Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee, Drinkin' Wine

The journey home was marked by rain, rain, and more rain. We were dropped off at the Novato headquarters of Rites of Passage, and expected to make our own ways home; but there had been flooding on the highways, with more expected. I caught a ride back to San Francisco with Linda, a fellow-witch, and as it turned out ours was the last car to make it out of Novato before the clouds began to empty themselves once again. I felt that this was significant in some way. Narrow escape from...something I couldn't explain, but I knew that luck was n my side.

I had to hold that thought during the move north to the Napa Valley. Certainly it was luck that had brought my meeting with Peter Mennen, postmaster of St. Helena, owner of a house on the Silverado Trail he was trying to sell, and in need of someone to house-sit. Peter's house was fully-furnished, so we shoved all our own furniture into one of the outbuildings and settled in. It was a mile or so to St. Helena, a good walk or a short bike ride northward on the Silverado Trail, left over the narrow Pope Street bridge (speed limit 10 mph), and onward to town. Traffic on the Trail was fast and furious; one of the two northward routes in the Valley, Silverado Trail was the one the locals used. Route 29, which ran through town, was for the tourists, most of whom were drunk from visiting the wineries along the highway and indulging in free wine-tastings. Not that the locals speeding along the Trail were much better-- nobody paid any attention to any posted speed limits, and it was up to pedestrians and bike-riders to take care of themselves.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there had been over 140 wineries in the Napa Valley, but most of them were wiped out by the double whammy of Prohibition and the phylloxera root louse infestation, which set back the wine industry until the end of the Second World War. Several of the original wineries still exist in the valley today, including Charles Krug Winery, Shramsburg, Chateau Montelena, and Beringer. But even in the old days the Napa Valley had not been a monoculture as it is today. Our nearest across-the-road neighbors were a couple of locals who had been born and raised in the valley. Born-and-raised were, for the most part, rural conservatives who looked with disdain on all the incomers, even though the incomers had money to burn. The born-and-raised remembered the Valley when there were other crops other than grapevines, before the tourists began to arrive in droves, before the farms gave way to vineyards with wineries attached, built in the form of castles, chalets, chapels, and any other shape that took the fancy of the new owners.

I was an oddity in the Valley, I didn't drink at all, and wasn't interested in the more arcane aspects of making a good bottle of wine. I went dutifully along with Ron on wine-tasting tours, but was more interested in the history of the place. There was an old wine cave in the back of Peter's house which had been hewn out of the rock by Chinese laborers; but the Chinese had vanished. They had been forced out of the Valley decades before, and been replaced as the laboring class by Mexican workers. There was a Mexican restaurant up in Calistoga, and another one in St. Helena, but there were no Chinese restaurants at the time. And I saw very few African-Americans. Apparently, Napa Valley in the 1980's was a white enclave.