner the biggest bids are Duckhorn, Beringer, Staglin, Shafer Hillside, and Phelps, each of whom regularly brings in over $8,000 a case.

Behind Tony, a block from the board above slams into a catch bucket. Another block slams into the bucket, bounces out, and lands on the cement floor an inch from the foot of a young woman in a sundress. She looks up, eyes wide.

“You almost got cut off at the toe ring,” scolds her date.

Making their way into the other room, Tony and Mark spy something that stops them in their tracks. The first thing they notice is the hair. Golden cornrow braids hang off the woman’s head like hippie beads in Greg Brady’s attic bedroom doorway. Black roots are clearly visible close to her scalp and the bangs are intentionally frayed. Her skin has a dusty blanche, like it just got a fresh sprinkling of baby powder. Her sunglasses, large and fashionable as they are, can’t hide the greasy dollops of black mascara or the fake lashes that are long enough to poke an eye out. Although she looks to be at least fifty, she wears knee-high white leather boots over white mesh stockings under white lace hot pants. A white belly shirt exposes her aging midriff. A cross between Bo Derek in “Ten” and Morticia from The Addams Family is an apt description.

Mark is aghast. “Look at that never-been-washed, burnt-out rope hair.”

“You laugh, but I bet she’s got more money than God,” says Tony.

He thinks people like her add a breath of fresh air to the auction. “Everyone else here has sticks up their asses.”

Another building across the way houses the Auction Preview Room, where auction lots that will be bid upon during Saturday’s main event can be viewed. One of the highest profile lots includes specially etched magnums from each of the 51 wineries making up the Napa Valley Vintners Association. In addition to wine, Stag’s Leap Winery’s package includes dinner with Lee Iococca. Beringer is offering up five magnums of their ’97 Napa Valley Cabernet caged in a miniature circus train. The bottle labels are painted with giraffe, lion, and tiger motifs. In the spirit of the Cirque du Vin theme, most of the winery displays are decorated with some variation of ball masks or laughing clown faces.

Eighty-eight year old Robert Mondavi and his wife, Margrit, shuffle around the room checking out the selections. He’s wearing a black fedora and a billowy, silk shirt with red, blue, and yellow horizontal stripes. His pants are simple tan dress slacks, but on his feet, he wears a pair of high-tech Nike sneakers with zippers instead of laces. Elderly gentlemen normally don’t fit the profile of an edgy athletic shoe company’s target audience, but hey, this is Robert Mondavi. As far as most people in Napa Valley are concerned, he can wear whatever the hell he wants.

Cult winery, Araujo, shows off its impressive new caves with a large format photograph that catches Tony and Mark’s attention.

“Mark, here’s what we should do,” says Tony. “We should put a banquet table in the winery.”

Mark shakes his head. “No.”

Paige explains how her winery, Spottswoode, commissioned an artist to paint wine labels featuring cartoon circus characters playing different instruments. From her vantage point in the marketing department, she knows firsthand the impact good auction exposure can have on a winery. Big bids mean big press, and big press brings new business, often enough to justify the cost of participation. If a winery also hosts a Thursday night or Friday morning hospitality event, the Wine Auction takes as much as $25,000 out of a marketing budget as well as requiring 2-3 years of planning.

Back outside, a line has formed for the tram ride down to the white wine and food booths in the main parking lot. As the threesome waits, a warm breeze tickles their faces. After a couple minutes of admiring the view, Tony points to an observation deck on another part of the winery. That’s where Paige, who worked at Sterling in her first job out of college, once stumbled upon a couple who were in the process of joining the Napa Valley equivalent of the “mile-high club.”

Tony grabs a glass of Chardonnay from a nearby hospitality table and recognizes the guy serving the wine from his childhood days back in Belmont. “He was the coolest kid in the neighborhood,” Tony says after moving away from the table. “He used to listen to AC/DC and Blue Oyster Cult and he’d charge all the younger kids a buck to watch his dad’s stag films.”

The parking lot at the bottom of the tram is lined with food booths, with each participating winery offering hors d’oeuvres and snacks along with white wine samples. The event organizers couldn’t have picked a hotter place to locate the festivities. Sun heats the pavement just short of melting. Spots under umbrellas and overhanging tree branches are the most crowded. Like the past few days, high temperatures today should reach 96 degrees.

“It gets hot like this from late May through mid-June every year, then the fog returns in July and cools things down,” says Tony. During this late spring hot zone, 100-degree days are a regular occurrence.

One table, under the banner “Surf de Soleil,” serves up a delicious ceviche, or cold seafood salad, served on a scallop shell for easy into-the-mouth tippability. The food almost makes standing in the heat worthwhile, but the serving sizes are small. The Milat Winery table hands out glasses of their Chenin Blanc on ice. The cold wine tastes sweet and crisp like chilled apple juice. Moving from table to table, Tony makes conversation with everyone he encounters. By 1:00 P.M., though, the threesome decides it’s too hot out and the finger food isn’t cutting it anymore. Lunch time.

Tony picks a little Mexican restaurant in Calistoga. They sit outside under the shade of a tree and Tony order for everyone in Spanish. When the waitress leaves, Tony starts grumbling because Bob Levy, the winemaker for Harlan, only gave him a few words worth of conversation back at the water cooler earlier. A year ago, Bob was interested in hiring Tony as an assistant winemaker. Tony thinks he may still be miffed that Tony took the Neal job without telling him first. Minutes go by, and Tony’s still stewing. He hates getting blown off by people who once talked to him all the time when he was with Duckhorn. Now that he’s working for a startup winery, Tony gets the brush-off.

“That’s when you tell who your real friends are,” says Mark.

Tony agrees.

“See, that’s why I have less friends,” says Mark, “I’ll flat out tell you if I’m pissed at you.”

Talking about the auction, both Tony and Mark agree this year’s attendance seems smaller than years past. The financial overextension affecting dotcom hotbeds like San Francisco has clearly impacted Napa Valley, even affecting its charities. Want proof? A tricked-out gray Hummer SUV sits parked on a busy intersection in downtown St. Helena that very same day. The vanity plates read, “VINO WGN.” A sign on the rear window says, “For Sale.”

Tony predicts the auction won’t pull in as much money as last year. “I bet they won’t see $6 million.”

“That’s why I’m waiting,” answers Mark. He’s holding off joining the Vintner’s Association for at least another year, until has some wine worthy of showcasing. “I want to be at our table saying ‘hoo-hah!’” he adds, beating his chest. When the time comes, Neal Family Vineyards will do it right. Hospitality event, dinner at the winery – the whole deal.

“There are some edgy wines,” Mark says about the barrel lot samples he tasted from the 2000 vintage.

“I’m so glad we didn’t do a 2000,” agrees Tony. “It’s going to be a rough vintage for Napa Valley.”

After lunch, they drive back down Route 29 to the JNS offices in St. Helena. Someone mentions that Boz Scaggs has sold out his show date at the Robert Mondavi Winery’s summer concert series. Tony admits he actually likes Scaggs. Paige starts singing his hit, “Lido Shuffle,” but messes up some of the words, which leads to an argument about music.

“Okay, Miss I’ve-got-Mariah-Carey-in-my-car,” Tony rags like an obnoxious 14-year old.

She teases him back about his penchant for rap music and hard rock.

“Okay, 30-year-old,” he says, reminding her that she’s older than the average pop music listener.

Over the truck’s speakers, Maceo Parker comes to the rescue. Both Tony and Paige agree he is cool. His CD, the soundtrack from the movie “Snatch,” is playing now and Tony cranks it louder. Outside, sunlight flickers through a tunnel of overhanging oak branches in front of the Beringer Estate, spreading a strobe effect through the truck’s interior while Tony and Paige perform a duet, yelling out lines from the movie.

“Sit down, you fat bald fuck!” they scream together in perfect harmony.

Taking a side street around the back of St. Helena in order to avoid the downtown stoplights, Tony points out the smallest houses he can find, a 1-bedroom at best, and guesses it would cost $200,000 to buy.

“And that’s only for a part-share,” chimes Mark.

Around five o’clock, Tony heads home to get dressed for his Thursday Night Hospitality Event, a dinner at Hartwell Estates. Tony and Paige live in an olive-green one-story ranch situated in a neat neighborhood of similar style houses just north of Calistoga. Out front, there is a small lawn shaded by a decent-sized tree.

“That’s my burnt out yard,” Tony announces.

He walks in the front door and says hi to Paige. She stares back at him, her lips pursed into a frown.

“Tony, she asks. “Do you have a license to sell hot dogs?”

Tony scrunches up his eyes, puzzled for a moment. Then, with a quick reach down, he zips his pants’ zipper.

Inside, the front foyer leads straight into the dining space at the center of the house, where a French country-style pine table sits surrounded by six chairs. On the wall behind the dining table is a Moulin Rouge print by Toulouse Lautrec. Off to the right, a short hallway T-s off to the master bedroom and a guest room. On the wall between the two rooms hangs a collection of framed photographs. One shows Tony at age twelve, tall and skinny, wearing a bright orange Little League uniform, a baseball hat that’s too big, and bowl-cut hair. He’s flanked by his father, grandfather, and great grandfather – four generations of Biagi men.

In another picture, Paige stands with her father. They share the same tall, wiry build and deep set eyes. In fact, their resemblance is so keen, a college friend who had never before met Paige’s parents was able to recognize Paige’s father in a grocery store in Davis one Parent’s Weekend. The friend said Paige and her father looked exactly alike, not exactly something a 19-year college girl wants to hear.

Back to the left of the dining area is a walkthrough space that connects to the kitchen. On one wall is a shelf of assorted wine glasses and decanters. Under the shelf is a heavy square butcher’s block with a microwave and two bottles of Glenfiddich perched on top. On the wall next the kitchen doorway hangs a cork bulletin board covered with tacked-up snapshots:

- Tony in a white tuxedo and black bow tie, dressed for his wedding, flanked by his real father and grandfather. His father, Ernie, has rugged good looks, slicked-back white hair framing a square-jawed, sun-reddened face.

- Paige and her wedding party, dressed all in white, getting ready for the ceremony.

- Tony at a party, holding a bottle of beer in his hand while wearing an empty Dr. Pepper 12-pack carton on his head like a stovepipe hat.

- Tony holding someone’s pet dog, exposing its pink belly for the camera.

- Paige and a girlfriend hiking in the mountains.

- Tony holding his fingers up like a surfer dude (thumb and pinky extended, middle three fingers curled in) atop some boulders with a lake in the background.

- Tony and his UC-Davis rugby teammates after a game. Tony assumes the “cool college guy” pose; chest out, elbows back.

More pictures of Tony and Paige with their friends fill the remaining corkboard space.

A pair of sliding glass doors leads to the back yard, a currently overgrown work-in-progress. Tall grass and weeds surround a sandbox, left over from the house’s former life as a day care center. A wooden frame borders a plot that will someday be the Biagi’s vegetable garden. Beyond their back fence are five acres of empty fields and panoramic views north to mountain ridgelines on either side of the upper Napa Valley, including Mt. St. Helena.

The kitchen, in the back left corner of the house, is small and functional. On the counter is a tray with six different bottles of olive oil and vinegar. The living room, to the left of the front foyer, is dominated by a TV armoire that pokes from its diagonal position in a corner out into the room. A comfy tan cotton sofa takes up the back wall underneath an Audubon-like painting of wild ducks. Given to Tony by the Duckhorn staff when he left the winery, the artwork includes a signed Paraduxx label and the larger duck print upon which the label was based, signed by forty-odd Duckhorn employees.

On the other side of the room, near the TV armoire, is a plastic CD tower, filled completely. A frame on the lamp table holds a photograph of Paige’s parents as newlyweds, her father standing tall in his Army uniform. In the space underneath the table lies a stack of coffee table books and wine encyclopedias, the titles revealing the couple’s interest in the grand traditions of international wines (Terroir, Grands Vins, Burgundy, The Cote d’Or, The Architecture of Wine, and Italy’s Noble Red Wines). Pictures of trips to Bordeaux and Burgundy cover the walls. Back by the front door, they’ve arranged a vertical photo collage of their five favorite French chateaux, places they hope to visit again.

Sure, there’s room for more furniture. Tony is the first to admit it’s not their ideal house, but they’re happy to own it. While Neal Family Vineyards kicks into full stride and Tony’s wines become better known, the Biagis will continue to dream. They dream of having children, of moving into a larger house, and perhaps someday even owning a winery. But Tony knows as well as anyone that the last one is the hardest to achieve. With ever-inflating real estates prices and dizzying amounts of regulations for new wineries, dreams like that cost millions. The frustrating thing about Napa Valley is, they’re surrounded by people that do have that money.

