The whole scene was impressive, honestly: there we were, at what I am probably not the only person to jokingly call “the Mothership:” the To Kalon Cellar at the Mondavi Family Winery, right there at the Ground Zero portion of the Saint Helena Highway. I walked in, past one of the most storied vineyards in the state—which contains, I found out, the oldest Sauvignon Blanc vines in North America—past fountains and flowers and arcs of olive trees. A setting of such elegant beneficence you’d call it “unrealistic” if you saw it in a movie.
Honestly, and don’t tell anyone this, I hadn’t been on the grounds in years: beautiful wines a given, beautiful estate ditto, but so much tourist traffic I’d learned to take out of town guests to smaller, off the main road spots whose wines you’d be unlikely to find offsite. Seminal, sure. A driving force in the building of Napa Valley’s wine scene—obviously. But Mondavi had become such a given to me that I usually skipped it. On September 2, I am very glad I didn’t.
So there we were. Upper level of the production facility. Picture fluorescent lighting on the stark white of a squeaky-clean, silent conveyor belt. A huge number of winery employees poised around crates of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from their superstar vineyard, the one I’d just walked through, the one named for the Ancient Greek word for beauty.
Margrit Mondavi walked in, flanked by a Carmelite priest and carrying olive branches. Words were said. Songs were sung. The priest gave a reading on abundance and generosity in a mellifluous Irish accent. Holy water was splashed on the grapes – and the congregation. Then Ms. Mondavi waved a hand and said, “Okay: just push the button.”
The conveyor began to move, employees poured clusters of grapes onto it, or took their places under the unforgiving light to pluck out berries that didn’t pass muster (“Or,” Mondavi noted, “God forbid, a bug.”). And with that, production was officially in full swing. The part mystical, part scientific process by which sunlight and water turn into Cabernet Sauvignon had been officially given the green light by the Powers That Be.
So we went downstairs to lunch.
I’m officially in recovery from taking these people for granted. A month ago they were a Very Good winery in a very serendipitously located piece of land and they certainly made the definitive fumé blanc. I knew they’d done a great deal for the Valley, and for UC Davis, and that the winery had been enormously influential in and beyond the Viniverse for decades. I didn’t know I would walk out of there that day feeling as though I had genuinely stood in the presence of… well, grace.
The Blessing of the Grapes is an annual tradition at Mondavi. This year was a little bit special, having come just a few days after a 6.0 earthquake shook Napa Valley to the tune of about $400 million in damage. Mondavi noted in her opening remarks that although the winery had sustained some damage—and not nearly as much as some of their neighbors—there were certain silver linings to mass disaster, one of which was the opportunity they provided for people to truly feel what it is to come together as a community. Anyone who’s experienced a large-scale natural disaster knows they do not discriminate. They do call on everyone to look at things from a different perspective—the one where we really are all in this together.
Apparently, one of the engineers surveying the property for damage called in with a frantic message that there was a burst water main and someone had better find it fast. “There’s even water in the creeks,” he’d said. Small streams dry up in this part of California even in normal years, but in a year of epic drought the sight of water running in the local streambeds seemed particularly, expensively disastrous.
You probably know where I’m going with this. There was no leak. The winery’s plumbing was totally intact. The quake had cracked open undiscovered underground springs, and the creeks were running with fresh water straight out of the aquifer.
Admit it: that’s kind of poetic.
The head winemaker was at our lunch table and when I said, “Ah, you’re the mastermind!” she smiled and was very quick to correct me. “It’s a team effort from end to end,” she said. “Truly.” And it was clear she meant it, which I thought was pretty cool: meet 100 winemakers (or chefs), and see how many of them genuinely see themselves as one piece of a collective machine. Many people in this profession—including some of the widely-acknowledged best—are about as team-minded as, say, Orson Welles. And I’m not saying one’s good and one’s bad: there are some truly outrageous egomaniacs in this world and some of them produce amazing wine. I care about the wine; I’m not here to judge anyone. But I will say it was lovely to meet someone who was so quick to point out that every hand that touched the process counted equally.
We all talked about wine, and family, and literature, and travel, and everything you can think of, Margrit effortlessly switching languages as she spoke to different people (ah, to be Swiss) and getting up to bring people ice cream so the server could take a break. We drank bottles of their genre-defining fumé blanc as well as a 2007 Merlot, which was, we found out, the only varietal merlot they had ever made. (Based on what I tasted, they ought to try it again! Yum).
Okay, don’t tell anyone I said this, but frankly, there are wineries in that part of Napa County, and I’m not naming names, where I have had tasting experiences that were heavily tainted with a patronizing, entitled sort of snottiness. As if it were clear that I wasn’t quite important enough to drink what they were pouring. It is an unpleasant experience and is another part of why the Saint Helena Highway isn’t my usual beat. It’s not that I expected that at Mondavi. But neither did I expect the amazing—okay, say it: wellspring—of genuine grateful humility that I experienced. You cannot fake that. I have had few winery experiences that can touch this one for sheer abundance and goodwill, and a spirit of sharing and learning and fellowship that had me grinning like an idiot the entire way home. Well, maybe part of that was the Merlot—but I don’t think so.
To Kalon doesn’t simply mean “beauty” in the way we use the word in modern English. Kalon is the sort of grace and beauty that radiates from people and things in their right place; a beauty arising from integrity. It’s a philosophy, not just an adjective. It is something that one lives.
It is alive and well in Oakville.