Who knows what all the deals are—the deals that keep the wine business going?
Actually we do know when the big deals happen. When, for example, François Pinault, who owns Chateau Latour, buys the Eisele Vineyard; when Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy buys Joseph Phelps Vineyards; when Champagne Roederer buys Diamond Creek winery. All of those properties are in Napa Valley, all of the buyers were French, and all of the purchase prices (undisclosed) were reportedly in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
But what we rarely hear about are the small deals –the family deals—the bedrock partnerships that keep a wine community alive.
That’s the deal that was struck between winemaker Aaron Pott and his wife Claire and Carole Meredith and Steve Lagier. No international brokers. No headlines. No actual money. Just a pact to keep a treasured mountain vineyard going.
Carole, Chair Emerita of the University of California at Davis’ Department of Viticulture and Enology, is the world famous geneticist who unlocked the power of DNA typing to figure out the parentage of grape varieties (including Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Zinfandel). Steve worked for decades making wine at Mondavi.
Carole and Steve owned a small vineyard (Lagier Meredith) high up on the slopes of Mt Veeder in Napa Valley and made a tiny amount of stellar Syrah. The Potts owned the vineyard next door. Over time the couples became close. As Carole and Steve got older, Aaron and Claire took over making their wine, and helping them with the vineyard.
Carole Meredith and Steve Lagier, well into retirement, had outside offers to buy the property, and it might have made financial sense to do that. After all, Napa vineyards command a good price.
But one day, they went to the Potts with a different idea: Aaron and Claire would continue making the Lagier Meredith wines and taking care of the vineyard. Carole and Steve would continue to live in their house on the vineyard for the rest of their lives. And the Lagier Meredith property would be given to the Pott’s two daughters.
This is the kind of deal that doesn’t make many headlines—but it’s a deal based on an old value system of community, trust, and families determined to keep a heritage alive.
Aaron and Claire make several wines from the Lagier Meredith Vineyard on Mt Veeder, including a 2023 wildly lively, spicy and rich Pott “Lagier Meredith Vinyard” Syrah that made me envision some fantastical imagining of blueberries and violets poured over volcanic rocks. There is a real purity and beauty to the wine, to its layers of supple texture, and to its slow arc of intense flavor.
Aaron Pott, Carole Meredith, Steve Lagier and Claire Pott, circa 2005
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On a completely different topic, I have been thinking a lot lately about why some wine regions engender negativity. Bordeaux does this. Napa does too. I know so many people in the wine biz who love to hate these two places. What is going on here? Is it the price of fame? And speaking of price, is it because wines from these two places cost a lot?
But if price alone was operating, then Burgundy would engender the same vitriol. But Burgundy remains well-loved, even if you’d have to take out a second mortgage to buy a case of it. Got any thoughts? Let me know.
Continuing on, we’re still in March—Women’s History Month—so designated by Congress in 1987. But recently I discovered that the celebration originated in Sonoma, nearly ten years earlier, in 1978. The wine landscape was very different for women back then. There were fewer than 3 nationally known women wine writers in 1978. There were no women Master Sommeliers (the organization didn’t exist yet). And there was just one woman Master of Wine in the whole world. How times have changed.
I decided to call up the CBS station in San Francisco and suggest they do a segment on the evolution of women in the wine industry. Amazingly, they did. You can see a video of the CBS segment below.
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The writer W. Blake Gray recently wrote a piece in Wine Searcher about his recent experience in the hospital and the reaction he encountered when he told the doctors how much wine he drinks.
Coincidentally, on the same day that I read Blake’s piece, I myself was talking to a doctor on the phone. We were going through her “lifestyle” questions:
Have you ever smoked? No.
Do you exercise? A lot.
Do you eat processed foods? Almost never.
Do you drink alcohol? Yes.
How much per week? About 20 glasses of wine.
I could hear her literally gasp.
I drink wine, I emphasized. I’m in the wine business.
You do know it’s a poison right? she said.
She was a doctor. I would have thought she would have been better informed. But the web of medical misinformation about wine is now stunningly massive in scope.
It’s not clear what can be done about this. Wine drinking is so easily lumped in as a manifestation of alcohol abuse. And the anti-alcohol forces at work today have convinced the public (as well as many doctors) that alcohol is a binary issue. There’s abstinence and there’s abuse. Black and white. That’s it.
Too bad that leaves out millions of us who are healthy and who drink wine every day. Just as people have done for 8000 years.
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—Karen
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