Carved into a wooded canyon on the east side of the Silverado Trail, the shady bowers of the Meadowood Resort provide respite from the open spaces of the valley floor. The resort’s discreet shingle-style architecture brings to mind the elegant restraint of turn-of-the-century New England seaside mansions. For the better part of the Napa Valley Wine Auction weekend, Meadowood serves as home base. On Friday evening, shuttle busses ferry auction attendees from the vast Sutter Home parking lots. At Meadowood, the throngs pour out into the parking lot, file down a pathway past the golf shop, and enter the auction grounds on what is normally the first fairway.

Stilt walkers and characters dressed as clowns mingle with the guests as they move past the barrel lot auction boards, which have been relocated here from the Sterling Winery. While some guests head toward an immense white tent in the distance, many others hang back by the entryway people watching. Steve Mariucci, coach of the San Francisco 49ers, draws attention the second he enters the premises. He looks great with a tan, someone says. Even as they stare at the others, people seem very aware of their own postures, even stilted. Some of the more adventurous types hold masks over their faces in strict adherence to the Cirque du Vin theme. Others too cool for run-of-the-mill formal wear willfully eschew bow ties and cumberbunds. Most of the guests dress in traditional black tie attire and try not to give the contrarians the satisfaction of staring at them.

In the large white tent, dinner is being served, catered by the venerable New York restaurant, Le Cirque. Each member winery of the Vintner’s Association hosts a table and provides a magnum of wine for their guests. Our table is hosted by Reynolds Family Winery, a new operation no one has heard of yet. With seats at prestigious tables like Harlan and Duckhorn reserved for the high rollers, it’s no surprise my wife and I find ourselves in back of the tent with an unknown winery. We’re disappointed at first, but then we meet owner/winemaker, Steve Reynolds.

Arriving at the table armed with magnum of wine and a cheerful grin, Steve introduces himself to everyone. He is forty-three years old, but looks twenty-eight. His short cropped hair reveals boyish features. Until the winery breaks even, Steve continues to work as a dentist one day a week to provide cash flow. Located in Napa on the Silverado Trail at the southern edge of the Stag’s Leap District, the Reynolds’ winery had its grand opening this past week. Steve makes the wine himself, splitting fermentation evenly between tanks and open-top bins. The tanks get pumpovers and the bins are punched down by hand. This way, he formulates an even, balanced style of wine, combining mellow tannins from the tanks with big, fruit-forward flavors from the open bins. For aging, he uses 90% new oak. With tonight’s dinner, the table will share a magnum of the 1999 Reynolds Reserve Cabernet. Its label is exquisite, featuring dried wildflowers pressed onto rough-cut handmade parchment paper.

Most of the winery Steve built himself. The property has an extra guesthouse, so if any of us ever needs a place to stay in Napa Valley, he tells us to come on by.

“Just flash your high beams at the gate,” he says.

“Although he moved up to Napa from Stockton seven years ago with his wife, only now does he feel accepted in the valley.

“There’s a checklist people go through before they give you any credit here,” he says. “First, they ask if you have a winery, and then who the winemaker is, and then where the fruit comes from, etc., to make sure you know what’s going on and that you’re not just ‘money.’”

Once you’re “in,” it’s great, he adds. He and a bunch of other guys in the valley have monthly barbecues up on Atlas Peak, and they call themselves the “Millionaire Wannabe Club.”

“Once you’re a millionaire, you get kicked out.”

Also at the table are some friends of ours, Lawrence and Michelle Kosick. The guy next to Lawrence strikes up a conversation. His name is Mike and he works for Sun Microsystems. He is tall, well dressed, and wears his hair neatly brushed back on his large head. He lives in Palo Alto, but has a weekend place here in St. Helena. When he finds out Lawrence works for Yahoo! in Santa Clara, Mike takes the fact that they both work in Silicon Valley as a license to tell his life story. He spends the greater part of dinner bragging about helicopter skiing experiences in British Columbia and giving Lawrence hot tips on new cult wineries. Lawrence begins referring to Mike behind his back as “the game show host” in reference to his polished appearance, feathered hair, and too-deep voice.

Mike has been to several prior Napa Valley wine auctions. “But last year’s auction was a really expensive one,” he announces, pausing for effect. “I bought a house!”

After dinner, the Pecota family, chairs of this year’s auction, take the stage to welcome everyone and introduce the night’s entertainment. Their daughter, twenty-eight year-old Andrea, grabs the mike.

At another table, Tony converses with a fellow winemaker. The friend looks up and says, “She’s one of the dumbest chicks around.”

“C’mon, she can’t be that bad,” laughs Tony.

She starts speaking. “It’s my pleasure to introduce a man that at least 600 women in this room would like to do.” There is nervous laughter as the crowd tries to figure out if she really said what they think she just said. Her gray-haired father looks over at her, smiling curiously. He seems not to have heard her, but realizes something has happened. She continues, nonplussed. “Lyle Lovett! Bring it on!” she finally screams.

As soon as she finishes her baudy introduction, Tony turns back to the other winemaker. “Okay,” he says, “maybe you’re right.”

As Lyle Lovett kicks into his signature rockabilly twang, Lawrence announces to the men of the table that he’s got some Cuban cigars that need smoking, so we head outside the tent. Mike considers Lawrence kindred high tech folk and corners him off to the side for further discussion on the state of the industry.

Meanwhile, Steve talks about how hard it was getting the winery going. Originally, he planned to build the winery with his father, but his father died suddenly while the winery was still under construction. Then, after trying to sell his dental practice to devote more time to the struggling winery, Steve was sued by his associate and forced to maintain a minimum client load. Incredibly stressed out and financially weak, Steve and his wife cried themselves to sleep most nights.

Five feet to Steve’s right, happily puffing away, Mike takes his Cuban cigar out of his mouth. Holding it out in front his face, he rolls the cigar slowly between his fingers, considering its quality. He releases a long, smoky breath. Looking through the cloudy wisps, he asks Lawrence, “So, whaddaya think? Is there a vineyard in your future?”

Lyle Lovett is still on stage with the aid of crutches, the result of falling off a horse a couple weeks prior. He plays five songs, then leaves. For those who haven’t yet gotten their fix of music, a rap/funk band is playing up front, near the barrel lot boards. A portable dance floor had been laid out below the stage. People are going crazy, really letting loose. The D.J. scratches out a hip-hop mix while fifty or so auction goers try their best to dance, performing spasmodic choreographies of fast, jerky feet and flying, pointy elbows. Hey, at least they’re trying. And they’re having fun. Because it’s for charity, maybe we can excuse the fact that rich, drunk, white people can’t dance.

The next day, Saturday, is another warm one. Thankfully, the dress code for the live auction is casual. A rare blazer or two pops up but shorts and sandals are more popular choices for the crowd filing into the main event. Once inside the grounds, attendees scurry to place final bids for the barrel lot auction which started Thursday at Sterling and ends at noon, today. The live auction begins in the main tent at 1:00 P.M. In the meantime, action moves to the periphery, where booths hosted by the best restaurants in the Napa Valley offer up gourmet specialties ranging from skewers with cherry tomato, basil, and mozzarella to lobster spring rolls and profiteroles pastries.

Inside the main event’s big white tent, experienced auction-goers have already claimed the best tables, reserving them by leaving articles of clothing on place settings or by tipping the chairs forward. By the time The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” signals the beginning of the live auction, the only seats remaining are practically outside the tent.

The first lot up for bid is a collection of magnums from all the 51 wineries that are members of the Vintners Association. Bidding starts at $5,000 and climbs quickly. The auctioneer taunts the crowd with staccato appeals for higher bids. Spotters positioned around the tent help communicate hard-to-see bids from the back rows to the auctioneer, brandishing the same kind of gigantic foam fingers you might find waving in the crowd at a baseball game.

The 51-magnum lot receives a final bid of $100,000 from an Italian-looking gray-haired gentlemen seated at a front table. When the auctioneer slams down his gavel, a group of volunteers dressed as court jesters sprints over, clapping to the beat of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best.” They overwhelm the winning bidder, surrounding him and frenetically waving sticks with silver streamers on the ends at him. He seems embarrassed by the attention, but tries to play along. If you’ve ever had a birthday party in a Mexican restaurant, you’d know the feeling.

Three imperials (double magnums) of Duckhorn’s Paraduxx Cabernet/Zinfandel blend, spanning the years 1998-2000, hit the block. Tony bolts upright in his chair, instantly alert. He was winemaker for both the ’98 and ’99 releases. He scans the crowd and surveys the bidding. The winner is Michael Towers, one of the original investors at Duckhorn. Tony is not a huge fan, having been blown off by Towers at the Thursday’s barrel sampling. Having an insider, or “shill,” bidding up his own label doesn’t seem right. But in the ultra-competitive wine auction arena, it is commonplace, according to Tony. For wineries who employ the questionable tactic, it’s a strategy for “brand preservation in the marketplace.”

On each table, at every place setting, are complimentary pads for bidders to scribble notes or quick calculations. When someone tries to take a picture of Tony and Mark, Tony holds up one of the notepads, upon which he’s written in red crayon, “I like boys,” in front of Mark’s face. Sitting next to each other, both wearing Hawaiian shirts, stealing the best wines from waitress’ baskets whenever one passes their table, the two men act like brothers behaving badly.

Finally, the Harlan lot comes up for auction. The cult winery consistently captures the most expensive bids at the wine auction. This year’s lot is a vertical collection of Cabernets, one bottle each from the years 1990 to 1998, cradled neatly into a fine leather touring suitcase. The auctioneer starts his spiel. Bidding starts at $5,000 and rockets upward by the second. The speed at which the price increases is dizzying. Within a minute, it’s up to $200,000. Then it’s $220,000, no, $300,000. The auctioneer calls for more bids, but there are none. The gavel drops. The loudspeakers boom out the UB40 song, “Red, Red Wine.” Here come the court jesters and their silver streamers.

The winning bid this time belongs to the wife of Red Adams, a wealthy Texas oil magnate. She is quiet with curly brown hair, almost grandmotherly. No excitement registers on her face. She’s done this before. UB40 sings, “Red, red wine, makes me forget…,” but could this lot of Harlan Cabernet ever really cause its new owner to forget how much she paid for it?

Next, it’s the Spottswoode Winery’s lot and Paige Biagi’s turn to be curious. She sits tall against the back of her chair with her sunglasses still on, surveying the crowd and the bidding frenzy. Last year, the Spottswoode lot went for $12,000. This year it pulls in $20,000. “Better, but not great,” she says. In 1999, during the internet economy’s heyday, the Spottswoode lot brought in $75,000.

The auction goes on like this for six hours. As the afternoon drags on, the large sums of money being thrown about becomes a blur of abstract figures. Inside the tent, people come and go. Those lucky enough to be members of the Meadowood Club or a guest at the resort have the option of escaping to the swimming pool. For Tony and Mark, however, now is no time for leisure. There is business to be had. Taking advantage of the lull in activity, they duck out to give a tour of the Neal winery to the owner of Rolf’s, a key restaurant account in Newport Beach. Earlier this year, Rolf bought twelve cases of Neal wine for his restaurant. He’s already sold nine and should be ready for a re-order. The tour goes well, according to Tony. Rolf’s wife says her husband, not easily impressed by most winery tours, was excited about Neal Family Vineyards. He ends up buying three more cases of the 2000 Chardonnay.

Around 6:30, the al fresco dinner starts. Waiting in line to re-enter the auction grounds, Tony strikes up a conversation with the woman next to him. As they talk, the guy on the other side of her notices she’s good looking and tries to chat her up. He used to work for Jim Beam, he brags, but now pulls a rickshaw for tourists down in Yountville. In this crowd, the job title “rickshaw driver” ranks slightly below that of stilt walker. His odds of ending up with the attractive young woman increasingly worsen as he moves through a pathetic repertoire of pickup lines.

“I looked in the mirror this morning and noticed I was missing something. It was you.”

The woman laughs nervously. He keeps trying.

“We’re going to tell our kids that we met at the Wine Auction.”

She looks around quickly for someone to save her. She does not ask Rickshaw Boy to join her for dinner.

White-clothed tables speckle the third fairway while a makeshift stage perches on the hillside above. Tony sits down next to Tom Rinaldi, his former boss and winemaking mentor. Tom, a legend himself for his efforts at Duckhorn, counts part-time Calistoga resident, Joe Montana, as a friend. Earlier today, the Super Bowl champ made an appearance at the auction, but left after being accosted by too many people.

Daniel Sogg, a young writer for Wine Spectator walks by. Tony talks to him for a couple of minutes about this year’s auction. Sogg appears laid back and studious, wearing an untucked shirt and a pair of small-framed specs nestled on the bridge of his nose. He promises to get Tony invited to the magazine’s magnum party at Tra Vigne next year and apologizes for not hooking him up this time around.

Tony waves him off. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, “That’s for the muckety-mucks.”

But Sogg thinks Tony’s successes at Paraduxx make him worthy. He tells Tony to keep him abreast of things at Neal.

