Lillie Coit's Larkmead Lane

It hosted one of the longest-running parties in the Valley, and it still fuels the celebration.

We turned down Larkmead Lane on impulse, mostly because we'd been reading a biography of Lillie Hitchcock Coit. The little country road runs north from Highway 29 to Silverado Trail, and much of the surrounding land once comprised her family's estate. Several winery properties in the area claim a legitimate connection to her legacy, but we were drawn to the old Hans Kornell establishment because of our own history. A generation or so ago, before the Napa Valley had quite reached its current preeminence as a wine capital, we passed many a late afternoon drinking Hans's super dry champagne while trying to hustle the tight-fisted Swiss out of some old redwood fermenting tanks.

It turned into an entertainment of sorts--Hey, let's go annoy Hans--and he felt compelled to humor us somewhat. We came with our own flutes and purchased a bottle of his sparkling wine on arrival, usually finishing it before departure. He found flattering our contention that he produced the cleanest, crispest cuvee anywhere, but our frequent purchases proved our sincerity.

He would sit on the edge of a bench out front, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest, eyes squinting skeptically in our direction, and demand to know what the hell we thought we would do with his old tanks.

Make wine, Hans, make wine.

Yeah, sure, he responded deadpan.

We never did get the tanks, but we still think of the pleasant hours spent there under the oaks as the sun dropped behind the western hills and the heat of late summer dissipated into a pleasant balminess.

Now it was midwinter, and a walk to the edge of the nearby vineyard revealed the rain fed stream rushing deep and clear toward the Napa River, a mile or so distant. All was a glowing green, except for the black folds of the mountain forests, wreathed in the lingering mists. The vines, bare and ready for pruning, were first planted in Lillie's day, and she walked the same route as we, especially after her husband Howard died in the mid-1880s.

She entered a deep depression, aggravated by the discovery that she'd been estranged from him so often because of lies her mother had told them both. The surrounding beauty gave her solace, and incessant hiking prevented her from dwelling excessively in her grief.

In those days, before pesticides drove off the insects that fed the larks, and, consequently, led to the birds' departure too, the vineyards and woods echoed with their calls, leading to her christening the property Larkmead. The songs and warmth of summer eventually lightened her mood, and she began to entertain constantly, developing friendships with Robert Louis Stevenson--writing "Silverado Squatters" at the time--and the then popular California poet, Joaquin Miller.

It seems like a property destined for entertainment and pleasure. From there you can see up and down the valley, can see sunrises and sunsets. It's far enough north to avoid the worst of the bay winds that sweep through on occasion, and the mountains crowd in sufficiently close to limit the direct sunlight and heat of summer. The nearby river offers swimming holes, and Lillie and friends were a quick carriage ride away from either Calistoga or St. Helena. It's telling that when she sought a place to live in San Francisco she settled on the Palace Hotel as an equivalently pleasant place to reside; the decision says something impressive about both venues.

The property is now known as the Frank Family Vineyards, and as we strolled toward the tasting room, a beautiful bright blue woody convertible in front of the stone cellar caught our attention. While admiring the venerable old car, itself a legacy of the delights of an earlier era, we saw Rich Frank posing inside the building for a photo shoot. He cooperated good-naturedly with the photographer's goading to look this way or that, and afterward, ambled over to the tasting room himself.

By then, we were already into our second or third taste of the sparkling wine made at the facility. The Frank Family approach is much more ambitious than Kornell's. Hans made just a few champagnes--a dry, a very dry, and, perhaps, a pink--and he started with other vintners' wines. Even so, his choices were invariably excellent, and he turned out a consistent, superior product year after year.

The Franks, on the other hand, produce a line of still wines in addition to four types of sparkling wine--a standard white, a pink, a red and a special white blend. They make all of their own product. One doesn't always look forward to pink or red champagnes, because they tend toward a cloying fruitiness. These, however, counted as the tastiest we ever encountered. And while the regular white went down well, the reserve blend was extraordinary.

On entering the room, Rich Frank introduced himself to the visitors.

Hi, I'm Rich Frank, he said to one couple, and the wife asked, Did you say, 'Rich'?

Yeah, he responded.

Well I'm poor, ha ha, she said, quickly adding, Not really.

To our amusement, Frank looked slightly confused. He was a man of minor Hollywood legend, a once high-level Disney exec who cashed out with countless millions, a man associated with one of those deal-making tales concerning helicopters landing on his yacht in the Med to take advantage of a big opportunity. A master of the universe who was able to isolate himself from fools, a man surrounded throughout much of his career by sycophants. And there he stood, subjected to the rather idiotic blather of some suburban haus frau who decided to jerk his chain.

Before Frank had a chance to say anything more, the husband piped in to laud the champagne.

You know, said Frank, the financial guys want me to stop making it. It costs three times as much to make a bottle of this as it does a bottle of still wine�.

The husband cut him off, the solution was obvious. You just raise the price, end of story.

Frank almost started to stutter in response; he'd attempted to play the gracious host, he'd humbled himself in front of strangers in a way that must have been foreign to him for years, and his reward was a staccato stream of non sequitor.

When he came to us, we proclaimed that we had worked for him once for about 10 minutes. It had actually been for a couple of months, back in the days when Hollywood met the dotcom boom. We first encountered him in our offices in San Francisco, and later at a Christmas Party at the Hollywood Athletic Club. He seemed always to wear a tailored suit, with an entourage in tow; his manner conveyed the impression that he was a man of few, important, well-thought words.

On hearing of this previous connection, Rich Frank moved on as if he feared an angry diatribe from someone he may have wronged . Such had not been the case, however, and we knew of nothing that accrued to his detriment. We let the man go in peace.

But we mused over the information that it cost thee times as much to make a bottle of champagne compared to a bottle of still wine. It was a shocking revelation, and we immediately appreciated the dilemma of producers like the Frank Family.

We have no battery of statistics, but we do remember that back when we knew Hans, a bottle of good Napa Valley champagne generally cost substantially more than a good bottle of wine from a local winery. That situation has reversed, despite the fact that the making of champagne doesn't even begin until you have a decent wine to start with, and the process demands another couple of years. One hopes that the Franks are up to the challenge.

Generally, we wouldn't care whether a house continued to make sparkling wine, but Larkmead is special. We like drinking champagne there, we like thinking about hot summer days passed, we like thinking about penny-pinching Hans.

Besides all of that, there's Lillie Coit. She was a champagne kind of gal, and the later history sparkles in her wake.

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