My Love/Hate/Crafty Toddler Relationship with Napa

I came here hoping to be a savior to a dying region. (And yes, I realize, I'm not that special.) Now I just channel toddler vibes.

Honestly, this piece weaves a lot of self-indulgent personal narrative into an eventual point and teaser for my next, meatier post; if you want to skip my long-winded, navel-gazing intro, jump here.

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The Part Where I’m Looking for the Light

In the darkest days of the Pandemic (ahem, summer 2020), when I thought for certain our restaurant would never reopen, and we had to board up our shop for fear of protestors bashing rocks through the windows, and I got screamed at by a woman on a bike because I was running along the empty Alameda coastline without a mask — “I hope you get sick and die!” she spat — I decided it was time to get out of Dodge. Dodge being Oakland. Just for a little bit, while we waited for the East Bay temperature to drop and the playgrounds to reopen.

Manic entrepreneur as I am, Josiah and I had already been scoping out locations to open a second location of Bay Grape in Sacramento and the South Bay. Our concept (wine shop / bar / wine club / education space hybrid) had proven itself successful, and my passion had grown into mentoring a new face of wine industry professional toward greater leadership positions. We could only offer so much job growth at one shop, but expanding into multiple outlets would enable us to promote individuals into bigger roles, training them in management and leadership and ultimately positively altering our industry’s MO. I set a personal goal to open five Bay Grapes in five years (spoiler: that did not happen!).

Around the time that we very nearly signed a lease in Sacramento, we had several guests from Napa visit us at our Oakland walk-up “door front” shop to buy cases of wine. “These kinds of bottles just aren’t available in Napa,” they all explained. Three friends with wineries in Napa told us the community there was dying for a place like Bay Grape.

This was intriguing.

I had an incredibly soft spot for the Napa Valley. When we first moved to the Bay from New York City, a friend had connected us to several influential winemakers in Napa. Our first week on the West Coast, we attended two parties in Napa: sprawling, impromptu, back-yard affairs full of fresh produce and fresh wines and young and promising winemakers and their mentors, the epitome of the “New California” movement and what I had always dreamed my life could look like.

“This is the most diverse, fascinating, promising soil and climate wine-growing region I’ve ever come across,” Julia van der Vink told me at one of those parties, when I asked why she chose to live and make wine in Napa, considering all the incredible, international wine regions she’d made wine in before. “Napa is not just hype,” she promised. “The potential here for mind-blowing, terroir-specific wines is unparalleled.”

My love for Napa and the community I had there grew over the years, even as we lived in San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda. Through winery and vineyard visits and hikes and runs and bike rides, I got to know the soil and climate variations Julia and others had told me about, and I saw what she saw. I got to know the boots-on-the-ground people making wine (not the CEOs at major wineries) and the intention they put into their products (usually their own labels, while they paid the bills making pricier wines for a decidedly different clientele and lifestyle). When I visited the friends in Napa who became like my chosen family, I got to know the “insider’s” Napa: the blue collar, agricultural, working class roots; the modesty and humility that natives and real residents carried; the slower-paced, family-first mentality people had in contrast to what I’d grown accustomed to living in LA, London, NYC and SF/Oakland. Underneath the marketing campaigns and shiny chateaux and McMansion 2nd/3rd/11th vacation homes of visiting investors, Napa was not much at all like what my Midwest relatives thought it was. I loved this Napa, and as I contemplated the possibility of moving and opening a business here, I became convinced that it was my calling to evangelize about it to others.

The Part Where It Turns Out I’m an Egomaniac

Furthermore, I became convinced that Napa needed me. (Yes, I’m often whacked-out egomaniacal one day; then quickly reverse to considering myself pure trash the next.)

Word had been spreading that Napa was too expensive, too elitist, too stuffy for the younger generations of wine drinkers. None of my non-wine-industry friends wanted to visit Napa, or drink those wines. Most of them couldn’t afford to. I was prepared to fix that: Napa needed more diverse residents, more youthful and forward-thinking business owners, a more modern marketing campaign and more modern amenities meant to attract anyone and everyone who wasn’t old, white, and rich. Bay Grape Napa would fix all of that. I would fix all of that.

I Googled “commercial real estate for rent Napa.” It was a Thursday. On Friday, we met the listing agent for the first space that Google turned up. On Saturday, we submitted a Letter of Intent to lease the space. Within a month, we had the keys to Bay Grape location two of five. “Forward march!”

We packed up our one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, the kid, the dog, and we made the U-Haul journey an hour north. I left our rented house to go for a run the next day. “Good morning!” my new neighbors twittered sunnily as I passed by, free-faced.

“We’ll just stay until the Napa shop gets open, and by then hopefully Alameda County will allow indoor shopping and dining again, and maybe the preschools will reopen. We can move back home.”

Well. Here we are over four years later. We did not move back, dear reader. We stayed, now absolutely considering this Napa Valley our home, because it is glorious here. I love the landscape of Napa. I love its people. I love my multitudes of friends who, like me, love having dinner in our back yards with carrots we grew and Grenaches we made while our kids get messy in the mud and go to bed too late. I love running alongside bud break in Carneros, biking up past versaison on Atlas Peak, helping my neighbor harvest that extra little plot of Sauvignon Blanc on a Sunday early morning in late August. I love that my neighbors to the left have a Pride flag hanging on their porch, while the ones to my right fly their Gadsden gold. When we hosted a summer block party in the cul de sac, the two of them clinked Modelos, brought by the Hernandez’s.

The Part Where I Promise I Have a Point

I am utterly obsessed with Napa’s bounty and beauty and diversity. And I also can’t fucking stand it. It takes an hour to get to the regional airport and two to get to SFO. There are extraordinarily limited cool dining options, especially if you’d like to eat something inspired by a continent other than Europe, especially if you’d like to spend less than $50/person. There is no Exploratorium or Lawrence Hall of Science.

