Two government interventions—the agricultural preserve and the appellation system—had enhanced the value of Napa’s fine wines.
Eager to exploit these commodities, more newcomers entered the industry. By 1988, there were 164 wineries in the county. Twelve years later, almost 300 crowded the small valley and its hillsides.56 The state, in association with the industry, had bolstered wine trade, but success came with environmental costs. By the year 2000, wine grapes accounted for almost 99 percent of the county’s gross agri-cultural production. Nearly forty thousand county acres held grapes, more land than had been utilized in previous years with mixed agri-culture. With little land available within the two preserves, new vignerons had turned to the higher hills that fell within expansive BATF borders for Napa Valley. For those eager to produce the
“cult” vintages that reaped high prices and greater prestige, some research suggested that the quality of wine produced on these steep hills was superior. Deforestation often followed. In the 1970s, Napa County placed a moratorium on timber sales, hoping to slow growth. It did not. With great profits to be earned in grapes, new-comers simply burned timber they could not sell.57
Hillside operations grew larger in scope and reached more pre-cipitous slopes. Expansion has been associated with problems within the watershed. In 1980, for example, heavy rains on a newly defor-ested hillside drove an avalanche of silt to the valley floor, wiping out other vineyards and blocking the main traffic artery. During an
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October 1989 storm, sediment from a thirty-acre vineyard tumbled into the Bell Canyon reservoir, turning the drinking water red for the town of St. Helena. In 1987, the California Water Quality Board identified the Napa River as an “impaired” body with high sediment, nutrient, and pathogen levels.58Sediment and agricultural waste filled gravel beds, smothered fish eggs, and changed water tempera-ture, visibility, and oxygen content. Diversions and road crossings, made necessary by the expansion of viticulture and tourism, ham-pered migration of steelhead trout, an endangered species. Napa avoided urban sprawl, but the explosion of vineyards put the valley at risk for a loss of biodiversity. The California Native Plant Society estimated that some 400 of 1,100 species indigenous to Napa County were threatened or endangered, including the Salt-marsh Harvest Mouse, the Northern Spotted Owl, and the California Red-legged Frog. Clearcutting threatened oak woodlands. Remaining trees competed with grapes for soil moisture. Oak regeneration became more difficult because fire suppression methods protected hillside vineyards that mingled with forests. 59
The dedication of more acres to grapes generated huge profits, but also contributed to infestations. Phylloxera returned in the late 1980s and forced growers to replant more than 50 percent of the valley when they discovered that the AxR-1 rootstock was not resist-ant. Again, the state is visible. The university had heavily promoted this rootstock because of its adaptability to a variety of environmental conditions. In the regular expression of their authority, the county agricultural commissioner and University of California Cooperative Extension also staked out the valley to halt other pests. In lower and middle valley vineyards, for example, Napans had found the grape leaf skeletonizer, previously unknown to Napa. The glassy-winged sharp-shooter, the vector for Pierce’s Disease, remained an ongoing con-cern.60Monocultural production systems effectively “set the table”
for pests to do what came naturally. Infestations and other environ-mental concerns prompted the mid-1990s creation of the Napa Sustainable Winegrowing Group (NSWG) by growers, vintners, and public officials interested in the Cooperative Extension’s integrated pest management programs and protection of the watershed.61 NSWG members, however, constituted a minority of Napa landown-ers. For some landowners, compliance with environmental regula-tions was at best an expensive inconvenience that could be turned into a commercial ploy. The American Society for Enology and
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Viticulture, for example, catalogued the environment as a public relations issue. NSWG members, while often deeply concerned for the ecosystem, even acknowledged that sustainable agriculture was a
“marketing advantage.”62
Conclusion
By 1980, Napans sought a specific state action—the creation of an appellation system—to help confirm an elite status in the global wine market. These were not the first public interventions. The University of California, an important agent of state power, weaves its way throughout this story. Even those agencies or state actions that failed to achieve their goals had profound impacts on Napa resources. The BSVC did not change national consumer habits, but it helped to prolong the use of nonresistant vines that allowed Phylloxera to wreak economic and ecological havoc in the 1890s. Prohibition was a more ambitious exercise by a nation-state whose authority was shaped by Progressivism and wartime mobilization. Prohibition con-tributed to a fluctuating demand for grapes that reordered valley farmlands in the 1920s and nearly destroyed the domestic wine industry, but it never stemmed the country’s alcohol usage. The agricultural preserve and the appellation system highlight more expansive public powers and civil society’s acceptance—indeed its recruitment—of them in the postwar era. State action protected the valley’s viticultural leadership, but contributed to a loss of biodiver-sity and other ecological problems that the state and the industry have yet to resolve. Consumers and industry actors have defined the meaning of Napa wine, but the role of the state, even a less central-ized U.S. state, can never be ignored.
