$260,000 for a barrel of wine, chocolate-covered nudes...

and other stories from the week of Napa Valley's Premier wine auction.                                                                       

       This isn't the famous one held each summer for wealthy wannabes from all over, but the winter bash for the wine trade: 600 devotees looking for rare wines to pass along to customers or to lay down. The blends are specially made for the auction, this year from the spectacular 2012 harvest that was both plentiful and good and raised a record - they're all records - almost $6 million which will fund the broadly-based efforts of the Napa Valley Vintners to promote Napa wine and enhance the valley overall.
     There were 225 lots and the winner was a cabernet, Scarecrow, that blew away last year's record. By my calculation that's about eight grand a bottle - a single barrel of cab -  but, hey, it's truly one-of-a-kind and proves not so much that enophiles are often well-heeled but that an exceptional vintage sells well on many levels. (Last year's mediocre vintage brought in half of this year's total.)
     Around the edges of Premier, for a solid week, are tasting and parties around the valley, including the annual Napa Gras at Raymond winery that this year featured two women wearing nothing but chocolate, which reminded me of an Impressionist painting, and lots of 2005 cabernet poured in Jean Charles Boisset's famous Red Room.                                                                      

     I tasted lots of wines, including three biggies from Bill Harlan (see my previous post). He gave me the remains of the bottle of 2000, which I took to a conclave of writers attending the Vintner's annual wine writers' conference at Meadowood. Driving up highway 29, I had to take some medication and had nothing to wash it down with so - you guessed it - swigged from the $1,000 bottle, one eye out for the cops. That, too, is Napa.    
     Lots of good food, of course, including the stand-in luncheon at Greystone, where the Culinary Institute of America fed everybody between the barrel tasting and the auction (seared scallops with roasted garlic aioli won my silent bid). The barrel tasting room emptied as soon as the auction began on the top floor of the beautiful, massive hall that was once a grape cooperative and today houses - appropriately - what must be the greatest collection of quite beautiful bottle openers, among other memorabilia.
                                                                           

   

   My own appearance at Napa's newest and best bookstore, Bookmine, had nothing to do with the auction. I read from Memphis Afternoons, Vanishing America, The Big Easy and my work-in-progress, a prequel to my novel, Nose. The idea was to chart a course (more or less) from my first desire to write into the present through both fiction and nonfiction.Several of my books just out in re-ebook and on-demand were available for the first time.

     One unexpected lagniappe for me was a bottle of 2011 cabernet handed to me at the book signing by one of the store's owners, Eric (the other's his fiance  Naomi ), winemaker at Pott. I didn't know the wine but could tell by the bottle's heft, deep punt and artfully designed label that the dark contents would impress. I opened it last night at my daughter Susanna's house in Berkeley, the proper conclusion to an extraordinary week. The wine was crammed with fruit - black cherries - that sets Napa cabernets apart from those of the rest of the world, a densely-flavored mouthful with an interesting finish and no discernible tannins, meaning it's ready to drink. Susanna found black currents there, and my four-year-old granddaughter, Brooklyn, said after a very long sniff, "Wine cupcake," more or less summing up the week.                                                                     

                                         (feralstudio.com)

Chateau Montelena and the "Popeye Syndrome"

  (The pagoda's still there, too.)                                   

     Bo Barrett has blue eyes and a gray soul patch and a professed propensity for being himself. ("I am what I am.") We were standing at the tasting bar at Chateau Montelena, the clear winner of the vino mondo-changing 1976 Paris tasting, in the white category. The chardonnay then came from the small, now famous Hanna vineyard and was vinified by Mike Grgitch, who went on to found his own winery, and it still does. The Montelena chard whuped some first-class burgundies in the '76 blind tasting and may have been a more chastening blow to the French than Stag's Leap Wine Cellars taking first in the red Bordeaux category. Both wines pushed the French first-growths aside like so many parking cones.
     The event was memorialized, sort of, in the movie, Bottle Shock, that brought a world of business to the chateau's somber stone facade, and a lot of lucre, too. "The movie was a love letter to the wine world," says Bo. "That's how they put it, and they said the characters would be composites," which fortunately is true. 

