Drink (45 page)

The future of California wine lay in the north, at the limits of Spanish settlement. Sonoma, the last in the chain of missions to be founded, had been equipped with the customary vineyard, and in 1833, together with a further forty-four thousand acres of land, this had passed into the hands of General Mariano Guadeloupe Vallejo, the civil and military governor of Mexican California. Born in Monterrey on July 4, 1807, Vallejo was a pivotal figure in the period of transition between Mexican and American rule, serving Spain, Mexico, and the United States as soldier, administrator, and peacemaker. In 1851, he retired to his estate in Sonoma and dedicated his energies to making wine. While his production methods were primitive, his wine was good—outstanding, perhaps—and its potential was recognized by a Hungarian cavalry officer who had come to pay his respects to the general, and who subsequently was responsible for establishing the reputation of the region in the estimation of wine lovers everywhere.

Agoston Haraszthy (1812-69), the father of modern Californian viticulture, had had enough adventures to fill several normal lives by the time he tasted Vallejo’s wine. Unlike so many Europeans who invented a noble background for themselves upon migration to the New World, Haraszthy was a genuine aristocrat, an officer and a gentleman who had served in the imperial bodyguard of the Austro-Hungarian court. Caught up in a political intrigue, Haraszthy had been forced to flee his native country for the United States. He commenced his American odyssey in Wisconsin, where he founded a town named after himself and established several businesses, including a sawmill and a steamboat line. In 1849, he led a wagon train west and settled with his family in San Diego where he ran a butchery, a bus company, and a livery stable, and served as the first sheriff of San Diego County. In 1852, he moved to San Francisco, where he again held various official positions, including the supervision of the San Francisco mint. Five years later, after being tried for and acquitted of embezzling from the mint (his smelters had run too hot and vaporized $151,000 worth of gold, which was distributed by the winds over the streets of San Francisco), he paid his fateful visit to General Vallejo and, after sipping his wine, bought 560 acres adjacent to the general’s estate. The land came complete with a small vineyard and a derelict winery.

Haraszthy threw his customary energy into developing and expanding his new property. Within a decade he owned six thousand acres around Sonoma, of which four hundred were planted with vines, and had built himself an Italianate villa and an elaborate system of underground tunnels in which to store his vintages. He cemented his friendship with Vallejo by marrying two of his sons, Arpad and Attila, to a pair of the general’s daughters at a joint wedding ceremony on Vallejo’s estate. He also introduced important technical improvements in viticulture to the region. His vines were planted on dry slopes and were not irrigated, they were fermented in redwood vats instead of raw hides, and he had experimented with a wide range of imported grapes.

News of his experiments, and the excellence of his wine, prompted the California legislature, in 1857, to employ him to examine how the quality of its viticulture might be improved. The following year, Haraszthy delivered a “Report on Grapes and Wines of California,” which provided practical advice on vines and soil types and was distributed to prospective planters. These latter were further encouraged with fiscal incentives: In 1859 the state legislature decreed that the first four years of production at new vineyards were to be tax free. Haraszthy, meanwhile, believed that there was still much more to be learned and in 1861 persuaded the governor of California to send him on a tour of the European wine-growing regions. He accomplished his assignment with typical vigor, gathering information and over a hundred thousand vine cuttings of some three hundred varieties, which were delivered via the Wells Fargo Company the following year. Haraszthy’s personal charm and perhaps some samples he brought with him to Europe made an impression on the French, for in 1862 the
Revue Viticol
was kind enough to suggest that California wines might be “capable of entering into competition with the wines of Europe,” albeit “in the distant future.” Upon his return to Sonoma, Haraszthy produced a second comprehensive report for the state agricultural board—
Grape Culture, Wines, and Winemaking
(1862)—which laid the foundations for the scientific production of wine in America.