Abbreviations
HNVIR: “History of Napa Valley, Interviews and Reminiscences of Long-Time Residents Collected by the Napa Valley Wine Library,”
St. Helena Public Library, n.d.
NCDACR: Napa County Department of Agriculture Crop Report
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NVWLA: Napa Valley Wine Library Association RBSVC: Report of the Board of State
Viticultural Commissioners SVC: State Viticultural Commission
Notes
1. Anon, History of Napa and Lake Counties, California (San Francisco:
Slocum, Bowen, 1881), 4–7.
2. Quotations found in Nina Wemyss, ed., Soul of the Vine: Wine in Literature (Oakville, CA: Robert Mondavi Winery, 1998).
3. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), 3–12; and Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), 1–10, 121.
4. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: the Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: 1992), 42–43, quoted in Karen R. Merrill, “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Winter 1999):
454.
5. In the United States, Stephen Skowronek postulates that nation-state power developed in the nineteenth century in a patchwork pattern, dispersed among national agencies. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: the Expansion of National Administrative Capacities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 290–92;
and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–8. See also Theda Skocpol,
“Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” 3–28; Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. Evans, “The State and Economic Transformation: Toward an Analysis of the Conditions Underlying Effective Intervention,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985; 1993 repr.), 44–72.
6. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: the Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 7–11, 403–7.
7. C. A. Menefee, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Book of Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino (Napa: Reporter, 1873), 128–34;
Irving McKee, “Historic Napa County Wine-Growing,” manuscript for the Wine Institute for the Wine Advisory Board, n.d., California
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State Library; Charles Sullivan, Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to the Present (San Francisco: Wine Appreciation Guild, 1994), 11–23, 399.
8. The European Mission grape, distinguished from V. vinifera, had been crossbred with “New World” vines; see Sullivan, Napa Wine, 9.
See also First Annual RBSVC (San Francisco: Edward Bosqui, 1881), 61–62; Tom Gregory et al., History of Solano and Napa Counties (Los Angeles: Historic Record, 1912), 147–48; Charles Tovey, Wine and Wine Countries: A Record and Manual for Wine Merchants and Wine Consumers (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1862), 245; Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York: Free Press, 1982), 96.
9. McKee, “Historic Napa County Wine-Growing,” 11; Sullivan, Napa Wine, 53–54; James Lapsley, Bottled Poetry: Napa Winemaking from Prohibition to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 205–9. The Napa District produced 297,670 gallons in 1870 and 2,460,000 in 1880. It included Solano and Costra counties, but most wine came from Napa; see First Annual RBSVC, 14.
10. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1998).
11. State Viticultural Commission, First Report, 62.
12. Ibid., 75.
13. Ibid., 185–88 (catalogue of available European vines).
14. Anon., Catalogue of the Products of California Exhibited at the Southern Pacific Company at the North, Central and South American Exposition, New Orleans (New Orleans: W. B. Stansbury, 1886), 98;
see also Viticulture and Viniculture in California, prepared specially for distribution at the New Orleans World’s Fair, A.D. 1885 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1885), 7–23.
15. U.S. wines earned 28 medals in Paris compared to Australia (36);
Portugal (289); and France (950). William P. Blake, ed., Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Universal Exposition at Paris, Vol.
IV (Washington, DC: GPO, 1981), 726–32, quoted in Sullivan, Napa Wine, 98. See also “History of Gustave Ferdinand Niebaum (Nybom) by John Daniel,” HNVIR Vol. I, 212–21; Eugene Hilgard, University of California, Report of the Viticultural Work during the Seasons 1883–84 and 1884–85 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1886).
