Wine Industry

CALLUSED palms and bandaged fingers; broken fingernails stained black with dirt -- Hollywood actor and director Emilio Estevez proudly shows off his vineyard worker hands as he walks the vine rows. Four years ago, Estevez planted this half-acre Pinot Noir vineyard around his Malibu home.

THE SUBGENRE of wine-importer memoir boasts one other notable effort, the justifiably beloved "Adventures on the Wine Route" by the Berkeley-based merchant Kermit Lynch, published in 1988. So it's a daunting task Neal I. Rosenthal has set for himself in "Reflections of a Wine Merchant," because it's never a good thing to be the lesser player in a field of two. It's in Rosenthal's favor that there's way more going on between the covers of his book than mere recollection. It arrives at a moment during which a battle is being waged in the wine world, and Rosenthal has nominated himself to be the standard bearer for what comes across as winemaking's reactionary fringe.

NAPA Valley lost a charismatic leader when Robert Mondavi died on Friday. Has the Napa Valley that fostered such a maverick passed as well? Mondavi's Napa was the Wild West of winemaking. For the dozen wineries in operation in 1966, costs were low, there was room to grow and mistakes weren't fatal. The challenge was to persuade Americans to drink wine at all. Today, high costs have created a region dominated by small producers.

AS HE stands before his Sensory Evaluation of Wine class at UC Davis Extension, John Buechsenstein, winemaker, professor and commercial vineyard location scout, sticks his nose into the tilted wine glass and breathes in deeply. Ah, Sauvignon Blanc: the chameleon of the wine world. Buechsenstein's nose knows. As an instructor at Davis and at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena, Buechsenstein teaches students how to sniff out wine's variations.

Vineyard manager Steve Thomas grasps the trunk of a zinfandel vine, a redwood of the vineyard, gnarled with age and planted in the days when irrigation meant a barrel of water on a horse-drawn cart. The workhorses and carts are long gone. But these old zin vines at Kunde Estate in Sonoma County still get their water the old-fashioned way, from rain, dew and a deep root system.

Last year, my French friend Claude told me there were wine caves you could drive through in Moldova that had extraordinary wine collections. I like wine. I like travel. I decided to see for myself. Why not? Change is good. Few people, myself included, know much about Moldova, and fewer still have visited here. This former Soviet republic is sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine.

There's a ghost in my wine. I haven't always believed in ghosts. That's a recent development. In the spring, my wife, Jenn, and I headed to the Napa Valley for a seance, of sorts -- an attempt to summon the spirits of winemaking past. I'm not talking about ghouls, goblins or apparitions in flowing gowns. I'm talking about the ghost wineries that dot the valleys, mountains and benchlands of America's most famous winemaking region. So what exactly is a ghost winery?

As California's winemakers begin the 2008 harvest, they are scrambling to find enough Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. After several years of bumper crops, Mother Nature turned fickle this year, offering up deep frosts, followed by hot weather and ultimately not enough rain. "This is one of the strangest weather patterns that I have seen in more than 30 years of farming," said Andy Beckstoffer, the largest independent grower on California's North Coast.

Don Cohorst has acres of vineyards, a stash of small-batch vintages and a barn he wants to turn into a cozy tasting room for wine-sipping visitors. He's convinced he can ply those wine lovers with samples of his Syrah and Muscat Canelli and sell them single bottles for as much as $20 -- more than twice the price he now gets from the small retailers who sell his wine.

Blame the volcanoes of the Northwest that sent so much lava roaring through this valley about 16 million years ago and set the stage. Or blame the glaciers of Montana for forcing floods, about 14,000 years ago, that carried in so many tons of rich dirt. Or you could just blame David Lett. He was the 25-year-old who rolled in from California 43 years ago with a trailer full of vine cuttings and a crazy dream about something called Pinot.