Chapter 2: In Camelot
Pulling out of his trance, Jeremy watched the haggard prune trees of his past give way to a lush, rolling carpet of trained vines — grapevines that produced fruit fermented into unbelievably expensive wine. The wine, made by a local winery, was superlative. But its high cost also was due to Jeremy Barnes’ name appearing on its label, for he was the most famous grape grower in the county, if not the state.
Jeremy was the benevolent ruler over this end of The Valley. It wasn’t the flat limitless desert painted green with the watercolors of agribusiness and a few pork-barrel canal projects. Jeremy wasn’t the sheik of a desert oasis. He had been bequeathed a part of Camelot, a beautiful corner of a cool, North Coast valley. And he was lord over some of the best chardonnay acreage in the world.
Jeremy found it amusing that he had been knighted by the connoisseurs of The City, for he felt that it was luck — being in the right place at the right time — that had gained him such notoriety. When many of those decrepit prune trees needed to be uprooted and replanted in the late 1960s, Jeremy had contemplated jumping on the bandwagon of the local farmers and planting grapes in their stead. Without an Italian surname and with a strong dislike for the “Dago Red” he had swilled and sickened of as a youth, Jeremy went his own way and vowed to plant only white grapes, specifically chardonnay.
Most of his neighbors went for advice to the old Italians working at the ancient winery, the one that had survived Prohibition by making sacramental wines for the Catholic Church. Jeremy turned instead to the agronomy department at the University of California at Davis. It wasn’t because Jeremy was shrewd, but more that his eldest son, Daniel, an agriculture student there, had persuaded him to use its resources. Daniel was fervent in his plea for careful planning and planting, having based his arguments on several viticultural courses he had taken to fill out his curriculum, and on an acute taste for good wine he had developed his first year in college.
So Jeremy listened to his son and to the few winemakers in the area that weren’t wearing wooden shoes. He planted a tremendous acreage of chardonnay — what then was an obscure grape variety in The Valley. In the several years it took for the vines to mature and bear a crop, Jeremy had received a considerable amount of kidding and hindsight advice from his neighbors. He often compared his situation to that of Peter Randall, a character in a short story by Steinbeck. Peter, to the shock of the other farmers, had planted his entire flat in the fickle crop of sweet peas; the neighbors thought he was crazy. Both Peter and Jeremy would be vindicated.