16. Annual RBSVC for 1891–92 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1892), 8–9, 24; Directory of the Grape Growers and Wine Makers of California (Sacramento: State Printers, 1888), 26–31; Napa County Land Register (Napa: Hunt & Wood, 1885), 11; Annual RBSVC for 1889–90 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1890), 7.
17. Ben C. Truman, History of the World’s Fair, being a Complete Description of the World’s Columbian Exposition from Its Inception
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(Philadelphia: H. W. Kelley, 1893), 307–9; RBSVC for 1893–94 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1894), 7–10; Lender and Martin, Drinking in America, 96.
18. First Annual Report of the Chief Executive Viticultural Officer of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for the Year 1881 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1882), 173–74.
19. First Annual RBSVC, 89–92; First Annual Report of the Chief Executive Viticultural Officer; Hilgard, Report of Viticultural Work, 1883–4 and 1884–5, 207–10.
20. RBSVC, 1891–92 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1892), 11–12.
21. RBSVC, 1889–90 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1890), 22; Anon., Principal Cellars: “Winehaven” on San Francisco Bay (San Francisco:
California Wine Association, 1909); Directory of Grape Growers, Wine Makers and Distillers of California (Sacramento: State Printers, 1891), 83–99.
22. RBSVC for 1889–90, 111–15; “Agroecosystems—Pierce’s Disease,”
Texas A&M University System, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Agricultural and Research Center, http://beaumont.tamu.edu/
research/Agroecosystems_default.htm.
23. First Annual RBSVC, 9; RBSVC, 1891–92, 8; RBSVC, 1893–94 (Sacramento: State Printers, 1894), 26–27.
24. Sullivan, Napa Wine, 175–91, 399; Anon., History of Solano and Napa Counties, 148; Katherine M. Dowdell, interview by Irene Haynes, n.d., HNVIR Vol. I, 51; W. W. Lyman, interview by Lois Stone, n.d., HNVIR Vol. I, 161; George T. Mee and Thomas H.
Mee, interview by Elizabeth Martini, August 16, 1964, HNVIR Vol.
I, 186; Frank Pocai, interview by Irene Haynes, HNVIR Vol. II, 58–59; Napa City & County Portfolio, 104.
25. Morton Keller, “Taking Stock,” in Morton Keller and R. Shep Melnick, eds., Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.
26. Ibid.; and Richard Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment:
Temperance, Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 171–73.
27. Frank E. Pocai, interview by Irene Haynes, January 9, 1975, HNVIR Vol. II, 64; Eugene B. Morosoli, interview by Gunther Detert, October 1979, HNVIR Vol. III, 104; Sullivan, Napa Wine, 197.
28. Steven Navone, interview by Irene Haynes and Elizabeth Martini, n.d., HNVIR Vol. II, 233–34.
29. Brother Basil, interview by Elizabeth Martini and Eleanor McCrea, n.d., HNVIR Vol. I, 25; Andre Tshelistcheff, interview by Richard G.
Peterson, July 7, 1972, HNVIR Vol. II, 37–38; James Morgan Bray,
“The Impact of Prohibition on Napa Valley Viticulture, 1921–1933,”
MLS thesis, California State University, San Jose, 1974, pp. 99–130.
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30. Navone interview, 233; Maynard A. Amerine and Vernon L.
Singleton, Wine an Introduction, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 288, discussed in Lapsley, Bottled Poetry, 227.
31. Acreage Estimates California Fruit and Nut, 1919–1953—by counties (Sacramento: California Livestock and Crop Reporting Service, 1956); Sullivan, Napa Wine, 186–87, 400.
32. The slow exit of Alicante Bouschet and Green Hungarian is visible in grape acreage statistics; see California Grape Acreage, 1978 (Sacramento: California Crop and Livestock Reporting Service, 1979), 8; see also Tshelistcheff interview, 7; Frank Pocai interview, 93; Lapsley, Bottled Poetry, 3–5; Sullivan, Napa Wine, 209.
