San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sleepy Suisun Valley gets a wake-up call
Napa’s famous Caymus opens a mega tasting room in Fairfield.
One of Napa’s biggest wine dynasties has planted its flag in an unexpected corner of the Bay Area: Suisun Valley.
Until recently, Suisun (soo-SOON) Valley, an 8-mile-long stretch of Solano County, had just six wineries. All are relatively small operations, catering mainly to local county residents. Most feel like mom-and-pop shops. So it’s a big deal that Suisun’s seventh winery is Caymus, indisputably one of Napa Valley’s most famous brands, whose main winery and tasting room are located in Rutherford.
Recently, the massive, state-of-theart visitor center known as CaymusSuisun opened — and it feels nothing like a mom-and-pop shop. Designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, an architecture firm behind Apple Store and Blue Bottle Coffee locations, Caymus-Suisun almost feels like a resort, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a promenade of palm trees.
“We want it to feel like you’re outside even when you’re inside,” said Charlie Wagner, whose father, Chuck Wagner, started Caymus in 1972. “And we wanted to show off the wind.” The glass walls, he said, are meant to elide the barrier between indoor and outdoor, and also to emphasize the strong Suisun Valley breeze, one of the characteristics that define winegrowing conditions here.
As proof of the wind’s intensity, Caymus-Suisun uses only stemless glasses — because traditional stemware would blow over, said Charlie’s sister Jenny Wagner. The Wagners — specifically patriarch Chuck Wagner and two of his children, Charlie and Jenny — have transformed this property since purchasing it six years ago, with the help of interior design firm Bureau + Geldert. Formerly an apricot cutting and dehydration plant, Caymus-Suisun can now seat 150 customers in the glasswalled tasting pavilion for either guided tastings or casual by-the-glass service. It has a private tasting area that can be booked for birthday parties or corporate events, complete with leather swinging chairs on a secluded deck. As a nostalgic touch, the private room has a vintage 1983 tape deck and a collection of cassettes (the room gets too much sun for vinyl records).
Gardens surrounding the tasting room include peaches, tomatoes, onions and other edible goods; visitors will be invited to roam around and pick some ripe produce to take home. Before leaving, all visitors will be routed through a wine retail room, where bottles of wine are for sale. (A bottle of 2000 Caymus Special Selection Napa Valley: $375.) A sleek espresso bar serving Camellia Roasters coffee awaits by the exit, a custom inspired by Australian wineries. The espresso drink is included
in your $25 tasting fee.
Unless you buy wine, of course, in which case the $25 is waived. “The goal is never to charge a tasting fee,” said Charlie Wagner. A concierge will meet you by the valet pick-up, to hand off your purchased wine as you drive away.
The impetus for coming to Suisun Valley was initially logistical. Chuck Wagner has been a longtime critic of Napa County’s strict rules governing how much wine a winery can produce and what sorts of activities it can host. (Weddings, for example, are prohibited.) In 2013, the county sued him for producing more wine than Caymus’ permit allowed, for which he paid a $1 million settlement. (Chuck Wagner also sued Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, alleging that winery closures during COVID were discriminatory.)
“Conditions in Napa aren’t conducive to making or bottling wine,” said Chuck Wagner. But neighboring Solano County represented a wild frontier, granting him considerably more freedom. In 2018, he moved the majority of wine production to a facility in Suisun Valley. All Wagner-made wine is now bottled here. The more time Chuck Wagner spent in Suisun, the more he liked it. “It reminds me of Napa 50 years ago,” he said: small family farms with diversified agriculture that includes walnuts, stone fruit and pears in addition to grapes. Before founding Caymus, Chuck Wagner’s family farmed prunes and walnuts in Napa Valley. “There’s more excitement outside of Napa,” he said. After establishing the wine production facility, he bought a second property, for the Caymus-Suisun tasting room, and bought or leased several other vineyards. His family now farms 600 acres of land in the valley.
The Wagners own many wine brands — Emmolo, Mer Soleil, Conundrum and others. But Caymus, in Rutherford, is the first and has always been the flagship. The top Caymus wine, its Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon, is a fixture of restaurant wine lists around the world and holds the rare distinction of being named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year twice.
Even as the family created the less-expensive, spin-off brands, they
“It reminds me of Napa 50 years ago.”
Chuck Wagner, founder of Caymus Wines, on his move to Solano County
have always gone to great lengths to keep Caymus in a separate class: They never opened a tasting room other than the original Caymus location in Rutherford, and they never put the name “Caymus” on any of their subsidiary labels. Until now.
So the fact that this project is called Caymus-Suisun speaks to the deep, unprecedented investment the Wagners have made in Suisun Valley. It was also a savvy branding decision in a low-profile region. Using the name Caymus, said Chuck Wag
ner, was a surefire way to “drive notoriety.”
Suisun Valley could use some notoriety.
“We’ve been waiting for this our whole lives,” said Lisa Tenbrink Howard, who owns nearby Tolenas Winery. She grew up in a Suisun Valley farming family — her parents’ Tenbrink Farms sells produce to top Bay Area restaurants — and started making wine about 10 years ago. The Wagners’ arrival, she said, is “outside validation” of the potential of the area’s terroir.
