Renaissance, Renaissance Man

Costumes, courtyards and wine culture.

The auction was finishing up on our arrival, but we got there just in time to catch the premier duel of the evening. A bottle of Screaming Eagle Cabernet--we think it was Cabernet--predictably claimed the most fevered interest, and the organizers of this River School benefit saved it for last. Merlin the Magician and Sportcoat Man vied with Maid Marion, and they shot past the fourteen hundred dollar mark without a blink. But getting to sixteen hundred and beyond became sticky, and the tension mounted with every recitation of the going, going... prelude to ultimate claim.

It came on the way to sixteen hundred, offered at the last minute by Sportcoat Man, and it recurred before hitting seventeen hundred, Merlin making the call even as the auctioneer prepared to form that last g sound on the way to pronouncing the last word. Then he asked for eighteen hundred, and Maid Marion casually nodded assent somewhere during the last possible split second.

The auctioneer unsuccessfully demanded nineteen, and ever so reluctantly uttered the final decision in the form of that most final of words: Gone!

The V. Sattui Winery provided a suitable venue for this ersatz time trip to a non-existant past, and the mix of medieval costumes and casual evening wear blended nicely against the backdrop of the stone building and its walls, courts and tower. Not only was the obligatory wine offered, but in this case there was home brewed beer of several varieties, including a dark, a darker and a mead. The brewer wore the brown, cowled robe of a monk, a pot belly evident beneath the folds.

His friend, Bruce, dispenser of said beer, explained how he'd helped make the stuff in the brewmaster's garage in 25 gallon or so batches, but the pleasant ritual was abandoned.

He was gaining too much weight testing it, said Bruce.

So now, the beer had to wait for special occasions to bubble to life, a loss to us all; we found it excellent.

We often see Bruce at Napa's legendary coffee house at First and Main, but this was our first opportunity to converse, and he eventually mentioned that his two kids attended the school. His happiness at the fact clearly indicated his belief that they received an excellent education, but we were precluded by events from pursuing the topic and learning more.

We did so later, by visiting the school's website, Riverschool.org. We found it fascinating.

It began with our clicking on the word "Mission," where we discovered this initial statement preceding the inevitable bulletpoints:

"Our students will be conscious, responsible, active citizens of a democracy and global community. We will achieve this by having these behaviors manifested in our students."

This we thought rather vague, considering that rather than describe what the school intended to do, the statement seemed to imply the kinds of students it wanted to have. There is a difference.

Then the statement goes on to confuse the students with a desired behavior, only hinted at in the expression concerning the students it seemed to want.

We also took exception to this citizens of a global community thing; we like to think our tax-supported schools create good American citizens. There is a difference.
Try as we might, we couldn't stop exploring that web site; it could have passed for a parody of political correctness and pop-educational jargon. Mushy, fuzzy sentiments badly expressed abounded on every page, and the whole was so infused with such a smug, self-congratulatory tone that this writer was embarrassed for the place.

We desisted from our perusal after encountering the section about helping students make good choices as opposed to "poor" choices. Not only could they not accept that such things as bad decisions could be made--"bad," after all, is such a judgmental concept--they didn't seem to believe that their charges could make poor choices either; they put the word in quotes, as if to deny the very concept of anything not good.

For comparison, we visited the web site for the Napa Unified School District, and looked for its misson statement. Here it is:

The Mission of the Napa Valley Unified School District is to produce educated citizens who achieve and perform at all levels of learning, are prepared to live fulfilling lives, and contribute to their community and the world in which they live.

It strikes us as a perfectly succinct, admirable expression of a school district's goals, and it could not be expressed any better.

The River School is an "alternative" school, which typically signifies "progressive," as well. But as is so often the case, we see little progress delivered by so-called progressives; they seem to specialize in vandalizing excellent, traditional systems of every sort on behalf of half-baked ideologies of wishful thinking.

But we digress; we were talking about the Renaissance theme party raising money for the worthy institution. Everywhere you looked a costume stood out amid the crowd, and Robin Hood movies played out along a cellar wall. And that brings us to another fuzzy concept, this tendency to confuse the Renaissance with ye merry olde England. We suppose it was the '60s-born Renaissance Festival that started muddying these particular waters, and the fact is, England pretty much missed out on the era. It was far from the political and intellectual ferment that bubbled forth in Italy in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries, and while sumptuously attired Venetians and Florentines were drinking wine and coffee on stunning piazzas we visit even today in emulation, the English still wallowed in muddy villages and squalid cities hardly deserving the designation.

But we're a curmudgeon at times, and it's ungracious of us to flog the issue; everyone we saw enjoyed himself, and every comment we heard was positive. It looked to have been a great success.