      Chateau Montelena, unlike Stag's Leap and other old-line, formidable names in the valley, has not tumbled into the corporate fold. The chardonnay today is still more of a classic white Burgundy - low alcohol, restrained oak, lean and austere - and quite unlike most chardonnays from Barrett's home state. So invested is Barrett in the winemaking process, and so wedded to the method, that he drew on the back of wine list a graph showing relative fermentation, malolactic (secondary) fermentation, alcohol and other developmental trajectories. I'll let you figure it out if you can, and be sure to take note of his signature.                                       

     The good news today is that all the wines are good, including the cabernets. I very much liked the 2009 estate cab - sightly smoky nose, some black cherry and tannin but well balanced, another example of classic wine-making with a nice finish. And Bo says it really is only 13.3 per cent alcohol. 
     Chateau Montelena has a venerable history, including Bo's father's tenure here, which I will let you read in my earlier book, Napa: The Story of an American Eden.
 http://www.amazon.com/Napa-The-Story-American-Eden/dp/0618257985/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380825737&sr=8-1&keywords=napa+conaway.

Behind every $800 cabernet there's a mystery...

     Napa, evening:   

   He sits in a deep armchair with his back to the windows, more like glass-stoppered portals in precise, drystone walls that once housed an assay office in Nevada and were shipped to Napa Valley to end up here, in gorgeously simple buildings like this one. The stones' provence has little to do with wine and a lot to do with gold and the opening of the West, but here they acquire a regal quality, framing light and blueish hills with halos of dry, dusty chaparral and the dark, twisted trees accustomed to drought but getting more of it these days than they bargained for.

    Bill Harlan's white hair glows in declining light, as do the stems of his glasses. I can barely see his face: just teeth - he's smiling - an open shirt, and interlaced fingers. What he's talking about isn't his famous and very dear Harlan cabernet sauvignon but the land it came off of, which lies all around us. I'll get to what he thinks about that land another time. For now - time's always too short in this valley, it seems - to those dark silhouettes in long-necked decanters: 2008, 2009, 2000.
    The nose on the first two reaches easily across three or four feet and up close is dense with black fruit and a trace of tobacco. Both were produced in cool years, but the assault's already an amazing combination of the same tastes plus a changeable briery quality that has to be terroir. There's a wildness about it, maybe the essence of all that chaparral up there, but something extraordinary. The rich mouthful of wine changes yet again as it goes down, same thing with the finish, a sensory chameleon hard to nail down in these young wines that are tannic, the more defined flavors pushing hard to get out.
    More of it does from the 2000, slightly bricky about the meniscus, with loads of cassis on the nose and the same big, licorous mouthful that's almost a meal in itself. I can't think of a food that's up to it - I'll try a rib later with the last of the 2000 and it will be blown away by the wine - and a similarly long, softer finish than as with the younger wines. It hangs on all the way down the hill to Oakville. 

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Other conaway books at: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/BigEasy.htm

                                

The winemaker and the novelist

      Dinner with winemaker Randy Dunn, Howell Mountain cabernet pioneer, and novelist Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City; The Last of the Savages). 
      McInerney (right) is one of those covering wine for the Wall Street Journal,  and we gathered - appropriately - at Press, the penultimate meat-erie in south St. Helena, Napa Valley. Randy's Howell Mountain and Napa Valley cabernets have recently come into their own again after a long hiatus when they were slighted by Robert Parker's Wine Advocate,the advocacy being of fat, fruity, alcoholic wines that ate Napa alive for two decades and are finally getting pushed back into the chaparral by critics and younger wine drinkers turned off by their excesses (and cost). 
      Balanced, better made cabs like Dunn's reward aging with great complexity and compatibility with food. He brought along three of the Napa Valley appellation cabs, slightly less expensive than the Howell Mountain, with fruit from various vineyards and some from his own. They were 1986, 1996, and 2006, the '86 with barely a trace of bricky color and a big, fresh, oaky nose. That one got leaned on heavily by us, but the '96 - slightly brighter in the glass, with a long, redolent finish, and the '06, already drinking well - were close behind. The wines helped in the demolition of grass-fed rib-eye and Snake River flank steak while the conversation followed the usual progression from wine to place to method.     Howell Mountain's on the east side of the valley, where Dunn and his wife, Lori, bought back in the Sixties and revealed as some of the most coveted cabernet terroir on earth. The defunct cellar was beneath an old house with it's own provenance - Warren Winiarski once lived there; a mountain lion once jumped through the window (after Warren moved out) - and Dunn has been unrelentingly hands-on, from vineyard pruning to wine-making.
     McInerney was surprised to learn, as most people are, that Dunn repairs his own tractors, and he was shocked - really - to learn that Dunn occasionally reduces the alcohol of small proportions of his wine by reverse osmosis. This is blended back in to lessen the punch overall and does not interfere with flavor. In fact, it enhances. Equally surprising was the fact that Dunn lightly filters his wines, famous for their integrity, complexity and age capability. "Filtering's not a bad thing," Dunn explained, if it's done right, removing impurities that don't contribute to flavor and can impede longevity.

