Region Aspires to Grapeness

If there were a single spot in all of Lake County where the past and the future come rushing together, it would probably be one short stretch of twisty Highway 29.

Calistoga is in the rearview mirror, so close that it is almost possible to hear corks pop and crystal clink. Up ahead, the oaks part to reveal a small jewel of a hillside vineyard. A few more curves and the Lazy S Mobile Ranch looms.

There they are, wine grapes and double-wides, the unofficial symbols of a region in transition, the hallmarks of a blue-collar county struggling to be the next Napa Valley, or some approximation of it.

The journey will be long, very long. Ordering a Cabernet Sauvignon at the restaurant in the county’s best hotel one recent evening drew a baffled response from the waitress. “Can you spell that for me, please?” she asked, as she slowly wrote in her order pad: S-a-u-v-i-g-n-o-n. “I don’t want to get it wrong.”

But the quest certainly will not be lonely. As Lake County strives to cash in on the cachet of the nation’s premier wine region, it must queue up in a long line of similar strivers, some more plausible than others.

The Okanagan Valley in British Columbia wants in, and so does the Mendoza region of Argentina.

“Some industry insiders predict Shandong Province may be the next Napa,” posits www.thatschina.net, referring to a region in China.

Since 2002, each of the 50 United States -- even North Dakota and Alaska -- has had at least one winery.

Paul Read, a viticulturist at the University of Nebraska, regularly gives a speech titled, “Nebraska: The Next Napa Valley.” His state, Read argues, grows good grapes and has 14 wineries. The only hurdle, as far as he’s concerned: “We have to market the bejabbers out of it.”

Mystique is one reason, money another, for rural areas to pin their hopes on the grape. Vineyards hire farmworkers, wineries, tasting room staff. Soon, they figure, the tourists will arrive, then the bed and breakfasts, the restaurants, the gift shops. Property values will rise, the schools will get better. Wine Spectator magazine will come to call, or maybe Gourmet.

For Lake County, which was actually a part of Napa until the boundaries were rewritten in 1861, such economic promise couldn’t be more welcome, or more necessary.

Million-dollar houses are starting to elbow aside rows of aging trailer parks on the banks of sparkling Clear Lake, but 30% of the homes in the county could still technically be driven off at any time. The median home price has been shooting up, but it was just $228,000 nonetheless in the first quarter of 2005 -- affordable compared with urban California.

Vineyard acreage has more than tripled in the last 15 years, as grape growers have snapped up affordable swaths of rich, red volcanic soil.

“Our grapes produce ultra-premium wines,” says Kelly Cox, the county administrator, who is spearheading an effort to rid the county of its trashiest trailers. “We think we have more to offer than Napa County. We have the largest natural lake in the state. We have a national forest. It’s a beautiful area.”

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To Rick Gunier, who runs the Lake County Winegrape Commission with his wife, Shannon, a tour of Lake County must begin with Clear Lake itself. From the vantage point of the prehistoric basin, believed to be the oldest lake in North America, it is impossible to dispute the natural beauty of this isolated region just two hours from San Francisco.

Reachable by two-lane highway only, snug in the embrace of the northern Coast Ranges, Lake County is shaped like a long, ragged doughnut with the 43,000-acre lake at its center and a vast network of mountains and valleys radiating beyond. In spring, herons nest on Anderson Marsh. In winter, bald eagles swoop.

Mt. Konocti rises near the lake’s southern tip, a dormant volcano visible from nearly any point along the 100-mile lakeshore. But the tree-covered dome dominates more than just the horizon, for it has also left a lasting imprint on the county’s soil.

The southwest shore of Clear Lake is all deep volcanic dirt -- brick-colored, well drained, studded with obsidian and the reason for the newly designated Red Hills grape-growing district there. It is the prototype soil for high-end Cabernet, a wine that many hope will seal the county’s fortunes.

“See that over there?” Gunier asks. “That’s all wine grapes.”

He is piloting his 35-foot powerboat, Got Grapes?, along Clear Lake one bright spring morning. The air is clear -- among the cleanest in California, they brag in these parts, and the state Air Resources Board agrees

Gunier has already recounted the recent history of Lake County’s wine industry, the growth from 3,000 acres of grapes in the early 1990s to about 12,000, the jump from $3 million in grape sales a year to $27 million. He has talked about the fight to get recognition for Lake County’s fruit, which has long been an anonymous ingredient in other regions’ finest wines.

In a couple of hours, Gunier will bump along the county’s back roads in his faded Chevrolet Suburban, its windows rattling, and point out the vast Red Hills plantings, and the pear and walnut groves that will probably be torn up to make way for more neat rows of trellised vines.

But right now, he is talking real estate, and it is easy to see why.

Invisible from the streets above but resplendent from the water is a long line of mansions, each complete with a private dock -- the kind of houses that would be right at home in Napa Valley, if it only had a lake.

“That one’s 12,000 square feet,” Gunier says. “That’s our anesthesiologist. He got a little carried a way. He brought palm trees in. There’s an in-law unit.”

Farther along the shore is a 6,000-square-foot beauty with a 3,200-square-foot guest house, whose owners “just bought the one next door for $1 million to turn it into a tennis court,” Gunier continues before buzzing Paradise Cove, a gated community with the cheek-by-jowl look of the Malibu coastline.

Gunier pulls the boat into Buckingham Marina after passing a massive stone complex whose main house has a circular tower and a trophy room. A big round fountain spouts beside the lake. There are topiary animals the size of people. Stone lions guard the dock.

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Good climate, good soil, good grapes, good winemakers, good promotion -- that’s Napa Valley in a nutshell, or at least many ingredients of its success. Investment capital flows in from around the world. Three million tourists visit each year. Real estate prices are among the state’s highest. The best suite at one of the best hotels commands $3,850 a night.

