A Sense of Place: An Intimate Portrait of the Niebaum-Coppola Winery and the Napa Valley

Kolpan, wine professor at the Culinary Institute of America, tells of the rise, fall and rebirth of the Niebaum-Coppola Winery. In 1879, Gustave Niebaum, a Finnish immigrant, purchased 1000 acres of property in Northern California's Napa Valley, which he christened Inglenook (Scottish for ""cozy corner""). Having already made his fortune in the Alaskan fur trade, Niebaum tried his hand at wine making, a venture that proved very profitable. The years following Niebaum's death in 1908, however, were turbulent for Inglenook. Fourteen years of Prohibition nearly forced the winery to close. Even after the law was repealed, Americans were slow in developing a taste for the grape. Consequently, the winery suffered extreme financial difficulties and was sold to corporate interests that had no intention of producing fine wine. In 1975, film director Francis Ford Coppola resuscitated the estate, which had fallen victim to years of mismanagement and neglect. While parts of the book read like publicity material for the Coppola vineyards (""To think of Rubicon [the flagship wine] as a commodity is to ignore its viticulture and viniculture""), Kolpan nicely incorporates vivid figures (including Rafael Rodriguez, a Mexican who started at Inglenook as a migrant worker in the 1940s and now serves as the vineyard manager and historian) and explanations of such viticultural concepts as terroir--the French term for the ""elusive, indefinable mix of soil"" and climate that gives wines their unique character. Illustrations. (Oct.)