      "My wine's sterile when it goes into the bottle," he added, but something else indeed emerges after some years,  proven once again by the dark, redolent pools sitting in big stemmed glasses in front of us.
      The novelist scribbled away. Look for a story eventually in the Journal about these revelations from a writer who has turned from Parker's and the Spectator's alcoholic, jam-busters toward balance and power for the long haul. It's all exemplified by Dunn, who sits high among the American iterations of cabernet sauvignon.

Pulling cork: 373

     An admission - I sometimes drink labels. Like this one with a world-class grasshopper (I didn't see the ant at first, up there in the upper righthand corner). It's an arresting image for a wine label, and a bit dissonant.  What could the message be?
     The winery's Cane & Fable, of Paso Robles, which sounds fabulous in its own right. The tasting notes on the back label are worth quoting if only for sheer invention: "The 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon greets you with scents of lush blue fruit and memories of your grandfather's briarwood pipe. As the flavor begins to march across your palate it leaves behind hints of sweet plums, warm cedar planks and freshly ground spices. Every little sip leaves you comfortable, content and just feelin' lucky."
    We've clearly crossed into fantasy here, which is fine. No reason why a label shouldn't inspire and divert us, as wine does. 373 is supposedly the number of a relevant fable from Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, and so I looked it up. Like much of Aesop it has a dark side: the grasshopper plays all summer and dies with the arrival of winter, whereas the industrious ant labors ceaselessly and survives underground.
     To push the metaphor, the ant's a better symbol for the winemaker and his product than a grasshopper, but a wine label with a big ant on it would be a challenge for any consumer. So what about wine itself? I didn't find that blue fruit on the nose, but there was the barest hint of tobacco. The assault's a little lush for me, but the 15% alcohol lacks offensive heat and the taste is pleasant, though there's not much finish. I expect one in a $20 wine.
     Impressive labels tend to be be more memorable than the wine. However, they still look good after the bottle's finished, and I was glad for the excuse to follow the grasshopper's lead into the deep literary past.

Letters from the Equator, 2 - Amazonia

            

               Two: Up the Amazon - Way Up
To see the first post go to: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/12/around-equator.html)

                                                    

The city of Manaus lives a thousand miles upstream from the mouth of the Amazon, in fact and imagination. The rubber capital of the world at the turn of the century and a legend in profligacy, then and later, it produced millionaires who supposedly shipped their laundry to Paris and patronized an opera house lavish by any standards, with 66,000 blue and gold tiles from Alsace-Lorraine set in the dome.

But I was more interested in the fantastically extravagant river and the backcountry that produced Manaus than I was in a large port, and quickly boarded a boat in the style of the old river steamers, on the Rio Negro, the major tributary of the Amazon, vast and slate-colored, that up close is the color of tea mixed with Red Zinger. This is not pollution but the effects of decomposing vegetation of unimaginable profusion.

As some of it passed our open decks, floating fields once fed to livestock by the cattle barons of the lower Amazon, certain aspects of South America were very much on my mind: the dreaded Chagas' disease, transmitted by the black and red reduvid bug adept at biting the face and then excreting in the wound (one guidebook advised against sleeping on the dirt floors of huts frequented by opossums), rabies, dengue, typhus, hookworm, and more specialized disorders - - Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, carried by black flies, and Leishmaniasis, unhealable sores from the bites of sand fleas.

I wasn't forgetting meningitis, hepatitis, and, of course, malaria, the ubiquitous equatorial complaint, the Bud Lite of microbes, in a distributional sense, brought to Amazonia on slave ships early in the last century. There are the visible creatures as well - poisonous snakes, spiders, and scorpions; that ingenious, remarkably energetic little parasite, the candiru fish, that supposedly can swim up one's urine stream and otherwise get lodged in the body's unsuspecting apertures. Also piranha, and homo sapiens. 

        We were, in addition to George, a German Swiss seeking his fortune as a guide - one does not dwell on last names in Amazonia - half-a-dozen older Japanese women wearing two pairs of socks each and powerful bonnets and waving paper fans, a family of Sicilians with a minicam, and three Israelis - Hanan, Hanni and Hanna - two of them clinical psychologists and the other an embroidery designer. That we were all headed up the Rio Negro for its confluence with the lesser Ariau River says more about the nature of contemporary tourism than it does about Amazonia, a wilderness with a semblance of its colossally diverse origins remaining and therefore both a spiritual and a material treasure.

