Napa Valley: How a handful of Mountain men made wine history

(PD) - Shortly after the Napa Valley appellation was created in 1981, a handful of Howell Mountain vintners sat around Mike Beatty’s kitchen table over a topography map and a few of bottles of wine to draw up their own sub-appellation.

“Picture a farm kitchen, an old table and four or five guys drinking wine, thinking about the appellation,” recalled vintner Bob Brakesman, one of the originals.

The men knew their wines were unique, due mainly to climate, elevation and soil, and they wanted the world to know.

The ringleader was La Jota winery owner and vintner Bill Smith, a former oil man who understood how to describe geology and how the government works.

“It was just an opportunity – something that came along, almost for free,” he said.

But it wasn’t that easy, said Mike Lamborn, son of Bob Lamborn, one of the vintners who attended that first kitchen meeting.

“In the early 1980s the appellation process was not nearly as rigorous as it is today,” said Lamborn, whose father passed away in April, 2004. “But they did their homework and the government had its requirements, so they all sat around a table with a topo map and a couple bottles of wine and started drawing lines. One would ask, ‘Where do you want to put the lines?’ and another would say, ‘let’s put it where the fog inversion layer sits.’ It was not totally arbitrary.”

Beatty, who was selling Howell Mountain grapes at the time of the meeting in his kitchen, said marketing was on his mind.

“Before there was an appellation rule or criteria, you could put anything on the label,” said Beatty, owner of Howell Mountain Vineyards. “But, once they were not going to be able to do that unless there was a Howell Mountain appellation, it became vitally important to those of us who were selling fruit in a premier area.”

The Lamborns, for example, had been growing grapes on “The Mountain” for a decade before the kitchen meeting.

“If you look at many of the valley floor appellations, to really differentiate between Oakville and Rutherford, for example, is sometimes hard to do,” said Lamborn of Lamborn Family Vineyards. “They are very similar geographically. The soils are a little different, but they are basically the same, while Howell Mountain is unique among the entire valley.”