Frank Gehry Comes to Napa
Kathryn Hall fairly bubbles at the coup she and husband Craig have just pulled off: Frank Gehry is going to redesign their St. Helena winery. What was once the ramshackle Napa Valley Cooperative Winery is to become, over the next two years, the world-famous Hall Winery designed by architect Frank Gehry. That’s a mouthful.
“It’s going to be somewhat the reverse of what I.M. Pei did with the Louvre,” says Hall, speaking carefully—she once practiced law, after all—but with an underlying enthusiasm that simply will not be stifled. “Hidden away for a half-century, in the middle of the present facility, is the old Bergfeld Winery, originally built in 1885. We’re going to free that structure to the light of day and surround it on three sides by a new winery that will combine the traditions of great wine production with the technology of modern day production, housed in an architectural work of art.”
If I only said “Bilbao,” you’d probably know what I was talking about. That, of course, would be the now renowned Guggenheim Museum in the north-central Spanish town of Bilbao (not far from the French border). Add the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and you begin to understand Gehry’s approach during his 40-year career: “architecture as art.”
“We feel very lucky that Frank wanted to work with us,” says Hall. “Craig and I love art, we love collecting art and we feel that an artistic approach is important both in the making of our wines and also in the facility in which our wines are made. When we started to dream about redesigning the old cooperative winery, we started with Frank Gehry. If it’s your dream, why not start at the top? What we like about his work is that it’s entirely untraditional and very creative.
“So, we said, why not contact him? We did. That was more than two years ago. We flew to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim. We flew to Los Angeles to see the concert hall and the other buildings he’s done there. What you discover—what we discovered—is that Frank loves art, too, and that he has this wonderful sense of interplay between each building and its natural setting. We shared our vision of what we wanted to do here: To expose the original winery building, to surround it with something artistic and flowing that spoke to the notion of wine coming from the earth. The blending of the traditional with the new technologies of winemaking. It’s vitally important that this new space of ours has a ‘feel’ to it that elevates the spirit. Isn’t that what art is all about, after all? The elevation of the spirit?”
A few months ago, Kathryn flew back to northern Spain with her daughter to see the Guggenheim again. “We also saw a new little 23-room hotel there that Gehry designed for the Rioja wine estate Marques de Riscal,” she notes. “There’s such a thrill, such an excitement to walk into a space that really speaks to you, that has something definite to say. Not to mention the obvious genius and inventiveness behind it all. That trip was a reaffirmation of how right we were in our decision. You have to remember that wine is all about celebration. Wine is a joyous thing, an inclusive thing, a product that brings people together socially. You don’t sit down and drink a glass of wine in solitude. That’s pretty rare. Wine is all about togetherness. So, too, is great architecture. It’s a joyous bringing together.
“There’s a lot of commitment in all of that, too. Growing grapes and making wine is a real commitment, a long-term commitment, and that’s what this project is turning out to be as well. It’s a real joy to work with someone like Frank, who has that instinctive feel for what you’re about.”
Hall makes a point of noting that the interior wine production area that Gehry’s art will cloak—with a flowing, undulating, latticework sort of roofline—is being designed by the locally well-known winery designer Jon Lail. “Jon clearly knows winery design better than anyone we know, so who better to provide the foundation for Frank’s work? Jon will provide the campus; Frank’s architectural flair will integrate itself into that campus.” [Jon’s wife, Robin, has a small noted hillside winery; her father was John Daniel Jr. of Inglenook fame. Daniel’s granduncle was the Finnish sea captain, Alaskan fur-trader Gustav Niebaum, Inglenook’s founder.]
The wine industry has long given lip service to two vital aspects of winegrowing: the importance of vineyard efforts and the actual “art” of making wine. The very connection of those two aspects, as it happens, seems quite naturally to derive from the very connection of Kathryn and Craig Hall. Kathryn, an attorney who was once an assistant city attorney in Berkeley and America’s Ambassador to Austria, also happens to have managed her family’s Redwood Valley (Mendocino County) vineyards for a decade beginning in 1982. Couple that with the fact that financier Craig is a major art collector. “My mother was an art teacher,” he explains almost laconically. Michael Jordan played a little roundball, too.