        We chugged into the estuary of the Ariau where botos - pink freshwater porpoises - disturbed the slick black surface, and woolly monkeys roiled the dense arboreal currents overhead. Our isolated hotel suggests a cross between a jungle gym and a white collar jail: Wire over the windows keep the monkeys and macaos out , but it was the smells and sounds at dusk that impressed, a fecundity of life lush and self-celebratory, from shrieking frogs to screaming pia birds. 
        In the tree-top cafeteria I ate pirarucu, a fish that can grow to 250 pounds, and later in the moth-swarmed bar ordered a caipirinha, an icy drink made from lime and cachaca, potent booze from sugarcane. "Are you sure you can handle it?" asked one--of the psychologists, cachaca having a reputation for engendering visions. But I was already having them.

         I climbed to my room to write, and discovered that I couldn't operate the computer and the fan at the same time. Sweat ran down my back for an hour while beetles and mosquitoes collided with the luminous screen, with the dangling bulb, and with me; my energy, like that of the generator, ebbed while the jungle's flowed. To finally turn off the light in Amazonia is to punch the cacophony button on one of the last proto-natural boom boxes on earth; to sleep is to dream of blue morph butterflies and anacondas, toucans, tapirs, and lithe, ring-tailed raccoon wannabes running across corrugated iron roofs.

      I awoke to a riverine landscape lit by its own soft, leafy radiance. George had arranged an outing in a motorized canoe that, despite the rain, would take us further up the Ariau. The Japanese had disappeared - did they know something I didn’t?

      The jungle was patrolled by territorial kingfishers and big, orange, fish-eating hawks. We, too, fished, Tom Sawyer-style, for piranhas, what I thought was the equatorial equivalent of a snipe hunt until something bore down on my hook and I levitated a fish that looked deceptively like a bluegill. With the disengaged hook I exposed literally razor-sharp triangular teeth, behind a kind of sheath.
     "Not dangerous today," said our boatman. They are dangerous during periods of low water, trapped, hungry and capable of skeletizing the likes of us. We caught half a dozen and, appropriate for those at the top of the food chain in a thoroughly Darwinian environment, ate them grilled for dinner, with limes and cold Brazilian beer.

      Travel in Amazonia does have a certain spontaneity , even when planned. A night hunt for cayman seemed pro forma until the five-foot relative of the alligator, spotlighted with juice from a car battery in the bow and snared with a lasso at the end of a stick, got loose in the boat and unplugged the battery with a vicious cut of its tail. The father of the Sicilians, 200 pounds of primo Mediterranean masculine protein, stood on his seat shouting, in Italian, "Dove?... dove?... dove?..." (Where? Where? Where?) The local boys got the problem in hand and back into a river punctuated with the bright ruby eyes of numerous other caymans.

       Caboclo is the word for people of mixed Indian and European blood who live in isolated settlements and make their living as they can, raising some papayas and other fruits, fishing and hunting armadillos. Such mestizos are credited with laying waste to much of the rainforest, squatting along the ill-advised trans-Amazon highway and clearing land that hasn't the nutrients to regenerate. Three families lived here on the Ariau, and their lives had more appeal than I had expected.

       They allowed us to look around, instant Levi-Strausses, clueless amidst thatch-roofed houses on stilts, a site for grinding, pressing and drying manioc, a Brazilian staple, chickens patrolling a clean-swept yard, and a pig rooting in the underbrush. All this suggested a level of prosperity and an order of magnitude in amenities when compared with the lives of the poor in Manaus and other urban sumps.

     Out in the river, two children in a homemade canoe fished with a bow and arrow mounted with a trident. Their catch included an  electric eel. The boy and his sister were neither more than twelve years old.

      

      There are less than two people per square kilometer in Amazonia; it includes more than half the country but contains a tiny fraction of the population. What we were looking at was a relatively benign aspect of humanity, admirable for its independence and knowledge in the unimaginably vast Amazon basin. Magnified by the millions of rural and urban poor pressing  at the seams of Brazilian society, these people represented the means for the certain extinction of many species and could well change the character of Amazonia, as well as the earth.
      For instance, 75 percent of the rain falling in Amazonia - a lot of rain - is returned to the atmosphere by the forest that is being burned at a rate best appreciated while flying over the permanent haze it has created. But I will never forget those beautiful children, their unselfconscious smiles or the boy's pride as he paddled to shore with a mess of fish in the bottom of a boat, on water flat and green as new-blown glass. 

       (Next: Equador)
      You can read more of my travel writing at:    
http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm