Cable car descent from Sterling winery: Jane and Nancy are going downhill rapidly

A day of wine and roses

I expect you noticed how that last posting tailed off and ended with a dull whimper as if I was too tired and couldn’t be bothered any more and just wanted to go to bed. The reason it was like that was that I started writing it early and then couldn’t finish it before Ted and Nancy arrived. And between starting it and finishing it in that dull way at the end of the day a lot happened. And I mean a lot. A lot of going places, a lot of talk, a lot of wine and a lot of loving.

I was going to tell you about my father and about the journal he kept of his train trip across Canada in 1923. And I was going to say more about Jack London and other writers – like Mr Sam Clemens, Ambrose Bierce (who crossed the Mexican border and was never seen again), and John Steinbeck – because I’ve always thought writers were the best thing you could be. All of them, by the way, were not true Californians but they all worked and wrote here. I like thinking about them. The way they wrote affects how I’m writing now, I also expect you’ve noticed. I hope it’s not too tiresome. I do other voices, like Holden Caulfield’s, and I expect you’ve noticed that too. I can’t do the big modern ones very well. I appreciate Norman Mailer, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malumud all right. But I’ll never get up there, never stand with them above the clouds and plant a flag on their high mountains.

Ah yes, just remind me, it was the Napa Valley tour I was going to tell you about, wasn’t it? But, Ted, I just want to make something clear. You remember at the end of the day, just after I had collapsed on the table, when I took out that black notebook and asked you to tell me what we had done that day so that I could write it down? And you looked a bit pie-eyed and started telling me the names of the wineries we had been to, and the places we had visited and the wines we had drunk, and Nancy at times cut in and corrected your memory? It’s just a small point but you said the first winery stop was at V. Sattui. But it wasn’t was it? There was another very beautiful one, perhaps the most fabulous of all, that we first stopped at. Do you remember? We may have been answering the call of nature and that’s why you never mentioned it to me. Anyway, there was a large fountain and a garden full of English flowers divided into four quarters. Groves of oak shaded us from a hot sun. It was a perfect start to an even more perfect day but I just wanted to make it clear that I can’t put a name to that heavenly place. Just a small thing and I hope you don't mind that I mention it.

I had done some googling the night before and had identified the V. Sattui winery as the maker of a “Madeira” wine. So we soon found it and the whole world and their friends seemed to have descended there at the same time. So it when I had finally managed to get the attention of one of their staff it was not the best time for a cross-examination. Why should an Italian family from Genoa, with no known connection to the island of Madeira or Portugal, who started making wine in California in the 1880s, make “Madeira” wine. The question came over a bit loaded and he started blustering and I argued a bit and the exchange frustratingly got nowhere. Later, I was tooling around in the car park admiring all the Japanese cars when I noticed a tall man in a big hat who looked like Jimmy Stewart. He spoke haltingly like Jimmy Stewart too and he looked straight at me and heard me out when I told him I too had trod a few Madeira grapes. Their first “Madeiras”, he said, were made in the 1930s when they decided to make a “light” tawny Port. It was a marketing decision then to call it “Madeira”, I asked. He agreed with a hesitant smile. Nowadays, he added, Californian winemakers had more confidence and did not feel the need to look over their shoulders to Europe. Did the Portuguese authorities never complain about this appropriation of the name Madeira? Well yes, a Portuguese finance minister had once visited the V. Sattui winery, Jimmy Stewart said. “We gave him a tasting of our best vintages and then he had our Madeira. At the end of the day he went away happy!”

At the small and delightful Cuvaison winery we plunge in to more tastings and catch the full attention of an amusing young man who was plying us with varieties of intoxicating nectar. He and Ted slug it away on the rise and fall of this or that wine, the pernicious habit of over-oaking, and the odd ways of wine drinkers while Jane and I lap it all up in blissful contentment. Nancy seems to know almost as much though.

At the Rombauer winery Ted pulls out a huge cold box and we spread a picnic table with food we had bought on the way from a special organic grocery store. Ted brings out a perfectly chilled white and a lusty red and we settled down. The setting is perfect. We are on a wooded slope overlooking the winery house and a valley. There is an aroma of dry herbs and faint wood smoke. We talk a lot and the bottles empty. It’s not just the wine but I really fancy Nancy – she’s such a lovely and witty person, you must meet her – and I burst in to tears. Although that’s not quite the story. It never is.

So it goes. Sterling winery, our next call, is owned by Diageo, who own everything from Guinness to Coca-Cola (probably not!). We take a cable car to the top of their vineyards to where four London bells hang from two towers. There we sit and sip and talk again.

The side of Jane’s face seems to be slipping. The redwoods seem to be moving and I see blue horses on the horizon. With a huge effort we drag ourselves away.

Thanks Ted and Nancy! Let's do it again!