The last of a series on our recent vacation to Napa and Sonoma Counties, which celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and cost us our life savings. Read other installments here, here, here, here, and here. Read why I may never go on vacation again here.
We read about Tulocay Winery in a guidebook. From the sounds of it it was a one-man operation -- that one person being Bill Cadman -- and if you made an appointment he would show you around personally. A web search turned up a couple of people writing about Bill and his wine, which was reportedly both good and relatively inexpensive. When I asked frequent commentor Wally -- who's in the wine business and knows people -- if he knew anything about Tulocay, he said this:
We scheduled a stop at Tulocay for our last morning in wine country. It's just outside of the town of Napa, south of where we'd been hanging around and on the way to San Francisco, where we were going to spend the last couple of days of our vacation. We planned on spending maybe an hour at Tulocay before crossing the Golden Gate into the city.
Tulocay is literally a Napa winery in that it's a winery in Napa, but the phrase "Napa winery" conjures up images of the kind of high-ceilinged tourist destinations we'd been hitting for the last few days. Tulocay is, in fact, Bill Cadman's house and a few outbuildings. His goal is to make about 1,000 cases of wine a year. He does that at the end of a long driveway, atop a hill a half mile or so outside what seems to be the less glamorous side to the town of Napa.
We knocked on the door and Bill snuck up behind us, announcing his presence with a string of robustly insulting remarks about our mutual friend Wally, and inviting us into his kitchen. There, we loaded up on wine glasses and crackers. Then back out to the patio in the front yard where he popped open a bottle of Chardonnay and started talking.
After the Chardonnay came a Pinot Noir, and after the Pinot Noir a Syrah and -- my memory grows foggy here -- I think a Merlot or maybe a Zin.
Tolocay is a winery with no vines. Bill, who ditched a job on the Pacific Stock Exchange in the early 1970s, came to Napa with no experience in the wine business. He learned the trade as a cellar rat at Robert Mondavi, among others, and eventually decided to make his own wine. He has long-standing relationships with the owners of excellent vineyards, and the grapes are grown to his specifications a few rows here and a few rows there around the valley.
After a while, he gave us a tour. We walked across the driveway past a forklift, a beat-up old pick-up truck, and a few huge fermenting tanks. He unlocked the door of a small barn and inside were barrels in which Pinot was aging and Chardonnay fermenting. The Pinot was quiet, but the Chardonnay -- some in oak, some in steel -- was bubbling away with the sound of a pet store filled with fish tanks. The smell in the room was fantastic, one of the best smells ever. It was grapes and wine and bread rising. We stood there for ten minutes or so talking about how Bill makes his wine before moving down to the next building, where finished wine is bottled and stored.
We kept talking, and as we talked Bill pulled a bottle of Cabernet out of a box.
"I almost forgot about this," he said. "We just bottled this a little while ago."
We walked back up to the patio, opened the Cab and kept going.
I've never understood those who seek to remove wine from its context, who consider blind tasting the only valid measure of a wine. Wine is, to me, entirely about context -- about the history of the plot where the grapes grew, the outlook of the wine maker, the friends with which it's consumed.
That said, any judgment I might have of Tulocay Wines should be considered highly suspect, given that the context in which we tasted them was maybe the best context ever. We sat for a couple more hours in the shade of Bill's patio, talking with a very nice, very funny man who is a no-nonsense expert in a subject that fascinates me: wine. Clearly, my judgment is impaired by all the things serious tasters seek to remove from the experience of judging wine.
My recollection of bill's wines is like this: The Chardonnay was crisp and unoaked, the first vintage going out under the Cadman brand, which features a World War II-vintage photo of his parents on the label. The Pinot was new world fruity and without volatile acidity, to which I'm highly sensitized and which ruins a lot of Pinots for me. The only Pinot I've ever really bonded with is Alma Rosa, and Tulocay's Pinot is very much in the same style. I liked it a ton. The Syrah was fruity and fresh and I don't recall the Merlot, so maybe we didn't actually have any.
The Cab that Bill nearly forgot, however, was the star of the show. Like the other wines, it was sleek more than opulent, with fresh fruit, a fill-up-the-room nose, and a subtle structure. Or maybe it just seemed subtle because we'd been tasting 15-20 wines a day for almost a week and my mouth felt like someone had rubbed it with 120 grit sandpaper. Plus -- and this is important -- I'm a lousy taster. I don't get subtle undertones of dry brush and vivacious red fruit. The professionals use a 100 point scoring system, discerning meaningful differences between a 92 and 93-point wine. I have a scoring system that delineates only three levels of quality: wine I want more of, wine I'll settle for, and wine not to bother with.
Bill's wines -- every one of them -- were wines I want more of. In fact, by the time his cat jumped into my lap I was ready to move in. Seriously: I'd work for room and board and a couple of bottles a week, and I'd spruce-up his Internet marketing and get his prices up where they belong and turn his home into a tourist Mecca. Except, I think, that's all the opposite of what Mr. Cadman is looking for.
We spent three hours at Tulocay. When we pushed off all of us were filled with regret that we didn't have more time. We had to get to San Francisco, where the urban portion of our vacation awaited. But in all of the excellent things we did this trip -- the longest, most extensive vacation my wife and I have ever taken -- there was nothing as memorable as our time at Tulocay. We bought a case of wine and will surely buy more as that dwindles. We'll go out of our way to return, to sit under the trees on Bill's patio and pass the time, maybe to pitch-in when he's bottling his next vintage.
If you're ever in the neighborhood, give him a call. I don't think you need any special introduction; I think Bill Cadman is just a nice guy leading a relaxed life atop a hill overlooking paradise, and he'd be more than happy to have you stop by to pass the time. I think that's exactly the reason he got into the wine business in the first place.
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