San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
What if To Kalon vineyard become an AVA?
Why the legal battle over who gets to use vineyard’s name — and how — is critical
Should To Kalon, California’s most hotly contested vineyard, become an appellation?
Hear me out.
Although To Kalon is in Napa Valley, it operates more like a vineyard in Burgundy. There, vineyards are appellations, with boundaries delineated by the government. Individual wineries own portions of each vineyard, but no one owns the name. All stakeholders of a vineyard like Le Chambertin or Le Montrachet are equally entitled to use those words on their labels, in the same way that anyone making wine from the Oakville American Viticultural Area (AVA, our appellation system) may use the term Oakville on its labels.
A vineyard has to be pretty special for multiple parties to want a piece of it — and for all those parties to want to call it by a common name. Such is the case with To Kalon, which first became a famous vineyard in the late 1800s under the tutelage of its original planter, H.W. Crabb. Today, six — actually, as of last week, seven — different entities claim to own portions of To Kalon. (As you might expect, some disagree over whose claims are legitimate.) But only one landholder, Robert Mondavi Winery, which is owned by the global conglomerate Constellation Brands, holds the trademark for “To Kalon” and “To Kalon Vineyard,” preventing other owners from using the name on their wine bottles.
Last week marked the second attempt to challenge the legitimacy of those trademarks in court, when Jeremy Nickel, who owns a parcel of land that once belonged to Crabb, filed a lawsuit demanding a cancellation of Constellation’s trademarks. Nickel’s suit makes a similar argument — that To Kalon is a place, and therefore should not be subject to trademarking — to one that Andy Beckstoffer, who owns 89 acres of the To Kalon Vineyard, made in a 2002 lawsuit.
More than 15 years have passed, but Beckstoffer (who settled out of court with Mondavi) believes that the true battle over To Kalon “is just starting,” he told me last week. The central tension remains unresolved. “It gets down to: What’s To Kalon?” he says. “I’ve said it’s a vineyard, and they (Mondavi) have said it’s a marketing concept.”
Beckstoffer believes To Kalon could set an important precedent for how Napa Valley treats vineyard names in
the future. “Up until the early 2000s, we marketed Cabernet Sauvignon like the Bordelais do: chateau marketing,” he says. But in the years since, that winerycentric approach has changed to a vineyard-centric approach — from Bordeaux to Burgundy. “If it’s the case that Napa Valley wants to promote vineyards first, and To Kalon is the poster child for that effort, we’ve got to make sure there’s great integrity to the To Kalon name,” Beckstoffer says.
That desire to protect integrity was part of what drove Beckstoffer to try to establish the Registry of Historic Napa Valley Vineyards in 2004, but the effort didn’t get very far. However, another To Kalon parcel owner, Graeme MacDonald, may be finding success through different means. In 2017, MacDonald successfully petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to recognize “To Kalon Creek.” Then last month he completed documentation for To Kalon with the Historic American Landscapes Survey, a division of the National Parks Service.
In the same spirit as Beckstoffer’s registry, these endeavors by MacDonald represent an effort to establish To Kalon as a name that describes a place, in irrefutable geographic terms. The more evidence there is for To Kalon-as-place, it would seem, the less there is for To Kalon-as-brand.
And if To Kalon is a place, there ought to be some objective principle guiding the use of its name. If you accept this premise, the only logical outcome is for an appellation: the To Kalon AVA.
Beckstoffer agrees. “This is a federal labeling issue,” he says.
To Kalon looks like it could easily fulfill the central components of an AVA application, which is administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). It meets the initial burden of “name evidence”: This vineyard has been known as To Kalon under multiple owners since the nineteenth century. The vineyard is fully contained within the Oakville AVA, making it eligible for a sub-AVA. It falls neatly along geographic lines: west of Highway 29, east of the Mayacamas Mountains, north of Oakville Grade Road, south of the Rutherford AVA boundary. What would count as the To Kalon AVA, of course, would be up for debate — as it already is. Whether the vineyard encompasses any land owned by Crabb, or only land that had grapevines during Crabb’s lifetime, is a point of contention in Nickel’s recent lawsuit.
The benefits of a To Kalon AVA would not be confined to those who own portions of the vineyard. The modeling of this famous vineyard on the Burgundian system would be a boon for all of Napa Valley: It would affirm its land’s potential for viticultural greatness throughout disparate eras and diverse interpreters. A vineyard like Montrachet is great because it has proven greatness over hundreds of years.
Most slices of California vineyard land have not been around long enough to compete in that arena. But one has.