All this in a county that produces just 4.2% of California’s wine.

So it’s not surprising that Lake County and Indiana’s Ohio River Valley and New York’s Finger Lakes and the Hawke’s Bay region of New Zealand; Paso Robles, Calif.; Walla Walla, Wash.; North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley; or Grand Junction, Colo., would want to emulate the Napa Valley.

Truth be told, they don’t really want to be Napa.

“When you get to be a very premium area like that, it forces all the local people out because of rising property values,” says Timothy Martinson, viticulture specialist at Cornell University Cooperative Extension in New York’s Finger Lakes wine region.

What most of them do want, though, is for their area’s wines to be as well received as the Napa Valley’s and for their regions to benefit from the tourism that good wines foster.

But one very important ingredient stands between the Napa Valley and, at the very least, its American competitors.

Time.

“People have been making great wine in the Napa Valley for 150 years,” says wine industry financial consultant Robert Nicholson. “I don’t know if they’ve been doing that in the Ohio [River] Valley. Time is very important when it comes to wine. Time to prove yourself, to build up a reputation, time to build a style that is unique.”

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Andy Beckstoffer knows his wine. He owns more than 1,000 acres in the Napa Valley, including some of the area’s most pedigreed vineyards, and cultivates more than 1,000 acres in Mendocino County. Beckstoffer Vineyards delivers more than 10,000 tons of premium wine grapes annually to more than 50 wineries.

Today he has 700 acres of vineyards in the Red Hills district -- it reminds him of Tuscany -- with 400 more to be planted soon. He’s looking for “the sweet spots,” he says, the microclimates that will ensure Lake County’s future as “a great Cabernet producer.”

That, however, is about as far as he goes in heaping praise on his latest acquisition. Napa is still “we.” Lake County is “they.”

As in: “They’re not going to become another Napa.” And: “We’ve got too much of a head start.” And: “They don’t have ... the number of wineries ... the standard of living, restaurants, affluence, schools.”

For, although few will dispute that the encroaching vineyards, the sprouting wineries and the brand new tasting rooms have been the catalyst for Lake County’s growing gentrification, wine has only gone so far in washing away the region’s history.

In the 1950s, the county was widely known as a prime vacation spot for San Francisco’s working class.

The Konocti Harbor Resort and Spa, viewed by many as the region’s best hotel, was created in 1959 by Local 38 of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union in part to benefit its own members. It was an era when families would return to the same holiday spot each year, and the little lakefront cabin resorts and mobile home parks did a steady summer business.

Pensioners liked the affordable land, and, back then, the building standards were lower.

“They’d have their little mobile home. Then they’d ... buy a plot of land and move their mobile home onto the lot,” said Andy Peterson, Lake County’s deputy redevelopment director. “We call it blue-collar retirement.... [But] this dream home doesn’t turn out that well. It wasn’t meant to be a year-round home.”

Today, building codes and enforcement have been tightened. A redevelopment district has been set up along the northeast quarter of the lake, and the county is buying up as many empty lots, trailer parks, dilapidated mobile homes and battered old buildings as it can, trying to transform the area into a string of open space, marinas and amphitheaters.

Driving along California Highway 20 with Gary Lewis, a county supervisor and former code enforcement agent, it is almost possible to envision Lake County circa 2025, when the little towns should be spruced up according to themes that were recently approved.

There’s Upper Lake, in Western motif, and Nice, remodeled along Mediterranean lines. Lucerne, whose motto is “Switzerland of America” will sport an alpine look. The county visitors bureau, in a former liquor store, already has the crossed wood beams of a chalet. Clearlake Oaks, the county hopes, will look like a fishing village in Cape Cod.

“It’s moving so fast,” Lewis says. Even he acknowledges, however, that the area is still “a hodgepodge.”

The new marina abuts a complex of abandoned buildings enclosed in chain link. Purchased by the county, they had yet to be demolished in June. Clearlake, one of only two incorporated cities in all of Lake County, is seeing new houses constructed beside condemned mobile homes on unpaved streets within walking distance of City Hall.

Taylor’s Lakeview Resort, a sad collection of rusting travel trailers, is less than two miles along Highway 20 from Tulip Hill Winery and just a little farther from Ceago Del Lago, a Mediterranean-styled winery and farm owned by Jim Fetzer, whose methods take organic to rare extremes.

Both wineries are proud stops on Lewis’ personal Lake County tour.

“At the end of the day,” says wine consultant Nicholson, “Lake County is coming on. It’s a long way to go to Napa, though.”

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Think globally, drink locally

Although many wineries across the U.S. turn out products familiar to regular wine sippers, they also produce beverages that are more specific to their own climate, soil and heritage. Some examples:

Alabama

Perdido Vineyards, Perdido

Elberta May Wine: “appropriately sweet with a pleasant bouquet of woodruff and a hint of fresh strawberries. This unique, old-European-style wine is recommended for use in punches.”

Alaska

Denali Winery, Anchorage

Alaska Ice Wine: “Our flagship product will surprise you with its body and complexity and comes in a unique ice wood box. Serve this wine chilled, and sip slowly to cherish its special charms.”

Indiana

Brown County Winery, Nashville

Vista Red Wine: “100% Concord, like eating grapes off the vine.”

Nebraska

Cuthills Vineyards, Pierce

Petite Amie: “has everything wonderful you would expect from a Muscat, plus the wonderful smell of fresh roses.”

North Dakota

Maple River Winery, Cassleton

Apple Jalapeno Pepper Wine: “This robust white wine has a semisweet apple taste progressing to a mild and not overpowering warmth of jalapeno peppers. This unique wine is perfect for hosting friends or with light foods. Serve well chilled or warmed.”

Source: Times research

Los Angeles Times