BICYCLING THROUGH NAPA

 Driving through the Napa Valley, I invariably think of the movie The Great Escape, specifically the scenes in which James Coburn, having just escaped from a German prison camp and stolen a bicycle, is leisurely pedaling through the Bavarian countryside with its panoramic vistas of broad green fields, picturesque little villages, and alpine peaks.  The Napa Valley also reminds me of the kind of region the protagonist of a picaresque fantasy novel might come upon--an alluring verdant landscape suggestive of exotic alien hinterlands.  A bicycle tour of the Napa Valley is arguably the best way to experience all it has to offer, much more so than from inside a car, which makes one more of a spectator than someone interacting with the countryside. One does not authentically communicate with the surroundings without feeling the touch of the wind and the sun.

The nature fix is exhilarating, and aside from that the most salient attractions are the Valley's wineries, more than 250 of them, these ranging from small family-owned ones producing no more than 200 cases to mammoth publicly-owned companies with productions of up to a million cases annually.  While I can quote Omar Khayyam at length onthe virtues of what he called The Grape ("that can with Logic absolute the Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute"), I am in truth only a casual wine drinker, certainly not anywhere in the league with a friend of mine, a virtually obsessive oenologist who goes the distance with his passion: his wine cellar is stocked not only with a daunting selection of international brands and vintages but also such apparati as Riedel "O" series wine tumblers (innovative glassware), wine stain removers (Stain Rx and Wine Away!), Grape Grabs (tiny purple rubber tubes that dislodge recalcitrant corks), Private Preserve wine preserver, and even a Champagne Sabre (for a show-stopping performance in opening bottles of bubbly).  In the company of my friend, on a tasting tour of wineries, I am as taciturn as Tonto alongside the Lone Ranger.

A bike tour of the wineries is the subject of this piece and it can be undertaken individually in a maverick capacity or by way of a guided tour.  The former has the appeal of spontaneity and personal discovery, the latter of informed guidance.  I'll give a few examples of wineries from my own experience, but will emphasize that with scores and scores of them to visit writing about three or four is something akin to looking at the proverbial tip of the iceberg and presuming to think that one has a true impression of its shape and volume.

    I was very much in a bike-oriented frame of mind as I checked out the Napa Valley biking tour scene, having just returned from Amsterdam, a city with 720,000 people and 600,000 bicycles--and the city council has even developed a bike stimulation program!  If you plan on going your own way you can rent a bicycle at Bicycle Trax in Napa or the St. Helena Cyclery in St. Helena or Getaway Adventures in Calistoga, which also does tours.  The rentals are of high quality bikes at hourly and daily rates and included with the bikes are helmets, locks, water bottle cage, rear rack and bag to carry picnic supplies.  A picnic is almost de rigueur, the lush, scenic countryside providing the perfect ambiance for a dejeuner sur l'herbe.

As for a guided tour, Getaway Adventures is the place to go.  You can take their one day Sip and Cycle tours or one of several multi-day tours.  It's a coin toss as to which of the one day tours is more enjoyable, the Napa or Healdsburg tour.  The Napa trip takes you along country lanes to visit family wineries both large and small, historic and modern, and along the way your palate is introduced to wines both robust and subtle--Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.  You'll visit a winery to see how Omar's Grape is converted into its proverbial potable version and a champagne cellar to see how champagne is made. This trip takes you 10-to-17 miles over mostly flat terrain, although there is more challenging mountain biking to be experienced in the area, about which more later.

    The Wine Country Luxury Weekend Tour starts in Calistoga, the "Hot Springs of the West" (so called for its famous spa) with guests checking into the Silver Rose Inn Resort and gathering for a wine and cheese reception before going to dinner in one of Calistoga's fine restaurants.  Day two begins with 20 miles of flat terrain cycling highlighted by visits to some popular family-owned wineries--Chateau Montelena, Vincent Arroyo, and Frank Family Vineyards.  After a gourmet picnic lunch outside one of the wineries the day culminates with an optional spa treatment at the Silver Rose Inn and Spa (the Cycle Therapy for sore muscles highly recommended).  There's time to tour a micro-brewery before dinner at another restaurant.  Day three takes you on a 17-mile loop in the Dry Creek and Alexander Valleys, stopping off at wineries like Lambert Bridge, Quivira, Dry Creek and Preston; and the tour ends with another picnic lunch on the sylvan grounds of a winery.

