I read the recent article about Tegan Passalacqua with great interest. I’ve been active in the wine community in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past two decades, and I grew up in Contra Costa County, just ten miles or so from the Evangelho Vineyard. It’s not often that a topic so literally close to home gets coverage. My boyhood was admittedly a long time ago, and I agree that things have changed a lot, but I’m not sure you are giving enough credit to the community of people living there, raising children, and trying to construct a decent life in a region that gets more and more expensive every year, all the while forcing families to live in housing farther and farther away from the main commercial and financial areas of the region. If you ever make it back, try catching a movie at one of the restored 1920s era vaudeville theaters in downtown Antioch or Pittsburg. Better yet, try and see the annual high school (American) football game between the rival high schools of those two cities. It’s amazing. For a real taste of the local culture, have a meal at the New Mecca Café in Old Town Pittsburg.
I do share the opinion of the article that these historic vineyards producing remarkable wines will most likely disappear in twenty years at the current rate of change. I think I read in Hugh Johnson’s The Story of Wine that there are no great wine regions without markets for their wines. Sadly, that seems to be just as true here and now as it ever was in Europe. As a brand, Napa has been so sensationally successful that other wine regions have been all but pushed out of the market. Napa has become aspirational in many ways, not just as a business model, but as a lifestyle. For as long as I can remember in my restaurant career, other wine regions nearby have had their reps and ambassadors pitching their wines and themselves as the “new Napa,” defining themselves by how they measure up to the region in every way. And if you ask the inhabitants of the East Bay about the local wine region, they are more likely to point you to Napa than to Brentwood, California. And if you are hosting a family event or visiting your neighbors for a barbecue, serving a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon is a sign of respect for those attending and a symbol of affluence for the person serving it.
As much as the agricultural heritage from my birthplace gets overlooked, as much as it seems to wither in the bright glare of success that Napa has had, it is hard for me not to root for Napa’s continued success. The wines are expensive and have played an integral part in my financial ability to provide for my family. Working as a tipped employee for so many years, the reward for recommending and serving an expensive bottle of wine was hard to miss. Now in a management position and making buying choices for a sizeable wine program, I love to support smaller and more overlooked local wine regions and historic vineyards, though they don’t sell nearly as well. (I would love to have some of the Sandlands wines on my list, but as you noted the production is small, and the line for allocations is long.) I admire Tegan and the work he does with these vineyards—for these vineyards. I’m sure to tell him and Morgan Twain-Peterson this every time I see them at a trade tasting. And yet, I’m not sure any of it is enough to change the trajectory these historic vineyards are on.
It’s not all bleak news. I recently came across the wines from Erggelet Brothers and their parallel project Urban Edge Farms. Sebastian Erggelet is Associate Winemaker at Grgich Hills, and Julian manages the Del Barba vineyard and runs the Urban Edge Farm. Their plans for the farm center on being a resource for the community, not just by offering healthy organic food to combat the kind of food desert created by our modern food systems, but by obtaining grants to become a teaching farm, by providing room on their property for a nursery school, and by hosting several community events. If there is any hope for the future of these treasured vineyards, surely it looks something like what is happening there.
The reason the agricultural land is becoming more and more scarce in Contra Costa County is because our economic system rewards housing development more than agriculture. The path towards a sustainable economic model for a farm is not at all clear to most people in the region who may have inherited their family agricultural estate. It’s easier to sell it to a real estate developer for $400,000 per acre. It sounds dramatic, but these days (and for some time now) in the Bay Area, there is less and less middle ground between those in the income brackets who can afford to drink Napa wines in their brand-new housing development home and those lost souls wandering shoeless in the streets.