Chapter 11: Who’s Afraid of Reggie Heath?
Sheila Burke, in a fashion typical of a member in the close-knit family of wine people in the small, premium wineries of their valley, wrote Jeremy a lengthy letter that afternoon while sunning on the veranda of her rented Mexican villa. Jeremy received it two days later and read the following:
Dear Jeremy,
I hope that what follows suffices for the information you requested from Stan and me. I believe the story I will relate of a fellow winemaker’s inaugural encounter with Reginald Sebastian Heath will prove most helpful to you.
This meeting with Heath was told to me during a chance encounter four years ago. I was on the Larkspur ferry to San Francisco, avoiding the unpleasant experience of trying to find a parking space for my gas-guzzling auto in The City.
Having retrieved a double-shot Bloody Mary from the ferry’s bar (for nerves: my fear of water is eclipsed only by my phobia of dying in my car in traffic), I returned to my seat to find the space next to mine occupied by a pleasant, benevolent-looking man of about 35. Having spied a wine periodical in my lap, and learning that I was winemaker at a small winery in The Valley, the gentleman informed me that he, too, had been in the wine business, having left our field for another type of work. Upon questioning him, I was surprised to find that he had been the winemaker at a small, prestigious, but recently closed winery in the adjoining valley, for his name did not register in my memory.
He told me that he had been trained in enology at UC-Davis, with a summer internship at Kloster Erback in Germany’s Rheingua, and after a short apprenticeship he had assumed the duties of winemaker at the above-mentioned winery, a position he held for two years. But he had left the winery and moved to Novato, in Marin County, and become a consulting chemist for several health-food restaurants in Marin and The City. I posed the inevitable question to him just as we pulled from the berth: Why did he leave not only a reputable winery, but the entire world of wine as well? A far-away sheen came over the eyes of my companion. He said that he unfortunately had left the winery not of his own volition, and that after his termination he had found it impossible to procure employment in any other winery in the state.
A distant look and bemused smile filled his face as I indignantly protested what appeared to be the blacklisting by the industry of my comrade. He turned, and looking me straight in the eye, said, “You seem like an honest, concerned woman. Let me tell you the circumstances – the terms – of my release. It is a chapter of my life that I have tried in vain to forget. I’ve gone so far as to change my name; my clients, the restauranteurs, aren’t even aware of my past life. And I want it that way. I feel it is the same as being kicked out of Harvard Business School for cheating; it’s best not to let anyone know you ever attended.”
Having given the preliminaries, and extracted from me an oath not to share his new name and current profession with any of my colleagues, he slowly reclined against the lower deck window that protected us from the blowing Bay fog and related to me the following tale of one man’s demise:
“It was several years ago when I, in the company of a group of winemakers and owners from a dozen of our county’s finest wineries, left for a cross-country promotional tour. The trip had been arranged by a grape-growers association of which my winery was a member. We were to visit a dozen metropolitan areas in two weeks, a hectic pace, but that was the only way the tour could be justified economically. The final stop of my trip was to be Boston. My winery had arranged for me to speak on a radio program about our wine. The host of the program was a man by the name of Reginald Sebastian Heath, the middle-aged son of an aristocratic Boston family. A limited partner of our winery – an acquaintance of Mr. Heath – had helped arrange the interview, a fact I, unfortunately, learned much too late.
“My interview was to have been recorded at eleven in the morning on a Saturday, with playback at three that afternoon over the classical station’s airwaves. Unfortunately, I had to call Mr. Heath at the studio for last minute changes, for by that time I was running almost four hours late. He agreed to conduct the interview live at three, and if I didn’t appear, he would have ready to replay a tape of one of his earlier wine programs. Needless to say, Mr. Heath was furious with me. He did not enjoy changing his schedule, especially for someone on California time.
“It would help if I described what had happened the previous night in New York. For most of the members of our tour, the Friday night before my interview was the celebration of the conclusion of our grueling, tiresome sojourn. Only I was to remain the extra day to speak with Heath up in Boston. The celebration was a rather raucous affair, since we had all felt the tour was a mild success; the people had treated us well and liked our wine, even if they had never heard of our valley before.
“We had gone en masse that afternoon to the Lone Star Café for two reasons: We wanted to let loose around some rowdy types, and we all wanted to drink a cold beer. We were sick of the stuffed shirts trying to trick us into giving the wrong pH of one of our wines, and frankly, we were tired of drinking, pouring and talking wine. We definitely fulfilled both our objectives at that saloon in the middle of Manhattan.