   If flat terrain biking fails to properly engage your bakery chutzpah, you will prefer Getaway Adventures Mountain Biking Weekend , which is spent cruising single track and fire roads.  One checks into the Hotel La Rose on Friday afternoon, is briefed by a guide, then rendezvous with the group for a wine country dinner.  On Saturday morning after a continental breakfast the tour starts in Annandale state Park where rides over the forty miles of trails are tailored according to individual levels.  The trails wind through meadows and forests thick with live oaks, Douglas-fir, Bay and Redwood trees and pink and white manzanita.  Lunch is by the lake, where swimming is also permitted, and dinner at another area restaurant can be preceded by a massage or spa treatment.  On Sunday after breakfast and the drive to Lake Sonoma there are several riding options from a half-loop around the lake to advanced single track and steep hills.  Lunch is on a hill overlooking a lake.  On these trails the live oaks are an especially majestic sight, a tree that first captured my attention earlier this year in the hill country of Texas, the most memorable one being the 350 year old live oak on the LBJ Ranch, which converted me at a glance into a live oak fan.

By way of arbitary example, here are some brief impressions of three wineries from among the confusing number of them to bid for your attention.  As a writer, I was drawn to the Saintsbury Winery because of its literary connection, which is to say it was named in honor ofGeorge Saintsbury, a British journalist and Oxford Don who wrote Notes  on a Cellar Book, a collection of notes, menus, and opinions about the wines of the 19th century.  Saintsbury was founded in 1981 by Richard Ward and David Graves with the specific goal of disproving the widely held opinion that Pinot Noir from California was "only marginally different than jug reds."  As the aforementioned self-avowed non-expert, I won't presume to indulge in winespeak but will merely say that their three styles of Pinot Noir are all equally seductive to the palate: the Garnet is robustly suffused with cherry and raspberry flavor; the Carneros is a more classic rendition; and the Reserve is the most fully flavored of the vintage.

    The first sight of the Chateau Montelena Winery puts one in mind of Europe: a stone castle on a hillside overlooking a Chinese garden, lake and vineyards stretching to the base of Mount St. Helena.  This is winery whose heritage dates from the year Manet painted Bar at the Folies-Bergere and it offers a unique tour and tasting experience that culminates in a comprehensive sit-down tasting and discussion of wine in a baronially grand Estate Room.  They release five wines each year and their Chardonnay, Riesling, and Cabernet Sauvignon have confused the noses of any number of Gallic oenophiles at Paris tastings. And since the French are by reputation primus inter pares in the world of winemaking, I chose Bouchaine because of its name.  Original redwood tanks from the early 1900's were used in the construction of the winery buildings and the result was the winning of several awards from the Napa Valley historic and architectural organizations.  The tasting room here has the ambiance of a hunting lodge, with a fireplace and deck and terrace that provide a scenic view of the surrounding vine-covered hills.  The specialties at Bouchaine are also Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and many of the complex flavors are the result of a beauty sleep in French Oak barrels for eleven months or more.  A votre sante!

    Exploring a small town can be an adventure in its own right, equal, I think, to exploring the countryside, a conviction I've reinforced lately by spending time in several of them--Fredericksburg and San Angelo, Texas; Searsport and Belfast, Maine; Mystic, Connecticut; Fernandina Beach, Florida; etc.  So, the aforementioned forests notwithstanding, you might consider a bike ride through downtown Napa, a fascinating town with an intriguing history: it was founded during the California gold rush and by the late 1850's the Main Street rivaled that of some small cities, with as many as a hundred horses tied to the fences and hitching post on an average afternoon.  By the twentieth century Napa had become the economic center for the Napa Valley with its burgeoning agricultural and wine interests.  You can get a bike map of Napa and explore at leisure.

Unlike most small towns, this is an international tourist destination and so has plenty of epicurean flair to offer in addition to a colorful history.  You'll find that history and the present day juxtaposed everywhere: the old Labor Temple and Firefighters Museum on Main Street are a stone's throw from a new riverfront micro-brewery, and the Napa Wine Bar on First Street is next door to Napa Net (the portal to cyberspace).  There are lots of old county seat building and classic Victorian houses in tandem with contemporary boutiques, coffee houses and upscale creekside restaurants.  There are also, inescapably, about 20 wineries in town.  And Veterans Park , along the river, and Fuller Park on Jefferson Street, are ideal places for picnicking or merely languishing and absorbing the sense of history co-existing with the modern world.