Although the federal government designated Suisun Valley as an American Viticultural Area in 1982, just one year after Napa Valley, a local winemaking scene did not immediately take off, said Ron Lanza,
whose family owns the longestrunning winery here, Wooden Valley Winery. Throughout the 1980s, Lanza said, his was the only winery making wine labeled as Suisun Valley. Virtually all farmers who grew grapes sold them to a single buyer, Sonoma’s Sebastiani Winery.
But when the wine corporation Constellation bought Sebastiani, in 2001, it canceled its Suisun Valley grape contracts, according to Lanza and Howard. With no buyer for their fruit, some growers started making their own wine. “It was a moment when we had to reinvent ourselves,” said Howard.
That process of reinvention seems to be reaching an apex with the opening of Caymus-Suisun. Representatives of four Suisun Valley
wineries interviewed for this story all expressed optimism that the Wagners could raise their collective profile.
Some of the other wineries are trying to break out of the momand-pop mold, too. Adjacent to Caymus-Suisun, Jeff and Jody Anselmo have transformed their family farm into Village 360, a multiuse development that includes a tasting room, a restaurant with a full bar and a wellness center that hosts yoga classes. (In Napa County, a winery opening today would never be allowed to host such activities.) The Wagners hope to build a walking path so that customers could pass easily between Caymus-Suisun and Village 360.
But fancy tasting rooms are only one element of how a sleepy place like Suisun Valley builds its reputation as a wine region. The wine itself has to taste good and be distinctive.
The Wagners may help steer Suisun in a new direction there, too. So far, the valley has hitched its wagon to Petite Sirah, a grape variety known for producing a thick, tarry, tannic red wine. A big sign on the valley’s main road proclaims Suisun Valley the “Petite Sirah Capital of the World.” Caymus-Suisun has bought into the local specialty, producing a Petite Sirah it calls Grand Durif, resurrecting an antiquated synonym for the grape that was used in the 19th century.
Petite Sirah can be a tough grape to love, too aggressive and teeth-staining for many drinkers’ taste. Jenny Wagner, who makes many of the Caymus-Suisun wines, is smartly experimenting with a range of other varieties, including the Greek white Assyrtiko and the Italian reds Nero d’Avola, Negroamaro and Schioppettino.
The most promising wine I tasted at Caymus-Suisun, however, was Grenache. On a wind-whipped hilltop 1,100 feet above the tasting room, the Wagners have planted 33 acres of Grenache — head-trained, the way vines were planted a century ago. The blue water of the Suisun and Grizzly bays, with the city of Martinez beyond them, is visible from here, ferrying a breeze that originated in the ocean.
Sitting on the hillside, Jenny Wagner opens a small bottle of nascent 2021 Grenache that she’d pulled from a barrel earlier that morning. It has the sweetly gratifying notes that Wagner wines are known for: warm cinnamon, and a punchy suggestion of strawberry-kiwi Snapple. But there’s also a backbone of acidity, and a finale of firm, bitter tannins. It’s good now, and will be better in a couple years when it’s released.
Serves 8
This beautiful galette celebrates spring in all its glory, with the star being the mild, slightly pungent green garlic. The galette dough is flavored with carom seeds (optional), which add a bit of a thyme-like flavor to the dough that I love! The pesto is made with earthy flavors of cilantro, green garlic and nutty pistachios, brightened with lemon zest. Layers of milder cheeses like fontina and creamy mascarpone complement the punchy pesto. Enjoy a slice of this galette with a glass of crisp and vibrant Chardonnay.
Dough
2¼ cups + 1 tablespoon all-purpose
flour
1¼ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
1 teaspoon carom seeds (optional, see headnote)
1½ sticks unsalted butter, chilled and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup ice water + 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
Galette
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 leek cut into thin rounds
1 cup fresh or frozen green peas Kosher salt, to taste
Coarsely ground black pepper, to taste 20 mint leaves, finely chopped
3 to 4 piquillo peppers, thinly sliced (optional)
1 cup Cilantro, Green Garlic, Pistachio Pesto (see Recipe)
4 ounces mascarpone, at room temperature
2 cups grated fontina cheese 2 tablespoons heavy cream + 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
Garnishes
20 pistachios, coarsely chopped 8 to 10 mint leaves
2 tablespoons thinly sliced green
garlic
Mix together the flour, salt, pepper and carom seeds, if using, and whisk until blended. Add the butter; using a pastry blender, mix until the butter is pea-sized.
Add 8 tablespoons of the ice water and toss until the dough is uniformly moist and holds together when pinched. If it seems too dry, add 2 more tablespoons of ice water.
Gather the dough with your hands, shape into a disk, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour, or until ready to roll out.
In a raw campaign video posted on Twitter in April, author and California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger looks squarely at the camera and asserts that “California is in a crisis of chaos.” His stern voice carries over images of a haphazard row of tents on the street and security footage of a burglary in a high-end jewelry store. “We won’t return to normal until rampant homelessness and crime are dealt with and order is restored.”