Mark comes over from his seat at the next table to pass around a bottle of ‘97 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet, worth $140 a bottle. Having farmed the famous vineyard for Heitz, he attaches special pride to this wine. Next comes a bottle from Cornerstone, an “almost cult wine” according to Tony, followed by a Hartwell Cabernet, which everyone agrees is excellent. When a bottle is opened from Ristow Vineyards, a winery owned by a renowned plastic surgeon, everyone’s happiness gains altitude.

Up on stage, Bob Trinchero and his family are introduced as the chairs of next year’s Auction. His winery, Sutter Home, was almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing White Zinfandel in America and bringing wine to the masses. The winery also produces premium quality wines under the M. Trinchero label. Taking the microphone, he announces that next year’s theme will be “Hooters in the Vineyard.” The crowd loves it.

Back at the table, a bottle of Merlot from William Hill makes the rounds. Paige looks at the label and says, “That could be a BMW 5-series, Tony.”

If Tony took the job there, they could buy a lot of really nice things. He pauses for a second at her comment. He’s fully aware of what he’s passing up by not pursuing the opportunity. Then, he smiles.

“No, Paige,” he corrects her. “That would be a 7-series.”

Around 8:30, the sunset drops a rosy hue over Meadowood that deepens the contrast between the lime fairways and the dark evergreens surrounding them. The air is thin and cool, sweater weather, and many of the day-long auction-goers are unprepared. They’re tired, too. The entertainment tonight better be good.

The headliner is a Scottish folk singer. A large, shaggy haired bloke, he wears shorts, a flannel shirt, and navy blue wool socks pulled up to his knees. Tuning his guitar, he tells the audience he’s from the windiest part of Scotland, County Fife. A waiter, who also happens to be Scottish, walks by Tony’s table and mumbles in brogue, “No, it’s not.” It’s the closest thing to encouragement the singer gets. Within 30 minutes, the cold and the bored make a mass exodus to the shuttle buses. The only quicker way to clear out the auction crowd would have been to announce free bottles of Screaming Eagle in the parking lot.

With the night still young and partying yet to be done, the action moves to “1351,” a bar named for its street number on Main Street in St. Helena. It’s the closest thing to a dance club in the valley. Auction goers trickle in, and the joint becomes a who’s who of the Napa Valley wine world’s new guard. Winemaking diva, Heidi Peterson Barrett, and her husband, Bo Barrett, owner of Chateau Montelena, belly up to the bar. A three-person funk band plays at the far end of the club. The lead singer has a blond crewcut and a black t-shirt that reads, “Ask Me About My Penis.”

In the fifteen minutes that pass between 9:30 and 9:45, the place becomes as packed as a Silver Oak release party. A stiff-limbed guy with khakis and an open-neck shirt hits the dance floor. He does not dance well, but deserves points for trying. A young guy in a tuxedo starts busting some serious moves, making the others look bad. Soon it seems everyone is out on the floor, including Bo Barrett, with his festive fish-print shirt, who’s really getting into it. A skinny man in a white shorts and white t-shirt appears from nowhere to prance in place with his hands near his hips, extending his pointer fingers downward like he’s drawing imaginary pistols and shooting at the floor. Steve Reynolds, our host at last night’s dinner, shows up solo and makes a beeline toward the frenzy on the dance floor.

A woman wearing a pink feather boa struts into the dance circle, positioning herself next to a muscular guy who has weight lifted all possible flexibility out of his body. His arms hang rigidly from his shoulders, elbows bent slightly, back hunched over like The Hulk. It’s hard to tell, but there is a good chance his pecs are flexing to the beat.

Finally, the folk singer from the auction arrives. Like a good Scotsman, he has little difficulty sniffing out the best pub in town. With the long hair, shorts and knee-high socks, he looks like Grizzly Adams dressed up for a soccer match. He heads to the back of the bar and approaches the band, bringing him dangerously close to the microphone.

“Uh-oh, he’s eyeing that mike!” someone murmurs. Fortunately, he ends up moving off to the side, working on his drink and watching the band from a safe distance. Tony walks over later and compliments him on his performance, explaining that the reason most of the auction people left is because they were cold. It’s not entirely true, but Tony feels bad for the guy.

When all is said and done, the biggest party of the year in Napa Valley ends up raising $6.2 million for charity. Once the 2001 Cabernet is ready for prime time and more is at stake, Neal Family Vineyards will join the Vintners Association. They’ll put on a dinner at the winery Thursday night or a hospitality event on Friday afternoon. They’ll host a table for the Friday night black tie event and Mark will proudly hoist a magnum of Neal Cabernet for his guests. But it won’t be done until their wine is worthy and they can do it right. Mediocrity is not an option.

For now, Mark and Tony are content to watch and learn, and auction weekend provided ample opportunity. Rich, drunk, white people might not be great dancers, but they’re important to Neal Family Vineyards. In the world of ultra-premium wines, high society is good business.

Chapter Sixteen

Veraison

Summer months bring veraison to the vineyards. Hard, green, young berries soften up and take on their varietal colors. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes are the first to turn, followed a couple weeks later by Cabernet and Zinfandel. Vineyard managers continue thinning fruit to maximize flavor intensity, ordering their crews to drop any excessively green or overlapping clusters. They monitor grape maturity and vine stress levels regularly now, both visually and by laboratory testing. Although it’s often said that vines grown in tough conditions produce better wines, too much stress can invite disease.

In late summer, about a month prior to harvest, irrigation becomes increasingly important. Growers reduce watering in the most vigorous parts of a vineyard while speeding up irrigation in areas of slow grape maturity. Veraison is an intense period of close observation. Although aerial infrared photos can facilitate the process, technology is no substitute for in-person surveillance. For Mark, veraison means a lot of time spent driving and walking the vineyards. For Tony, veraison means a lot of time without Mark. Although he’d rather be back at the winery, now is the time for Tony to hone his sales skills, improve client relationships, and execute decisions about managing the winery, all on his own. This year’s veraison is a chance for Tony, like the grapes, to develop his own varietal colors.

It’s late August. The road Tony drives is more congested than Napa Valley’s Route 29 on a Saturday afternoon in June, but there are no vineyards in this scene. He’s in Los Angeles, winding his way through Wednesday morning traffic. From the freeway, the distant hills obscured by a gray lens of smog are vague apparitions. The combination of overdeveloped hillsides and polluted air makes it easy to forget that land near present-day downtown Los Angeles once nurtured some of the earliest commercial vineyards in America. The first of these pioneer grape-growing operations was planted by Joseph Chapman in 1824. Another vineyard was planted seven years later by an appropriately named Frenchman, Jean-Louis Vignes. And while there are no more vineyards in Los Angeles today, there remain plenty of wine drinkers. In an attempt to get Neal Family Vineyards’ Cabernet into their wine glasses, Tony will hit more than a dozen target accounts between San Diego and Santa Barbara on a three-day SoCal sales blitz.

Today, he has three calls scheduled. Tomorrow, he will cram in nine. So far, the winery counts 60 California accounts. The wine being sold is the 1999 Cabernet, with an October release date. They’ve already pre-sold 150 of 310 cases. This is the home stretch.

Tony’s L.A. road wardrobe includes new blue jeans, black slip-on dress shoes, and a short-sleeved, black wool, polo shirt. At the moment, he’s desparately trying to locate the Howard Stern Show on the radio.

“Shit, what station is he on? I think it was 98-point-something.”

He strikes gold at 97.1, then wrestles for lane position with a woman in a black Mercedes, referring to her by some pretty creative names as he does so.

Soon, he’s lost. Wrong exit. On his way back to the highway, he passes the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, ironically situated right next door to the L.A. Coroner’s Office. A couple minutes later, he finds himself directionally challenged once again, only to discover he was going the right way after all.

“Hi, I’m Tony,” he says, ragging on himself. “I’m smoking crack. Copious amounts.”

Tony’s not the only one without a sense of direction today. Back at home, his wife, Paige, is trying to figure out what to do next. A few weeks ago, she was let go by Spottswoode Winery, her job in marketing downsized to a secretarial position. Stripped of any real responsibility, she opted out of the new role. That they offered her six weeks severance pay did little to soften the blow. Six months ago, the owners, gave her a 29% bonus and a great annual review. Five months later, she’s the only layoff in the company. When she found out it, crushed her. She loved working there.

In Tony’s opinion, this whole turn of events might be better for her in the long run. Spottswoode is a family-owned winery. As much as Paige came to feel she was a part of the family, the fact that her name is Biagi, not Novak, meant she’d never be fully included. The owners allowed employees to attend mid-day Pilates lessons and play tennis in the afternoons, but only the family members could really get away with it. The lifestyle surrounding her at Spottswoode was enviable. But it wasn’t realistic.

“As cool as it looks,” Tony told Paige, “you’ll never be able to live like that. It’s a different world.”

All the same, he’s proud of the way that Paige made sales her first priority, answering phone calls from clients instead of mutely resigning herself to administrative tasks like making extra copies of fax cover sheets. Paige ended up opening seven new accounts for Spottswoode, so from a sales perspective, Tony thinks it was a mistake for them to let her go. She possesses a wealth of client knowledge that could really come in handy as Spottswoode attempts to double their wine production this year.

“You need someone who knows the difference between Spago and The Flask,” he says.

Before his first sales call, Tony stops for a quick breakfast burrito in Glendale. Paging through the L.A. Times, he discovers a restaurant review about a hot new spot called Bastide. The writer portrays the chef and the owner as complete opposites.

“A lot like Mark and myself,” Tony remarks. “Except Mark doesn’t seem like as much of an asshole as this owner. Sometimes Mark’ll stomp his foot and act like a little kid, but he usually comes around. After a while he’ll say, ‘I see what you mean.’ He’s a real quick learner.”

Then, he’s back to discussing the L.A. Times review, comparing the restaurant to Quintessa, one of Napa Valley’s flashiest new wineries.

“You can buy the nicest winery, build the best caves, get the best art, and hire the best winemakers, but if you don’t have passion, it ain’t gonna work.”

French Laundry, the renowned Napa Valley restaurant, is a great example of passion versus vanity. “That was chef Thomas Keller’s passion. He wasn’t trying to be famous. He was cooking from his soul. People think it’s ‘A,’ but it’s really ‘B’.

What about the Neal winery? Passion or vanity?

Tony chews on his egg, potato, and cheese burrito.

“True, Mark built a beautiful winery, but I don’t think it’s too gaudy.

He takes a drink.

“Let me ask you something. Which would you rather do, buy a Thomas Kinkade from one of those tourist trap galleries, or buy something unique from a guy selling paintings on the side of the road?”

His point is that wine lovers enjoy the process of discovering small, off-the-beaten-path wineries far more than simply grabbing a jug of Gallo off a supermarket end-cap display. People seek out these elusive places of passion. At least that’s what Neal Family Vineyards is counting on.

The Red Carpet Wine Store from the outside resembles any other good-sized discount liquor joint – it looks like a converted gas mart. Inside, customers are greeted by an inventory sale spread over three collapsible buffet tables. Bottles of Silver Oak dating back to 1977 are available, as well as some selections from Caymus, Heitz, Phelps Insignia, Dunn, Dalle Valle, Shafer Hillside Select and Spottswoode.

The store caters to beer drinkers and wine connoisseurs alike: a Doritos rack stands on one side of the front entrance while a shelf of expensive Reidel wine glasses flanks the other. Toward the back of the store is a large, square, wraparound tasting bar where Tony hopes to present his samples to the store’s wine buyer, Jim. The original appointment was for 1:00 pm, but Tony’s hoping Jim might be able to meet him now, at 11:00. The woman behind the cash register says she’ll go back and find him, then doesn’t move. Tony starts pacing. He picks up a three-vintage blend of Heitz Cabernet, made with wine from three different harvests back in the 70s.

“I’m tempted to get it for Mark, but it’s probably beat to shit.”

Tony puts it back. Then he wanders over to some racks of Burgundy and Bordeaux and comments on the reasonable prices. Reconnaissance mission complete, he returns to the California Cabernet. He peers back the clearance sale by the front entrance.

“I like the foldout tables. Very nice touch.”

He picks up a bottle of Marilyn Merlot off a shelf, laughing at its label featuring the blonde bombshell in a scoop-neck dress.

“We used to sell this stuff at the St. Helena Wine Center. We’d get all these $21 money orders from people in places like Alabama who wrote with backward ‘e’s.”

Jim, the wine buyer, finally appears and assumes a standing position behind the tasting bar. His hair is black and he sports a goatee. He wears a short-sleeved, cream, buttoned-down shirt with gray pants.

“So, where are you guys located?” he starts. As soon as Tony answers the question, he fires another.

“Mmm hmm, so who is Neal?”

