And welcome to A Sense of Place: An Intimate Portrait of the Niebaum-Coppola Winery and the Napa Valley by Steven Kolpan, professor of wine studies at The Culinary Institute of America. By charting the history of one piece of Napa soil, the author provides an absolutely fascinating tour that is part documentary, part Hollywood fable, and part scathing chronicle of corporate ineptitude. When Finnish mariner-turned-San-Francisco-millionaire Gustav Niebaum establishes Inglenook Estate in 1879, his dream is to make the finest wine in California. His heir comes close to fulfilling the dream before selling a portion of the estate to a wine co-op, which is purchased by liquor giant Heublein. Heublein turns the once-proud estate into a jug wine brand. Meanwhile, the heir's Mormon wife--who hates everything about the wine business--sells the original house and remaining vineyards to film director Francis Ford Coppola, who 20 years later buys Heublein's parcel to reunite the original estate. Chapters recount this tale through the recollections of Rafael Rodriguez, a migrant laborer working at the property in the 1950s and now vineyard manager; Scott McLeod, current Niebaum-Coppola "winegrower" and artisan of the high-end Rubicon; and Dennis Fife, Inglenook's final president during the tumultuous Heublein days and now a respected winemaker in his own right, in a chapter that reads like a financial report written by Mel Brooks.
Captain Niebaum's 1884 Inglenook Claret sold for $3 a case. Coppola's 1995 Rubicon was $75 a bottle. For the price of A Sense of Place, every Cabernet fan will be able to savor a little piece of "Rutherford dust." --Tony Mason