22
A Bunch of Wine Buffs
Were Rapping It Up, When …

In 1961, M.F.K. Fisher helped imagine and start the Napa Valley Wine Library. In this piece, published in 1975 by Golden Gate North Magazine, M. F. K. Fisher describes the personalities and dinner parties that inspired a center of oenological research that remains devoted to preserving and sharing information about viticulture, enology, and the history of the Napa Valley.

CLOSE RELATIVES OF A THRIVING, HANDSOME, intelligent child can be obnoxiously bland and boastful about him, and it is impossible for me, personally, to mention the Napa Valley Wine Library without beaming proudly: I was in on its birth, in 1961!

Since that year, the library has grown past any of our original hopes, and is now an integral part of the culture of Napa Valley, of Northern California, and indeed of many distant centers of wine interest. During the first year we managed to gather what seemed a fine nucleus of almost 100 books, some of them of real value. By now we have about 1,000, expertly catalogued, as well as rare collections of bottle labels, brochures, house organs, and periodicals devoted in one way or another to enology, lodged in the St. Helena Public Library until larger quarters can be found.

Members of the Napa Valley Wine Library Association, which our small enterprise became legally in 1963, feel proud as punch to have got the baby off to such a fine start, and are delighted to see the public circulation of our books increase in direct ratio of the membership list and the bank account.

It all started over the generous dinner tables of the valley, where talk had centered ineffectually for a long time on the sad truth that countless valuable documents and books about local wine history were mouldering in attic trunks, or being thrown out by tidy housewives, or going up in smoke of one origin or another. The pioneers of the industry were disappearing, in spite of the basic fact that wine people are mysteriously inclined to outlive ordinary mortals. And there was no information available to local people who wanted to study more facets of their own life-work. . . .

Francis Lewis Gould, an almost legendary authority on wine judging and tasting, has probably sat at more good tables and shared more fine bottles than most men alive, and he grew so impressed with the truth of what he heard, and so impatient with the lack of anything but dining room chit-chat about the problem, that he plunged characteristically into action.

He bullied, coaxed, wheedled, and otherwise awed St. Helenans into handing him something over $700, and then pulled together seven enthusiastic “trustees,” and the Napa Valley Wine Library was born. Its first cries were loud and healthy, and within less than two years became so well heard and understood that the association was formed, with the first little band of officers enlarged by yearly elections and called an executive committee.

Of course, the original and continuing purpose of the library, to make it one of the important printed collections of the wine world, was amplified and made firmer by skilled legal counsel. It states that the association shall be maintained by and for “persons interested in books and other documents relating to wine, and to the history of wine; to acquire funds for the Napa Valley Wine Library; to encourage and solicit books, manuscripts, and other documents pertaining to wine, particularly those relating to Napa Valley viticulture, enology, and wine lore; to encourage cooperation from the St. Helena Public Library …”

And so it was and is, thanks to the determination of Francis Gould (fondly and widely known as Paco). We have some money in the bank from membership dues and gifts. We have a library of increasing value and reputation, available to anyone with a public library card that can be served by the inter-library loan system. We have devoted helpers, both professional and volunteer. At the regular board meetings there is an annually changing collection of lawyers, teachers, bankers, vintners, retired tycoons. In other words, the baby is now a fine sturdy kid, with great promise!

One thing that got it/us on our feet was the annual tasting for the members. At first we had to scramble to make things look festive for a handful of dogged supporters. Within five years or so we had to limit the attendance sternly to 2,000! The first tastings were held in everything from a condemned lumberyard to an empty automobile salesroom, and then moved to the gracious but limited lawns of old Spottswoode, one of St. Helena’s Victorian prides. By now, the increasingly well-organized parties have been held at various valley landmarks: Beaulieu, Krug, the nobly restored Niebaum House. They are pretty things to go to, on the wide green lawns in the August twilights, and members who can get in are gently hypnotized by them. So, fortunately, are the vintners who provide their best table wines: Rieslings one year, rosés another, then white or red Pinots, Zinfandel.…There is no need for music at these celebrations: local ladies drift about in stylish summer cottons, with apparently inexhaustible trays of nibbles; there is a brave supply of Rouge et Noir cheeses; the most famous vintners in the state stand proudly behind their tables, pouring tirelessly. There are even special wine glasses available for a slight fee (the association is strictly nonprofit), valuable for nostalgic reasons and for their imprint of the fine library insigne designed by Mallette Dean.

In other words, it’s quite a party! And it costs $5 (or one annual membership), and it brings in money to buy as many books as we can, which is what it’s all about.

An acquisitions committee directs new purchases, subscriptions, and donations of manuscripts and various other artifacts. (We love old bills of lading and photographs and deeds. . . .) Gradually, as we come to be taken seriously by “the outside world,” we are accumulating an impressive if still somewhat modest collection.

