Customer Reviews

Napa: The Story of an American Eden

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a crash course in modern Napa Valley politics that reads like a novel. Conaway profiles the main characters in the Valley's battle to balance growth with preservation with both historical accuracy and insight. For anyone interested in the American wine industry, Conaway's book is a primer on how the movers and shakers got to the top and how they intend to stay there.

This is a masterful narrative, of interest to enophiles, wine drinkers, travellers, and cultural historians, too. Compelling personal stories, enough details about the challenges and processes of the business, and a good sense of the times in which these pioneers found themselves add up to a wonderful page turner.

Read this before your first visit to Napa and your experience will be all the more wonderful...and you'll know why, for example, it's "Neibaum-Coppola" and not just "Coppola."

I ordered this book thinking that it was, as stated in one of the reviews, the sequel to Conaway's 1990 book "Napa." Actually, this edition IS the 1990 book, only published in 2002 by a different company, with a subtitle and without the photos that appeared in the earlier edition that I have. I enjoyed Conaway's book immensely when I read the earlier edition, but take care not to buy this edition thinking that it is the sequel.

This book is a crash course in modern Napa Valley politics that reads like a novel. Conaway profiles the main characters in the Valley's battle to balance growth with preservation with both historical accuracy and insight. For anyone interested in the American wine industry, Conaway's book is a primer on how the movers and shakers got to the top and how they intend to stay there.

This is a very interesting and informative read about Napa that includes all the rich history, progess and hurdles, and sometimes scandal that contributed to what the Napa Valley is today. The book is written in such a way that it's almost more like a fiction novel but there's so much information packed into the pages, it truly is a history book of Napa. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it to any and all "wine geeks".......

This "history" book tells the true story of America's most revered viticultural area. Page by page we travel along the hard road the earliest vintners took to create the Napa Valley we have today and the great lengths some would go to exploit it's heritage. The words flow like a fascinating novel filled with stong pioneers in search of a place to produce Californias "liquid gold" and the wiley characters who wanted to exploit its terroir. In the end this small hamlet, which is just 1 hour north of a city filled with sky scrapers, has become a land more valuable planted to vine then any place else in our country. A must read for anyone who has the spirit to GO WEST and for any one who truly appreciates the making of a fine wine. I have read this book 3 times. It has created in me the uttmost respect for the valley I spent summers in and which I cherish to this day.

A well written narrative history of Napa Valley. Not just the wineries but of the important players, politics and business deals that led to Napa being a world renowned wine region. The author does an excellent job of documenting the political decisions that went in to keep Napa an agricultural community. Battles between the vintners and growers are well covered and Conaway does a good job of staying as balanced as possible, though it seemed to me he clearly favored the growers. Overall, the book provides a well written history of Napa Valley and I would recommend it for those interested in wine, travel or even those interested in local politics.

One final thought: I read this book after I visited Napa and realized that despite the boom in wineries, business, tourist traps and all the other stuff described in this book it's not as bad as it seems. I thought of it likes this: Napa is about one hour from San Francisco. Compare that to New York City where one hour puts you inside of the horror that is Middlesex County New Jersey!

As a frequent visitor to Napa, I would love to read an update to this book. Very good background about the families and events that helped to make Napa what it is today. Good detail, well researched, easy reading. It ends in 1989, the next 20 years would be another welcomed addition to this saga.

In the 1960s a tide of hippies, back-to-the-landers, wine buffs, corporate
burnouts and urban refugees flowed into California's Napa Valley and began
restoring its the vineyards. Some wanted the simple life; some saw profits.
Others sought to beat the French at their own vinous game, and a few

succeeded.

Napa wines won a famous 1976 tasting (the French were apoplectic), mightily
boosting reputations and profit potential. Soon, bottom-line worshippers
corporatios marginalized mere sweat-equity farmers in muddy boots and
pickup trucks, moving James Conaway to record the loss of innocence in his
best-seller "Napa" (1990). Now his fine sequel--told through heroes and
villains--finds America's Eden in crisis.

Tsunami tourism (5 million visitors a year) is bad, the new-wave investors
worse: dot-commers, lawyers, real-estate moguls and others skilled in
pulling fortunes from the air and convinced of their right to do as they
pleased, the law be damned. Vulgar McMansions profane lovely hillsides,
spoiling the grand views for everyone else. Arrivistes craving the cachet
of their names on top-dollar labels spend recklessly on vineyards dozered
and dynamited into ever-steepening slopes. These grow fine grapes, but
their runoff muddies Napa's river and threatens its watershed and wildlife.
The wines themselves are obscured between [price]"monster cabernets" and
"fruit bombs" and cheap stuff--often not even made from Napa grapes--meant
to strip-mine tourists. Pretentiousness thrives: Napa Valley now has an
"Office of Protocol."

Existing legal controls might have limited damage had county officials
bestirred themselves. They don't, and so zealots force the issue: Wine Guys
vs. Enviros. Reasonable people capable of compromise can't stop the slide
into unproductive rancor. Fulminative rhetoric draws neo-Prohibitionists
attacking "alcohol farms," ex-urbanites utterly ignorant of agriculture,
and radicals demanding an end to all local regulations, even seeking
exemption from state environmental laws. In the background real-estate
developers dry-wash their hands at the prospect of turning incredibly
valuable vineyards into astronomically valuable housing lots.

The result is one of those "mother of" lawsuits. It would be unfair to say
who wins because Conaway, a brisk and vivid writer, maintains suspense to
the end. But it is fair to say it accomplishes little and may mean ruin
later on.

Eden--it's not a pretty picture.

I'm a professional historian. I research, teach, and read lots of California history. While Conaway's facts may be accurate, this is not good history. He does provide a list of sources in the back of the book, to his credit, but there's no context for the story he tells. This a story of the corporatization of Napa Valley, a development that was part of a much larger movement underway throughout the nation at the same time it was taking place in the wine country. It is also the story of the individual wineries and key persons of the time, such as the Mondavi, de la Tour, Neibaum and other noteable families. Yet, there's no sense of their relative importance to the story--or more important--what story the author is telling. That was my greatest frustration with the book: it's purpose isn't clear until the very end. People come into the book without the reader having any sense of their significance to the story. And there are lots of folks in this book. There's a helpful list at the front of the book that allows the reader to attach some individuals to particular wineries and the eras of the Valley's history, but it's not entirely complete. For instance, Barbara Winiarksi's not there, although her husband is listed. Important public officials are also absent as is one of the books most intriguing characters, Rafael Rodriguez. An index at the back helps remind the reader how they came into the Valley. A map at the front aids the reader in locating various geographical features of the Valley, towns, and wineries.

The best portion of the book is the final section, called "The Tragedy," where Conaway describes the political tussle between the fruit growers and the vintners over development, the conflict that resulted in what you find in Napa today, including the strange Wine Train, the plethora of wineries that offer cooking classes, sell souvenirs, and generally engage in lots of activities not directly related to the making and selling of wine. The struggle involved attempts to create a legal definition of a Napa wine in order to both insure the well-being of the growers and preserve the Valley mainly for agricultural purposes in the face of vintners' activities unrelated to the production and selling of wine. Growers believed that those activities not only took up valuable land, but brought in tourists--both of which had a negative impact on the agricultural preserve created in the late '60s to maintain the health and well-being of the people and primary industry there. Many of the characters involved in that fight are introduced earlier in the book, but because there are so many people in the book and due to the lack of foreshadowing the character's importance to the story, it's difficult to remember how individuals such as Reverdy Johnson came into the Valley in the first place.

I learned a great deal about the history of the Valley and the people who made it. Yet an introduction laying out the book's goal would have been most welcome. Furthermore, this seems a story that focuses on insignificant details and does so without the larger context of which this story is a part. Corporatization of various segments of agriculture is an important development in California and the nation's history. Conaway reveals the role individuals and local officials played in that history. But what developments beyond Napa helped play a role in the general trend toward corporatization? What was going on in in Sacramento, Washington, and Wall Street? Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman's book, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, is a model of how writers can weave together local, state, and national developments.

If you're a Napa addict, you may or may not be interested in this book. It's lots of people, lots of details, without a sense of why they are important, other than for their wine, their names--until you get to the end. And if you are a Napa addict, you may not like the outcome since it is something of an indictment of all that draws so many to the Valley today: the souvenirs, the cooking classes, the restaurants, and the Wine Train. If one of my students had written something like this, with so many details, but no sense of the argument being made, I'd give them a C. I'd also advise them to expand their reading beyond the history of wine, beyond fairly dated works of state history. California history has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past fifteen years, but that is not reflected in the author's list of resources--other than one of Kevin Starr's volumes.