San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
VERGE OF EXTINCTION. A HERITAGE GRAPE ON THE
Not so long ago, a group of Napa Valley luminaries held an annual, ultraexclusive party. Attire was black tie only. Dinner was a sevencourse affair. The wines, all of impeccable provenance, were often decades old. But the festivity had an unusualforNapa twist: There was nary a Cabernet in sight.
This was the yearly meeting of Inglenook Winery’s Charbono Society, a group that celebrated, of all things, the Charbono grape — an obscure but essential facet of Napa’s history.
Inglenook was the most prolific American producer of Charbono for the better part of a century, with an annual production exceeding 4,000 cases. The winery’s initial efforts with the grape were no doubt circumstantial: European immigrants had planted a good bit of Charbono in Calistoga around the turn of the century, some mistaking it for the Italian grape Barbera. Someone had to buy the fruit. But over time the Inglenook Charbono more than justified its existence, developing a fanatic following — hence the Charbono Society.
The Charbono Society convened its final meeting in 1989. A few years later, Inglenook stopped making the wine altogether, responding to a marketplace that increasingly wanted Cabernet Sauvignon. And in the years since, the Charbono grape has waned.
Today there are just 76 acres of this California heritage grape statewide, 45 of them in Napa Valley. Compare that to 21,665 acres of Napa Cabernet. Plus, Charbono grapes sell for a pittance compared with neighboring Cab vines: $3,649 per ton versus $7,854 in 2018. In fact, Charbono is officially endangered, according to Slow Food, which names it as one of just two wine grape varieties in its Ark of Taste, defined as “a living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.”
“There’s no logical reason to plant Charbono anymore,” says Matt Morris, who makes two versions under his eponymous label. “Anyone who does it is like Don Quixote.”
“Cab pays the bills,” confirms Peter Heitz, whose Shypoke Vineyard in Calistoga has had Charbono since 1904. “Charbono is the probono work.”
Yet against all odds, the Charbono Society lives on. Five years ago, a group of farmers and winemakers began their own annual convention to celebrate the grape — a jokey tribute to the Inglenook affairs of yore. Attire is decidedly not black tie. The principal organizer is Morris, a photographer turned Charbono nut turned vintner who spends the year ravaging Internet wine auctions for old Charbono bottles. This is when he shares his wares.
This year, the society has descended on the Charter Oak restaurant in St. Helena, where over smoky pork chops and charred slabs of beef the vintners uncork a rainbow’s worth of Charbono bottles — from 30yearold Inglenook vintages to their own current releases. Ridge, on the eve of releasing its firstever Charbono (from Calistoga’s Frediani Vineyard), has brought a barrel sample. Las Jaras, the naturalwine partnership between winemaker Joel Burt and comedian Eric Wareheim, has brought the wine it calls Glou Glou, a chillable, lightly extracted, carbonicmaceration Charbono from Mendocino.
“It’s a spaghetti red,” says winemaker Françoise Peschon, who crafts the Charbono for Matt Morris Wines, as she swirls a glass of inkyred liquid. “We’re so focused on making polished wines here. But Charbono is raw.”
Winemakers are no strangers to extravagant dinners, but there’s something different about tonight’s occasion. They’re not just here to congratulate each other; they’re here with a mission. They hope that by celebrating this underappreciated element of Napa’s past, they can help ensure it has a future.
“I do think it’s important work, and I know that sounds stupid because I don’t think anybody else cares,” says Heitz (no relation to Heitz Cellars). “It’s important that diversity in grape varieties exists. Life would be boring if you only went to Michelinstar restaurants all the time, or if you only drank Cab. Charbono’s part of our landscape.”
Like Zinfandel or Petite Sirah, Charbono is a fundamentally American wine. The variety originated in France’s alpine Savoie region, and is now planted widely in Argentina, where it’s known as Bonarda (which is not the same as Italy’s Bonarda, a misnomer), but American Charbono makers have never used these as models. Unlike our Francophile toilings with Cabernet, Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, the grape’s expression here is without a foreign antecedent.
The grape is dark and profuse, growing tight, heavy clusters on the vine. Although it’s not particularly high in acid, monstrous tannins give the wines longevity. So late in the season does Charbono ripen that André Tchelistcheff once called it the “Christmas grape.” But it has the advantage, highly unusual in this part of the world, of developing fully ripe flavors at low sugar levels. You can get a plush, dense wine at just 13% alcohol by volume.
