A Monument to the Good Life in Napa

It is the talk of the wine country, the new new thing in the Napa Valley, the buzz of sophisticates even in this season of insecurity. Its opening on Sunday will feature everyone from Julia Child to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Its modernist building will house gourmet restaurants and exhibitions on starvation. Its gardens will be curated by the organic farmer who did Steve Jobs’ estate in Silicon Valley. Robert Mondavi, the wine baron, has spent nearly $30 million coaxing it into fruition.

Copia: The American Center for Food, Wine & the Arts will be the nation’s first major museum devoted exclusively to sustenance, in all its variations. What that means isn’t exactly clear.

Not everyone here gets it yet, and its backers have been accused of elitism. Scholars, foodies and others are hailing its opening as a benchmark in America’s appreciation of the art of living well.

“It’s, uh, unique,” Mayor Ed Henderson said with a laugh, fresh from a preview of the corrugated-metal-and-glass center, which looks like a cross between an agricultural lab and a swank warehouse. “Is it pretty? I don’t know. It’s different. I sound like a mayor, don’t I? Tell you what--come see for yourself.”

Thirteen years in the making, the 80,000-square-foot, $55-million nonprofit center is intended to examine the role of wine and food in art and society. Named for the Roman goddess of abundance, it is part gallery, part fun house, part cooking school and part haute cuisine food court.

Initially modest in scope, it was conceived by the now-88-year-old Mondavi as a way to raise his region’s international wine industry profile. Over time, its mission greatly expanded to include food-related art and movies, outdoor concert-picnics, a rare cookbook collection, cooking classes, wine tastings, heirloom seed collections, state-of-the-art kitchens and more.

Visitors will find diversions as disparate as an installation on genetically altered “Frankenfoods” and a display of 16th century decanters. They can dine at Julia’s Kitchen, a restaurant named after Child, or hear a lecture on, say, Oregon wines or Mexican cheeses.

Its high-powered trustees and partners range from UC Davis and Cornell University deans to several large wineries and the publisher of Wine Spectator magazine. Child, Martha Stewart and Berkeley’s Alice Waters, doyennes of American food culture, have honorary board seats. The resume of its director, Peggy Loar, includes a nine-year management stint at the Smithsonian Institution.

“I can think of small places like this in, say, Europe, devoted to single subjects, but this is a major educational institution,” said Barbara Haber, a food historian and curator of books at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. “This is going to be a point of destination, and far more high-minded than people might presume.”

Though a museum devoted exclusively to food and wine has been talked about for years, Haber said, it has taken until now for Americans to get past the notion that mere sustenance was too trivial for serious study. Chefs are now celebrities, wine columnists grace the lifestyle sections of the most middlebrow newspapers and universities offer doctorates in food history.

“This is throwing down the gauntlet and saying that food and drink is a serious subject, and that California is the citadel of this aspect of our culture,” says Gourmet magazine Editor in Chief Ruth Reichl, who has also served as restaurant critic for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. “Thirty years ago, American wine was a joke and when you said ‘American food,’ people thought hamburgers.”

In the community of Napa, the response has been more complex, fraught with yearning and some class envy. Though the city’s name resonates with the good life, Napa proper, a faded river town of about 70,000, is a world apart from the verdant paradise where the socialities summer and tourists play.

Though Napa may be the valley’s namesake, it has become--how to phrase it?--the place where the help lives. The shipyards and steel mills that were once its backbone disappeared in the 1980s, replaced by low-paying jobs catering to the visitors “Up Valley.”

Its main claim to fame has been the blighted and flood-prone Napa River. Copia now overlooks that river just on the edge of downtown.

To some here, the budding gardens and undulating edifice are mainly about money. Copia is the first phase in a downtown overhaul that promises--or threatens--to change the character of the city at the behest of a rich man who doesn’t even live there, some critics say.