“Later that evening our group split into two. Half of us went to see the Rangers play hockey, and the rest left for Studio 54. I was with the former. At the game we consumed a demijohn of beer apiece. It was an exciting game against Chicago with plenty of fights on the ice, and – as I shall describe – even one in the stands. At a questionably legal check in the game, a Chicago fan standing on his seat in the row in front of us threw his empty half-pint bottle at the ringside glass. Two men, whom I thought to be home-town fans, pounced on him and began to beat him mercilessly. I had forgotten the old axiom about not getting involved in New York, because I gave the pair a couple of hard shoves out into the aisle, freeing the missile launcher long enough for him to make his escape. It turned out that the two men were plain clothes detectives moonlighting as security officers at the game. So off I went to jail.
“A fellow winemaker raced around town collecting bail money, and finally, at 6 a.m., I was out. But I had already missed my plane to Boston by the time I arrived at the airport. I called Heath that morning, hopped on a later flight and raced northward. I arrived at the studio an hour before the live broadcast was to begin. I went into the bathroom and the mere sight of me in the mirror was enough to make me sick. I cleaned up as best I could and took two of everything in my shaving kit, yet I still looked bad and felt worse. And at the time I had yet to realize what a feeble attempt I had made to prepare myself for my public crucifixion by Heath.
“I was the first California winemaker on his program. He had invited on his show a few visiting wine masters, the difference being that the latter own the winery in addition to overseeing the production of the wine. Heath had considered the latter interesting enough to interview, since they came from the same economic strata as he did, a premium winery requiring even then at least a two-million dollar investment to produce a decent quantity of high-quality wine. Before we went on the air, Heath extracted from me the fact that my father owned a sporting goods store in San Bernadino, which elicited a look from him that he used only upon tasting cheap Italian wines with a low level of breed and character. And of course I did not tell Mr. Heath the true reason for my tardiness. I simply said that I had been mugged leaving an excellent performance of La Boheme, an opera I could readily identify with.
“The interview did not go well. You must remember that this was a few years ago, when California wine was still riding in the back of the bus on the East Coast. And Mr. Heath felt it was his duty to teach this backwoods upstart a lesson. After the opening claptrap and introductions, a loose transcript of the program went something like this:
Heath: I have heard rumors that a second American Prohibition might be in the offing, now that alcohol is considered a drug. How could the neophyte California wine industry handle that?
Myself: I haven’t heard anything of the sort, Mr. Heath, and I don’t believe it could ever happen in this country again, at least not the prohibition of the making and consumption of wine. If such a scheme is introduced, I’m sure we could handle it.
H: Well, there are many who have said that California still hasn’t been able to handle the effects of the last Prohibition. How many varietals does your winery make?
M: Five.
H: And you grow all your own grapes? Grow them around the winery?
M: Yes. All estate-bottled wines.
H: I find it fascinating that you people out there can grow little patches, one right next to the other, of all these different grapes and sell an Irish-stewpot of wines. I read somewhere that in the South they call that sort of thing truck gardening. Why in 1395 Philip the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, banned the gamay grape from the slopes of the Cote d’Or, for even then they knew what grapes grew best in what area.
M: Well, perhaps we can appoint someone in Washington to do that out West. Or wait about 40 years. I believe that within that time, say about 2010, we will have realized what grows best in what areas. And only those varietals which can make the best wine – and consequently command the best price – will be grown in those particular areas. Forty years is considerably shorter than the centuries it took the French to do the same thing.
H: Your idea is good so long as all the valleys that grow the best grapes aren’t covered within that time by tracts of retirement homes and suburban subdivisions.
M: At least we don’t have an expanding oil refinery a mile from our winery such as they have at Chateau Lafite.
H: What about that one grape in particular, zinfandel? Most of the new plantings are in that varietal. Isn’t it odd that the bastard grape – the grape without a traceable European parentage – is the most widely planted grape in California?
M: When planted in the proper locale and treated correctly, it makes a wonderfully complex wine.
H: Chardonnay seems to be quite successful in California, if you listen to the people who make it there. I have had one, though, that was quite good. From Anthony Collins, a dear friend of mine. Have you tried it? The ’76?
M: Yes. It’s good.
“I must interject here, Miss Burke, to tell you that I had dealt with Mr. Collins in the past. He was an obnoxious ass with the same snotty demeanor as Heath. He also knew very little about winemaking. And he owed my winery $2,000 for some bulk press wine we had sold him to dilute his awful ’77 chardonnay. But let me resume the transcript of my interview.”
H: I did have trouble with his ’77. He said the slightly off smell in the nose – a bit of a burnt-match smell – was caused by too much sulfur in the vineyard; that most wineries had the problem because it was a wet year. He said that with a short breathing time the smell would disappear. Does your ’77 have a similar problem?
M: No, it doesn’t. And I don’t think that sulfur in the vineyard was his problem.
H: No?
M: No. I think it was his divorce.
