USA TODAY International Edition
‘Napa at Last Light’ goes down beautifully
Last of wine-country trilogy is lovely read despite detours
Rare is a bottle of 1971 Ridge Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. Rarer still is a book beautifully written, yet marred by an utter lack of cohesion.
To experience such a phenomenon, decant Napa at Last Light: America’s Eden in an Age of Calamity (Simon & Schuster, 287 pp., ★★★☆).
Author James Conaway is a master of language, and his sentences are as well-tended as some of the California vineyards he describes so lovingly. He’s an expert on all things Napa Valley; this is the third installment in his trilogy about a tiny swath of a huge state that the Southerner fell in love with in the 1980s.
This denouement reads, though, as if it were assembled by someone drunk on cheap port. It seems to be a scrapbook comprising all the tidbits that didn’t fit into volumes 1 and 2 — a “notebook dump,” journalists call it.
Conaway knows his subject matter incredibly well, but whatever wispy narrative he has assembled meanders, peppered with much more detail than any non-obsessive can handle. (Does the reader need to know that an area in one well-known home was called the Marshmallow Bedroom because of the lumpy mattress?)
But a patient reader will learn much about the Napa Valley:
The 1976 Judgment of Paris, the tasting competition that put the American winemaking upstarts on the literal map.
The growing corporatization of the California wine industry.
The area’s susceptibility to drought and wildfires.
The controversies — including land-use disputes — stemming from the wine tourism industry that draws busloads of travelers who want to tour the vineyards and visit the on-site “entertainment centers.”
The fights between vintners and locals not directly affiliated with the booming businesses.
Bold-faced names such as Robert Mondavi and Francis Ford Coppola appear, as do plenty of smaller players who brought about great change in the once-unruly valley that today boasts an $18 billion-a-year wine economy.
As for Conaway’s prose, it’s worth savoring.
Describing the wildlife in the region is a tasty sentence you wouldn’t expect in a book for oenophiles or aspiring ones: “Only the elegant mountain lion gazes knowingly at the light that comes on automatically at night, piercing the darkness she owns.”
One property is described as being “surrounded by a riot of blooming wild mustard. This and other chest-high nitrogen fixers compose a dense, nutritious jungle overrunning the vineyard and trying to hide the winery’s name painted unspectacularly on a rail fence.”
Wines tinkered with too much are “lobotomized potions.”
Look at Napa at Last Light as a soft read, much like a 1982 Bordeaux.