Chapter 7: The Winemaker’s Fury Unleashed
“Jeremy, there’s one jerk with a nice spread in the next valley. You know how he pays the rent?”
“How?”
“By drawing those quaint, fictional settings for their phony labels.”
“Isn’t that false advertising?”
“No. There’s nothing unlawful as long as they register those phony names in some obscure book in the county clerk’s office and put their four-digit BATF number in microscopic type on the label.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it? It pisses me off, Jeremy, I realize our wines sometimes sell for two or three times the price of those phony-label wines, so we don’t compete head to head. But those phonies still occupy shelf space and squeeze out the tiny wineries with a good product that really does come from grapes grown and fermented in this valley.”
“I’m no marketing genius, Stan, but I don’t see why that whole thing doesn’t collapse. Why it isn’t exposed.”
“Jeremy, I’ve thought about it for some time. I’ve wondered how people that created that monster ever chose the wine business in the first place. To me a wine label is sacrosanct. A truthful label is the only way a consumer can know what he is buying. He can’t take the wine out for a test drive before he buys it. I read the other day that Customs in New York seized some wine with counterfeit Mouton labels. Perhaps we ought to look at how our laws are protecting us not from the French, but from ourselves.”
Jeremy had thought it odd that a man in Stan’s position should be asking for more regulation of “The Industry,” but he couldn’t help but nod in agreement with him.
Stan told Jeremy that most of the ‘marketeers’ who had invaded the wine industry had a single task: To create in a product an impression or image that in most cases just didn’t exist. Their bosses at those huge wineries went ga-ga over their ideas, Stan had said, because their bosses came from the same school of thought. Somehow those corporate players ended up in The Valley, probably escaping the big cities filled with people like them and with the images and illusions that they were responsible for creating.
“Jeremy, you and I are a vanishing breed,” Stan had said. “I suppose there might be a couple Frenchmen engaged in this same conversation right now somewhere in Burgundy. Since I studied winemaking and started this winery, I’ve had a single ideal: To work for the wine. We’re craftsmen, artists, if I may say so. I guess that was why I was so selfishly sad to see Daniel die. He was just like you. He worked for the wine. He was the perfect heir-apparent.
“These other people who are invading our turf seem different. Hell, I’ve studied them – we have a few of them right here at The Winery. They only want the wine to work for them. It’s merely a vehicle. There’s no love there. It’s something to exploit before they go peddle jelly beans or designer jeans. Sorry, Jeremy, but to me they’re whores.
“We have so little tradition in California – especially in the wine biz. I hate the phrase ‘Wine Industry.’ Hell, your father grew prunes and my father was a San Francisco banker with a taste for wine. And the marketers think they can create for us some instant tradition. If anything, this whole marketing wave for the ‘80s’ is going to do more to prevent us from developing that tradition.”
“But we need marketing. It’s such a big cog in the wheels of free enterprise.”
“Yes. If it’s a tool to inform the consumer – truthfully inform the consumer. Granted, there are some people who seem to do everything in their power not to sell their wine. How about that little place down the road? Those two doctors who make only Alsatian-style wine. It’s called Hirshenbienen-Dzinziano Cellars. Can you imagine asking the waiter for a bottle of Hirshenbienen-Dzinziano gewürztraminer? They’re either fools or megalomaniacs.”
“You didn’t do too bad saying it,” Jeremy noted.
“I’ve practiced.”
“So Schloss is on your shit list.”
“They’re not alone. Don’t think Schloss is the only one doing that crap. Steam Mountain Winery just down the road from Schloss bulks in three-fourths of its finished wine from Desert Valley producers. Then on the back label they put a big map of this valley with a star for Steam Mountain – complete with arrows and underlined words that leave the consumers with the impression that the grapes and the wine came from here. Those same folks are putting wine in pop bottles with Styrofoam covers so it can be swilled at the beach before the empties are chucked on the sand. I’ve heard rumors that there is a Burgundian hit squad – former members of the French Foreign legion now living in Chablis – who are training to sneak over for the public execution of Steam Mountain management. I’ve put in a request for 50-yard line tickets for the spectacle.”
“I won’t attribute that rumor to you, Stan.”
“And don’t think just our valley harbors those types. Most of the refineries over in Disneyland don’t have a clean record.”
Stan Bergen spoke the nicknames used by some local growers and winemakers to describe – in condescending terms – the wineries in the rival Napa Valley that lay on the other side of the mountain ridge. “Refinery” was the name used for a has-been winery – one that a dozen years ago produced a small quantity of premium wine. Then it was acquired by a huge corporation and expanded until the jug wines bearing the winery’s name – composed of cheap wine from the desert – made up a majority of its sales. The marketing arms of the refineries dwelled on the fact that their winery had produced great, award-winning wines in the 1960s and early ‘70s, despite those wines not being on the shelf – even in Oklahoma City – in more than a decade. But it was instant tradition, and it sold.