Art supplies
There are, equally, two parts to the Halls’ present vinous exploration, and each part is compelling. The focal point for this article is that they’ve taken over the former Napa Valley Cooperative Winery facility (mostly recently Edgewood) on Highway 29, on the southern boundary of St. Helena, to create a state-of-the-art winery, Hall-St. Helena. There, the “art” of wine is in the capable hands of New Zealand native Richard Batchelor. “Richard is a talented winemaker, and he’s proven himself in production and staff management,” noted winery president (and former winemaker) Mike Reynolds when Batchelor was promoted to the head winemaking position last March. Batchelor, after earning his postgraduate degree in viticulture and enology from Lincoln University in Christchurch, worked in New Zealand at Sherwood Estate and Seifried Estate wineries before signing on as enologist and lab director at St. Francis Winery in Sonoma Valley.
One of the important vineyards that Batchelor draws from is Alexander Valley’s T-Bar-T Ranch, which the Halls purchased from Forrest Tancer (Iron Horse) a few years ago. “It’s a wonderful vineyard,” says Berkeley native Kathryn, a graduate of Hastings College of Law. “Forrest only decided to sell it because it had become apparent that his children weren’t interested in the wine business. I love the land, I love working the vineyard, I love the smell of the grapes when you walk through the dirt at harvest time. Our focus is Cabernet Sauvignon, because that’s the wine that both Craig and I like most, and we both favor the powerful, fruit-forward California style to the more subtle Bordeaux style. That’s why we’ve planted Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot up here at our estate vineyard.”
Their home—architectural showplace is more like it, with extraordinary artwork collected by the Michigan-born Craig from the likes of Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Joel Shapiro, Roy Lichtenstein and Sam Francis—sits above Auberge du Soleil on the Rutherford Bench, a prime site for Napa Valley Cabernet. Complete with hillside caves, it’s now the site of their second production facility, called Hall-Rutherford.
The old winery
The old winery, the centerpiece for the new Gehry effort, was originally built in 1885 by William Peterson, a New England sea captain. Peterson, who made several circumnavigations of the globe in a nautical career that spanned more than three decades, set upon a second career as a grape grower with his third wife. The couple moved to St. Helena in 1873, purchasing 49 acres of land on the south side of town, west of Highway 29.
He started construction of the winery a few years later. The lower floor is solid stone and the second story wood-framed. At 5,000 square feet, it gave Peterson the capacity to produce 27,000 gallons of wine each year. Sadly, the vine root louse phylloxera reared its ugly head in the early 1890s, and Captain Peterson’s venture ended in financial failure. In 1894, he sold the property for a pittance to Robert Bergfeld, a German immigrant who replanted the vineyard, chiseled out Peterson’s name on the stone archway and replaced it with his own. The Bergfeld name remains to this day and was used, for a time, as a label in the 1990s.
In 1910, famed Oakland civic leader and wine man Theodore Gier—also an émigré from Germany (wine and grapes had been his life even there)—bought the property from Bergfeld, who had done little with the facility but try to lease it. Gier had founded Giersburg four miles south of Livermore in 1888 and built Mont La Salle’s stone winery (later Christian Brothers, now Hess Collection) in the hills west of Napa in 1903. Gier was described in the Livermore Herald as “of slight frame and of uncommon nervous tension, bids fair to be a special factor in Oakland’s expansion and enrichment for many years to come.”
The dynamic and visionary Gier expanded the Peterson facility to three buildings, producing as much as 250,000 gallons a year. One of his new buildings surrounded, dwarfed and hid the original winery structure…until now. At the onset of Prohibition, Gier sold the winery, which saw little use through the “Great Experiment.”
