A legacy worth toasting in the Napa Valley

Before he got into wine, Bill Harlan had plenty of adventures. He hitchhiked from London to Cape Town; supported himself for a while playing high-stakes poker in a Lake Tahoe casino; got a job at an airport and learnt how to fly; drove the Mille Miglia from Brescia to Rome and back; trained as a merchant seaman and sailed the world; lived on a houseboat in Sauselito, California, so elaborate it was known as ‘the Taj Mahal’; and co-founded Pacific Union Co, a hugely successful real estate business in San Francisco.

He embarked on wine with the same flair and apparent fearlessness, intent on making a Californian wine that would rival the best from Bordeaux. Harlan Estate, which he established in Oakville in the Napa Valley, in 1984, did just that, its wines becoming highly sought-after (Berry Bros & Rudd has a few magnums of the 2014 starting at £1,925.35 each, in case you’re wondering how that translates to price).

Talking to Harlan, who is now 81 and a hugely respected and influential figure, what struck me was the scale of his vision. It is best encapsulated by the way he thinks about time, planning not for the day, week or month – the limit of my myopic scope – but for the century.

Once he had burnt off some of his wanderlust, Harlan began to get serious about the future he wanted to build. This involved strategising in terms of what he calls a ‘200-year plan, which is really looking 100 years behind us and 100 years in front of us and living today’. He says, ‘I began listening to my grandmother talking about her grandparents coming west in the covered wagons before the Civil War in the US, hearing stories of what people went through, some of them losing kids along the way.’

A trip to the French wine regions of Bordeaux and Burgundy also helped to shape his perspective on time, enabling him ‘to see a lot longer’ and think in dynastic terms, of building a wine estate over one or two lifespans. He notes, ‘If you have the vision of something you would like to create over generations it takes the pressure off the moment, takes away the anxiety of trying to do everything, earn the most amount of money in the least amount of time, all those kinds of things.’

Harlan is a fascinating man to speak to, philosophical and eloquent – a great teller of stories. Last year, he handed the reins of his wine businesses – there is also a sibling estate, Promontory, and Bond Estates, which bottles cabernet sauvignon made from grapes grown in specific Napa sites – to his son Will.

Who among us wouldn’t benefit, both on an individual and a more global level, to thinking in terms of a 200-year plan? A key, says Harlan, is mental breathing space. ‘In each day we need a certain amount of time for contemplation, a certain amount of time when we work, time for celebration and time for rest.’ Harking back to his days at sea, as a watchman on the 4am-8am shift, his own contemplation time usually comes in the hour before dawn. Does he think that fortune favours the bold? Harlan has a more measured take on the Latin proverb. ‘I think it was Louis Pasteur [it was] that said, “Fortune favours the prepared mind.”’ Something to chew on. And for your glass this week, I have wines from family businesses that have been built to hand on from one generation to the next.

Harlan plans not for the day, week or month – but for the century