WHO WILL SAVE THE DAY NOW FOR NAPA?
Before It’s Too Late for the Napkins to Figure it Out
By Alan Goldfarb
August 9, 2022
Item: Dave Chappelle Gets Grumpy About Napa Noise Ordinance, Insists On Going Past Curfew Twice at Blue Note Jazz Fest
• Sfist, August 8, 2022
Item: Napa County Residents, Tourists React Following Legionnaires' Disease Outbreak
• NBC Bay Area, August 5, 2022
Item: The New Napa: Yadkin Valley Wine Country
• Town Carolina Magazine, August 1, 2022
Item: Napa Valley has perfected one type of wine. But is it starting to all taste the same?
• San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2022
It seems as though the end of days is coming for America’s most iconic wine region. Maybe it’s because Napa Valley has taken it in the shorts lately. But in my experience – going back to the late ‘70s – Napkins are a resilient bunch.
Napa Valley has survived Prohibition. It lives on past the corporate takeover of its most known winer(ies), even after the wine country’s most transcendent figure – Robert Mondavi – died. And like a phoenix, thus far it has risen from the soot pile of fires. The forementioned Mondavi – much like a modern-day Draymond Green – willed his “team” to victory. And so too – in the guise of a gateway signpost, in which his image crushes grapes in an old basket press –Napa Valley may well outlast and overcome its lack of diversity, so defiantly called out by a great comedic chronicler. And Legionnaires’? It’ll be starved like phylloxera.
But I’m certain The Valley can’t come down off its outsize-priced, monocultural wines. That rocket has left the crushpad and it ain’t goin’ back in the bottle. When was the last time you saw the monied class become so egalitarian as to afford the underclass a chance to partake in the pie?
As for Yadkin Valley – wherever the hell that is -- becoming the next Napa? That too is not going happen; as with every other wine region in America whose progenitors always begin by saying something, ”We’re like Napa, 30 years ago.” Napa is Napa and nothing is going to supplant it as the pinnacle of America’s wine dreamland. If that were to happen, it would be akin to Gaillac – once long ago, thought to be France’s greatest wine region boasting, “We’re No. 1.”
Clarksburg, if it ever realizes it should throw its lot in with Chenin Blanc, might gain some deserved notoriety, but let’s be genuine here, Napa it’ll never be. Thank goodness Sonoma – once gripped with Napa-envy – has figured out how to diversify and at last, release its Napa-2 yolk to become its own wonderful wineland.
But “We’re the new Napa”? No, my sistren and brethren. Napa is the standard. The OG. The best America has to offer. But it somehow has to figure out a new way. And realize once again – just as it had in the late ‘90s when it calculated correctly that new American drinkers were to be weaned from sweet drinks and therefore, sweetish wines would be the marketing play – it has to know there’s a new constituency out there to sweet talk.
I suppose “wine experiences” and fabulous, phantasmagorical tasting rooms; and untold amounts of cash floating around out there now – like Disneyland for mid-adults – might win the day. Today. But the day after that, it’s got know that girls and boys are figuring out they don’t live by Cabs and Chards alone.
There is no Bob Mondavi riding in on his or her steed anytime soon to guide the citizenry through the miasma of wine-ness. Who is there? In lieu of Mr. Mondavi is it going to Messrs. Melka, Matthiasson or McCoy? My dough is on the latter; and what a sensation and turn-of-events that would be if Carlton McCoy leads us through the next half-century. He’s the Modern Man for our times. He seems to possess all the qualities the Napkins – and the country – need to keep the quo status, at the same time, to climb over the Mayacamas Range to bring us a new day. Say hallelujah!