Sadly, 1862 proved to be the zenith of Haraszthy’s career. The state of California refused to pay him for the vines he had collected in Europe; two years later, a collaborative venture with silent financial partners, intended to fund an ambitious program of expansion at his Buena Vista Winery, failed, and Haraszthy was squeezed out by his investors. In 1866 he left California for Nicaragua, where he established a distillery and a sawmill, and where he met his end in 1869 when he fell into a river infested with alligators.

In the same decades that Vallejo and Haraszthy were developing viticulture in Sonoma, other entrepreneurs were planting vines in the adjacent Napa Valley, led by George Yount, an ex-trapping partner of the same William Wolfskill who had settled down to make wine in Los Angeles. Yount had arrived in Napa in 1838 armed with a land grant of twelve thousand acres from General Vallejo and a new Christian name—Jorge de Concepción—after having been baptized a Catholic and confirmed as a Mexican citizen. The region was untamed country at the time, with more grizzly bears than settlers. Yount is reputed to have killed several of the former while engaged in the process of clearing his land. He founded a town named after himself, as was the custom, and established a small vineyard on his acres. In 1849, an apostate Mormon named Samuel Brannan set up at the north end of the Napa where he, too, founded a town—Calistoga.

Brannan had ambitious plans for his new settlement, which he intended to develop as a West Coast Saratoga for the wealthy inhabitants of San Francisco. At the ground-breaking ceremony, Brannan is claimed to have been overcome with drunken exuberance and to have sworn he would create “the Calistoga of Sarafornia.” The name stuck, and when Calistoga opened for business in 1862 it featured a sizable hotel, landscaped grounds, a racetrack, a swimming pool, a skating rink, and a goldfish pond. Over the following decade the Napa Valley filled up with settlers and was divided into a patchwork of small farms and ranches. A large proportion of the immigrants were Germans, a number of whom established little vineyards in which they attempted to replicate the delicate white wines of their native land, thus introducing another style to the region.

The net effect of the émigrés, visionaries, financiers, and mountain men on the production of Californian wine was enormous. By 1862, the state was home to 10.5 million vines—a 40 percent increase in just two years. This created problems of success—first in the matter of labor. Few emigrants would deign to sully their hands tending vines or grape picking for the low wages offered by winery owners. Moreover, many of the people who had arrived in California were professionals—doctors or lawyers who followed the sensible philosophy that it was easier to obtain gold from miners than from the ground. Haraszthy solved the problem on his estate by recruiting Chinese labor, at eight dollars a month with board, via a contractor in San Francisco named Ho Po, who sourced agricultural workers from Guangdong Province in China. Initially, such guest workers were welcomed in the Golden State, as unobtrusive, law-abiding “coolies,” who were usually kept secluded from “proper,” i.e., white, immigrants. Their anticipated role in the future was set out in the pages of the
California Farmer,
which hoped that they should be to the state “what the African has been to the South,” but with the advantage that they went back to China at the conclusion of their contracts.

However, a number of Chinese came to California to settle as well as to perform labor for a fixed term, and they introduced their own drinking customs to the state, and indeed to America. These were more or less unchanged from those that had been observed by European visitors to China in the sixteenth century. Much of their drinking was therapeutic, and when they wished to become intoxicated they smoked opium in preference to getting drunk. Their favorite drinks were rice or plum wine, imported from their homeland, which were consumed in small measures, and with a degree of ceremony. They also imported medicinal beverages, including snake wine, which they believed to be a cure for rheumatism. Its reputation as such spread beyond the Chinese community, and other Americans began to manufacture imitations, which they sold under the generic name of
snake oil
.

While Chinese labor enabled the California wine industry to keep growing, Chinese Americans were of little assistance in solving the second problem generated by the success of the industry as a whole, which was how to dispose of its increased production. The eastern states of America, which might have been expected to be buyers on patriotic grounds alone, were perceived of in California as being obsessed with whiskey, if they drank at all. In the opinion of Arpad (son of Agoston) Haraszthy: “The great obstacle to our success, is that the average American is a whiskey drinking, water drinking, coffee drinking, tea drinking, and consequently a dyspepsia-inviting subject, who does not know the use or value of pure light wine taken at the proper time and in moderate quantities. The task before us lies in teaching our people how to drink wine, when to drink it, and how much of it to drink.”

