"Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson."Today, there isn't one square inch remaining of undiscovered land in the 'long green strath' of the Napa Valley where Robert Louis Stevenson once briefly sojourned. In the 1880s, when the above passage was written, wine making pioneers settling in northern California must have indeed seemed much like the gold prospectors of some forty years earlier, who came en masse to seek their very own El Dorado. Even to this day people come to the Napa Valley in pursuit of some hitherto elusive viticultural mother lode, hopefully overlooked by perhaps hundreds of like minded wine-prospectors before them, that will yield up to them alone a wine of mythic proportions - perhaps a new Pétrus, or even a Le Pin. Search on! In the meantime, I'll sit back with a glass of Vinomaker's finest and observe their endeavours from my little, gilded corner of the valley that is Vinoland.
Happy birthday Robert Louis Stevenson.
