Thaddeus Duprey writes I run a wine bar and shop named Outer Space Wines with my wife Emily in Napa, CA. We left our lives in Maine a year ago to go all in on our own wine venture after previous experience as Somms and Cellar hands. We live in St. Helena with our two children, George and Franklin and our dog Boomer.
A profound and ridiculous act
Let’s get this straight: Paseante Noir is not a grape that deserves an ode. It’s not one of the great varietals of the world, with centuries of history and global name recognition. Nor is it a grape that was once in vogue and has fallen out of favor, nor any of the secondary grapes that could all stake a claim to being reasonably ode worthy. In fact, it has almost no history, and almost nobody has tried it. It is a brand new grape, and almost certainly nobody’s favorite, except for maybe one person.
That one person is UC Davis grape geneticist Andy Walker, who crossed Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Vitis Arizonica to create Paseante Noir, which is both drought and Pierce’s Disease resistant. I assume he loves it, because parents love their children, but this is unconfirmed.
Can you imagine the gall to create a new grape? Sure, it feels reasonable for some academic to hypothesize new varietals, but who would drink them? California is so stuffed with vineyards of Paseante’s parent grapes that we have all but declared open season on them, and we’re ripping out 100+ year old vineyards like we’re at war with history.
And yet, here’s this new grape, and a few intrepid, reputable winegrowers producing it. Why?
I live and work in Napa County, running a small wine shop, and this is a valley that is in trouble. Anybody you talk to about wine these days acts like the sky is falling down, and they’re not wrong.
I went to a “Dads and Doughnuts” breakfast at my son’s daycare before Father’s Day. The kids all immediately ditched us, so it was a bunch of Dads sitting around talking. One farms grapes on his family’s land in Napa. He told me about beautiful hillside Cabernet that he grows on a vineyard so steep that it costs a fortune to farm it. By the time harvest came he had spent nine thousand bucks a ton just to grow it, but that was fine because he’s always sold it for fourteen. But last harvest, in a common story here, the buyer pulled out and he desperately went looking for another.
How much do you think he got? Breakeven at $9,000? Seven? Five?
$600 a ton. It’s so bad you’d think it was a fib if it weren’t happening everywhere. Grapes are going unharvested, given away, or sold for pennies on the dollar. Farming grapes was never a hugely profitable ordeal, but not long ago it was at least stable. A few years ago it was even good. People could hope. But now, everywhere you turn, wine is dying. Wineries are shutting down, the younger generations aren’t drinking, the grape market is in freefall, etc.
How did it get so bad so fast? How did people go from stable, even hopeful, in spite of a devastating fire year, to feeling like the rug was pulled out from under them so damn quickly? My friend ended up ripping out that hillside vineyard-- turns out hope is expensive to maintain. What a loss.
As we all know, hope is getting harder to come by, especially outside whatever is happening in the wine world. The US is doing its level best to rip itself apart, but the global order isn’t doing a drastically worse job. I’m writing this a couple hours after learning that the United States has attacked Iran. A year ago that would have been the most important news in the world, but today it hardly registered, swallowed by incessant notifications of constant tragedy. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic to say it’s a hard time to be hopeful for our future.
And that’s why this grape geneticist Andy Walker gets so under my skin. The world is in chaos, the wine industry is imploding, and he thinks there’s a market for a new grape?
And yet, somebody out there is planning for our future. Someone sees a world where we are still drinking through whatever major setbacks befall us. Maybe that world has a little more drought, and a little more Pierce’s disease, but there’s a grape for that. Still farmers growing, winemakers working, and little wine shops with shelves for their bottles. There’s wine being made, and bought, and there are people that survive the nuclear winter to do these things.
Not only that, but they’re toasting world peace with… Paseante Noir? What a profound and ridiculous act of hope it is to create a new grape and believe it has a future, in this moment right now. To be one of the growers to pause ripping out vines to plant new Paseante ones. To be a winemaker staring at pallets of unsold Cabernet and make a barrel of something nobody has ever heard of. What steadfast belief in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
I’m a relatively recent father. I have a five year old, born at the beginning of the Global Pandemic, and a two year old born in the wake of Russia invading Ukraine. Parenting, as it turns out, is also a profound and ridiculous act of hope.
A year ago, recently laid off, I packed up my family, and moved 3000 miles from Maine to Napa to take over a struggling little wine shop with my wife during “hard times to sell wine.” It turns out that I too have the ability to believe in the future of wine (and our shared existence) in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
At that shop, we work with great wine growers, makers, and sellers, and we have a crew of regular customers that wish good things for us. We come together, support one another, and buy bottles of wine in the hope that we will have a good occasion in the future to drink them. And at this little wine shop, tucked amongst bottles from grapes both great and obscure, we have a bottle of Paseante Noir. We hope you’ll try it.
Image by diane555 via iStock.