Tony tells him about Mark’s vineyard management company and the new Neal winery. Rolling out his fingers from closed fists, he runs through a quick list of Mark’s marquis clients. Then, he casually mentions he was winemaker on the Paraduxx label at Duckhorn and that his wife worked in marketing for Spottswoode. All in all, he presents a nice little package of wine business credibility.

Jim nods and listens as Tony answers each question. He swirls his sample of Neal wine, takes a sip, then says, “Give me some good news on pricing.”

“$360,” Tony answers, giving him the case price.

Jim nods.

“Is that good or bad?” Tony wonders.

“Good.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tony says. “The first time I threw that out, people were like, ‘Is that for a six-pack?’”

Just then, Jim recoginizes Tony’s face from a tasting they both attended a while back.

“Probably when I worked at Duckhorn,” guesses Tony. They talk for a bit about Tony’s old boss, Tom Rinaldi, and the new winery he’s running, called Provenance.

But Tony doesn’t get paid to reminisce about former wineries. He needs to subtly steer conversation back to Neal Family Vineyards without it seeming too much like a sales pitch.

“Yeah, now Duckhorn owns all its own vineyards, similar to us,” he segues. “We don’t make any wine from fruit we don’t grow.” Tony eyes open wide as he moves through his pitch, animated. He comes across genuine, perhaps because many of his responses and declarations begin with him saying, “I’ll be honest with you…”

Jim takes another sip. “That’s good wine,” he says. He orders three cases right there, then refers Tony to another store he owns up in La Canada.

“Have them taste it. Do you know the area?”

Tony doesn’t.

“It’s a very wealthy area. Houses start at one-point-two. It’s like Beverly Hills.” He talks as quickly as Tony does; the banter is rhythmic.

Tony explains that Neal will not be releasing a 2000 vintage and will instead sell the wine off to the bulk market.

“Wow,” says Jim. “Is this your only job? What are you going to do with all your time?”

Tony tells him he helps out Mark in the vineyards, plus they will have some Chardonnay and a little bit of Zin in 2000.

“Good for you. Sounds like a great deal for you. So what’s up with the 2002?”

“My boss thinks it’s like ’99 all over again,” Tony reports. “Uneven in the hills, but if you handpick, it’ll be fine.”

Jim takes five cases total, three for this store and the two that Tony has agreed to allocate to his La Canada store. After Jim walks away, Tony says the only problem is that the other store is known for being a “bad pay.” He’s not supposed to know this, but because Paige works with them at Spottswoode, he knows they settle their accounts very slowly.

Two other employees come over to try Tony’s wine. They swirl, taste, then discard the excess into the silver spitter, all the while bombarding Tony with questions about production, location, and price. Tony quotes the case price to one of the men, Kai, and gets no response.

“Is that good or bad,” Tony finally asks

“It’s great,” says Kai, looking up quickly. His hair is graying and he wears a mustache and a friendly demeanor.

Tony repeats his spiel about the importance of their winery’s location on Howell Mountain, Mark Neal’s passion for grape growing, and Neal Family Vineyards’ long-term focus on quality. As he speaks, the movements of his hands match the animation in his voice.

“So you just sold off the 2000?” Kai asks, shaking his head in disbelief. He holds the base of his glass with his thumb and forefinger, deftly spinning the wine into a miniature crimson whirlpool.

“No one on the marketing end said ‘Well, everyone else released some, shouldn’t we?’” asks the third guy, who is blond and wears a denim dress shirt.

Tony thinks for a couple seconds before admitting, “Yeah, the comptroller did.”

Everyone laughs.

“Works for me,” Kai announces. He smiles and firmly shakes Tony’s hand before heading back out onto the floor.

“We believe in long term relationships,” Tony tells Jim. “You’ll never not get your wine.” He invites them all to come by the winery for a tour the next time they’re in Napa Valley.

Out in the parking lot, Kai catches up with Tony again and tells him a story about a salesperson from another winery.

“You’d know the name if you heard it. He came in yesterday. I think he was the marketing director. He was charging too much for good wine and there are lots of other good wines for less. I thought, ‘Hey, these guys are established, probably paid off their vineyards a long time ago, so where’s the money going?’” He shakes his head. “If you want to sell us wine, $40-$55 is the limit.”

They discuss discounting, when stores undercut a winery’s suggested retail price. It’s been a problem with a couple of the Neal Family Vineyards accounts.

“I’ve got to go in and do damage control,” says Tony.

If someone across town drops prices on their Neal wine, it makes other stores look like they’re overcharging. Tony uses the “two chance rule.” The first time a store is caught discounting, they receive a warning. The second time, they lose their allocation.

“I’ve got to protect the other accounts, too. I’ll be honest with you, we’ll make mistakes along the way,” Tony tells Kai, “but we want to protect good accounts.”

Pulling out of the parking lot, Tony is happy. “Five cases. Not bad. That just paid for my $100 hotel room.”

It’s now 11:30 a.m. In Napa Valley the misty morning fog would already have dissipated, but the smog here still drapes the city. On the way to the next call, Tony calls his father-in-law, Roger Peterson. Tony will be staying with his parents-in-law tonight at their house in San Diego.

When Roger picks up, Tony coos his name, drawing out the first syllable.

“Roe-jhay!!!”

“Hey, Tone! Big Tone! How you doin?” answers Roger, performing his best mob henchman impersonation.

After a brief conversation, Roger and Tony put nine holes of golf on the docket for later this afternoon.

The next store on Tony’s schedule, Wally’s, has been reluctant to buy their wines, so Tony contemplates bailing. After quickly considering all the influencing factors - Mark not here, nice order in the bag from Red Carpet, I love golf - Tony cancels the appointment. He’ll more than make up for it with tomorrow’s nine calls. Plus, he can always swing by Wally’s on Friday morning on the way up to Santa Barbara, if he has time.

The next stop is Foothills Wine & Spirits in La Canada. Just as Tony enters the store, a phone rings and the manager, a guy of ample proportions wearing a lime-green polo shirt untucked over jeans, picks it up. Tony waits, hands flat on the tasting bar counter. Then, he paces the store. The floor space comprises one big open room neatly criss-crossed with rows of wine racks. Tony eyes a circular display tower stacked with trophy wines. The names are familiar; Araujo, Dalle Valle, Harlan.

When the manager gets off the phone, Tony explains to him that Jim from Red Carpet suggested he stop by.

“I don’t know if you’re interested or not,” starts Tony. He’s using the borderline sheepish, soft-sell approach.

“Sure,” says the manager.

“I can probably only get you two cases for now.”

The manager takes a taste. “Very nice fruit.”

He looks up at Tony. “You did a good job.”

Tony tells him how much it costs, then pauses.

“Price point’s good, too,” says the manager. “That’s the main thing.”

He mentions that despite the bad reviews coming in from the wine press, he’s seen a lot of good ‘98s from California.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Tony says, gesturing toward the bottle, “We need to sell this in order to pay off the winery.”

Tony knows wine buyers expect justification for high-priced wine. A recently constructed winery is a good excuse. If a winery has been around for a couple decades, it’s more than likely the land and winery construction costs have long since been paid off. Unless they consistently produce top quality wines, established wineries have a tough time justifying expensive prices, especially during down markets.

Tony hooks the manager, telling him he’s only offering wine to select accounts, stores he thinks will do a good job relating the Neal Family Vineyards story to their customers and stores that don’t rely on scores and press to sell wine.

“Every bottle here is a hand sell,” boasts the manager. He wants to include the ’99 Neal in a tasting of California Cabernets the store will be hosting in early September. Tony balks. Mark won’t release the ‘99s until October. If they give this store an advance supply and another store carrying the Neal label finds out, it could get ugly.

“I’ll ask my boss,” Tony says, smoothly avoiding use of the word “no.” “He’s picking this week and he gets a little antsy. But I’m having a nice long dinner with him later this week. I’ll work on it then.”

The manager compliments the Neal wines’ affordability again. “You’re falling into a price point that’s very do-able,” he starts. “We’ve got a pretty affluent customer base here, very ‘old money.’ Even shacks here start at $800,000. Lots of studio people. They’re all still doing okay in this economy, and they’re getting more and more into wine.”

Now, it’s the manager who’s selling Tony. To prove how good a market Southern California is, he tells a story about another winery that ended up redirecting most of its Northern California allocations to Southern California because people are still buying wine there, despite the economy.

Tony agrees it’s tough selling premium wines these days and that not listening to the market is sheer stupidity. As a result of what they’re hearing on the street, Neal Family Vineyards may even drop prices for the 2001 vintage if the economy doesn’t improve.

“Hey, that would be a great trend,” says the manager. “But someone has to have the balls to do it.”

“You’ll meet my boss someday,” Tony laughs. “That man doesn’t lack stones.”

Another hand shake, another good call completed.

Outside in his truck, shortly after noon, Tony calls Mark with an update. When Mark answers his cell phone, Tony hears dishes and silverware clanging in the background, the familiar sounds of Green Valley Café. Tony reports his good news so far and reminds Mark he has nine more calls scheduled for tomorrow.

Next, Tony listens to a voicemail from a woman at the cooler repair company who scolds him for not being at the winery today when her workers showed up. According to Tony, the workers were actually supposed to have been there at the beginning of the week.

Swearing, Tony returns the call.

“I said to come early in the week because that’s when I’d be there,” he explains when he gets the woman on the line. “Now, I’m in L.A.”

Then he provides her with a quick lesson on the exact definition of “early in the week.”

“Monday-Tuesday is early, Wednesday is middle of the week, and Thursday-Friday is end of the week.”

Even though Tony is 421 miles away, the winery refuses to let him go.

Meandering a confusing network of highways, Tony crosses the Los Angeles basin into Orange County then heads south toward San Diego. He points out Camp Pendleton, surprisingly dry and dusty considering its proximity to the ocean. Tony stares at a gathering of army trucks like a fascinated little kid.

“Dude, look at all that ordnance they’re unloading.”

Around 2:00 p.m., the monotony of highway driving is interrupted by a call from another winemaker looking for Tony’s advice on picking dates. He buys grapes from one of the vineyards Mark manages. He knows Tony buys grapes from an adjacent block in the same vineyard. He’s noticed Tony’s fruit is still hanging and he wonders why. Should he should let his block hang longer, too? Now, Tony is in an awkward position. He knows Mark prefers when his clients spread their picking dates evenly over the course of harvest time. Mark’s biggest nightmare would be a situation where everyone wants their grapes picked on the same date. But if Tony recommends picking now, and the other winemaker finds out later that he waited longer with his own grapes, Tony will look like an asshole. Trying to find a noncommittal middle ground, Tony hems and haws.

“I can’t really tell you what to do. I think you gotta do what’s in your gut, what you feel is right.”

The winemaker keeps pestering him, though, asking a series of technical questions about issues he’s having with the grapes. It’s not uncommon for winemakers to ask advice of their peers when they’re having problems. It is common, however, for winemakers flush with superlative scores from the wine press to forget to share credit with winemakers who gave them advice. In the end, Tony gives it anyway. He suggests the other winemaker take some samples down to E.T.S. for potassium testing and warns him about predatory wild fowl.

“The turkeys hammered you pretty good there last year.”

At his father-in-law’s country club, Tony walks around with a sense of purpose. The guys in the pro shop all know him by name, no doubt a result of Tony’s well-placed holiday wine gifts. Having already hit a bucket of balls on the range, Roger is ready to go. On the first tee, Tony revels at how Roger, not yet retired, somehow manages to play golf three times a week.

“Christ, who’s counting,” says Roger, waggling his driver over the ball.

A straw hat caps his six-foot-plus figure and shorts reveal wiry legs bursting with cord-like veins. Before each shot, he stands rigid and focused, with the intensity you’d expect in someone who once flew combat helicopters in Vietnam. But in between shots, when he and Tony pester each other, Roger’s rigidity breaks down. He laughs. And when he laughs, he releases a series of surprisingly high-pitched “Hee-hee-hees.”

As he walks off the third green, he starts singing aloud. “Another day, another fifty cents!”

“You got a raise?” asks Tony.

The course is hilly, bordered by million-dollar Spanish-style stucco mansions with red tile roofs. The views lead down canyons that funnel up crisp ocean breezes. Waiting to tee off on the fourth hole, they talk about an interview Paige had earlier in the day with The Henry Group, a wine distributor. The position would be in sales, working 100% on commission. Roger thinks it would be good for his daughter.

Sure, Roger and Tony get along now. But what did Roger think of Tony they first met?

“Goddamn Dago!” Tony answers for him.

“Guinea Wop Bastard!” Roger joins in, laughing.

They seem to have worked out thier differences.

At 5:45 p.m., in the golf club parking lot, Tony checks in with Mark one last time. They talk about the winemaker who called Tony earlier. Mark does not want him picking as late as Tony or even at the same time. Tony complains this puts him in an awkward position.

“You could give him the perfect recipe, and he still might fuck it up,” says Mark.

