Visitors to the USA arrive clutching driving licences as tightly as passports, since viewing the land of the free usually means handcuffing oneself to a steering wheel first. Many, of course, relish this prospect. An idealised, uncongested, wind-in-the-hair wheel down the the lonely, arrow-straight Interstate Highway is the spawn of countless movies. The reality can be more mundane: slow lines of traffic ambling between sprawling urban nodes, full of reasonless acceleration and deceleration, redeemed only by the singular appearance and sometimes strange behaviour of those caught in the same drift tide.
What, though, of the landscape beyond? In northern California, the landscape is often beautiful enough to make the car seem like a prison. Smooth, buff hills, round-contoured and undulating, scattered with sentinel live oaks from which lace lichen hangs in airy swags; green stretches of vineyard, suddenly rythmical and disciplined; then thick forest cover beyond, with the redwoods marching up moist folds while tanoaks and madrones filter the light of the higher stands. If you’ve left your motel early, you’ll never forget the interfingering fillets of fog drifting into the valleys, wherever the last million years have left a door open to the cold ocean; better still if you can drive a high road, since then you can gaze down onto the silver vapour, filling the lost floor like a soft tongue. That fog, in fact, feeds everything I have just described: the lace lichen sips it and the redwoods wrestle it down to their roots, while the vineyards use it to mitigate summer’s morning heat and thereby retain acidity in the grapes.
Which is the kind of stuff you can learn on a vineyard walk. Wine tourism may be institutional in California, but it mostly means a series of tasting-room sales pitches linked by another half-hour of cruise control. The vineyards glimmer greenly and the buff hills beckon, but all you’ll normally go home with is a head full of Wine Spectator scores and a little more adipose tissue. So when Allan Wright of Zephyr Adventure Holidays mailed me to ask if I wanted to join him on a Sonoma Vineyard Walk, I was keen. Even for professionals, California vineyard visits mean a short run of tasting glasses followed by supersized helpings of catalytic conversion. I’d always longed to walk those buff hills and Sonoma, with its complex pattern of sub-valleys, was the perfect place to do it from an educational point of view. Maybe I could begin to grasp the subtle differences between Dry Creek Valley and Alexander Valley, and feel the cool of Russian River for myself.
The idea was to tackle two AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) every day, with short walks through each concluding with a tasting by a lake, or up on a hilltop among the madrones. Lunches were generally picnic-style; dinners were more leisurely, in local restaurants. The overall base for the trip was the Flamingo Resort in Santa Rosa, where you can swim in a heated pool at any time of day or night as a pink neon flamingo slowly rotates next to the moon in the night sky, where my breakfast was served by an attentive German grandmother, and where the foyer was full of assertive old ladies trying to get their antiques valued. Jayne Mansfield was just one of those pictured poolside in years gone by (in characteristically pneumatic pose) at what locals know affectionately as the ‘Flaming O’.
The trip surprised me. I had forgotten that the structure of the California wine business is very different from that of Europe. Wineries not infrequently buy all their fruit under contract; indeed wines are often also made under contract, thereby giving rise to the ‘virtual label’, run out of a spare bedroom on a Blackberry and a USP. If you want to understand the fundamentals of California wine, by contrast, you need to visit grape growers – like Richard and Saralee McClelland-Kunde in the Russian River, whose 202 ha (500 acre) estate sells to no fewer than 50 different wineries, each one of which wants something a little different. Russian River is cool, known for its Pinot, Chardonnay and (increasingly) Pinot Gris, but even here you’ll find California’s signature grape Zinfandel. “I’m very fond of Zindfandel,” confessed Richard as we sat sipping it on picnic tables at the top of his Lion Ridge vineyard, “but it’s so cold around here that we can only grow it … just over there.” He pointed to the small west-facing ridge below us, soaking up the last rays of light, as half the party grumbled about having forgotten to bring their sweaters. We suddenly grasped terroir.
Earlier that morning, I’d had a masterclass in practical economics from vineyard manager Mark Houser of Alexander Valley Vineyards when I innocently enquired why some of the flat benchland vineyards couldn’t migrate up on to the hillsides. The wine might be 30 per cent better, was the gist, but with costs at 60 per cent or more higher, no one was going to be dumb enough to make the experiment. De-alcoholisation of over-strong wines, the vital importance of fog to stop sunburn and the terrifying menace that is the gopher were other topics Mark touched on, pointing out ‘vineyard designates’ (pre-assigned parcels) for this or that winery as we made our way forward. The ubiquity of cover crops as an alternative to herbicide showed how far organic thinking has moved into the mainstream in Californian viticulture. We even visited one Dry Creek vineyard, Truett-Hurst, which was on the verge of a dive into biodynamics (the radical form of organics based on the agricultural lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924). They were about to celebrate with a giant ‘Iron Man’ bonfire.
Leave the car behind, of course, and you are with nature at last. No one knew the name of the beautiful, heavy snake, striped with brown and verdigris, which slithered away at our approach, but we showed it sudden and silent respect. Rod Berglund of Joseph Swann taught us not to touch the innocent-looking poison-oak saplings as we slid down through woodland, “but this one,” he said, tearing out a sapling of pretty, yellow-flowered broom, “doesn’t belong here at all.” There were no mountain lions (cougars) in evidence as night drew on, even up on McLelland-Kunde’s Lion Ridge, though we had seen a bald eagle flap staggeringly by with a steelhead trout in its claws a little earlier that afternoon. Blue herons and turkey vultures were regular companions, the latter doubtless on the look-out for stragglers; and the flowers (wild blue iris, orange poppies and scented chamomile) were surging underfoot. California may be one of the USA’s most populous States, but to European eyes, its emptiness is still vast – and pristine.
The wines we tried on our visit were mixed in quality, but included elegant Cabernet, Syrah and Chardonnay from Michel-Schlumberger in Dry Creek valley and the fresh Russian River Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris of Joseph Swann. The final trip itinerary for later in the year, sensibly, includes a dinner at the Third Street Ale Works in Santa Rosa. The microbrewing revolution in the US has produced many flavour masterpieces to match the achievements of the country’s greatest vineyards. Indeed, a glass of fragrant IPA from Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma brought me back from the brink of despair after the tour, when back pain turned me from pliant human into a disagreeable object made out of tropical hardwood. The pain was not the consequence of excessive hiking, since the walks are all easy and short. I had, though, worn inadvisably light clothes before the sun had crested the ridge line of the Alexander Valley one morning, and close inspection of a 130-year-old Zinfandel vine at Sausal had exposed spare, bare flesh to an icy Pacific blast. I didn’t just understand terroir at that point; it actually stabbed me in the lower vertebrae. I wanted an education, and I got it.