33. Quotation from Paul Verdier, City of Paris department store, San Francisco Chronicle, October 11, 1933; see also Roy Raymond, Sr., interview by Robert Trinhero, n.d., HNVIR Vol. I, 242; Francis L.
Gould, My Life with Wine (St. Helena: Francis Gould, 1972), 21;
Sullivan, Napa Wine, 210.
34. “Napa Valley Vintners: The Early Years, 1943 to 1958,” scrap-book, NVWL Press Release, May 18, 1994, NVWL; Porterfield,
“Charles Krug and his Winery,” 12; History of Napa County Viticulture and Wine Making by John Daniels, 23 November 1969, HNVIR Vol. I, 232–33, and Robert Mondavi, interview by Ina Hart and T. E. Wilde, December 29, 1978, HNVIR Vol. III, 200–8; Robert Louis Stevenson, Silverado Squatters (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1883), 56.
35. Tchelistcheff interview, 7–9, 89–92; George Deuer, interview by Bernard Skoda, June 19, 1974, HNVIR Vol. II, 130; A. J. Winkler, interview by Ruth Teiser and Joann Leach Larkey, 1973, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 16–34.
36. Regarding the Morrill Act, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 145; Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 281; Ed Weber, interview by Kathleen A.
Brosnan, January 11, 2005, transcript in Brosnan’s possession. Mr.
Weber is Napa County’s agent for the University of California Cooperative Extension. Regarding the associational state, see Jess Gilbert, “Agrarian Intellectuals in a Democratizing State: A Collective Biography of USDA Leaders and the Intended New Deal,”
in Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 215; and David E.
Hamilton, “Building the Associative State: The Department of
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Agriculture and American State-Building,” Agricultural History 64 (1990): 207–18.
37. Lapsley, Bottled Poetry, 47–51, 137; “California Wine Outlook,”
Bank of America Report, San Francisco, September 1973, p. 6; and Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: the Rise of American Wine (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 187.
38. John Teuter (Chair, Board of Supervisors, Napa County, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), testimony given in Meeting in the Matter of Proposed Regulatory Definitions of Appellation of Origin, San Francisco, November 13, 1979, transcript, NVWL 228;
“Judgment of Paris,” Time, June 7, 1976, 58; “Cabernet Sauvignon:
An Assessment of Supply and Demand,” Grape Intelligence Report, St. Helena, July 1989, pp. 1–2.
39. NCDACR (1967); NCDACR (1971); Acreage Estimates of California Fruit and Nut Acreage, 1919–1953; California Fruit and Nut Acreage, 1971 (Sacramento: California Livestock and Crop Reporting Service, 1972), NVWL; Anne McLachlan, “The Wine Grape Industry of Napa, California, 1964–1979,” Thesis, University of London, 1980, p. 2; and Irving Hoch and Nickolas Tryphonopoulos, “A Study of the Economy of Napa County, California,” California Experiment Station, Giannini Foundation Research Report 303 (August 1969): 36. A prune farmer noted,
“Some people even felt that the grapes were so worthwhile they even took out young and productive prune trees in order to raise grapes.”
Interview of Arthur Schmidt by Gunther Detert, 21 March 1981, HNVIR Vol. III, 149.
40. Napa County Planning Department, “Population Data of Napa County,” Napa City-County Library, November 1966; “Draft Environmental Management Plan for San Francisco Bay Region,”
Vol. II, San Francisco, Association of Bay Area Governments, December 1977, p. 3; John J. Cuddy, The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco and the California it Centers (San Francisco:
Californians, 1947), 48. In 1959, Santa Clara held some 73,000 acres of fruits and nuts; by 1992, only 1,900 remained, see California Fruit and Nut Acreage (Sacramento: California Livestock and Crop Reporting Service, 1959), 5; California Fruit and Nut Acreage (Sacramento: California Livestock and Crop Reporting Service, 1992), 10.
41. Volker Eisele, “Twenty-five Years of Farmland Protection in Napa County,” in California Farmland and Urban Pressure: Statewide and Regional Perceptions, eds. Albert G. Medvitz, Alvin D. Sokolow, and Cathy Lemp (Davis: Agricultural Issues Center, Division of
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Agricultural and Natural Resources, University of California, 1999), 103–23; and James B. Conaway, Napa: An American Eden (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 82–92.