“Or,” says Tony, “he’ll screw it up and say to you, ‘your winemaker told me to pick.’”

Mark sounds tired. He fesses up to having had a tough day - a rare admission. The grapes have not been cooperating with him.

“In one cluster sample, there were two green berries next to two at 28 [Brix].”

“Well, that’s your lifeblood,” Tony commiserates. “Hopefully, someday, you can make the winery your lifeblood.”

“Yeah,” Mark responds lethargically. Even dreams of the future can’t excite him, now.

“Anything else?” Tony asks.

“No, I’m just getting beat up.”

“You’re just doing the right thing. It makes you look good to your other clients.”

Mark refuses to abandon the subject of the stubborn grapes. He starts referring to them in overly anthropomorphic terms, as if the fruit is willfully spiting him.

“There’s 28’s going off, dehydrated, mixed in with green berries!”

“Like Zinfandel,” offers Tony.

“Exactly like Zinfandel.” Mark thinks they’ll have to resort to either hand sorting or pulling off the green berries, two incredibly labor-intensive solutions. On top of all this, the clients want to know what’s going on.

“Well, I trust you,” says Tony.

“You know, you just want to wake up in the morning and hope it goes away,” laughs Mark. “Kind of like a bad date.”

Tony says he’ll call again tomorrow to let him know how all the sales calls went. “Maybe I’ll find you a nice present.”

“I tried to shoot something today,” Mark interjects, referring to the fact that hunting season has started. “Couldn’t even do that.”

The bond between these two men is complex, still solidifying. Sometimes Mark assumes the role of instructive big brother. Other times, Tony plays supportive little brother right back at him. Tony has also learned to push back when necessary, to manage his manager; important skills he’ll need to have on the road to his winemaking dreams.

Chapter Seventeen

Same Vineyard, Next Year

It’s the first Friday in September, 2002. At 6:30 A.M., skies are clear, no fog. It’s the kind of warm, dry weather vineyard managers hope for during harvest. Too much rain brings mud, which can slow down picking. Excessive moisture in the soil can seep up into the vines and dilute the grapes’ flavors. Fortunately, the myriad microclimates in Napa Valley ripen at different times allowing picking to take place at staggered intervals. Grape maturity peaks as early as August or as late as November, depending on vineyard location, with elevation, sun, soil, fog, and varietal type all playing their part. Each vineyard develops its own personality and winemakers memorize which plots produce the most distinctive flavors. The better they know their vineyards, the easier it is for winemakers during harvest. A little organization does a lot to reduce the craziness. Tony is up early to sample grapes in the vineyards. First, he’ll head up to Atlas Peak, then work his way over to Mt. Veeder, Oakville, and finally, Howell Mountain.

In downtown St. Helena, the Phillips 76 gas station across the street from Sunshine Market bustles with activity, mostly tricked-out Ford Mustangs or the aging Honda Accords and Toyota Corollas favored by the pickers. Not a lot of Mercedes or BMW’s on the road, yet.

The morning air is 48 degrees, chilly enough for Tony to layer a quilted down vest over his green chambray short-sleeve shirt. The cold never seems to affect his legs, because once again, he wears shorts. It’s no surprise that his beard is unshaven; lackluster grooming commonly signifies the arrival of harvest.

Despite his disheveled appearance, Tony is on top of things. Last year, he was thrown into harvest after only 20 days on the job at Neal Family Vineyards. He didn’t know Mark, the vineyards, or the equipment at the winery. This year, Tony has a solid system in place for getting fruit to the destemmer and an extra set of hands in Cyril, a young French intern hired for the duration of harvest.

In addition to having things squared away up at the winery, Tony is doing a good job selling wine.

Every target account on last week’s Southern California sales trip bought their allotment of wine. One store asked for ten cases. But Tony couldn’t say yes without first speaking to Mark, who now wants to be in the loop on sales matters. So much for the autonomy Tony expected. Working for Mark is tough and getting tougher.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, you work for Mark Neal, you must be an asshole, too.”

Now that he’s been with Neal Family Vineayards for over a year, Tony realizes there is another side to Mark’s personality. But very few people know about his private persona as a devoted family man. His public reputation precedes him.

“The problem is, most people are willing to give others a second chance. But Mark will go for someone’s throat the minute they screw him over. You cannot believe the stones he’s got, the things he’ll say. Sometimes, I’m like, how do you come up with that? It’s beautiful. He’s the kind of bully who kicks sand at you on the beach and if you don’t kick sand back, he’ll run you right over.”

In Tony’s opinion, Mark should get more involved in sales by joining him on more sales calls.

“He needs to know the wine business. He needs to get down to L.A. You can’t just sit here on this white ivory castle in Napa Valley and think you know the business – you don’t.”

At 7:15 a.m., Tony drives past the Silverado golf community with its luxury homes and tennis courts. Hot air balloons hover over the valley, catching the morning thermals. He continues upward past familiar boulder-strewn fields. Around a hairpin turn, the low morning sun blinds Tony to a stop. “Whoa,” he says, slamming on the brakes in the glare.

Arriving at the Second Chance Vineyard, Tony heads straight for a plot of young vines at the back edge of the property. Hanging to the vine in small, tight, indigo clusters, the fruit looks more like blueberries than grapes. Tony plucks one and pops it into his mouth. It tastes like a sugary string bean, very vegetal. “No reason to sample here,” says Tony. “They might be ready by the end of the year.”

This is Tony’s first sample of the vineyard this year. He looks to Second Chance for the cherry, blackberry flavors it produces when ripe.

“It’s still early in the season, but it’s good to get a baseline of the vineyards while I still have time before crush.”

From a safe distance, a wary, twitching rabbit watches Tony work. Besides birds chirping, the only other sound is that of Tony’s boots scraping through the cocoa powder dust between rows. White starch on some of the leaves is evidence of recent spraying against mildew. Tony cuts wide around a patch of star thistle, a prickly, poisonous weed.

In a row to the left of the driveway, Tony reports one side looks a little green and the other side is “way behind.” He moves quickly through the rows, trailing his hand against the grapes, leaving empty stems where he passes. Returning to his truck, Tony pulls out an old straw hat.

“Gotta have a cool Tony hat for sampling,” he announces. The drawstrings hang over his ears, but he pulls off the look with confidence. He’s comfortable doing his own thing.

“I don’t have a lot of friends. I’m different. People here don’t understand why I want to sit and watch football.”

He heads uphill, behind the house, to inspect another section of vineyard. There, water dribbles steadily from the drip irrigation system onto the fist-sized clumps of dirt in the rocky, arid soil. Vines that prosper in these condition grow grapes that are chock full of flavor. In fact, out of all the grape sources in the Neal Family Vineyards arsenal, Second Chance produces the biggest, boldest, “monster” Cabernets.

Back on the other side of the driveway, the vines have greener, heavier canopies the closer they are to the pond in the middle. The reeds at water’s edge are lush, not thatchy yellow like the surrounding hillsides. Interrupted by Tony’s meanderings, a covey of quails takes flight with a thundering of wings. Tony barely notices them, focusing his gaze on the upper reaches of the vineyard. He thinks the northeast corner of the shelf looks much better this year. He heads over to pick some samples. Tasting a grape, he guesses the sugar level is 22 degrees Brix. He knows it’s not 23, because he’s not picking up enough acids. Back at the truck, he checks the juice with his refractometer. It reads 21.8. This guy’s good.

Leaving the vineyard, Tony checks voicemail messages. It’s another winemaker he knows, over at Turley Cellars, complaining about how busy he is.

“Like you’re the only one working hard,” Tony snorts. He hates that woe-is-me-during-harvest attitude.

“Just learn how to do cellar work quickly. Have hoses coiled near the tanks, ready to click on, and eat while you work.”

Heading back down Atlas Peak to the valley, around 8:50, Tony checks in with Mark.

“Good morning, Mark, how was frost?”

“Fucked up. It’s 49 degrees now in Pope Valley.”

Tony tells Mark they need to spend some time going through rows because some old vines need to be ripped out. He’s venturing into Mark’s territory, now.

“They’re all green. It just looks bad,” Tony says.

“Any mildew scars?” asks Mark.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t see much.”

“I had the wind machines on today,” reports Mark. “Almost put the sprinklers on.”

“Can you imagine the mess that would have been?” laughs Tony. “It’s going to be an interesting year.”

Mark agrees, “It’s getting more interesting the further we go.”

“Anything else?” asks Tony.

“Exciting? Nothing. I’m exhausted.”

They make plans to play golf on Sunday. But planning golf is one thing. Actually getting Mark to perform a leisure activity during harvest is another. Soon, they’re back to talking business.

“There’s no more than six or seven tons at Second Chance, if you thin it,” says Tony.

He also thinks the vineyard won’t ripen uniformly, making picking tough.

“We’re gonna have to mark it off, ½ a row here, ½ a row there.”

“I know, I just dropped some Zin. The grapes were still pink. I said fuck it, drop it.”

They talk about brittle stems, which Mark has never seen in Cabernet before. It’s ironic. No matter how well organized you are, no matter how well you know your vineyards, the grapes can still throw you for a loop.

Tony stares at the golf course as he drives by the Silverado Country Club. “I’m definitely playing golf this afternoon,” he announces. It’s a sign of Tony’s confidence in his job. Last year, he never even though of breaking out the clubs during harvest. This year is a different story. Despite the weird conditions affecting some of his grapes, Tony exudes a sense of calm. The one thing he can’t control is nature, so why worry about it? With winery operations running smoothly and the 1999 Cabernet moving out the door quickly, he’s pretty close to hitting harvest on cruise control.

Next stop is the Wyman-Smith Vineyard, located on the western edge of the city of Napa in the Mt. Veeder appellation. Because it gets hit first with the Pacific fog and ocean breezes, Mt. Veeder is one of the coolest regions in the Napa Valley. The owner of property, who happens to be Mark’s lawyer, relies on revenue from selling grapes to help pay the mortgage. Wyman-Smith is a young vineyard, in its second year of growth, situated on a gently sloping hillside next to a pleasant ranch style house. Tony likes the vineyard’s red fruit qualities (blackberry, raspberry, etc.) which add structure to his Napa Valley Cabernet blend. Next year, Tony thinks Wyman may be able to stand on its own as a single vineyard designate.

Fingering the grapes, he guesses the brix is 22.5. The vines look great, thanks to Mark’s crews. He puts some samples in a baggy.

“Enrique did a really good job here,” says Tony.

With nothing to worry about, he stops to pick up a tennis ball, then a piece of old PVC pipe, and plays fetch with a pair of happy-go-lucky Golden Retrievers running around the property.

“This is really looking good…Great crop…I’m happy with it.”

He can’t get over how great the fruit looks. Still a month away from getting picked, the vineyard is right on track. The grapes hang neatly in a straight line along the trellis wire, one cluster per shoot, just the way they should.

“Perfect,” says Tony. “I don’t need to do anything in this vineyard. It looks phenomenal. Enrique’s doing a hell of a job, here.”

At 10:00, Tony checks back in with Mark, lauding the crews’ efforts at Wyman-Smith.

“Hey, give Enrique a big hug and kiss for me.”

He heads up Route 29, listening to the last half hour of The Howard Stern Show. Just before the Robert Mondavi Winery, he points out a vineyard owned by one of the valley’s most successful grape growers. One after another, purple bunches hang low from the vines, closely clustered to maximize the fruit tonnage per acre. Maybe too clustered for Tony.

“Hey,” Tony yells out his window, “don’t be afraid to hang some fruit!”

In Rutherford, he stops by the Wykoff Vineyard.

“Well balanced and tasty,” he announces. After sampling a grape, Tony spits it out to avoid “berry belly,” a sour stomach condition brought on by excessive consumption of acidic fruits.

Tony’s grape carcass splats on the ground amidst a collection of dirt clumps ranging in size from fists to footballs. The brittle chunks give way unpredictably under foot, making it hard to walk straight and easy to roll an ankle. Although the Wykoff vineyard occupies land that was once an ancient river bottom, the soil is more clay than alluvial silt.

Tony guesses the fruit’s at 22.8. He points to some seeds he spit into the sample baggie.

“See how green they are? They’re a long way off.”

No matter the sugar level, these grapes are still not ripe enough to make good wine.

Looking around the vineyard, he notices there is not as much fruit hanging this year. A good crop here would be seven tons an acre, but it looks like they’ll be lucky to see 4 ½ tons. On a positive note, Wykoff is showing some unified ripeness, no green berries mixed in with purple like they’re seeing on the Howell Mountain properties. Part of the problem up there has been moody weather. Last week, temperatures yo-yoed from 35 degrees to 105 degrees over a three-day period. If it’s true what winemakers say, that struggling is good for the grapes, 2002 is shaping up to be a banner year.