Looking fit with a close-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, Shellenberger declares that he alone is the man who will clean up the streets. In a nutshell, that’s his pitch for governor.
Shellenberger is order. His opponents are chaos.
Hailing from the Berkeley hills, Shellenberger looks like an affable guy who decided to throw his hat in the crowded governor’s race to address social problems. But, make no mistake, Shellenberger’s agenda is downright menacing.
During his appearances on Fox News and Joe Rogan’s show, Shellenberger is full of buzzwords like “progressive wokeness” as he rails against what he refers to as a culture of “pathological altruism” — his diagnosis of the true causes of widespread homelessness and substance use. According to Shellenberger, permissive “radical woke ideology” — funded by George Soros, among others — fuels and enables substance use, which he thinks is the reason why California’s homeless population has swelled over the past decade.
To afford a two-bedroom apartment in California, a household must earn $6,766 per month, or $81,191 annually, according to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Someone making California’s minimum wage would have to work 112 hours per week to afford rent. According to Shellenberger, however, this stark inequality has little to do with more people living in cars and in tents on the street.
Unlike his wishy-washy opponents beset by awful human emotions like empathy and compassion, Shellenberger is “obsessed with stoicism.” And his glib analysis of addiction and homelessness lead him to cruel and harsh solutions. California’s 160,000 homeless people inevitably arrive through a series of bad life choices. And they need a hefty spoonful of tough love, tough policing and personal responsibility.
As governor, Shellenberger would create an agency he calls “Cal-Psych,” a bizarre Big Brother-style structure of mass institutionalization run by the state whose mission would be to round up the unhoused and coerce them into a system of shelters and “treatment.”
And people who don’t want to enter his benevolent Cal-Psych program? They can go straight to jail.
Shellenberger claims to want to save people from addiction and overdose deaths by institutionalizing them. But, in 2019, California’s prison system reported an overdose death rate more than double that of other state prison systems. Overdose deaths only began to drop in California prisons after the state expanded access to lifesaving medications like buprenorphine and methadone, both of which are highly effective treatments for opioid use disorder.
On Rogan’s show, however, Shellenberger belittled those who take these medications and called it “sad.”
“The goal right now is addiction maintenance,” Shellenberger said. “That’s what these guys are doing for everybody ... The goal should be recovery.”
Shellenberger seems to have no idea that every definition of recovery includes taking prescribed medication. Forcing people to go cold turkey while they’re incarcerated is not only dangerous, but can be lethal. A 2007 study found that people with opioid addiction recently released from incarceration are 129 times more likely to die of an overdose than the general population. That’s especially true in California, where a lack of reentry housing lands people back on the street. America has tried to jail drug users for the past 50 years of a failed drug war. Even Orange County’s conservative district attorney, Todd Spitzer, says jailing people with addiction is futile: “Those who are addicted to drugs should not be spending time in jail.” Shellenberger thinks otherwise. His campaign is based on the idea that people with addiction cannot recover unless they are coerced. But that’s simply not true. UC San Diego researchers analyzed high-quality studies of compulsory treatment and found that forcing people into institutions not only fails to improve outcomes, but it can also make things worse. The majority of these studies did not find that mandatory treatment positively impacted measures like drug use and recidivism. Two of the studies actually found those mandated into treatment had higher rates of recidivism compared with control groups. Another recent study found forced treatment, like incarceration, is associated with a higher risk of dying.
None of this even touches the potential for ethics and human rights abuses that an agency like Cal-Psych would have in forcing hundreds of thousands of people into institutions and jails.
The relationship between substance use and homelessness is complicated. Consider that states such as West Virginia and Kentucky have some of the lowest rates of homelessness in America while having the highest rates of addiction and overdose. Surely the low cost of rent and abundant housing in these states has nothing to do with it.
The vast majority of people who use substances do not become homeless. Rather, homelessness exacerbates mental illness and addiction; people use substances to cope with the horrors and trauma of life on the street.
But Shellenberger dismisses these obvious facts because they don’t comport with his zealotry. Instead, he claims that California invites homeless migration — because life on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin or Los Angeles’ Skid Row is such a peachy picnic.
It’s easy to dismiss Shellenberger as a long-shot candidate who entered the race to elevate his personal brand. But underestimate him at your own peril.
Shellenberger has found a rich vein of reactionary anger among an aggrieved electorate that doesn’t care about his facile analysis and absurd plans that he has no clue how to execute. The rage he has tapped into, to be sure, is largely justified. But Shellenberger shifts the blame to pathologically “woke” infrastructure he says coddles drug users.
The truth is that such infrastructure doesn’t exist.
California is no bastion for harm reduction and housing first policies. Story after story tells us how difficult it is to find shelter, services and affordable housing in places like San Francisco.
Democrats who speak loftily of compassion while refusing to build the infrastructure to support it make it easy for a guy like Shellenberger to come along and exploit their failures.
Shellenberger is dealing in dark vibes that intoxicate voters. What makes him dangerous, however, is that he’s a true believer — high on his own supply.