42. In 1967, land sold for five hundred to three thousand dollars per acre;
in the 1990s, some prices per acre exceeded two hundred thousand dollars. See Hoch and Tryphonopoulos, “A Study of the Economy of Napa County,” 14; James Conaway, The Dark Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 1–6. County population teetered below 125,000 in 2000, substantially less than predicted in 1966. See “Projections and Planning Information, 2001 Updates for Napa County,” (San Francisco: Employment Development Department, 2001), A–2.
43. Mondavi interview, 210–11; Sullivan, Napa Wine, 392–94.
44. Nathan Chroman, Wine Review, July 1975, pp. 1–2; see also Mondavi interview, 209; Jack L. Davies (President, NVVA), testi-mony (9-17), and W. Andrew Beckstoffer (President, Napa Valley Grape Growers Association), testimony (10-11) given before Rule Making Hearing of the BATF of the Department of the Treasury, San Francisco, April 13, 1976, transcripts, NVWL.
45. See Warren Moran, “The Wine Appellation as Territory in France and California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 (1983): 700–7.
46. “California’s Wineries,” Wine Spectator, April 1979, p. 13.
47. Critics employ the term terroir to describe physical features—sun, soil, climate, water—that distinguish vineyards and their products.
James E. Wilson, Terroir: the Role of Geology, Climate and Culture in the Making of French Wines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 22–56.
48. Lapsley, Bottled Poetry, 206.
49. Davies testimony, passim; and Beckstoffer testimony, passim.
50. Lapsley, Bottled Poetry, 207–9; Robert Mondavi, testimony given in Napa Valley Appellation Hearings for BATF of the Department of Treasury, Napa, CA, April 28, 1980, 42, NVWL.
51. Emmanuelle Vaudour emphasizes the need for spatial modeling and geographical information system data to more carefully catalogue characteristics of any particular locale; see Vaudour’s “The Quality of Grapes and Wine in Relation to Geography: Notions of Terroir at Various Scales,” Journal of Wine Research 13, no. 2 (2002): 117–41.
52. Stags Leap Appellation Committee (John Shafer, Chairman),
“Petition to Establish the Viticultural Area of ‘Stags Leap’ under Title 27 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 9,” submitted to the Director, BATF, April 13, 1987), Appellation File, NVWL, 1, 12.
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53. John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 172–74; Scott, Seeing Like A State, 49–51.
54. Stags Leap Appellation Committee, “Petition,” 1 (first quotation), 4 (second quotation), 43–52.
55. “Petition to Establish the St. Helena Viticultural Area in the County of Napa, California,” submitted to the Director, BATF, March 9, 1994, 24—NVWL. The petition cited a number of scholarly publica-tions by Elliott-Fisk as well.
56. Irene W. Haynes, “Napa Valley Wineries,” Report prepared for the NVWL, 1988, NVWL; Conaway, The Dark Side of Eden, 26;
“Petition to Establish St. Helena Viticultural Area.”
57. The value of Napa’s grapes exceeded $354 million by 2001, see California Fruit and Nut Acreage, 2001; “Napa River Watershed Task Force,” Phase II, prepared for the Napa County Board of Supervisors, September 2000, p. 1; Stewart Smith, interview by Gunther Detert, March 9, 1985, HNVIR Vol. IV, 254.
58. “Napa River Watershed Task Force,” 2, 4; Juliane Poirier Locke, Vineyards in the Watershed: Sustainable Winegrowing in Napa County (Napa: Napa Sustainable Winegrowing Group, 2002), 32–36.
59. Locke, Vineyards in the Watershed, 47, 51.
60. NCDACR (1999); George M. Schofield, “Cabernet Sauvignon: An Assessment of Supply and Demand,” Grape Intelligence Report, St.
Helena, August 1998, pp. 2–3.
61. Integrated Pest Management: Field Handbook for Napa County (Napa, CA: NSWG, 1997), 2.
62. American Society for Enology and Viticulture, “Environmental Issues: Compliance Overview,” Sacramento, June 22, 1993, pp. 1–4, NVWL; Locke, Vineyards in the Watershed, 15.
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