In Napa, It’s Still the Best of Times

ST. HELENA, Calif. —  The sun was high by the time the live bidding started. Bottles had long since been uncorked, and the crowd under the big white tent was sweaty and loose. The spin was that the Napa Valley Wine Auction might not be much of a party in this hard year.

But no, here was Chuck McMinn, whose Cabernet was a hit even if his telecom company had been out of bankruptcy for just six months. And there was Orange County’s David Doyle, who would spend $320,000 on one lot, though his software firm’s stock was trading at about a third of last year’s share price.

“We’ll start the bidding at 10,” the auctioneer was calling, launching an event that would include dibs on dinner with Ted Olson, the U.S. solicitor general whose famous wife, Barbara, was a Sept. 11 plane crash victim. “Do I hear $10,000, how about 20, 30, 40, we have 50, do I hear 70, 90, don’t be afraid of six figures.” In one corner, a CEO and a venture capitalist were betting on how far this year’s auction proceeds would fall from last year’s $7.6 million. (Less, as it turned out, than either expected.) In another, a woman in stripes was gamely repeating the oldest new-money joke in the valley: “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large fortune.” Not everything has changed in the nine months since the world supposedly changed forever. Here among the vineyards and villas, the summer resolution seems to be: Don’t let the terrorists win.

Each year--beginning in June, with its signature auction, and ending in September, when the San Francisco Opera opens its season--the Napa Valley becomes a sort of Bay Area social hub. For the second-home owners and affluent summer people who have come to form a sizable minority in the still-rural region, this has tended to mean a party circuit so lavish that the place is regularly billed as “the Hamptons of the West” in society pages. This year, however, not even the Hamptons of the East has offered much respite from the post-tech-bust, post-Sept. 11, post-Enron anxiety, and the conventional wisdom here was that the wine country summer would, likewise, be a bust.

So much for conventional wisdom.

As the mercury climbs, this place is looking more and more like the Teflon Valley. “I have to say I don’t see much difference--the parties seem to be the same as ever,” laughed John Traina, a Faberge egg collector and former shipping executive who has spent summers and weekends in Oakville for decades. In fact, the only regular event he knows to have been canceled--or even downscaled--this year is his own Fourth of July barbecue, where some 400 socialites and farmers annually get together at his estate for line dancing. He’s canceling, he says, only because scheduling conflicts forced him to move up the date of his annual trip to Europe with his children and Danielle Steel, the romance novelist who is his ex-wife.

Private parties are planned for Julia Child and Sophia Loren and the Washington, D.C.-based architect Leo Daly. Wine country caterers and chefs say their summer calendars have been solidly booked for months. “Let’s see,” murmured Urannia Ristow, who shuttles between San Francisco and her Ristow Estates vineyard in Napa. “I’ll have my dinner for my wine group in July and probably some other sort of wine event, but it’ll have to be in July too because August is just crazy, it’s the big month.... “

“Life is short and fragile,” explained Italian-born jet-setter Maria Manetti Farrow, who says her sole concessions to the times have been a decision to forgo wearing real jewelry on commercial airliners and to make her usual nonstop entertaining schedule more intimate this year at Villa Mille Rose, her 60-acre Tuscan-style summer home in Oakville. “Yes, I am a businessperson, and we expected things would turn around by now, but I am trying not to be upset. I would rather enjoy deeply my friends.”

“I think all Americans are feeling, ‘Use your good silver and drink your good wine because you don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow,’ ” said Traina’s son, Trevor, an Internet company executive who also has a house in the valley. “Also, to the extent that San Francisco is a target city, you do feel safer [in the valley]--no dirty bombs up there.”

The reluctance to go gently into social hibernation reflects broader resilience in Napa County, which is farther than other affluent retreats from scenes of the Sept. 11 attacks. It also has been less directly buffeted by the tech slump than most of the Bay Area. Its restaurants are bustling. Hotel occupancy, which has fallen throughout the Bay Area, is expected to hold steady here this summer. Unemployment--lower than at any spot in the Bay Area and less than half the rate of Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County--was a mere 3.3% at last count.