H: Pardon? Excuse me?
M: Collins was in the throes of serious marriage problems after the crush of 1977. To be truthful, his wife had grabbed the kids and left him. So he went to Lake Tahoe with a student in his wine appreciation class to tutor her at a remote ski lodge – and to sort things out – and back at the winery his young wines sat on their lees during the entire time forming hydrogen sulfide – a rotten egg smell – in the wine. He tried to process it out but couldn’t, so he bought some of our press chardonnay to blend in and he bottled anyway.
H: That’s interesting. But his first release, the ’76, was good, although I’ve never had a California chardonnay that rivals the buttery richness of a good French Meursault.
M: Apples and oranges.
H: What?
M: You can’t compare the two. Do you rate Loire River sauvignon blancs with those of Graves? Of course not. And don’t some French Meursaults have quite a bit of pinot blanc grape in them? I believe our wines can stand on their own merits. By the way, I have a question for you, Mr. Heath.
H: Yes?
M: You described in your newsletter our chardonnay as having the nose of a cross between truffles and creosote. That turned off many readers of your newsletter who otherwise would have purchased our wine. Could you elaborate on your description?
H: I don’t recall that particular comment, but I would think that my description is accurate and should not be taken as a disparaging one.
M: The blending of the smells of fungi and a telephone pole?
H: We writers must use whatever word pops into our mind when we taste the wine, no matter how unusual, abstract or subjective that term may be.
M: It just seems to me to be such a shame that people pay you fifty dollars a year for your newsletter – to have you tell them how good the wines were that you quaffed with their money – that those people don’t take what you say with a grain of salt.
H: Sir, I’ll have you know that I have a very loyal following of knowledgeable wine drinkers.
M: Then why do they need to be told what to drink? Wine knowledge can be a collective experience. Wine drinking, wine tasting, is done by the individual. It is not a spectator sport. Does it matter that you ranked one wine third with one of those bullets like I see in Billboard with a 16.8 rating, and another, made in an entirely different style, fourth with a 16.7? That’s so silly. Reminds me of a saying: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, review.
H: For a young man, you certainly have developed strong opinions. What does your crystal ball see as the future for California wine? No doubt it is quite interesting.
M: I suppose you’d want my bleakest view. At its worst, by the year 2010 we will have only, say, ten wineries in the state – one for each major valley. And probably just a couple of corporations which own those ten. At each of those plants a few ‘styles’ of wine will be made, those styles being decided by a trade-association panel of ‘wine experts’ who will be in charge of determining the collective taste of American drinkers. And although there are only ten basic styles of wine there will be hundreds of different labels dreamed up by the marketing arms of the companies to slap on those wines – so Americans will still have ‘freedom’ of choice, like we now have when we buy auto tires.
Imports will be tightly controlled, with large duties placed upon them so that only the elite, such as the panel of experts, can afford them. Small, premium wineries will all but disappear for two reasons. First, because of all the advertising-induced clamor for freeze-dried wines and the like, the romance of winemaking will all but have died. And second, with the small winemaking operations almost taxed out of existence, the mammoths will control all the vineyards. What little wine is sold by the small producer will be from the back door of the place, since the same conglomerates which own the ten big wineries will also control all lines of distribution as well as have an exclusive contract with the few remaining chains of retail wine and liquor outlets.
H: Bizarre scenario. But returning to reality for a moment, the main complaint I receive from my listeners about California wine is that it is so, um, rustic. Still so Wild West. A sort of Gold Rush mentality of the wine people there. There’s no tradition, no history, no civility – no nobility. They’ve told me that when they open a bottle of wine from your area that they can actually taste the coarseness of the wine.
M: I’ll agree that parts of my winery’s county are still untamed. Right before I left I saw a wild boar on our new grape ranch out at the geyser range.
H: Grape ranch? What do you do, herd around little bunches of grapes? Or your pickers? You don’t still beat them, do you?
M: Beat them? That’s a loaded question.
H: Please tell our listener more of those bucolic tales of wild boar and tigers and Indians. I find them so quaint. It must be hard making wine in such primitive conditions.
M: Well, I do have an interesting tale for you that happened just before I left.
H: Do tell.
M: I had stopped by a bar in Healdsburg after a day in the vineyard. The bar’s named Pete’s, but everybody calls it Dirty’s.
H: How gauche!
M: And I sat down at the bar, and this old sheep rancher from way up in the hills overlooking our valley was on the stool next to mine. We started talking, and soon he was telling me that he lived up there by himself and that he, ah, would get lonely up there and he would relieve his frustrations – his desires – by cornering an ewe.
H: You don’t say!
