CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE
I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in
all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
Caesar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
Petraea. Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
expiring by the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same
time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The
beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
precious metals: the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit,
they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes
and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas,
where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something
finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of
Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is
poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly
matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
"You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?"
a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me
through his premises. "Well, here's the reason."
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet,
and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a
single department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But
it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.
"Chateau X-?" said I. "I never heard of that."
"I dare say not," said he. "I had been reading one of X-'s
novels."
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason
why California wine is not drunk in the States.
Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It
did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where
alone it can expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones,
to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for
wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature. The
dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis
of the dust! Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that
brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
behind the faggots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness,
has features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of
the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and
scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.
We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing
the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the
south and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly
mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough
perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead
and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still
fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the
buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom:
through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro
by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great
inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of
some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers
an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very
neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is
avoided by the most impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche
of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were
so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr.
M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.
No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them;
there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but
the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a
wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but
recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but
I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from
Greenock: he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch,
which pleased me more than you would fancy.
Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless
barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black
malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.
Now, his place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the
verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars
like a bandit's cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and
sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram,
who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for
pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting
wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted
all. I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and
white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet,
and I fear to think how many more. Much of it goes to London--
most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English
taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and
the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the
mind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered;
and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the
earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine,
that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a
flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle
in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are
moving farther on: the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools
but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to
fresh woods! This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the
moving footfall, haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chasing
Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander. As we drove back to
Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
side was dotted with the camps of travelling families: one
cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going
to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps
Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom
we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us
as we drove by.