And “Disneyland” was a term tagged on the Napa Valley after a trade publication had bannered a headline proclaiming that more tourists had crept through the congested roads of the famous valley than had passed through the turnstyles of the well-known amusement park for that particular year.
As jealous neighbors, Stan, Jeremy, and others of The Valley were quick to point out that each succeeding year brought escalating prices for their valley’s wines or for their grapes pillaged by Disneyland wineries. But all of The Valley’s residents – Jeremy and Stan included – felt at some time or other that their wineries and their wines were considered stepchildren in the eyes of the general public.
“Tell me this, Stan,” Jeremy had said. “If Schloss wines aren’t so good, then why have I been reading about all those gold medals Schloss has won? Their ad in The Wine Light said they had won – I don’t know – I guess about a half dozen golds at some fair.”
“Jeremy, see if you can catch my drift. First, you know that if I had my way we wouldn’t even enter those silly wine competitions, those lotteries. The best wines have nothing to win and everything to lose. Those connoisseurs on the judging circuit have tanned their tongues by the time they get to our wine – the four-hundred-and-eighth for the day. And which wine do they choose?”
“You tell me.”
“Hruska wine.”
“Hruska wine?”
“Yes, after ol’ Senator Hruska, the guy from Nebraska whose quote legitimatized mediocrity.”
“Your joke, Stan?”
“You bet. The wines that ‘win’ tend to reflect a style that is the opposite of distinctive. Mundane is the word I’d use. From a wide range of styles or personal artistic expressions, they take a democratic vote for the ‘best.’ Obviously, the best wines on each end of the stylistic spectrum lose out. The least obnoxious wine for the mass of judges wins. Jeremy, that’s not the method I would want to use in choosing what wine I want to drink. And one more thing –“
“Yes?”
“I wouldn’t put too much credence in Schloss’ gold medals. They probably won them at some obscure contest like the Deaf Smith County Fair in the Texas Panhandle. A contest where 87 percent of the wines entered came back with some sort of award. And –“
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget that Yum-Yum Donuts and Albertson’s supermarkets both are touting that they won almost a dozen gold medals a piece at a couple of California fairs.”
“What for?”
“Baking goods and dairy products.”
“I see your point.”
“Few do.”
“So tell me this, Stan. Are all the big wineries like Schloss?”
“Thank God, no. There are several I can name that put out a consistently good product. That don’t fib to the public. That at times take the care and the expense to make a wine that almost rivals a Jeremy Barnes Vineyard Chardonnay. Unfortunately, their number dwindles.”
“So, there are exceptions.”
“Yes. Maybe Schloss is just the epitome of all that can be wrong in a winery. The extreme. I have a particular distaste for the place because Schloss is so blatant yet so sneaky, and it’s right here in our own backyard.”
“Isn’t there something we can do about it?”
“Not about them, at least not in this age of laissez faire policies – when the President has gutted the gutless agency that controls the wine biz. What we can do is educate ourselves and others about who we are and what we stand for – and make the comparisons for them. So the wine drinkers know there is a choice. A true choice.”
Having related his conversation with Stan Bergen to Bobby, Jeremy told his son of his interviews with former employees at Schloss, including two winemakers, seven cellar workers, three cellar masters and two accountants. Jeremy had begun to wonder who in the County hadn’t worked for Schloss at one time or another. Even Jeremy’s youngest son, Tobie, had been employed for three weeks as a crush worker a few years before.
Jeremy had spoken with the former head of the Schloss public relations department; the poor guy had been fired by the General Manager three days before Christmas. At his termination, the employee was told that he had performed admirably for Schloss, but that his position was being eliminated to make salary costs look better on a loan request to be submitted to the bank after the first of the year.
Slowly, Jeremy had confirmed Stan’s story – and opinion – of Schloss. Building up his case against Schloss had the effect of replacing his grief with revenge. He had collected an inch-thick file on Schloss that he kept in his office, his private office since Daniel’s death.
He felt he held a strong indictment against Schloss, not so much for killing his son, but for simply continuing to blight The Valley’s landscape. He realized that Daniel mistakenly had stepped in the way of Schloss’ struggle to exist – simply by stepping in front of a Schloss truck bearing cheap desert wine. Daniel, like any other human being coming into contact with the company, was simply raw material to be consumed, burnt and expelled, and unlike its employees, Schloss just hadn’t had to pay FICA taxes on him.
Jeremy wanted to shout the sordid story of Schloss from the treetops. But he knew there was only one way to prevent his cry from falling on deaf ears. He needed to find the appropriate moment and manner to expose the winery. Ironically, it was a letter from Tom Delaney, the head of Schloss, which gave Jeremy his perfect chance for revenge.