M: Yes. And I didn’t know him from Adam, but he proceeded to go into detail about how he did it. First, he would corner the ewe against the fence, and he would put the hind legs of the animal in his boots, and he would throw a saddle on its back – a regular horse saddle – and he would reach under and grab those two things that hang down from the saddle –
H: The stirrups!
M: Yes. Then he reaches up and grabs that knob on the top, on the front, the, the –
H: The saddle horn!
M: You fuck sheep, too, Mr. Heath?
H: Why! . . . Why! Ah. We’ll return in a movement, excuse me, a moment, ladies and gentlemen.
“During the break Mr. Heath demanded that I leave his booth and the studio at once, which I immediately and happily did. Knowing that I had the last laugh made me feel so much better, physically, as I r0de back to the airport. Unfortunately, by the time I’d arrived for work Monday morning, a rough transcript of the interview was laying on my desk in the laboratory. I was told by the president, a close friend, that I had not only embarrassed one of our major investors and the winery, but I had set back the reputation of California wine in New England for years. I was asked for my resignation, and I gave it to him on the spot.”
By the time my comrade had finished his story, the fog had begun to lift off the choppy Bay water, and both our eyes were filled with tears, only mine weren’t from crying. My acquaintance finally let out a huge laugh. I told him that that was the spirit, that we all had to learn from our mistakes. He said that he was only able to laugh about his tiny token of revenge he took on Mr. Heath for the first few years after the incident. He had found a set of Christmas cards with a lamb and its mother on the cover. Each holiday season, my friend would send Mr. Heath a card, and he would write inside, “Wish ewe were here.” We both had a good laugh and my companion arose, for we had docked at the busy pier. We shook hands and wished each other luck, and I watched him disappear into the Bay fog. I have never seen nor heard of the man again.
Truly Yours,
Sheila Burke
Reading between the lines of her letter, Jeremy found a ray of hope in Heath as the unknowing Woodstein of the wine business. Calls to Jeremy’s other contacts disclosed the recent flight of Reggie Heath to California and his new residence there, but not the reason behind it: The trust fund set up for Reggie’s family had been completely mismanaged, with its administrator, a former friend of the family, absconding with a large portion of its capital. Efforts to extradite the man from his Central American hideaway had proven futile. To continue living in the splendor to which he was accustomed, Reggie was forced, for the first time in his life, to rely on his own efforts to pay his way into the establishments he always had taken for granted.
Heath had been surprised that what was required of a working wine connoisseur came so easily to him. He also came to admit that many of his prejudices against California and its wine scene were groundless. Reggie discovered the urbanity of San Francisco, the pockets of civilization in LA, and the country club and health spa located in the county that held Jeremy’s vineyards.
“Yes,” Heath had said to himself in an introspective moment one evening as he quaffed a rare ’68 cabernet from the veranda of a guest-home overlooking the vine-covered valley, “I believe I actually can tolerate this.” An unspoken factor in his change of heart was that everything, from the glass in his hand, to the pate in his belly, to the marble under his feet, was “comped” by the corporation that owned the winery he presently beheld from his loft.
Reggie Heath had moved to California and become one of the industry’s chief spokesmen. He herded his considerable flock back East – and his growing congregation in the West – toward a new understanding of California wine and that state’s greatest contribution to Western Society — The Trend. Heath helped change what had been considered California wine’s greatest liability – lack of history and tradition – into its greatest asset. With the help of Heath and his contemporaries, the chosen few new wineries of the season became overnight sensations through the media event known as “first release”.
The newest, most vogue winery, whether it be solar-powered or gravity-fed or owned by a washed-up TV celebrity, was lavishly reported on and praised by the information brokers in their stories on the latest “first release.” Readers snatched the bottles off the shelves as fast as they arrived at the retailers. They went so far as to buy futures — if that was what their brokers told them to do. The infant wineries saw their inventory fly from their warehouses the first year. Quotas were set. Distributors begged for more. The winemakers were astounded by their success, yet subconsciously troubled by the mass clamor to consume their products. Their young wines were being quaffed within days of release, which, for cash-flow reasons, were only a few days after bottling. With virtually no time to develop bottle age and bottle bouquet, their chardonnays and cabernets and zinfandels were closed-in, acidic and harsh. Yet in the hysteria of “first release” the wines were consumed by those who felt the need to be the first kid on the block to have guzzled the newest wine. Privately, a few of the winemakers likened the practice to infanticide.
Within three years of their first vintage, many of those same wineries that had ridden the crest of the popular wave now found themselves in irons on a calm sea of unsold wine. They had been forgotten by the writers who had once shouted their name from the crow’s nest. For now those same writers were too busy reporting – live! – from the Wine Country’s newest three-star French restaurant, the first tasting of the first release of that season’s latest winery.
June 14, 2010 at 3:26 pm
I’ll share this to my friends