A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma - Couverture rigide

Deutschman, Alan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0767907035 ISBN 13 : 9780767907033

Editeur : Broadway Books, 2003

Synopsis

Book by Deutschman Alan

A propos du livre

Extrait

THE DENSE, DOGGED TRAFFIC persisted across the Golden Gate Bridge and all through the Marin County suburbs. The freeway's congestion continued for a twenty-mile stretch. Then, as a city dweller, I felt a quiet thrill and a sense of anticipation to see "Sonoma" in reflective letters on the green sign suspended over the roadway. Few place names held a sense of promise in their very sound, the way they did to Proust's narrator as he surveyed a map, but "Sonoma" was one.

The word worked like an incantation, for as I turned off of Highway 101 and swung sharply eastward, the trappings of suburban sprawl disappeared almost instantly. The motels and fast-food drive-throughs and office parks and housing tracts were suddenly banished. There were open fields on either side of the road. It began to feel like the country, but the remnants of modernity were still too near to be certain. A first-time visitor wouldn't be sure whether this was just an anomalous patch that somehow had defied development but would soon give way to the pervasive concrete and neon of homogenous civilization.

Then came the real portal to a radically different place and culture. There was a little bridge over the Petaluma River, which flows north from San Francisco Bay. The water marked the border to Sonoma County. The span had a gentle arc, and as I came to its peak and could see the other side, I was hit by a panorama of spacious pastures, flat and expansive, a purely rural environment. The roadway descended to the ground and I passed lushly green sod farms. I saw grazing fields with hundreds of idly lounging cows.

The Sonoma borderline had an actual meaning; unlike so many place names that had been reduced to little more than arbitrary post-office markings and administrative zones in a vast undifferentiated megalopolis, Sonoma was a pronounced break, an anomaly and anachronism, a place that still defined itself by a lasting heritage of rural and small-town country life.

On the left there was an old decaying red barn. The corrugated metal panels were torn from its pitched roof. The wood siding was cracking and coming undone. A grain tower leaned at a sharp angle, seemingly ready to topple, a homegrown Pisa. It was next to a farmhouse that was so magnificently warped that its shape, once rigidly squared, had turned sensuously curvilinear. These were the kind of buildings that Walker Evans might have photographed for his portraits of the austere beauty of the impoverished South during the Great Depression. What a shock that this scene was so close to the rich technophilic city, hardly thirty miles, and that I had just passed a string of the most expensive suburban towns in America, and that those cows could spend the day snoozing on such prohibitively costly soil, and that this barn hadn't been supplanted by hundreds of houses.

The grazing land extended from the plain into the voluptuous foothills. While the Marin hills were mostly covered by evergreens, here the sculpted earth forms had been denuded in many places to serve as pastures. The surface still had patches of green from the winter's rainy season, when the color was spectacularly vivid. But the dry weeks of April and the intensifying sun had begun to burn the land back to brown.

Outsiders commonly assumed that the "northern" in northern California meant that it's as far up as the Northeast. But the Bay Area actually covered the same latitude as North Carolina, and the spring sun was direct and intense. The local conceit was that the landscape is "green and gold." The greens were ever present, but the rest was still dirty brown to the visitor's eye, an arid, dusty tone rather than a warmly resonant one. The land's beauty was undeniably weird, a little eerie at first, more like an alien planetscape from "Star Trek" than the Gone With the Wind conception of country. It was a slowly acquired taste for natives of other climates. But after a few years the sun-scorched surfaces began to seem less like the moon and more like the natural order of things.

This little valley beside the Petaluma River was a geographic vestibule or antechamber, a transition from the people country to the coming entrance to the wine country. It was a chance for city dwellers to decompress and adjust.

The car rose up a little promontory. There was another visual explosion as the Sonoma Valley suddenly appeared, the grand mansion that dramatically opened out of the smaller waiting room. The tableau radiated for thirty miles: the eye followed from south to north, right to left, from the fading waters of the bay toward the marshy wetlands preserves and then the vineyards. I scanned from the foreground of wide-open plains to the far-off backdrop of the Mayacamas, the high, dark curtain of mountains separating Sonoma from Napa.

I swung a sharp left onto Arnold Drive, named for a forgotten general who lived in these parts. The road had just a single lane in each direction but nonetheless qualified as one of the major thoroughfares of the Sonoma Valley. Ahead I saw a bunch of cattle amid the unruly grass. A chain-link fence kept them out of the very first vineyard. The neatly ordered horizontal rows of trellises ascended a knoll to a white-shingled winery that looked like a big house.

The road swerved along the edge of the foothills of Wildcat Mountain. The scene alternated abruptly between new money and old country. A grand Tuscan villa commanded the top of a hill encircled by canopies of vines. A little farther there was a stunning abundance of yellow and red roses beside the low stone walls that proudly demarcated another wealthy vineyard. Then came an antiquated little airstrip that still had a few creaky old biplanes parked by the road. More ruins of barns again evoked the Walker Evans motif. A cluster of tractors and plows, long abandoned to rust, seemed like weird sculptures in the weeds. A hillside hacienda looked over hundreds of parallel rows of chardonnay and pinot noir. Then just across the street there was Angelo's homemade beef-jerky shack with a gloriously kitschy life-sized statue of a cow poised on the roof.

