A wine guy at City Hall

Last fall, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was in Washington, D.C., he says, "I heard from a couple of Republican senators that they wanted to see me. I thought, 'Well, that's kind of strange,' since we didn't exactly have a lot in common." If anything, a typical Republican senator in this Congress might want to avoid being seen with the California politician who brought a tempest to the national stage by issuing marriage licenses to gay men and women at City Hall.

"But I met with them," Newsom says, "and they just wanted to tell me how much they loved my wine."

The wine in question was the estate Cabernet from PlumpJack, the small Napa winery that Newsom founded in a limited partnership in 1997. Born from a lease agreement on 50 acres of valley floor, with an old barn for an address, the winery made an immediate splash when Robert Parker gave its inaugural Reserve Cabernet 95 points in the Wine Advocate, putting it in the company of other cult Cabs of the era such as Harlan, Colgin, Dalla Valle and Screaming Eagle.

It's fitting that San Francisco, with its incredible food and wine culture and proximity to Northern California's great wine regions, should have a wine guy as a mayor. Despite the fact that Newsom seems destined from birth to be a politician, he's been a wine guy in one form or another for much longer than he's been involved in government. In fact, the PlumpJack Group, a collection of hotel, restaurant and retail businesses the mayor created with partners that include family friends Gordon and Billy Getty, got its start with a wine shop.

Fifteen years ago, Newsom and Billy Getty were in their early 20s, and like a lot of kids in their early 20s, frequented their share of liquor stores -- mostly to purchase wine, for which the pair had developed a mildly patrician taste through the good graces and deep cellars of Billy's father, Gordon. What typically happened amounted to a dis: Seeing two guys in their 20s, the store clerk, without so much as a second thought, would point them in the direction of the beer cooler.

Eventually Newsom and Getty got sufficiently indignant to launch their own wine shop in San Francisco's Marina District in 1992. They called it PlumpJack, after an opera Gordon Getty wrote based on Jack Falstaff, Shakespeare's magnificent rogue. From its outset, PlumpJack Winery was about making wine accessible to people Newsom's age, presenting it affordably and, whenever possible, devoid of mystery. "I knew nothing about the business," says Newsom, "and very little about wine. I just knew that I loved it." He knew, too, that people his age were not being served. Indeed the wine-shop vibe in San Francisco at the time was often red-carpeted and gallery-like, trading on rarity and reinforcing snobbery. Newsom found this objectionable.