Foreclosure notices, up all over the region, fell by 20% in Napa County in April. The wine auction raked in $6.1 million for local charities--less than last year but more than in 1999, which set that decade’s record. While San Jose’s symphony orchestra, the oldest in the West, was going belly-up this year for lack of funding, wine country philanthropists were reopening the historic opera house in the town of Napa and anteing up for the new state-of-the-art food and wine museum, Copia. Economists attribute the valley’s relative health to the demand for retirement homes in the wine country among equity-rich empty-nesters and to the county’s reliance on sectors other than high tech. “In the Bay Area, if you’re not Silicon Valley,” said Stephen Levy of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto, “you’re looking good right now.”

Also influential, however, has been the presence of wealthy part-time residents who have long treated the valley as a second hometown. The 22-year-old wine auction, for example, was co-founded by the then-wife of a philanthropist whose main residence was in San Francisco. Today the auction is a key charity source, especially for local health care nonprofits. “The place just gets under your skin,” explained Pat Montandon, now 73, who devised the auction with vintner Robert Mondavi.

In fact, as this year’s event got underway, Montandon said, she was shopping for real estate in Napa Valley--a tidbit that locals relished as a coda to the public divorce that drove her from the wine country shortly before the first auction. (In the claustrophobic world of San Francisco society, Montandon is known as the third wife of the now-deceased businessman Alfred S. Wilsey, who--follow closely now--wed her after the annulment of her marriage to the lawyer Melvin Belli and later divorced her to marry Dede Dow Traina, who is now the president of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and who was then the wife of Oakville’s John Traina, who then went on to wed Danielle Steel.) Such lore--”so very Falcon Crest,” as one socialite jokingly put it--has helped make the valley more than just a place for its investors to park capital in a bear market. “We’re like Palm Springs or Saratoga,” laughed Napa County Assessor John Tuteur, who first came to the county some 50 years ago when his own father bought a summer home.

About one property in five, officials say, is owned by people whose primary residence is elsewhere, and about half of those second homes belong to owners from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Tuteur says that about half are owned by “Old Napa” families, as longtime property owners like to call themselves, and most of the rest were bought in the go-go 1990s. The result is an old-money/new-money demographic that is both financially buffered against the world’s problems and emotionally vested in maintaining the valley as a Shangri-La apart from them.

The nation’s political and economic problems, however, weren’t far outside the tent as the summer unofficially opened here in this month. At the auction, McMinn, chairman of Covad Communications Corp., suggested that “after the events of 9/11, I think people will bid more generously--or they should, anyway.” He successfully bid $100,000 for the dinner with Ted Olson at Pillar Rock Winery.

Across the room, high rollers fondly recalled the record-busting 2000 auction, when the economy sent bids into the stratosphere. “Honey, this is cheap compared to two years ago,” chuckled Yvonne Adams, wife of Louisiana oilman R.A. “Ray” Adams, upon spending $300,000 for nine bottles of Harlan Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. “We spent, what--$700,000, I think--two years ago.” As the afternoon wore on, however, talk focused on safer topics, such as the scandalous screw-top caps being used instead of corks on $140 bottles of wine by the Plumpjack winery, which is owned by one of the heirs to the Getty fortune. And the last race of the Triple Crown, being run the same day as the auction. And McMinn’s new 14,000-square-foot wine cave. And Pamela and Richard Kramlich’s local work in progress--a massive, glassy home-museum designed for the venture capitalist and his wife by the architects Herzog & deMeuron to showcase their media art collection.

At one table, talk centered on whether Norah Stone--whose husband is the son of W. Clement Stone, the Chicago insurance magnate--would be throwing the opulent birthday bash that gets her Azalea Springs vineyards into the society pages each year. She will.

“We’re having a surrealist theme,” she confirmed, adding that she’d only briefly considered canceling but decided against it. “Somehow a surreal party just seemed appropriate this year.”