The smell of shit infused the air. In the city the term "organic" connoted freshness, healthiness, pesticide-free safety, but here it meant the pervasive odor of manure, especially on mornings when a farmer plowed a large plot.

I swerved right at the fuel-stop intersection that the locals call Big Bend, where the roads fork to circumnavigate a thousand acres of farms. Later I swung left and passed Ford's Cafe, where for decades the local farmers have gathered for breakfast and gossip before dawn, as early as four on summer mornings. Ford himself lived in a trailer home behind the ramshackle diner. A semi truck was parked in the gravel lot.

The lingering stink of shit gave way to a soothing perfume. This road was lined by a wall of eucalyptus, a century old and a hundred feet high, with their layers of curled, peeling barks and their drooping sheets of delicately long, thin leaves. The majestic trees emitted a hypnotically sweet aroma, especially in the moist hours after a sustained winter rainfall, when the air was fully saturated with the deliriously seductive scent. And now, during the rainless months from April to November, when the air was so hot and dry, the eucalyptus were like the wood walls of a perfect sauna, and stepping outside felt like entering a spa.

I went by more vineyards and then the road straightened and a remarkable vista opened suddenly. Far in the distance, down a wide avenue, there was a soaring, slender palm tree in front of the creamy, rough-hewn stone of Sonoma's old city hall. It stood at the center of the verdant town square, the Plaza, which was backed by a high vertical wall of mountains densely covered with green trees. The idea of the natural, curvaceous hills as a curtain behind the linear precision of the manmade vista evoked the aesthetics of refined Old Europe. But as I came closer, the facades of the vintage buildings surrounding the square--weathered stone, craggy adobe, warped wood--were remnants of a raucous cowboy town of the Old West.

I drove along the edge of the Plaza, looking toward the arched canopies of tall trees and the circular stone fountain surrounded by groomed hedges and the vibrantly colorful rose garden. Stopping at the southeast corner, I noticed something most unusual. A healthy, well-fed rooster was crossing the intersection in front of me with the haughty self-assurance and entitlement of a pedestrian in Manhattan. He arrived at the corner alcove of a nineteenth-century stone building, which sheltered the doorway to Maya, a Mexican restaurant. The fowl paused for a moment as a trio of slender young blonde women in chic urban black entered the building. Before the door recoiled, the bird strutted in.

TO GRASP WHAT MADE SONOMA so unique in all of America at the turn of the millennium, and to understand why its townspeople formed a grassroots political movement to repel the invasion of the outsiders, it would be good to know about the old-time movie palace and the flock of peacocks on Seventh Street East and the fellow who sold giant ostrich eggs at the farmer's market. But the swiftest way to appreciate the sublime differentness of Sonoma, the way to get inside its strange culture, is through the chicken saga.

On an early Monday morning at the end of April 2000, as we were parked in front of Sonoma's city hall, waiting for the one bus of the day that could take my girlfriend, Katharine, back to her job in San Francisco, a flock of chickens surrounded our Honda Civic. They swarmed and squawked with a frighteningly manic energy. I counted eight birds in a quick glance, but they were moving too quickly to tag mentally, and the enveloping cacophony meant there were surely many more outside my range of vision. The roosters were cockfighting as vigorously and violently as combatants in a sleazy back-alley betting contest. The hens crushed up against Katharine's side of the car and blocked her door as though they wer...

Présentation de l'éditeur

When acclaimed journalist Alan Deutschman came to the California wine country as the lucky house guest of very rich friends, he was surprised to discover a raging controversy. A civil war was being fought between the Napa Valley, which epitomized elitism, prestige and wealthy excess, and the neighboring Sonoma Valley, a rag-tag bohemian enclave so stubbornly backward that rambunctious chickens wandered freely through town. But the antics really began when new-money invaders began pushing out Sonoma’s poets and painters to make way for luxury resorts and trophy houses that seemed a parody of opulence. A Tale of Two Valleys captures these stranger-than-fiction locales with the wit of a Tom Wolfe novel and uncorks the hilarious absurdities of life among the wine world’s glitterati.
Deutschman found that on the weekends the wine country was like a bunch of gracious hosts smiling upon their guests, but during the week the families feuded with each other and their neighbors like the Hatfields and McCoys. Napa was a comically exclusive club where the super-rich fought desperately to get in. Sonoma’s colorful free spirits and iconoclasts were wary of their bohemia becoming the next playground for the rapacious elite. So, led by a former taxicab driver and wine-grape picker, a cheese merchant, and an artist who lived in a barn surrounded by wild peacocks, they formed a populist revolt to seize power and repel the rich invaders.
Deutschman’s cast of characters brims with eccentrics, egomaniacs, and a mysterious man in black who crashed the elegant Napa Valley Wine Auction before proceeding to pay a half-million dollars for a single bottle. What develops is nothing less than a battle for the good life, a clash between old and new, the struggle for the soul of one of America’s last bits of paradise. A dishy glimpse behind the scenes of a West Coast wonderland, A Tale of Two Valleys makes for intoxicating reading.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Broadway Books
• Date d'édition: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0767907035
• ISBN 13: 9780767907033
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 221
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible