I WAS interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all
wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those
notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Cæsar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the
age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and
Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petræa. Château Neuf is
dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage—a hermitage indeed from all
life’s sorrows—lies expiring by the river. And in the place of these
imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented,
dream-compellers:—behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting
god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth
among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing
their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of
good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to
desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and
look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the
guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy “took his whack,” like liquorice water. And at the same time,
we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands,
already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards. A nice
point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian
wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste
a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of
vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals:
the wine-grower also “Prospects.” One corner of land after another is
tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is
better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos
Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than
the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those
virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to
something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips
the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But
there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses
and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the
palate of your grandson.
Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted
better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it
lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to
sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing its own
name, is to be fortune’s favourite.
Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
“You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?” a San
Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his
premises. “Well, here’s the reason.”
And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted
labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing
from such a profusion of _clos_ and _chateaux_, that a single department
could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all
looked unfamiliar.
“Chateau X—?” said I. “I never heard of that.”
“I dare say not,” said he. “I had been reading one of X—’s novels.”
They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason why
California wine is not drunk in the States.
Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry. It did
not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the
river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can
expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir
of the day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of
the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for
ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to
the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
masterpiece of nature. The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can seem a
stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in
that old flask behind the faggots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man’s outposts in the wilderness, has
features of its own. There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or
Rhone, of the low _côte d’or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of
Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert. We visited two of them,
Mr. Schram’s and Mr. M’Eckron’s, sharing the same glen.
Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a
little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the
rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a
bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still
flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the
part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their
twisted horns of blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards,
canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched
across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom. The last is no great
inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some
moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an
abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is
venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most
impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its
own in this steep and narrow forest dell. Though they were so near,
there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M’Eckron’s head
must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been
cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran
the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun
and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.
Mr. M’Eckron’s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden
house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines
planted and tended single-handed by himself. He had but recently began;
his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his
father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we
exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would
fancy.
Mr. Schram’s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley,
eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even
after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued
for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the
picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug
into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit’s cave:—all
trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.
Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all
about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I
was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office;
his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished
a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and
read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted every variety
and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy
Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the
latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more. Much
of it goes to London—most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of
the English taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.
It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the
stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the
cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth’s cream
was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such
as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so
quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah
might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the
bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram
might mantle in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving
farther on: the wine-vats and the miner’s blasting tools but picket for a
night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir
of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the
land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,
still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere
passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women,
whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
drove by.