Corner of Hollywood and wine

Niebaum-Coppola Estate has two faces. Most people see the vulgar show-biz facade that glorifies the Napa Valley estate’s owner, film director Francis Ford Coppola. Yet behind all the glamour and hype -- and the merchandise emporium selling “Godfather” souvenirs -- is one of the world’s finest wine estates.

This is the most striking paradox in California wine. Coppola is a shameless self-promoting businessman on one hand, on the other a conscientious vintner who has painstakingly reconstructed one of California’s great 19th century wine estates.

And this fall, the historic Niebaum winery produced wine from Niebaum estate grapes for the first time in 36 years. This achievement has a sweet taste indeed. The Rubicon and Cask Cabernet Sauvignons, the old-vines Zinfandel, the rich Cabernet Franc -- each showed ravishing perfume and deeply concentrated, vibrant flavors, and the ineffable character of the vines that grow on the estate’s gentle slopes. The little one-room winery within the imposing chateau seems far removed from the limousines, buses and tourist hordes with their branded bags of Coppola merchandise.

More than a century ago, Finnish sea captain Gustav Niebaum retired from the Alaskan fur trade to the Napa Valley estate he called Inglenook. He built a Bordeaux-style chateau containing a jewel box of a winery that turned his Rutherford grapes into some of the first Napa Valley wines to be internationally recognized. Niebaum’s 1887 Inglenooks were the first California wines to be estate-bottled, rather than shipped in bulk.

Niebaum’s descendants maintained a high standard for Inglenook “Cask” wines through the 1960s, when his grandnephew, John Daniel, sold the estate to Heublein Inc. The sale was disastrous. Heublein exploited the estate’s reputation by ballooning production with generic grapes brought in from outside Napa Valley, erecting an ugly industrial winery to handle the volume.

The final vintage for estate wines produced in the original Niebaum winery was 1966. By the mid-1970s the lustrous Inglenook name, once a symbol of California’s highest potential, had become a synonym for cheap jug wine.

Coppola purchased Capt. Niebaum’s house and part of the original Niebaum vineyard from the Daniel family in 1975. He watched and waited while Heublein was purchased by a series of increasingly larger companies.

By the mid-’90s the Inglenook brand was virtually dead, and its new corporate owners had lost sight of the estate’s true value.

In 1995, Coppola made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

A big production

That’s where the paradox began. Coppola continued the large-volume production, using Lodi and Central Coast grapes to produce more than 300,000 cases annually of inexpensive table wines bottled under the Francis Coppola Presents label.

And he went beyond simply restoring the original Niebaum Chateau to create “a structure devoted as much to Hollywood as to Bordeaux,” as writer James Conaway observed in “The Far Side of Eden.”

What true wine lover could pass up the chance to pay $85 for an “Apocalypse Now” camp shirt (available only at the winery and its Web site)? Actually, some might relish the irony of a historically significant building housing a display of ersatz “artifacts” such as actor Al Pacino’s desk from “The Godfather,” or the mint-condition car from Coppola’s lesser-known “Tucker.”

Meanwhile, however, he quietly restored the integrity of the original Niebaum estate. John Daniel’s vineyard manager, Rafael Rodriguez, continued to tend the vines by organic methods (the entire estate was certified organic in 2000).

In the early 1980s Coppola introduced a limited-production wine called Rubicon, made from the estate’s best vines and produced in a makeshift winery in the old Niebaum stable.

The first Rubicon vintages were disappointingly dense, coarse, and tannic. They were shunned by critics and consumers alike.

But Coppola persevered. He hired a prominent winemaking consultant, Tony Soter, to upgrade the Rubicon program. And in 1991 he brought an untried young winemaker named Scott McLeod on board.

McLeod has been calling the shots for several vintages now, and the estate seems to fit his sensibility like a glove.

The tourist-trap aspect doesn’t bother him, he says: “That’s on the periphery of my job, which is producing a first-growth level wine from this jewel of an estate. If there seems to be a disconnect between the two sides, I think we just have to be realistic about the fact that Napa Valley is a big tourist destination. It’s America’s wine area.”

A maritime aesthetic

Under McLeod, the Niebaum-Coppola estate wines -- Cabernet-based Rubicon (3,000 cases, $100 a bottle), Cask (1,500 cases, $65 a bottle) and Edizione Pennino Zinfandel (1,500 cases, $44 a bottle) -- have taken their place among the most consistently impressive Napa Valley bottlings. The distinctive Cabernet clone in the estate’s vineyards was recently registered as UC Davis Clone 29.

I tasted some of the new wines from the tanks with McLeod during the harvest. Some were in mid-fermentation and still sweet, like ambrosial syrup. The Rubicon Cabernet from the 35-year-old Garden Block, which produces less than three tons per acre, tasted like chewy violet candy.

Others had already fermented to near-dryness and were ready to be pressed, before going into small oak casks for aging. The old-vine Zinfandel had a luscious aroma and flavor like sun-warmed berries spiced with black pepper, and the Cabernet Franc made me think of a black cherry liqueur.

No doubt the winery reflects Capt. Niebaum’s maritime aesthetic. It’s easy to imagine it inside an old-time sailing ship. The room is a compact wooden box with lots of vaguely nautical-looking hardware, some old and some brand-new.

Cosseting the grape

It was noted by early observers of the California wine industry. “To insure a proper receptacle for the wines, Captain Niebaum erected a cellar and winery, which was completed in 1887, and which, for perfection of detail and elegant finish, has no equal in America,” wrote Frona Eunice Wait in her 1889 book “Wines and Vines of California.” Wait went on to describe a winemaking regimen that is remarkably similar to the one practiced by McLeod today.

The Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Zinfandel grapes are delivered to the winery from the surrounding vineyards in large boxes. Their first stop is a stainless steel table where the bunches are examined by workers who reject any fruit that looks underripe or moldy.

The crusher is gentle -- it barely breaks the grapes to let the juice begin to flow and absorb color from the skins. As the bin beneath the crusher fills with crushed grapes and juice, a forklift (just a minor improvement on the 19th century block and tackle) raises it and dumps the soupy must into one of the tall oak tanks that line the walls.

The wine is fermented in these wooden tanks the traditional way, with indigenous yeasts.

Once fermentation is underway, winemakers ascend to a wooden catwalk where they deploy pneumatic equipment to punch down the cap of skins and seeds and aerate the new wine that comes bubbling up from the inky depths.

The gleaming metal gadgetry looks futuristic, yet it’s simply bringing a mechanical advantage to tasks performed with muscle power a century ago; “Captain Niebaum meets Captain Nemo,” as McLeod puts it.

The reference to 19th century sci-fi writer Jules Verne is apt. You might say McLeod is making wine in a time machine. The little gem of a winery was considered state-of-the-art when it first produced wine in 1887. Amazingly, behind some of the most garish commercialism in the modern Napa Valley, it still is.