Our next stop constituted a genuine legacy of history. Just south of Calistoga, The Tucker Farm Center memorializes a family made most proud by Reesin "Dan" Tucker, an early inhabitant of the upper Napa Valley. We got our first hints of the story at a rare book store while sampling an old volume of memoirs written by an early California Yankee. He contrasted a certain sort of prosperous, selfish pioneer who over the years had thrived on a generosity of others that he would never reciprocate, with a nameless man who risked everything to save the Donner Party stranded in the Sierra snows where they had begun to eat each other.

That man, we later learned, was Reesin Tucker, and he brought some of the Donner Party to the Napa Valley to recover. And we had our own history at the farm hall bearing his name; the last time we'd been there had been for a country western dance at which we knew not a soul until a local girl made us welcome.

But this night the hall had been taken over by the friends of Acme Fine Wines and the semi-jazz strains of Steve Emerson and his friends. A bottle of wine served as admission, and the tables inside the brown, shingled structure disappeared under the scores of wine bottles atop them. We counted more than a hundred different brands, and have seldom seen such an opportunity to sample more wines in a more pleasant, low-key environment. We knew no one this time out either, but were still made to feel welcome, despite the absence of that local girl.

It was a jeans and boots crowd, notwithstanding the ubiquity of Bimmers, Benzes and Audis, and unlike so many events characterized by lots full of such vehicles, the attendees proved friendly and unpretentious. Real and veggie burgers simmered on the outdoor grill as new friends and old neighbors traded personal gossip and the latest rumors concerning what was happening to the crumbling Mondavi empire, the dissolution of which has resulted in so much disillusion. As one former alumnus explained to me earlier in the evening, they'd gone public in order to be able to keep the business in the family, and the result was to have the Mondavi's driven from the very wineries bearing their name. Talk of bitter irony, especially in light of their earlier expulsion from the garden of Bacchus by Peter Mondavi, master of Charles Krug Winery, where the Mondavis-meet-Napa saga begins.

Acme Fine Wines, of course, is one of the beneficiaries of Robert Mondavi's successful campaign to make Napa Valley wine famous. He re-energized an industry that faced oblivion, and were it not for him, it is doubtful that there would be an international wine industry at all. Despite the characterization of globalization as bogeyman, thousands and thousands of unique, local wineries and businesses grew and flowered in the warm, global environment fostered by the old man. Wine dealers like Acme owe him a great debt--as does everyone who enjoys wine.

In fact, we're reminded of the Medici of Florence, who did so much to promote the real Renaissance, and the flourishing of arts and letters in the 15th and 16th Century. We can imagine the snorts of derision that must emanate from some at the comparison between Robert Mondavi and Piero, Lorenzo, or Cosimo Medici, but our own modern promoter of wine and the Napa Valley literally transformed the world.

We remember the wine industry of the '50s and early '60s, and pleasant though it was, it was also insular and small. Over the course of a decade or so, Robert Mondavi built the valley's biggest new winery in a couple of generations, strengthened the ties between the Napa wine industry and UC Davis researchers, he promoted the wine to restaurants and distributors nationwide, and, finally, he reached out to vintners--and would-be vintners--around the world, spreading the faith of refined hedonism.

Singlehandedly, Mondavi re-energized an industry that was still recovering from war in Europe, and Prohibition in America. In the '60s, Napa and New York state were equivalently well-known for their wines, and American wineries numbered in the dozens. Now there are thousands in America, and thousands more in places like New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Mexico, all wineries and wine industries that would not have existed were it not for Robert Mondavi's efforts.

He shifted the focus of middle-class American entertaining from backyard barbecues featuring meat and beer to dinner parties consisting of good wine and more imaginative food, and he disseminated reflections of a new lifestyle to a ready world.

Perhaps these phenomena lack the value of cancer cures and an end to poverty, but they are worthy nonetheless, and utterly universal. People have always wanted to live and eat well, and Robert Mondavi took us to a new level back in the '70s, if only by reinvigorating an appreciation for an older approach to life. That life slowly ebbed away in the postwar period, as Americans moved ever faster toward vague goals of achievement, and many Europeans abandoned their own traditions in emulation. There might not be a wine industry now were it not for Robert Mondavi.

He fostered a rebirth and reinterpretation of the old ways, much as the Medici did in their day. He's affected more people faster than the Medici ever dreamed possible, and the fruits of his efforts spanned the globe in decades rather than centuries. Like him or loathe him, however you feel about the kind of business and glitz culture spawned by his efforts, the man is a giant. A real Renaissance Man.


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Copyright WineMerchant.com 2006