After a quick stop at the winery to drop off his earlier samples, Tony heads over to east-facing slopes of Howell Mountain to 1540 Vineyard, so named for its street number on Deer Park Road. Above the vineyard is a ridge crest populated by a dense grove of stately pines. Views sweep to the east over the relatively undeveloped Pope Valley. Sinuous, rolling hills and oak-lined valleys wander down toward the Central Valley plains. Despite its 1,365-foot elevation, the vineyard falls a mere thirty feet outside the Howell Mountain appellation.

Tony drives the perimeter of the vineyard engaged in four-wheel drive to deal with the severe pitches. The vines themselves occupy terraced benches cut into a steep hillside. The soil is crumbly, chalky, tufa deriving from prehistoric volcanic ash.

“It made good wine last year, but was really sparse,” says Tony. “It’ll be better this year.”

The air smells pleasant, of dry grass and hay. Sun shines all day long up here, with no fog breaks, causing fruit to ripen earlier than on the valley floor. Last week, the grapes had already hit 26.1 Brix. Now, checking some juice with his refractometer, Tony reports a reading of 26.3

“The sugar’s not going anywhere,” he says.

The fruit is almost ready to pick, but the seeds are still a little green. He notes evidence of turkey damage in the vineyard and the appearance of yellow leaves in the fruiting zones. Down low on the property, a sample comes in at 25.6 Brix, a bit further behind in ripeness than the sections higher up. Blending lower with upper, Tony figures he’ll get something good. If 1540 produces more fruit next year, Tony wants to pick each section separately to give him an even greater selection of vineyard sources for the Napa Valley Cabernet.

Around noon, Tony calls Mark, who’s already seated at Green Valley Café.

“Meet for lunch in fifteen?” asks Tony.

“You’re at 1540? Better hurry up!” Mark answers, skeptical that Tony can cover the distance in such a short amount of time.

At 12:30, finally seated at the restaurant, Tony gazes out the front window at traffic. Trucks full of picking bins rumble down Main Street. A sign of harvest’s arrival, there seem to be more industrial vehicles on the roads than rental Mustangs.

“I like it the other way around,” says Tony. “I want the money here.”

In a year’s time, Tony has hit his stride as a winemaker. He has made the winery organized and efficient and he knows the vineyards better than ever. He’s been working hardest at learning the business aspects of his job. The recent spate of successful sales calls has built up Tony’s confidence, which in turn makes Mark’s increasing involvement in sales even more frustrating. Mark is treating his winemaker like an overgrown crop, thinning Tony’s business responsibilities in order to make him concentrate on winemaking. Hopefully, with respect to managing Tony, Mark will apply some of the vineyard management principles he knows so well. While a certain amount of struggle is good for a vine, too much stress can destroy it.

Chapter Eighteen

Harvesting Emotions

After October comes and goes, crush draws slowly to a close. Tony has been with Neal Family Vineyards for over a year, now. He turned thirty in late September, surrounded by friends and family at a Mexican fiesta put on by his wife. Most of the 2002 crop is off the vines, either fermenting in tanks or beginning their hibernations in toasty oak. Sporadic grape loads still trickle in, but nothing like the frenzy during September and October. So far, the second harvest is passing more smoothly than his first.

Early in the morning on the first Monday in November, low misty clouds hang over the valley, nicking the top of the Mayacamas range to the west while engulfing the crests of the Vacas to the east. Atop Howell Mountain, the Neal winery is completely socked in, enveloped by a raw, chest-tightening chill. Parked out front is Tony’s Explorer, its dusty exterior a comment upon the priorities of its winemaking owner. Car washes can wait, but ripe grapes can’t. Tony’s choice of clothing changes, too, as he finally succumbs to the realities of another season’s turn. Gone are shorts and vests, replaced by jeans and a golf pullover. In honor of San Francisco winning another World Series game the night prior, Tony dutifully sports his dirty, grape-stained, formerly-white Giants baseball hat.

Cyril, the French intern, stands on a ladder doing pumpovers and getting equipment ready for today’s fruit. This is his last day at the winery. Tomorrow, he returns to France for another year of college.

Later today, Paige Biagi will have what is supposed to be her final interview for a sales & marketing job at the Kuleto winery. Tony is excited for her, but also nervous and distracted. He really wants her to get the job.

Tomorrow, it is supposed to rain, so Tony has scheduled delivery of eight tons of Zinfandel today. If he leaves the grapes hanging in the rain, he risks diluting the flavors. Today’s load, by the way, is not destined for the Neal Family Vineyards label. Without a 2000 Cabernet, cash flow is tight, so Mark cut a side deal with another winery owner. He agreed to buy some of Mark’s excess Zinfandel grapes with the caveat that they be custom-crushed at the Neal winery. Here it is the end of crush, and the fruit Tony works on isn’t even his own. It’ll be at least two weeks before he can singularly focus on the Neal Family Vineyards wine. He’s in a sour mood, and the fact that the other winery owner isn’t interested enough to observe the actual crush makes it worse.

“The best part is watching it happen every year,” vents Tony. “The true enjoyment is making the product, working the long hours. There are too many people who just treat it like a business. For them, it’s ‘another 10-percent margin and I’m doing okay.’ But they’re missing what it’s all about.”

He walks over and points out a piece of paper tacked to the wall. It’s a fax from the other winery owner outlining the winemaking procedures Tony is supposed to follow as he moves the client’s grapes from crush through fermentation. The detailed five-day script maps out precise pumpover schedules and fermenting regimens, each task performed more frequently than Tony would do himself. With so many winemaking touchpoints, the other winery owner’s technique is an extreme example of the “hands on” approach.

“You know how many times we’ll see him up at the winery?” asks Tony. He answers his own question by making a zero sign with his thumb and forefingers. “Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a great guy, but…”

He looks back over the fax again and laughs. He finds it funny when people try to be regimented with a product so dependent on the grace and whims of Mother Nature.

“It’s like they think nothing changes along the way.”

His critiques today aren’t limited to winemakers with control issues. Winemakers on the other end of the spectrum, those professing minimal human intervention, also make him angry.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, we do all of our wine organic.’ But it’s really all about business and marketing for them. That’s why they do it. I mean, just make wine and shut up.”

After spending the past year following Tony, I know that this dark mood, oozing bitterness, is an anomoly.

“Oh, I’ve just been thinking about things today, that’s all,” he apologizes. “It’s not official yet, but Liparita might be going out of business. They find out next week. It sucks because they’re good people. A lot’s changing in the industry these days. Even for us at Neal, it’ll be sink or swim come 2003, 2004.”

Kindled by the subject of Liparita, Tony’s discontent mushrooms. He shifts the target of his tirade to life in Napa Valley.

“There’s no camaraderie here anymore. Yeah, we’re all friends, but there’s so many factions. Paige was getting her nails done the other day, and this woman who totally knows her didn’t even say hi. I don’t know. It’s sad.”

He looks over at Cyril, then continues.

“In France, everyone’s friends. It’s more rural. Here, we’re so damn close to San Francisco it changes things. Theoretically, this should be a gated community with a golf course and a mall on the valley floor.”

“C’mon,” he scoffs. “It’s all over!”

He turns away, shaking his head.

“This is an industry based on an art form, winemaking, but to buy assets in the valley you need money, either yours or investors.’”

He pauses.

“Who knows,” he says, absently picking dried grapes off his crimson-stained palms.

He looks around.

There’s work to do.

“It is what it is,” he mutters.

While moving hoses around the winery floor, he starts talking politics. Although he’s not that personally involved, Tony keeps an ear to the ground on issues like land use, where environmentalists are locked in battle with vineyard owners over hillside development. The property owners feel they have a right to grow grapes on their land, while environmentalists think planting vineyards on hillsides is akin to scalping the landscape.

“The problem with the people fighting on either side is that they’re either so far left or so far right. Then, there are those people who say one thing and then do another. The Araujos [producers of one of the most expensive cult wines] are a perfect example.

Sure, they’re doing biodynamic farming now, but they made their money earlier by stripping the land and putting up starter mansions in Santa Barbara. They made their fortune raping and pillaging the countryside. I find it funny that they say we have to go biodynamic, now.”

Tony marches off to another part of the winery, leaving me with Cyril, the intern. Asked what he thinks is the biggest difference between Bordeaux wine country and Napa Valley, Cyril answers without deliberation. “Everything is so expensive here. The only thing I find cheap is Levi’s.”

Tony yells down from his office, “Hey Cyril, whose croissant is this?” His eyes are fixed on a waxed paper bakery bag.

“It’s yours,” comes the much anticipated reply.

“Ah ha!” Tony cheers, reaching his hand into the bag like a bear paw into a honey pot. He settles back and checks his messages. One of them is the other winery owner asking for an update on his grapes. But Tony has no update to give. The grapes are late.

He surfs the web. First stop, the discussion boards on eRobert Parker. Picking through the postings, he points out how many of them are bashing California wines. He notices several entries about Pinot Noir.

“I gotta talk to Mark,” says Tony. “I want to make my own wine next year, some pinot. Just two tons worth. I don’t want to trip the light fantastic or anything, but if Paige gets this job, maybe I could buy some grapes…”

He checks up on his online Fantasy Football team, “Colon Blow,” named during one of Tony’s more intense Beevis & Butthead moods. Right now, the stats put him about 7,000th out of 16,000 total players in the league.

“Not bad, considering some of these guys have no lives outside this stuff.”

He points to the name of one team, “Sith Lords 7,” and laughs.

“I don’t care if I win, I just can’t lose to a team named after a Star Wars character.”

While Tony waits for the grapes, a forty-something banker from Oakland arrives to pick up some wine he ordered and to take a tour of the new winery. He brought along his mother, who looks to be in her sixties. Since Tony expects the fruit to arrive at any moment, he performs an express version of the winery tour. Standing in the front foyer, sweeping his hand toward the back caves, he humbly introduces the winery. “Nothing fancy, sorry. We don’t have a nickelodeon player or anything like that. Just barrels and stuff.”

They taste some Chardonnay at the bar and then move into the caves for some barrel samples. The first batch Tony offers them is the 2002 Atlas Peak Cabernet, a single vineyard designate.

“We’re only making 250 cases of this,” he explains. “They’re 15-year old vines, 1-¼ tons per acre. We’ll use this as a reward for our best customers.”

Cyril walks in to tell Tony the truck has arrived with the grapes.

“You want to unload the grapes?” Tony asks him.

“Uh, Okay.”

“You don’t seem that excited. I’m letting you unload the truck.” Tony smiles. He’s having fun with Cyril. Like Tom Sawyer convincing Huck Finn to whitewash a fence, Tony tries to make the task sound more fun than it is.

“Yeah!” fakes Cyril as he walks off.

Tony returns to the subject that keeps him going when everything else is a bother.

“Zinfandel is great - a tannic, inky, barbecue wine. But we really want to focus on Cabernet and Chardonnay.”

Talking about wine, Tony’s mood improves.

“We’ll probably let 30-40% of our wine go,” he explains. “Sell it off to bulk because it’s not good enough. We want to get to the quality level of Araujo, Harlan, etc., but offer it for a better price. I mean, it’s tough to repeat what they’ve done. Every winery is different, but we’ll see how it goes.”

Gradually his earlier funk dissipates. Discussing the wines he’s making, he projects his voice clearly and in it, you hear the passion. He’s not making this stuff up.

The guests listen, nodding their heads. They try some Petit Syrah, which will be blended into the Zinfandel to add backbone and color to the fruity varietal.

“This is grape juice,” the banker’s mother decides after a taste.

“Actually,” Tony corrects her gently, “it’s brand new wine. Just fermented.

Staring at the inky liquid, she jokes, “It’s like something you’d polish your shoes with.”

Tony chuckles and agrees, “This is pure motor oil, black as night.” He loves when people say what they think and don’t try to be pretentious.

Back at the tasting bar, the banker asks which local restaurants carry the Neal wines. The names roll off Tony’s tongue with confidence.

“Let me see…Tra Vigne, Mustard’s, Auberge, and Martini House are all carrying it. Roux wants to try some, too.”

As they taste the ’99 Cabernet, the banker admits some aimlessness in his wine preferences.

“I’ve got A.D.D. when it comes to wine. I like to try a lot of different ones.”

“Well,” says Tony, “it’s a perfect time to do that. There are so many wines out there. Some will do well, some won’t make it. It’s a debt business. If you don’t have assets to balance debt, you’re in trouble. Luckily, Mark, the owner here, has lots of assets with his other company.”

Speaking banker’s language, he tailors his message to the audience.

A couple minutes later, Mark arrives and introduces himself. The banker ends up buying his mother a six-pack of the Chardonnay in addition to the case of ’99 Cabernet he came to pick up. Tony apologizes about having to leave so abruptly, but the grapes are here. Mark thanks the guests and offers to walk them out.

