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  • Napa Valley and the Jeffersonian Ideal
  • James Conaway (bio) and
    Dispatch by James Conaway
    Photographs by Peter Menzel

Thomas Jefferson believed in the civilizing influence of wine and that a nation of farmers would transform the American landscape. Is the growth of viticulture in California’s Napa Valley the fulfillment of his vision or a rejection of it? [End Page 178]


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Harvesting of red-grape varieties in Napa Valley, CA.

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It sits on the flat floor of Napa Valley with a backdrop of dry, distant chaparral rather than on a little mountain overlooking towering hardwoods, but the winery is named Monticello nonetheless—designed to evoke its namesake outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Smaller than the original, the house lacks Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Chinese Chippendale balustrade above the faux-Palladian porch, and the geometric wood tiles in the entrance hall are not in the authentic pattern. “When I saw how long it took the carpenter to lay those tiles,” says the owner, retired National Security Agency linguist Jay Corley, “I thought, My God, I’ll go broke.” Of course, spending too much money on your house is very Jeffersonian.

Corley, in khakis and a Stanford University windbreaker, bears no resemblance to the third president of the United States, yet his white hair gleams in refracted autumn sunlight as Jefferson’s does in the well-known portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy.

I first interviewed Corley twenty-five years ago for my book Napa: The Story of an American Eden and remember him sitting at his desk after lunch, nursing a glass of red and discoursing on the challenges of selling what was still considered in some circles an un-American product. I was struck then by how effortlessly a former intelligence agent could become a vintner, transformation being the hallmark in Napa in the wake of the Paris tasting of 1976 that favorably compared California wines with top-ranking French ones and catapulted the valley and its estate owners into vinous stardom.

Monticello Vineyards is a relatively modest endeavor by Napa’s standards, producing some 15,000 cases annually, yet it hardly represents Jefferson’s agrarian ideal. He had hoped that grapes (along with wheat) would provide an alternative to tobacco, which had already worn out the commonwealth’s soil, and that affordable wine would wean the yeoman farmer from hard cider and whiskey. “No nation is drunken, where wine is cheap,” he wrote in an 1818 letter to Baron Hyde de Neuville, “and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage.”

Jefferson considered farmers essential to the survival of democracy because they were tied to the land by living on and working it. The discreet planted parcel was the farmer’s preserver—and the farmer, by virtue of his devotion to the land, the preserver of the nation. But, just as Jefferson’s vineyards were tended by hired workers and likely some enslaved gardeners rather than his extended family, in Napa Valley such labor is largely done by migrant workers—many of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Those who have remained in this country trend into vineyard management and mostly succeed because they are experienced, smart, hard-working, and eager to undertake tasks Americans aren’t. By comparison, the aspirations of the vintner class are much more akin to those of the aristocracy that Jefferson deplored, even though he belonged to it.

Today, Corley’s sons Kevin, Kent, Chris, and Stephen run what amounts to a sentimental architectural replication offering well-made but expensive wine while the paterfamilias expounds on things Jeffersonian. “The proportions of the dining room are about right,” he says, showing me around. “Jefferson would come in early and sit and read until the rest of the family gathered for dinner.” There’s no signature dumbwaiter here, though, and the wine cellar below, with its temperature controls and plush decor, is full of New World cabernet [End Page 180] sauvignon and chardonnay that didn’t exist in Jefferson’s time, rather than the wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Germany, and northern Italy...

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