Napa at Last Light by James Conaway

Author:James Conaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER TWELVE:

The Death of Shame

The pastoral idea of America had . . . provided a clear sanction for the conquest of the wilderness . . . But no one, not even Jefferson, had been able to identify the point of arrest.

—Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

1.

Since the United States Geological Survey never formally recognized the Howell Mountains, they should have fallen off maps of Napa Valley long ago. Other names—the Vacas, a lesser chain bordering the Suisun Valley in what’s now Solano County, and in Spanish times the interchangeable Sierra de Suscol and Sierra de Napa—were also in common use. But the Howells hung on, maybe through the force of personality of their namesake, John Howell, a shadowy figure who started the valley’s first blacksmith shop in St. Helena in 1856.

The Howells hook up at the top of the valley and form a vortex with the southwest-trending Mayacamas, a lusher range that still outshines its droughty eastern cousin in social cachet, if not in terroir, lofting the eye and the imagination toward Sonoma and the Pacific Ocean.

The Howells are the last wall between the valley proper and the vastness of the rest of the United States. Its soils are mostly silica found in rhyolite tuffs and breccias—broken rock segments cemented together by heat or pressure—and there’s also basalt lava, serpentine, sedimentary rock, and volcanic gravels washed down in the stream beds. But few nutrients, which means it isn’t suitable for many crops other than vines. It stresses them, and their fruit is said to evince more character and depth of flavor than grapes grown down in the loamy valley. This has led to the outsized popularity of Howell Mountain cabernet sauvignon at the end of the twentieth century, and of vineyards on the steep slopes even though the viticulture’s arduous.

The confusion of terrains is greatest at the northern end, just shy of Mount St. Helena, where plunging canyons, obsidian cliffs, hillsides too steep for any ATV, and impenetrable, protracted stands of mixed chaparral and manzanita overhang gin-clear seeps. Creeks flow in the dense shadows of rock, oak, Douglas fir, and redwoods, often inaccessible except on foot and occasionally horseback, when the rider is pitched forward in the saddle and keenly aware of exposed geology and the proximity of the mostly unseen: the bears, deer, coyotes, and mountain lions Lori Dunn worried about during the fire.

The northern boundary of Wildlake remained inviolate for years. Some vineyard development occurred on the road in, removed from the wilderness boundary and in another watershed. But at the same time, with the number of Napa wineries now approaching five hundred and the valley floor planted out, new vineyards were going in anywhere legal, and sometimes not—on mountaintops and strips of land deemed plantable by vineyard managers and their consultants. These all worked for aspiring wine squires who might once have considered this too backcountry but now couldn’t seem to live without it, particularly when their right to do with land whatever they pleased was challenged by neighbors and, increasingly rarely, by the county itself.

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