On the pad, the grapes are crushed easily and quickly as Tony maneuvers the forklift back and forth with well-practiced precision and efficiency. It’s now 11:30. The sun struggles to dissipate the haze. It’s just one of those days when the sun has to work harder to burn through. And it’s one of those days when Tony’s passion has to work a lot harder to burn through. Today, his patience was running on fumes. But somewhere in the back of his head is a little voice, an embodiment of the passion within, that interrupts dark thoughts of bitterness and self-doubt and tells Tony Biagi to just shut up and make wine.

There is an ebb and flow to life in Napa Valley, consistent and predictable. Grapes come in and wine goes out. Wineries change and so do the people inhabiting them. There will always be those who predict the demise of Napa Valley, including Tony himself, sometimes. At the same time, there will always be low-key, hard-working people willing to hunker down and do what they have to do. The world doesn’t always give us what we want and it rarely runs according to our plans. Things change. People adapt. It is what it is. Success in Napa Valley without money is possible, but achieving it demands a unique combination of perseverance, passion, patience, and adaptability. Even then, it’s certainly not guaranteed. But there are still those, like Tony Biagi, who are willing to try.

Chapter Nineteen

Winter Break

My original plan was to observe a year in the life of a winemaker as he practiced his craft from grape to glass. Twelve months have come and gone, but something is missing from my story.

An ending.

Tony made it through a year at Neal Family Vineyards, but he doesn’t seem all that happy. I pay another visit to the winery three months later, to check in with Tony and see how things are going. I feel like there is some unfinished business. Plus, I miss Napa Valley.

It’s early February. The morning air is crisp, visibility clear. The sky over Napa Valley rolls away in seamless striations of blue, morphing from deep indigo overhead to pale robin’s egg atop the distant upvalley ridgelines. South of Napa, the undulating hills of Carneros take the form of giant beasts slumbering under a heavy green blanket. In the foothills above the Silverado Trail to the west, dark shadows obscure deep canyon nooks. On the roadsides, bare oak trees stand at attention like stick figure sentinels. In the vineyards, mustard flowers and field grass alternate lemon/lime between vine rows. The vines themselves are sealed tight in dormancy, naked of buds and leaves, weathering the winter in a state of harnessed fertility and power at rest. But the vineyards aren’t the only places feeling momentum. A little winery called Neal Family Vineyards is finally getting noticed.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently delivered some great P.R - albeit circuitously – in an article about “shelf talkers,” those hand-written tasting notes hung underneath bottles on wine store shelves. The investigative piece, which revealed that many of the shelf-talkers are actually written not by store employees but by the winery’s own salespeople, featured a photograph of two bottles side-by-side, one of which is the 1999 Neal Family Cabernet. The other bottle has a winery-supplied shelf-talker underneath it, while the Neal bottle boasts a hand-written review from the owner of the store. There is no actual mention of Neal Family Vineyards in the body of the article, but the publicity they received from the photograph was priceless. The owner’s review, clearly legible to Chronicle readers, described the Neal Cabernet as “a glorious, mouthfilling, full-bodied rich wine. Reminds me of Bryant Family at nearly 1/10th the price.” To legions of next-big-thing, cult wine treasure hunters, the message is loud and clear. Keep an eye out for Neal Family Vineyards.

In late December, Red Carpet Wine & Spirits, the large Los Angeles wine retailer Tony visited back in August, released its “Top 100 Wines for 2002.” The 1999 Neal Cabernet was #1 on the list. The review reads:

We taste 3,000 wines a year, and this is hands down my pick as best new find…This Cab is deep in color with loads of black currant, cedar and spice. A tremendous wine for the price!

Asked about the ranking, Mark smiles.

“Yeah, did you see that? Now, Tony says he’s the winemaker. Before, he didn’t want anything to do with the ’99.”

Tony didn’t get to work on the wine until the very end, when he, in his own words, saved the vintage. If it’s true that Tony’s efforts were primarily spent making the wine drinkable, he’s done a commendable job. He’s done even better selling it, creating solid relationships with accounts that are now salivating in anticipation of the 2001 release, the vintage that will mark’s Tony’s grand entrance as a head winemaker.

Expectations are high.

Things are going well for the other half of the Biagi family, too. After a couple of frustrating months searching for a job, Paige has landed a plum position in sales and marketing with Dalla Valle, one of the premier cult wineries in Napa Valley. It is a small operation, so she works directly with the owner. The work is challenging and interesting, and Paige gets treated well.

Up at the Neal winery this morning, Tony works alone, topping off barrels. The caves are quiet. Soon, the scraping sound of a keg being dragged across the concrete floor, the rhythmic throb of the mobile pump, and the acid jazz grooving from Tony’s boombox blend together in a meditative symphony. It’s been a couple months since I’ve been up here, and the familiar, comfortable smell of the place stops me in my tracks. Instinctively, I take a deeper breath to give myself a bigger dose of the Cabernet-marinated, oaken air.

This time of year being slowest in terms of winemaking duties, Tony would normally be hitting the road calling on accounts. Instead, Tony explains, Mark has gotten more involved in sales. He has even started delivering wine to some key accounts, usurping one of Tony’s former responsibilities and favorite parts of the job. Most of the marketing details have been handed over to Mark Van Gorder, Mark Neal’s right hand man for business affairs at Jack Neal & Son. These changes took effect soon after harvest, just as the ’99 Cabernet was being released. Essentially, Tony has been stripped of the General Manager responsibilities that had attracted him to Neal Family Vineyards in the first place. If he had simply wanted to be a winemaker, he could have gone any number of places, based on his success at Duckhorn.

“I wanted the job description written up in a contract, but Mark said he didn’t work that way. He said he worked on handshakes,” Tony says, shaking his head and frowning.

“Well, now he’s gone back on his handshake. I’ll never do that again.”

Despite working countless hours and driving thousands of miles building bulletproof relationships with target accounts, Tony won’t enjoy the fruits of his labor. He thinks it’s fine for Mark to be more involved in sales, considering he is the owner of the winery. But in Tony’s opinion, Mark doesn’t know what he’s getting into.

“300 cases practically sell themselves,” says Tony. “When production hits 1,500 cases in 2001, it’ll be a different story.”

Ironically, after Tony managed to sell what was essentially someone else’s wine with the 1998 and 1999 releases, he will not have the opportunity to pitch his own first vintage. He knows the story behind the label better than anyone, but he won’t be able to tell it. The 2001 Cabernet, a wine that could solidify his reputation as a winemaker, will be sold by someone else while Tony is left behind at the winery.

If things were amiss at the winery, if the wines were being neglected while he was on the road, Tony might understand. But in Tony’s opinion, that’s not the case. He thought he had everything under control at the winery.

Ranting, he loses focus and overfills a barrel. Swearing, he rubs the spilt wine into the barrel with a towel.

Would he ever consider leaving Neal Family Vineyards?

He stops wiping and looks up.

“Right now, I’m not really looking,” he responds. “But yeah, I would.”

Luckily, passion is portable. If he does move on, another winery will benefit from Tony’s love for the game.

In the year I spent chronicling the adventures at Neal Family Vineyards, I wanted to believe the team of Mark and Tony represented something more than the average boss-employee relationship. But when you put your name on a bottle, like Mark has, and you live in a place where your reputation means everything, like Napa Valley, you do whatever it takes to protect your kingdom. On the other hand, when you’re confident in your talents, like Tony, and you’ve been promised certain things that have since been taken away, the inclination is to hold firm, on principle. Both sides wants recognition. The story is now about two strong-willed individuals, good at what they do, butting heads. And at this winery, there may not be a middle ground.

First thing in the morning on Monday, February 24th, Tony walks into Mark’s office.

“I’ve been given an offer I can’t refuse,” he tells Mark, “so I need to talk to you about it.”

He tells Mark he has accepted the head winemaking job at Plumpjack, a boutique winery in Oakville that counts Gordon Getty among its founders.

Mark is speechless. Then, momentary shock turns to anger.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he spits back. “You’ve already made up your mind.”

On February 26th, up at the Neal winery, Tony finishes filtering the 2001 Chardonnay. Friday it will be bottled and Tony’s work here will be done. He is excited about his new job, but lowers his voice when he talks about it.

He admits to blind-siding Mark somewhat with his decision, but claims the opportunity at Plumpjack was just too great to pass up. It’s a 10,000 case per year facility with solid financials run by talented people.

“If I do this,” he says of the job change, “at least it’s me running my career into the ground.”

The position at the new winery is limited to winemaking, with no general manager responsibilities. Now, it seems having control over sales and marketing isn’t as important to Tony.

“The reason I wanted to run marketing at Neal was because I needed to. Mark knows how to grow grapes, and he does it well. Mark doesn’t have experience marketing wine.”

One lesson Tony learned from his experience at Neal Family Vineyards is never to take a job without a written contract. While doing business with a handshake seemed honorable enough when he agreed to come and work for Mark a year and a half ago, now it seems overly naïve. The “old school” way of doing things in Napa Valley may be quaint history for Tony’s generation. When he got out of college in the early 1990’s, the job market was dismal. Friends of Tony’s lucky enough to land high tech jobs down in San Francisco and Silicon Valley have now been forced to job-hop constantly in order to stay one step ahead of layoffs and plummeting stock prices. Six months ago, Tony saw his wife get laid off, ostensibly because she wasn’t a member of the winery’s founding family. It’s easy to see why Tony, after witnessing all this, now believes the only person he can really trust with his career is himself.

It’s difficult to watch someone young and optimistic like Tony become jaded. But it’s understandable. One of the things he learned from Mark Neal is that even in this alleged American paradise called Napa Valley, you need to build up your defenses and cover your ass. Increased corporate ownership of the valley’s wineries and land has created a more competitive, survival-of-the-fittest mentality. For Tony, it comes down to doing whatever it takes to make it in Napa Valley. With the new job, he’s well on his way.

“It’s a better lifestyle for me and Paige.”

As a first-career winemaker, Tony may never save enough to start his own winery. But in his new position at Plumpjack, he’ll be able to live the life of someone with far greater means, enjoying enviable perks like free dinners at the Plumpjack restaurants in San Francisco and complimentary rooms at the Plumpjack Inn on the slopes of Squaw Valley.

“As long as I don’t abuse it, everything’s free.”

Driving along with Mark a week later while he criss-crosses the valley monitoring his pruning crews, I hear a different story, one about Tony wanting control over too many aspects of the winery.

“I like to run things in a team way, where everyone has their own skills and areas of expertise. That’s why, at Jack Neal & Son, I rely on a team of people who are experts in their fields. No one person can do everything. You need to know how to work together with people. I think Tony’s one helluva winemaker. But I don’t want my facility run by one person. I can’t hand it over to one person. Tony wanted full control over everything. That’s fine, but I just can’t offer that. I think that would be great if he owned the winery and paid the bills”

What about Tony’s General Manager duties being stripped away?

“I didn’t take over sales, just the allocations,” Mark responds, maintaining he wanted to spread out the distribution of the ’99 Cabernet to retail accounts over a longer period of time, whereas Tony wanted to sell it all out the first month after release. Mark wanted to stretch the allocations over a two-year period until the 2001 release to fill the void created by the non-existent 2000 vintage. Tony thought selling out the ‘99s immediately would be a great way to create demand through scarcity (“If it sells out, it must be good!”). It turns out Mark ended up selling out only a few months after release, anyway. Middle ground was found, but not in time.

Although Mark admits to hand-delivering wine to an account, he claims he was just trying to help.

“It was a Saturday. Someone called for their wine, and I knew Tony was training for a bike race. So, when I didn’t get him on his cell phone, I went ahead and did it. But I tried his cell phone first.”

What Mark really doesn’t understand is why Tony would ever want to deal with the tedious paperwork involved in the administrative tasks of marketing and accounting in the first place.

“It’s all about the bottle. Let’s worry about the wine first. I didn’t want to ever look back and think we took our eye off that. He should let other people worry about the paperwork. Tony was a great fit style-wise. He had full control over getting everything to the bottle. But I looked at how much work he was already doing and didn’t think he could crank it up to 5,000 cases with all the administrative stuff. I wanted to help out.”

Pulling into Grgich Hills winery, Mark drives over to the edge of the vineyard, grabs some pruning shears from under the passenger seat, and hops out of the truck. With a deft snip, he clips off a swaying shoot, leaving a perfect, fresh cut tight to the vine.

“If I could do all this stuff myself,” he gestures across the vineyard, “I wouldn’t need 450 people working for me. I like to work with teams, hear what they have to say, then make my decision. Tony doesn’t want to listen. He wants to do it his way. I’m strong willed, but at least I know it. That’s why I have all these other people around.”

He thinks Tony would’ve done just fine staying at Neal Family Vineyards, and still doesn’t agree with his decision.

“Tony and Paige are great friends,” he says. “But if Tony just wanted to be winemaker like he is at Plumpjack, he could’ve done it here.”

