I was up in Napa Valley for a couple days to check out the Rutherford area for an upcoming article in Wine Enthusiast, and then on to Premier Napa Valley on Saturday. Napa was very beautiful and warm between winter storms. The skies were clear, Mount St. Helena’s peaks were dusted with snowy white, the flowering plum trees were pink, and every vineyard and hillside was splashed with cheery yellow mustard blossom. But people seemed to have the blues.

The view from Rubicon, looking north

Everywhere I went, I asked winery folks how business was going, and the answer invariably was a shrug of the shoulders or a roll heavenward of the eyes. Winery owners large and small told me things are tough; they’re hanging in there, hoping for better times. A friend, a wealthy grower, cracked that even the multi-millionaires are scared: they used to be worth $20 million and now it’s only $10 million. I went to Dean & DeLuca’s wine store, filled with dozens of tiny-production Cabs priced from $75 to $100 and up. “How’s high-end Cab doing?” I asked the guy working the floor. He shook his head. “Terrible.” People just aren’t buying anymore.

I stopped by the Oakville Grocery for lunch. There were two beefy guys, contractor-types, grabbing coffee and danish. I overheard one tell the other, “I told him I have to cut his salary if he wants to stay employed. Hell, I cut my own salary 25 percent.” As I handed my credit card to the lady at the register, the guy said to me, “You wouldn’t be needin’ any work, would ya?” I laughed and said, “Only if you let me pay on credit.” He laughed back. There’s a kind of grim, gallow’s humor these days, even in Oakville.

Went to a famous cult winery and asked the winemaker how sales are doing. Pretty good direct, he said, meaning through the tasting room and wine club, “but New York is dead.” The head of another cult winery said he’s seeing a big drop in off-premise sales, which is a mainstay of cult Cabs. “A lot of this is anecdotal,” he shared, “but we hear about restaurants closing all over the country, and customers shifting from going out to dinner to buying more of their wines at stores.” No way will 2009 repeat the sales of 2008, he fretted.

On the other hand, the parking lot at Auberge du Soleil was jammed, while limo drivers waited out along the curb on winding Rutherford Hill Road, to whisk sated guests back to whence they came.

But of course it was Premier Napa Valley weekend, second in importance only to the Napa Wine Auction itself, and an important gauge as to how the economy is doing; and in Napa, topic number one was the collapse of the Naples [Florida] Winter Wine Auction. Held  Feb. 7, it saw the take plunge to $5 million from 2008’s $14 million, a shocking fall of 65 percent. Everybody was wondering if it could happen here. During the barrel tasting at the Culinary Institute of America, a winery owner confided, “I’ll be amazed if PNV does half of last year,” when the auction fetched $2.2 million.

Well, in the end, PNV did better than that: nearly $1.5 million, or about 68 percent of last year’s haul. In his article in the Napa Register, my old friend, the writer Pierce Carson, called that “exceeding expectations” because the fears of a fall off the cliff had been so widespread. I guess that’s true, but still, when you’re down 32 percent from a year ago, it’s not really good news.

I’ve begun holding winetasting seminars at Franklin Square Wine Bar, a hip new wine bar that recently opened on Broadway in my Upper Lake Merritt neighborhood, near downtown Oakland. Upper Broadway was wrecked by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but it’s roaring back, with new condos and commercial buildings, restaurants, art galleries and cafés, as well as Franklin Square Wine Bar. Here are some images of my May 4 tasting of various Pinot Noirs from the Pisoni Vineyard, in Monterey’s Santa Lucia Highlands, with my special guest, Gary Pisoni. (www.pisonivineyards.com)

Mr. and Mrs. Gary Pisoni with Steve. That’s proprietor Rick Mitchell in the background on the left.

Gary first planted the vineyard back in 1982, mainly to Bordeaux varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon. “We didn’t know what to grow!” he told me. Today, of course, the vineyard is mainly known for its Pinot Noirs; wineries line up “from here to Napa, and from here to Santa Barbara, both ways,” to procure the grapes, Gary laughs. Only about a dozen wineries are lucky enough to actually be able to buy fruit from the 55-acre vineyard. In 1998, Gary launched his own Pisoni brand. (more…)