But those three petty things aside, I hate it because the marketing powers that be (Who is it anyway?! Visit Napa Valley?! The wealthy old Cabernet houses?!) are not aligned with my interests or my Napa. They’re not willing to show a wider audience what my friends, my neighbors, my favorite winemakers or chefs or artists are doing that excites me. They don’t seem to get it that there are others out there like me: “young” people (do I still count?), “middle class” people (if I can afford to live in Napa do I even qualify?), “diverse” folks, folks with small children, folks in the arts or ag or non-profit sectors, folks who would love to visit and drink wine if they could feel comfortable doing so, if they could afford to do so, if it looked like the kind of place that wasn’t douchey AF.

Then I hate it because the County does idiotic things like this and this, adding insults to an already deeply injured industry. Do they want the Napa wine industry to shrivel and die like the Cabernet nobody wanted this past harvest?

(See? Told you there was a very long lead-up to this part of the piece.)

I was prepared to lead with this point, highlighting my friend Jess’s articles (linked above) and her ongoing amazing reporting on these issues in the Chronicle. I was prepared to proclaim, like an ADHD victim of junk food short-form media, “These regulations are too much! They inhibit small business! Not fair! Money-hungry! Hissss!” I would wheeze like an angry goose.

But then I remembered critical thinking. I dragged that dusty old maneuver out from under the bed. I took a few minutes writing this article’s very long, self-indulgent intro to process my critical thinking. Finally, I realized that there are nuances and layers here I’m not sure I’ll ever comprehend. I had questions I couldn’t find easy answers to:

• Why do these regulations exist?

• Who created them in the first place?

• And because of what concerns?

• How have those concerns changed? How has the Valley and the wine industry changed?

• Who is pulling the purse strings today to keep those old regulations intact? Is it Gregory who lives in the house up on the hill only two weeks out of the year?! OMG is it Elon?! It’s Elon, isn’t it? [Spirallllll!]

• WHERE on Earth does the purported $22K a small winery would spend on permitting go?

• If large wineries are dropping this kind of cash to get their way, whose lap is that quiche dropping into?

• Do I, as a Napa resident, benefit in some way I’m not yet aware of? Is this why the potholes in the roads get fixed so much faster than they did in Oakland?

• If not, who do I talk to to complain?

• And if so, should I still be complaining? Or should I shut up and eat that eggy brunch pie, chased by a cool glass of Big Name Chardonnay?

Most critically, I realized this: Simply complaining about my list of issues with Napa instead of really digging into the miry, historical depths of why my County officials and our legislation regulate and insist on what they do isn’t going to help. Complaining solves nothing.

Alas. That kind of deep, long research, culling through old articles on microfiche, interviewing the Supervisors of yore who once-upon-a-time wrote the original legislation, trying to ascertain the texture and mood and complicating circumstances at the time of drafting seems reserved for paid journalists at extinct publications. (Hi Jess and Esther! Would love to see the Chronicle hunker down on this; I’m sure Hearst will pay that invoice!)

I am an unpaid (mostly) writer, self-publishing as a sort of sabbatical catharsis. (Though if you’re kind enough to become a paid subscriber perhaps we can solve for this together.)

The battle for land and money and rights here in Napa will continue, forever and ever (or at least until wildfires burn it all down) because, as Julia asserted 15 years ago, “Napa is not just hype. The potential here for mind-blowing, terroir-specific wines is unparalleled.” There’s gold in them thar hills, puppets.

The Part Where We Make Like Toddlers

Now, then. To wrap this diatribe at long last, I will propose something even more controversial: I propose we make like toddlers and look for crafty ways to circumnavigate the old-school, not-serving-us-anyway rules that have been put in place by these “out of touch” parents. Look: times are desperate, right? And yes, it sure would be all nice and pretty to host guests at your vineyard (if you already have that privilege of owning a vineyard), but since this is a Substack called Resilient Wine, I am in the practice of observing and promoting resilient practices and opportunities. I am here to prop up wineries and makers who are asking “What if…?” and who are working toward a totally different, new, exciting, holistic, pragmatic and inclusive future. Here is what I’ve got to share, then:

If we are small, and if we do not have the money to lobby or change the rules so that we, the small, can compete… then perhaps we start our own new game. Like a toddler would. We can invite our other excluded friends. We’re the booger-y or disheveled ones, the shy and introverted or the way too extroverted, the little kids who didn’t quite fit in for some reason or another anyway.

We can find a corner of the playground that the parents haven’t restricted yet, and we can set up our scavenged toys the way we want them. Yes, we’ll have to be sly, but we are toddlers. That’s what we do. We are resilient.

One time, when I was lamenting to our pediatrician how difficult it was to constantly negotiate and re-establish rules and boundaries with my then-toddler, the doctor told me this: “From an evolutionary perspective, our kids are literally more evolved than us. We’re like the Beta version; they’re V2.0. Stronger, better, faster than we will ever be. You cannot compete. You must understand this. You will lose. It’s evolution.”

The old-guard will die. And we are coming up behind them. It’s evolution. Let’s make like clever toddlers and keep building forts and castles and ferries in new corners. Let’s keep inviting others. Let’s examine and spotlight who’s doing this already, and let’s learn alongside those rebels.

With that, I am very pleased to introduce you to The River Club, who have done just that in setting up a collaborative wine tasting room in an admittedly rather bedraggled (but very imagination-ready!) nook of Napa. They are experiencing much success! I can’t wait to tell you about it!

But, sigh, I have taken too much time here not editing myself already, so their story will come next. Soon. Very soon, I promise. Right now it is this toddler’s nap time.