Hearing his cell phone ring, Mark jumps back into the truck. It’s a guy looking to taste some Neal wines later this afternoon. As always, Mark has an extremely busy day ahead of him. He is apologetic as he struggles to fit the potential customer into his crazy schedule.

“Basically,” Mark explains to the caller, “we’re a one man show.”

Chapter Twenty

Passion is Portable

On a morning in late March, low clouds linger over the Mayacamas like smoke from a forest fire. Prevailing coastal winds push the air eastward, slowly scraping the clouds’ dark, gray underbellies over the high ridgelines, ripping open slices of powder-blue sky over Napa Valley. Down on the valley floor, fresh green leaves sprout at even intervals on the vine cordons, the tiny verdant outgrowths kicking off another chapter in the vines’ annual story of renewal. The vines aren’t the only ones starting over. In Oakville, halfway between Calistoga and Napa, Tony Biagi has a new job at the PlumpJack Winery. No longer relegated to the outer flanks of wine country, Tony is now making wine a stone’s throw away from the geographic center of Napa Valley.

PlumpJack is located at the eastern end of the Oakville Cross right where the flat, oak-lined straightaway rolls into an S-curve. On the north side of the street, immaculately constructed stone walls line the beginning of the driveway, protecting rows of olive trees belonging to the neighboring Eden Roc property. Numerous low shrubs, tightly manicured into perfect spheres, break up the monotony of the hardscape. From the main road, the driveway jigs and jags northward following vineyard boundaries. Off to the right in the distance, emerald-green slopes scattered with darker evergreens rise above the Silverado Trail.

The parking lot is nondescript, an unpaved rectangle surrounded by vineyards, surprising for a winery founded with Getty family money, A pathway lined with olive trees leads into a small courtyard between the winery and the tasting room. Wheat-colored pea gravel crunches underfoot. Shading the winery is a mature oak tree, itself dwarfed by a towering eucalytus. The half-dozen buildings comprising the PlumpJack compound are all painted dull, earthy green and blend unassumingly into the landscape.

Tony sits in a small, windowless office deep amidst the barrels in the winery building, looking over some spreadsheets on his computer. He has a desk and a file cabinet. Dozens of three-ring binders fill the shelves above his desk. Behind him is a white laminate counter area with a stainless steel sink. On the shelves above sit various examples of bottle designs used at Plumpjack as well as several half-bottles filled with different blending possibilities for the 2000 PlumpJack Reserve Cabernet and the 2001 PlumpJack Merlot. On the floor is an antiquated electric space heater. Tony is fine with the barebones environment; he’s just happy to have a fax machine in his office.

In addition to his usual shorts, he wears a faded sweatshirt from Phillips Academy, an east coast prep school he knows nothing about, and a Meadowood baseball hat. Rock music cranks over the speakers into the winery, thanks to a 100-disc CD changer.

“People think it’s cool here. They love the music. But sometimes I have to tell them to turn it down,” he says pointing to his cellar worker, Barrett, and his assistant winemaker, Jeff, working nearby. Barrett will be leaving PlumpJack next year to pursue a Master’s degree in oenology in Australia. Tony is excited for him. You can’t stop a man from doing what he needs to do. Jeff is older, in his forties, so people often think he is Tony’s boss. John Conover, the General Manager, actually lays claim to that title.

“People say I look too young to be a winemaker,” says Tony, shaking his head. “I’ve been doing this for thirteen years. I am young. What do you want from me?”

For the time being, PlumpJack also employs a consulting winemaker, Nils Venge, so officially, Tony does not yet hold the top position on the winemaking masthead. With the exception of harvest time, Venge only puts in a couple hours a month at the winery. He’s also approaching retirement age, it won’t be long before Tony is running the winemaking show completely. In the meantime, Tony doesn’t have a problem working with Venge. So far, he likes the rest of the staff, too.

Prior to Tony’s official start date, PlumpJack’s management invited Tony and Paige on a trip to Las Vegas with other winery employees being rewarded for their efforts over the past year. In addition to winning $500 on the tables, enough to buy a massage for his wife and tickets for two to the show, “O,” the junket gave him a chance to bond with members of the PlumpJack team.

While the new job provided him a 20% bump in salary and some nice perks, Tony did not walk into an easy situation at PlumpJack. Although the winery earned top scores in the wine press in the early 1990’s, quality had slipped a bit due to what one local wine retailer called PlumpJack’s “revolving door of winemakers” over the past decade. In addition, winery operations were hardly a perfect state of affairs.

“Like anywhere, there were issues,” says Tony.

The prior winemaker, exhibiting a classic case of “short-timer” syndrome, left a host of tasks undone on her way out the door, like neglecting to order barrels for last harvest’s 20,000 gallons of wine. As a result, Tony’s spent his first week at the winery working twelve-hour days, first swelling the new barrels with water, then filling them with wine from the tanks. For Tony, it was all in a day’s work. He’s never been afraid of getting his hands dirty, especially getting paid to do something he loves. He looks forward to helping revive the winery’s once grand reputation.

Tony walks out of the winery, through the courtyard, behind the compound to the vineyards. Pointing south to the perfectly landscaped knoll occupied by Eden Roc, he explains that the grapes grown there are sold to Harlan Estate, who turns the fruit into $300-per-bottle wine. He gestures over the hill to a property on the other side of the Oakville Cross.

“Over by the red barn, that’s Screaming Eagle.”

His pointed finger sweeps left and up the slopes above the Silverado Trail to a French Chateau-style mansion.

“That’s Vine Cliff,” he announces. “Below that, Dalle Valle, where Paige works.”

He swings his arm back 180 degrees, to the low eastern foothills.

“That bare spot up on the hill, that’s Harlan.”

Back to the western side of the valley, above Vine Cliff and Dalle Valle he points out two small houses on the distant ridgeline.

“Up and over there is a plateau. It’s really beautiful, with a view of Lake Hennessey. That’s where David Arthur is.”

PlumpJack is surrounded by good company and its land is steeped in viticultural history.

Tony returns his gaze to the vineyard plot directly in front of him. Turns out, the land contains some connections to his own personal history as well.

“The funny thing is, Mark Neal planted this vineyard in 1992.”

He says it with nostalgia, as if his departure from Neal Family Vineyards happened a long time ago. Things have moved quickly for both men since the breakup. While Tony settled in at PlumpJack, Mark pushed forward, too. He hired Celia Masyczek, a well-known consulting winemaker, to work on the Neal Family wines. Gove Celio, who recently left his winemaking position at Liparita Cellars to work for Mark’s vineyard management company, will return to the winery side of the business to handle the cellar work for Neal Family Vineyards. Tony thinks the personnel shifts by Mark were a good idea.

“The truth is, I couldn’t get him where he wanted to be name-wise,” says Tony. “I told him he needs a consulting winemaker if he wants recognition fast.”

On some fronts, the separation has been a clean break; all mentions of Tony have been stripped from the Neal Family Vineyards website. On other fronts, reminders are hard to avoid. The other day, Tony saw the green Explorer Mark gave him as a company car with another Neal employee at the wheel. Now, Tony drives a red Ford pickup with 90,000 miles on it, purchased for $3,800.

“It’s got great gas mileage,” he beams, “something like 30 miles to the gallon!”

So much for the BMW 7-series he and his wife joked about at the Wine Auction. At least for a couple years, anyway. For now, Tony says he and Paige need to watch their budget.

The wives themselves have had close encounters. Last week, Paige bumped into Marguerite shopping with the kids in downtown St. Helena.

“Where’s Tony?” The children asked. “We want Tony to come back! Why did Tony have to leave?”

Paige bit her tongue. How could she explain to them that Tony left because he disagreed with their father?

Walking east, Tony points out the tiny leaves now sprouting on the Cabernet vines.

“Look, isn’t this cute!”

He kicks the rust-colored soil and loosens a fist-sized rock, then stops near the boundary of the neighboring Rudd Vineyards & Winery. The ground under the vines is so packed with large rocks, it seems they were mixed into the dirt on purpose. Actually, this land formed the banks of an ancient riverbed. The rocks are great for drainage, Tony explains, and Rudd’s vineyard crews till deeply to bring them up to the surface.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

He stands on a stump-sized rock and looks a couple hundred yards east to the Silverado Trail and the geological bench above it. “That’s nice.”

Bordering PlumpJack’s northern property line, behind the tasting room, is a two-track dirt road, with freshly-mowed field grass separating well-worn tractor ruts. The cover crops have also been trimmed to carpet-like tightness, their lustrous green contrasting with the dusty brownness under vine.

Walking along on one of the tracks, Tony points to some rocks visible under the vines and says, “Isn’t this soil great?”

It’s a scene of genuine admiration, like an artist gazing upon a new subject to paint. He turns and squints northward.

“Mark farms the vineyard just past that wind machine over there. How weird is that?”

Quickly, he returns his focus to PlumpJack. “This vineyard is phenomenal. I mean, look at it!”

He shakes his head in amazement. “We’ve got a great staff here, too.”

Walking down a final row of Cabernet, he assesses the trellis system.

“God, this is classic Mark Neal viticulture. Quad pruning? 10 x 8 maybe?”

Although he’s moved on to a new winery, Tony can’t seem to clear Mark out of his head. With reminders everywhere in the small world that is Napa Valley, Tony might as well just try to get along. He knows Mark is angry and disappointed with him for leaving Neal Family Vineyards, but he thinks someday they’ll return to being friends, the way they started out. Of course, it is easier to forgive and forget when things are going well. Though neither man knows it yet, good news is just around the corner for both wineries this year. For Mark, it comes in the form of a Spring Wine Spectator article listing Neal Family Vineyards as one of the “Best 2002 Napa Valley Cabernet Prospects.” In the Fall, PlumpJack’s 2000 Cabernet lands a cover position with the same magazine. The winery’s profile will rise even further when PlumpJack’s co-owner, Gavin Newsom, wins the election for Mayor of San Francisco in November. Also this year, Tony will finally meet renowned wine critic, Robert Parker, Jr. He’ll even lead Newt Gingrich on a winery tour. Good thing he’s a Republican.

Around 12:30, Tony decides it’s lunch time. Gone are the days of Green Valley Café at noon. Down in less-populated Oakville, Tony faces limited dining choices, usually picking between Mustard’s Grill, a well-known upscale restaurant, or The Nest, a rustic deli with its own horseshoe pitch out back. Today he selects Mustard’s.

“But don’t tell Paige,” he murmurs. “We’re a little tight right now.”

After he sits down, two guys on the way to their table stop and say hello.

“Hey,” says one, “I’ve been hearing great things about you, Tony.”

There is a buzz about Tony, now that he scored the PlumpJack job. In fact, people who stopped talking to him when he left Duckhorn are now inviting him to cocktail parties again.

Over a bottle of Gewurztraminer, a crisp, melony fresh varietal perfect for a springtime lunch, Tony raves about his new boss, John Conover. Tony feels completely in sync with the PlumpJack General Manager’s business philosophies.

“What he believes and what I believe are so similar, it’s scary. Like that fact that you can’t build a winery around tasting scores. He’s real savvy. He pitches articles to GQ and The Robb Report, lifestyle and image stories about the winery, because he knows their target audiences are ours, too.”

Tony never felt as confident with Mark’s abilities to market wine.

“I used to tell Mark, ‘Just because you’re great at growing grapes, doesn’t mean you know the wine business.’”

Conover, for his part, has developed a clear understanding of the wine industry based on years of experience running a winery. Knowing that sales and marketing are being handled professionally allows Tony to be content in a winemaking-only role.

In the middle of the meal, Tony stops speaking.

“Am I talking too loud?” he wonders, having overhead a senior couple at the next table complaining to each other about the volume of his voice. He’s embarrassed.

When Tony gets up from the table at the end of the meal, the elderly woman mutters, “Thank God, he’s leaving.”

I tell him not to worry about it, but he still looks flustered. It’s that sensitive side of Tony revealing itself again.

As Tony walks to the door, the manager of the restaurant shouts out, “Hey, Tony, thanks for coming!”

Tony hopes the elderly couple heard that.

Like the leaves now starting to grow on the early spring vines, Tony Biagi has worked hard to establish himself. Leaving Neal Family Vineyards, he postponed his dreams. But a little struggle has been good for this winemaker. His new winery is a place where, like a great Cabernet, he can age gracefully. If Duckhorn was the bud break of Tony’s career, then Neal Family Vineyards was his bloom and PlumpJack his veraison. The future is his to harvest.

After lunch, Tony heads back to work, leaving me alone in the PlumpJack courtyard. A cool, pleasant breeze carries birdsong through the olive bower. There’s a hum of distant tractors and a collective whisper of tree leaves brushing against each other. The sun, having melted away the low clouds, now bastes the valley in warmth. Out in the vineyards nature carries on, unchanging in its cycles. It’s the people who come and go, taking their shots at perfecting what the earth gives them.

The End

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