The underrated winemaker Charles Forni led the group of growers who started the Napa Valley Co-op at the Repeal of Prohibition and, later expanded to a half-million gallons of capacity, often crushed up to 40 percent of the Napa Valley’s entire production. Wine historian William F. Heintz once observed that “Charles Forni deserves to be ranked alongside Charles Krug, H.W. Crabb, Judge John Stanly, Gustav Niebaum and other pioneer legends of Napa Valley.” For many years, the entire production of the Peterson facility was sold directly to Gallo. In 1994, the property was sold to Golden State Vintners for their Edgewood brand. Craig and Kathryn Hall acquired it in 2003.
Wine as art
As Kathryn Hall suggests, none of the Gehry hype means a blessed thing unless the wines stand up for themselves alongside the artistic part of the equation. “At the end of the day, the building isn’t worth much if the wines aren’t good,” she says. “If the wines don’t make their statement as well, it’s all for naught.” Fortunately, the Halls—and their winemaker, Richard Batchelor—are able to draw upon more than 400 acres of vineyard (Napa Valley and Sonoma County’s famed Alexander Valley) for the Bordeaux-model red and white wines they produce.
Taste, for example, the sleek 2005 Sauvignon Blanc ($20), spritelike with fresh grass and lemon up front with mineral hints of grapefruit in the finish. In the summer, it would pair nicely with a spicy, chilled gazpacho; comes the winter, try it with a grilled pork chop.
The 2003 Hall Napa Valley Merlot ($28) is an equally stealthy wine, with a subtle, oily texture and well-formed coffee, mocha and cassis fruit structure that begs for veal piccata. The 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon’s ($35) fruit profile is rather similar to that of the Merlot, though leaning toward the black currant side of cassis and artfully adding velvet tones of blackberry to the mix. The Cabernet was aged nearly two years in French oak (half of that new), and the folks at the winery suggest pan-roasted mushrooms as one formidable accompaniment. [They also like dark chocolate and braised meats. Not necessarily in that order.]
Then there’s the flagship, the 2003 Kathryn Hall Cabernet Sauvignon ($75, Rutherford, Sacrashe Vineyard). This beauty has both lightness and weight, with velvetlike blackberry, cassis and licorice in the mouth. The texture is oily and long, as befits any liquid work of art. The patient thing to do is to put this in a dark corner of your cellar. If you aren’t able to delay your gratification, think filet mignon or prime rib, rare to medium. If you burn the beast, don’t waste this wine on it! [The vineyard name, by the way, is not a native word but rather formed from the initials of those who originally planted the vineyard. Pronounce it sack-ruh-shay.]
The Halls extend the concept of “wine as art” to the bottles themselves, which sport thicker (hence heavier) glass and a broader width and heft as an artistic statement. “The 2003 reds that you tasted are in ‘Ancienne’ bottles, from the French producer Saverglass,” notes winery president Mike Reynolds. “The Sauvignon Blanc—an almost identical bottle—is produced domestically by Owens-Brockway. They’re both in ‘antique’ color [the glass is a deep, olive green] and both are, for us, the classic Bordeaux shape.”
When asked what her new venture will cost, Kathryn Hall begs off only slightly. “I’d be happy to tell you, but we don’t really know at this time.” And then, in an echo of Carl Sagan’s deathless line about the population of the universe (“billions and billions”), she giggles and says, “But it will certainly be millions…and millions.”
And how does one justify so grand an expenditure? “It’s a business,” she says, the giggle having faded. “Our new winery architecture will attract people to us who would have otherwise not have heard of us. The winery will become a brand and a destination. It’s also something of a legacy, whether or not our children follow in our footsteps. Two of our children do seem to be on track to continue our work. David, who finished up at USC in international relations, has worked here at the winery for four years and is doing his graduate work at UC Davis. Our daughter Jennifer is considering doing her graduate work in law at UC Berkeley.”
The bottom line, though, is the communicative spirit of the work. “Art is important because it speaks to the soul,” says Hall. “Art touches a part of you that’s beyond the ‘everyday.’ It is a part of us that can too easily be lost in the daily rush of work and family. But it shouldn’t be lost. It’s of vital importance that our spirits be occasionally lifted.”
