This is a tough time to be a business magazine columnist: I’m writing these words in mid-December, but you won’t read them until February. What with the global financial crisis (GFC), California’s budget woes and the change of administration in Washington, who knows what will happen in the six weeks in between?
Fortunately, I’m here as just your Napa insider, not as an economic prognosticator of any kind. Because from inside Napa County, where I reside and write, things are just as uncertain as they are in that big, wide world outside the valley walls. While great plans are afoot for a Ritz-Carlton, and other hotel developments are well under way, several local businesses and institutions have been teetering on the brink of insolvency. Some have toppled into the pit already; others are taking what measures they can to ensure the doors stay open for as long as possible.
COPIA’s bankruptcy, announced in December, is old news by now; but it’ll be years before the discussion of what went wrong ends. Many local pundits (and in Napa, every third adult you meet is likely to display pundit-like tendencies on this topic) generally start by pointing their fingers at COPIA’s original director, Peggy Loar. They say Loar, a museum professional who had worked for the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and helped found the Wolfsonian Foundation in Florida, blithely assumed a $12.50 admission price wouldn’t dissuade visitors from entering an unknown institution with an overloaded name. (COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts—just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?)
Worse, even those who did shell out $25 for two (with many of the food and wine programs costing extra) were as apt as not to find the place underwhelming. Curatorial efforts to tie fine art exhibitions to the wine and food theme yielded uneven results, while the mighty scale of the $55 million building tended to dwarf small crowds. Still, wasn’t COPIA—the brainchild of winemaking giant Robert Mondavi—”too big to fail?” Only for about seven money-losing years, it seems. By 2008, despite wave after wave of layoffs, lowered admission fees and a change in top management, the center went down for the last time in a sea of red ink.
What’s next for the riverside complex—including a delightful amphitheater for outdoor concerts and weddings, a cramped but well-appointed indoor theater and an entirely too luxurious boardroom—is unclear as I write. But readers of the Napa Valley Register sent a hail of suggestions to the newspaper’s website. (An ice rink, a homeless shelter and an indoor go-kart track are three that stood out for me.) COPIA’s south gardens, including chickens, rabbits and a children’s garden area, are already slated for a hotel development after the center sold them off last year. I’m hoping the north gardens, just adjacent to the main building, will be spared; but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about COPIA, it’s that any expectations are likely to be dashed.
Speaking of dashed expectations, I thought I had the dandiest job lined up a few months ago, writing up wine tasting notes a few hours a week for AppellationAmerica.com. Located in downtown Napa, just a bike ride from home, the company runs intensive, forensic wine tastings aimed at, first, identifying the typical characteristics of wines grown in all the appellations of North America and then gauging individual wines on how closely they match those types. I spent one very absorbing, 10-hour day there in August, observing and later participating as a group of experts sampled more than 80 different wines from Monterey. (Yes: That’s a lot of wine, even if you spit. I arrived home in good shape, but had to go back next day for my bike helmet.)
Not only was the work interesting, but the man who offered me the gig—company co-founder Roger Dial—impressed me as an erudite, intelligent and interesting fellow. His AppellationAmerica.com bio read, in part: “As a wine educator, his pedagogical line has remained consistently Hellenistic…it’s not ‘about’ wine, it’s about humanity, and what this unique elixir does to compensate for the incomplete civility of our kind.” Seemed like a fascinating boss, and I’ve almost always worked well with principals. So when he called to say he’d be home in Nova Scotia, Canada, for a few weeks, I said I looked forward to starting work when he got back.
Weeks stretched to months, and I left a message; no reply. It was starting to seem as if my job—which would have been a new position—had fallen victim to the GFC. Finally, in early December, the story broke online: Roger Dial and his son, Adam, had left AppellationAmerica.com in the hands of their chief investor, Tom Welch, another Nova Scotia resident. Reading between the lines, it seems money was tight: “It came down to a focus on business and revenue,” Welch told the San Francisco Business Times.
So much for my great job, I guess. But I’m glad to see, in mid-December, that AppellationAmerica.com is still putting out new articles and that Clark Smith is still on board. Smith, if you haven’t encountered his work, is a winemaker, writer and musician with a major rocket-scientist streak—he dropped out of MIT in 1970—and a fluency with both wine and words that makes him one of the most interesting people on the oenology scene. I will miss Roger Dial—and I will definitely miss what looked to be a skill-stretching writing job—but as long as Smith is still on the masthead, AppellationAmerica.com will remain a key reference site for people who are serious about North American wine.