If your Cabernet veered overripe, a small serving of Charbono could freshen it up. “It was always the master blending grape in Napa wines,” says Morris. “Great color, low alcohol,” no green flavors. Randall Grahm, who made a Frediani Charbono under his Ca’ del Solo label from 1993 to 2002, routinely added 2% or 3% Charbono to wines like Barbera and Nebbiolo. “One of the most amazing features of Charbono,” he says, is “its ability even at homeopathic doses to act as a sort of catalyst for the unlocking of the fruit expression (of ) other varieties, a sort of vinous MSG, if you will.”
Charbono was the secret sauce in early vintages of the Prisoner, now one of the bestselling red blends in the U.S. “Those early Prisoners had a fair amount of my Charbono in them,” says Calistoga farmer Vince Tofanelli, who also furnished that label with Zinfandel. “As it got successful, of course, I couldn’t keep up with the ratio, so the percentage got smaller.”
Virtually all of Napa Valley’s surviving Charbono resides in Calistoga. Why? “It could be the length of the days — it’s a little warmer in Calistoga, and Charbono does have a long growing season,” Tofanelli says. “But really I don’t have any science behind it. It’s just something where you kind of look at the oldtimers and see that it works.”
“Economic forces are a little slower to reach this sleepy little hollow,” Heitz says of Calistoga. “You’ve got these old Italian, German, French families that still have
their properties and don’t have a big fat mortgage,” much like his own family, who emigrated from the Alsace region on the FrenchGerman border in the 1890s.
For decades, Inglenook alone kept most of Calistoga’s Charbono vineyards in business. The Heitzes, who had been supplying Inglenook with Charbono since Prohibition, ripped out all their other grapes in favor of Charbono in 1987 at Inglenook’s request. That same year, expecting a steady customer in Inglenook, Tofanelli planted Charbono for the first time in his family’s 90yearold vineyard. But by 1996, with Inglenook out of the Charbono game, both farmers were scrambling to find buyers for their crop.
Eventually they both started making the wine themselves, and the Tofanelli and Shypoke Charbonos are two of the best examples available.
The very elements that have won Charbono a following — its proclivity toward low alcohol levels, its rustic tannins — have also excluded it from Napa Valley stardom. “You can’t do the two things that are high on the list for ‘cult wine,’ ” says Morris: “You can’t really push for ripeness, and it’s so tannic that you can’t really throw new oak at it either.”
A similar paradox: Many Charbono fanatics have discovered the wine because of its low prices — but those low prices may also put the grape’s survival at risk. Robert Foley Vineyards, possibly the most stalwart grower outside of Calistoga, sells its flagship Howell Mountain Cabernet for $200 — or its estate Charbono for $38. (Foley cites the 1968 Inglenook Charbono as the bottle that made him want to become a winemaker.) That sort of price differential has led many curious wine drinkers, like Morris, to discover Charbono for the first time.
“But the farming costs are still the same,” says Arbe Garbe winemaker Enrico Bertoz, who makes an Amaronestyle Charbono from Shypoke Vineyard. “It’s not cheap to make. And it still does not command high prices. You have to be nuts.” When farmers could more than double their crop prices by replanting their land to Cabernet, can they afford to keep Charbono vines in the ground?
If Charbono can gain more devotees, maybe it stands a chance. “Within my own mailing list I have such rabid fans for it, but outside I feel it’s very difficult,” Tofanelli says. “We don’t get respect. There’s a stigma about considering it a truly worthy wine.”
Which is a shame. Because when it’s young and fresh, Charbono can be charmingly quaffable, a perfect “spaghetti red,” in Peschon’s terminology, and a refreshing antidote to the heavywrought polish that afflicts many modern Napa wines. And when it’s aged, the best Charbonos prove that the variety can indeed yield a serious wine, one that can hold onto a core of bright, vibrant fruit for decades while developing layers of texture.
Does it matter if a relic of Napa’s viticultural past goes the way of the dodo? Few of us mourn the loss of grapes like Berger or Green Hungarian, which once proliferated in these same corners. But Charbono is different. Besides the fact that it makes a beautiful and complex wine, its survival also represents a resistance to the Cabernet monoculture, which may soon become more important than we now realize. Which seems better poised to withstand climate change: a grape variety that falls apart when pushed to excessive sugar levels, or a grape that hangs through all of autumn’s heat and refuses to ripen past a very restrained threshold?
Charbono raises a final question. How do we know Cabernet is Napa’s ultimate solution? It’s only really been the main event for a few decades. Maybe Cab is Napa’s destiny, or maybe it’s only its destiny for this epoch. In Calistoga, at least, Charbono arguably has been a reliable performer longer than Cab. Refusing to let it die, letting the wisdom of the past inform the present, is to acknowledge the possibility that we might not have everything figured out just yet.