The interest of Mondavi (who lives in Oakville, about 12 miles away), along with a county-approved tax hike in 1998 to pay for a $230-million flood control project, have already pulled in new business and investment. Economic Development Director Cassandra Walker says that, including Copia, nearly $130 million in new private investment has flowed in since 1999. “People are buying property, doing historic renovations,” she said. Francis Ford Coppola is renovating a historic movie theater and the downtown now has at least three well-reviewed, high-end restaurants.

But some old-timers are mourning.

“The wine culture is snob culture,” complained Harry Martin, a city councilman and publisher of a local weekly newspaper. Napa, on the other hand, has a chronic housing shortage, below-average incomes and more than half of the county’s residents.

“Thirty-three percent of our population is Hispanic, 30% are seniors living in mobile home parks, 40% of us are renters. People are breaking their backs here to make a living, just for minimum-wage jobs that will leave them priced out of the market.”

Martin says that Mondavi’s projects--which include a Mondavi-financed art school and an opera house that will be named after Mondavi’s wife, Margrit--have been a short-term drain on the city, siphoning off funds for street improvements and sidewalk repairs.

“This has eaten away at city money that could go to our neighborhoods, just so tourists can come up here and learn how to make creme de la poo-poo,” says Martin. “It’s just Robert Mondavi’s monument to Robert Mondavi.”

Not surprisingly, Mondavi takes issue. Mondavi has spent his life in Napa Valley, he says, and he simply wants to give back. The balding son of Sicilian sharecroppers built one winery in his youth with his brother and another alone in his middle age after a fierce public feud with his family.

Earlier this year, he and his wife gave a $35-million gift to UC Davis to establish an institute for food and wine science and a performing arts center, both bearing his name. His efforts in Napa are similarly philanthropic, he says, born of concern for his region.

“People in Europe and Asia look at us as Johnny-come-latelys,” said the vintner. “I wanted to let the world know we’re more cultured than we’re perceived to be.”

Copia and its ripple effect on Napa’s economy, he and others say, will help residents help themselves in the long term. Kurt Nystrom, Copia’s deputy director for finance and operations, estimates the center will pump more than $20 million a year in salaries, contracts and secondary business into the local economy. Most of the center’s 60 or so employees live in Napa, Nystrom said.

“To evolve, we have to do these improvements,” Mondavi said. “It’s not going to be an elitist thing. We hope to work in harmony with the city.”

His Copia, housed in a sweeping structure designed by James Polshek, the architect who is doing the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas, is surrounded by the river on three sides.

From its tall glass windows, visitors can gaze across the banks toward a leafy nature preserve. From its curb, they will enter through 3 1/2 acres of edible organic gardens. Most plants are seedlings and saplings now, but they’ll eventually include olive and nut groves and beds for the preservation of rare botanicals, a specialty of the curator of gardens, Jeff Dawson.

Inside, guests can sample wines, take classes or stroll through art installations. Concerts are planned for the 500-seat outdoor amphitheater, and art films will be shown in the 280-seat theater. Chefs will lecture in the 80-seat demonstration kitchen. A standing exhibition, “Forks in the Road,” will explore food history, issues and kitsch. Art installations by eight international contemporary artists will explore food production and consumption, including a stunning tile floor by Los Angeles artist Jorge Pardo.

Some 300,000 guests a year are expected. The wines featured in tastings and classes will come from across the country, not just California, and bottles for sale in the gift shop won’t include Mondavi’s, or any from Napa, so as not to compete with the wineries.

Last Sunday, the place was still raucous with last-minute hammering and drilling. In Julia’s Kitchen, a roomful of local merchants munched blissfully at a free preview meal. “Oh. My. Goodness!” moaned Traci Gee, a local businesswoman. “I just had the pan-seared shrimp and the steamed black sea bass and--oh, my, goodness.”

When the doors open this weekend, Mondavi and Child will lead Copia’s opening parade through the streets of Napa with such disparate epicurean icons as the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales, the Doughboy and dancing grapes--of the chardonnay and cabernet variety, naturally.