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.
"Gavin's whole idea was to try and be unpretentious and reasonable so as many people as possible could enjoy good wine," says Paul Birman, who has run the shop and served as Newsom's wine buyer almost from the start. Markups were kept low and Newsom and his staff sought out small, unknown wineries, often stumbling onto the next big thing in the process. PlumpJack got early allocations of such highly prized wines as Marcassin and Peter Michael -- pricey bottles, but even on these, Newsom kept his markups low.
"They went into this whole business thinking, 'Why should we gouge people?' " says Birman.
A few years later and a few doors up on Fillmore Street, Newsom opened the PlumpJack Cafe, a restaurant with such an aggressive wine-pricing structure that each bottle was priced only a few bucks above retail. In a town with impressive wine lists and even more impressive wine prices, it was seen as a bold move, and the Bay Area's wine geek population took immediate notice.
According to longtime general manager Rose Gibson, the cafe became Newsom's wine education salon. "Late in the evening there'd be 10 guys sitting at the big table," says Gibson, "including the Gettys and sometimes Gavin's father [retired Judge William Newsom], and we'd bring out 10 or 15 brown bags covering Italians, Bordeaux, all of the new California Cabs. This is when Araujo and Bryant Family had just come out and were still cheap, $50 or $60 on our list. And they'd spend the evening -- in the interest of research -- trying to guess what was in each bag."
The wines that did well became fixtures in the wine shop. "We'd know of course what they liked by the empty bottles," adds Gibson, "and those were mostly the Cabs."
Gibson and Birman agree that like a lot of Northern California wine drinkers, Newsom started with a clear penchant for the bold, brash Cabernets that vaulted to prominence in the late '80s and early '90s. And that is how the mayor cultivated a special affinity for Oakville, where his winery came to be. "I love Oakville," says Newsom. "It's always been the place for me where \o7terroir\f7 speaks the loudest."