In the event, California demand accounted for much of its new production. By 1861, the state had over 380,000 inhabitants, compared with a little less than fourteen thousand immediately prior to the gold rush. Many of the newcomers were from wine-drinking cultures in Europe who considered the fluid to be a necessity of life. Furthermore, the surprising number of professionals who’d trekked across the prairies or shipped around Cape Horn also had at least a familiarity with wine, and once in California they drank the local vintages. The prestige attached to wine drinking also made it attractive to miners. Those wishing to distribute some of their newfound wealth felt they made a better show if they bought claret or champagne with their gold dust. That much of what they drank was made in California mattered less than labels declaring it to be French. Finally, any surplus in production was taken up by distillation. For those die-hard Yankee immigrants who considered spirits to be the only drink worthy of the name, overproof brandy was as good as a similar beverage distilled from corn, and if the vintners occasionally labeled their product whiskey, few of its end consumers noticed the deception.

22 GOOD TASTE

In the same decades that Americans were forging trails over and building towns in wildernesses, the French were aspiring to civilize their already-settled nation and to perfect every detail of sedentary life. Even such biological imperatives as eating and drinking were scrutinized and transformed, so that a meal or a bottle of wine no longer served merely to fill the belly or to quench a thirst, but was also expected to provide an aesthetic experience. There was artistry in cooking and winemaking, and nineteenth-century French connoisseurs trained their senses to identify, to appreciate, and to applaud it. His or her training ground was comprised of the restaurants of Paris, which were appearing in their dozens all over the City of Light. They were the creatures of the French Revolution. Some were started by the cooks of the nobility who had lost their places when aristocratic households were broken up, many more were opened to satisfy a growing desire for equality of access to luxury: Citizens with the money and inclination to indulge their taste buds should have the opportunity to do so in the ideal republic.

The new restaurants were theaters of gastronomy. The machinery and the raw materials with which their chefs worked their magic were banished from the stage—the kitchen itself was hidden behind closed doors, through which wondrous culinary creations would emerge, perfect and complete, paired with wines absolutely suited to their complex flavors. As the nineteenth century progressed, they became social and cultural institutions, with their own vocabulary and, indeed, ideology. To the connoisseurs, or
gourmands,
who patronized them, an exquisite dinner at a legendary restaurant was a quasi-religious experience.

The discipline of the gourmand was pioneered by Alexandre Balthasar Grimnod de la Reynière, who published his gustatory adventures in his
Almanach des gourmands
(1803). The
Almanach
purported to be a guide to the best food in Paris and to have invented the literary genre of the restaurant review. Unlike prior commentaries on eating, which sought to combine consumption with moral, economic, or medical observations—the wastefulness of the rich, the brutishness of the poor, the dangers posed by red wine and radishes to people of a phlegmatic disposition—the
Almanach
portrayed a good meal as an end in itself. The book was both successful and controversial. Its opponents claimed it encouraged the sin of gluttony by promoting an unhealthy obsession with delicacies. Gourmands who “build the weaknesses of their private lives into doctrines and propound them in a public forum” were fetishists of the worst order. Controversy stoked sales, and the
Almanach
ran through eight editions by 1808, by which time it was established as a reference work and was taken perhaps more seriously than its author had intended. It possessed more than a streak of gothic fiction in its style. The judgments contained in the
Almanach
were claimed to have been pronounced by an anonymous jury of taste, a gastronomic grand inquisition, whose seventeen members met every Wednesday at an undisclosed location to consider, in conditions of strictest secrecy, the offerings of the best chefs, confectioners, pastry cooks, and wine merchants in Paris. Moreover, there is a love of the macabre, and the revolting, in the text. Readers of the
Almanach
were advised, for instance, that the best way to tell if a turkey carcass was fresh or not was to insert a finger into its anal cavity and then lick the finger.