Most of it is on the open shelves of the St. Helena Library for public circulation, and only the rarest of the books are kept behind glass, to be used in the reading rooms with permission. A careful shelf list is brought up to date and reissued every two or three years, with current additions every few months in insertable sheets, and all this is available to association members and anyone who will write to the wine librarian, St. Helena Public Library, St. Helena, Calif. 94574.

This lady is, hopefully forever, Mrs. Elizabeth Reed, who manages with unflappable skill to handle both the public library and our own wine shelves. She is helped by several trained librarians, apprentices in librarianship, and volunteers. All of them answer questions happily, pull files for research, check out books both trivial and technical for home enjoyment. Our small collection of rarities, like the 1862 edition of Haraszthy’s Grape Culture, for instance, is locked up but available to qualified readers … and meanwhile we have invested in two excellent photocopies of this vital book on California viticulture, which circulate steadily

Several other valuable documents and volumes have been photocopied, and many more, like a complete run of the St. Helena Star, can be viewed through the weird machine in the main reading room. Tapes of wine pioneers are being made constantly, and one large volume of their transcripts is already available for in-library use. Also, transcripts of the interviews done by the Bancroft Library in Berkeley are gradually being addedto our collection, for in-library use. There are a few recordings which can be borrowed with special permission—i.e., Alexis Lichine’s The Joy of Wine, and we have reprints or photocopies of many California classics like Waite’s Wines and Vines.

The list of our open-shelf books starts off inevitably with the highly reputable name of Leon Adams, and ends with the 1968 edition of The Wines of Burgundy, by H. W. Yoxall. In between are hundreds of treasures to be read (bottles to be quaffed …), from the weightiest technical treatises to lighthearted studies of Bacchanalian revels in old London. There are books in German, French, Italian, Spanish, even Latin, dating from several centuries to the present.

The list of periodicals is based on California grape growing and wine drinking, but includes subscriptions to magazines and pamphlets from several other countries. Our increasingly valuable files of house organs, labels, and brochures relating to the wine industry, both American and worldwide, are constantly being updated by paid assistants. All this can be discussed with the wine librarian, of course, for use in the reading rooms or for regular circulation.

The monthly withdrawal list of wine library books, which has been greatly helped by the inter-library loan system, has grown most pleasingly, and is heaviest during the weekends when wine appreciation courses are given, and students can prowl the shelves.

These courses, directed by James E. Beard, master printer and one of the founders of the library in 1961, were started in 1966, and are counted as something of a phenomenon. They followed two seasons of the highly technical but successful extension course given by the University of California and sponsored by the Napa Valley Wine Library in St. Helena. They are much more informal, naturally, but in their own way are equally valuable to people eager to know more about wine growing, wine making, wine drinking. So far, almost 2,000 exhausted but happy “graduates” have received their diplomas (of course designed and printed by Jim Beard himself). A firm and successful effort has been made to keep the courses limited in both size and number, but Beard could easily fill every weekend of the year, if he and his faculty were not merely human.

As it is, the courses are hard work for all concerned, thoroughly delightful as well as of real value, and do a great deal to help the image of the association as an important and serious part of Napa Valley life. The instructors are well-known enologists and vintners; the pace they set is heavy but exciting, through vineyards and cellars and classrooms and delicious lunches (and many a good bottle!), and “alumni” hold nostalgic annual meetings in far-off wine enclaves like Redondo Beach in Southern California and Cleveland, Ohio.

Anyone who takes the appreciation course is automatically a member of the association, and information can be obtained from James E. Beard, Post Office Box 16, St. Helena, Calif. 94574. The fee remains ridiculously low. It does not include lodging, or breakfasts and dinners, but there are several good answers to these problems, throughout the valley.

It is strange by now to look back on our first clumsy efforts to get started, even with Paco Gould’s lovely nest egg to goad us. Once we gave a showing (to raise more money, of course) of the apparently deathless old flick, They Knew What They Wanted, made in the valley and starring Carole Lombard and Charles Laughton, and found at the last minute that we could not serve wine during the intermission because we were in the grammar school. Needless to add, the affair was something of a fiasco. From then on, we carefully avoided such zonings, and while our lawn parties have always been pleasantly well mannered, we have been able to serve and drink local wines as we have seen fit. Only once did we have a rough moment, when gate crashers who had been turned away invaded an annual tasting through the back vineyards: a good record for some fifteen years of public enjoyment of a fermented product!

Meanwhile the bibliography grows longer every year and month. The files of labels, old photographs, local maps and manuscript are becoming fatter. The bank account looks plump. Our baby, like the public library, has plainly outgrown its present housing.… But the Napa Valley Wine Library Association remains so healthy and handsome, there is no doubt about its fine future, nor about the unflagging enthusiasm of everyone who works for it. It is indeed offering vintage quality to us all, even so young in the bottle.