    Finally, if you're upt to testing both your energy and capacity for exploration, I recommend a trip to Rockpile.  The name brings to mind certain high terrain battle sites in military history--Pork Chop Hill, Heartbreak Ridge and the Meat Grinder.  Rockpile is a remote area in Sonoma County where grapes of unique and exceptional character are grown against the odds under tough conditions on a rocky mountaintop.  The eleven growers there are perhaps analogous to the mountain men who expanded the Western frontier in early American history.  There are no wineries or tasting rooms at Rockpile, but its hills and valleys, which are full of coyotes and wild pigs that outnumber the people, are exquisitely scenic.  And getting there, as the saying goes, is half of the fun. Your trip to Rockpile can be part of a larger tour that include three other wine-growing regions--Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley and Russian River Valley.  If you want to do this you'll need a map to make your way circuitously to Lake Sonoma and Rockpile Road.  Then Rockpile Road will take you through 14 miles of scenic hills and valleys, surrounded by virtually primordial landscape where there are occasional glimpses of the pioneering vineyards.  The trip to Rockpile is indeed a trek, but it will reward you with an experience of the wine country that the garden-variety tourist doesn't get.

Images and texts provided by Nuikki . All rights reserved.

Bordeaux – home of wines and dreams

 As the sun sets behind the horizon of vineyards, the busy sounds of the day turn to silent whispers of the night. The shadows ot the grey and deserted streets in the village become longer and deeper finally enclosing the whole village in their embrace. It is the moment of the night when the street lamps glow with unnatural, remote brilliance like distant planets.

Small, grey houses with their many corners have closed their doors from strangers and are still, waiting for the new dawn. This is the hour when man´s ego almost sleeps, the hour when one shivers, wraps the coat around tighter and thinks ”I am a traveler, but this is my home.”

This grey, quiet village of St.Emilion is not only a state of mind; it´s a memory of something inside me, a memory of love and faith, of the great potential of humanity. And what wouldn´t be real about a place that is so perfectly committed to its way of lifethat even the foundation of it is created first and foremost to serve the daily bread – the making of wine. The whole village ”breathes” through the caves which were dug in its foundations and are still used to store the wines. St. Emilion is overwelmed with its own memories and mysteries, its own essentil surface of time, when love anf life were more simple and more innocent to live and understand than today.

But then I try to ask myself ”Isn´t St.Emilion like any other wine place?”, and wouldn´t I be telling myself the same story if I were in Barolo or Haro? But somehow St.Emilion is different. In modern world everything happens rapidly, but despite the never ending instability some things remain uncompromising and end up as a legend like St.Emilion. It is one of the few places where wine lovers´ deepest dreams still seem realistically possible. People here live true the dream that the spirit of our life, what we all believe of life, world and our place in it, should be reflected in the buildings and places where we spend our lives. A town should be alive like the people who call it home.

There might be no better place to be led by this passion than this ancient City of Wines, for it´s a beautiful reminder of everything we hope to become. In this lovely and uncomplicated place our possibility is only a measure of how deep we might dream if given a lifetime within its walls.

And St.Emilion is only one of those plentiful places in Bordeaux where you get lost in your overwhelming feelings. In fact the whole Bordeaux is filled with awe-inspiring wine places that have drawn travelers there for centuries with their unparalleled wines, historical sceneries, fabulous castles rising like mirages midst the vines, and charming, ancient villages with politely distant but kindhearted people. This is the land that makes my dreams come true, a land where my mind wonders to relive unforgettable moments again and dream of new ones.

Images provided by Pekka Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Experience modern art in a champagne cellar

It is June now, and rain is slowly falling from the dispirited Reims sky. Thirty metres underground, in cave complexes from Roman times the humidity is the same, but the combination of modern European art, long archways, and dusty champagne bottles is peculiar rather than dispirited.

Right near central Reims, behind grand iron gates rises the Elizabethan-style château that Madame Louise Pommery built in the second half of the 1800s and under which winds a labyrinth of endless wine cellars. There, twenty million bottles of champagne await maturation under the watchful eye of cellar master Thierry Gasco.

Nearly 100,000 people per year arrive to wonder at the cellars and acquaint themselves with the intricacies of champagne. Beginning in mid-June, the best and most innovative modern art from various parts of Europe has also been on offer. The father of this great idea, Fabrice Bousteau, the long-time leader of the French Beaux Arts magazine, zooms by without any greeting and in his pork pie hat looks just like Buster Keaton. The L’Art en contemporain Europe exhibition that belongs to the European cultural season programme is to open soon in order to celebrate the EU chair of France. The main curator is busy fixing up the massive exhibition in turn spreading all over the castle’s champagne cellars.  

The spotlight of the modern art exhibition, which is exceptional at least for its venue, is until the end of the year on some fifty young artists, who were all chosen by the managing editors of their countries’ leading art magazines. “This is by no means the first modern art exhibition on these premises,” points out Nathalie Vranken, who clearly knows much on the matter and who hosts the visit by the managing editors together with her husband Paul-François Vranken.

Actually, the event, which goes by the name Expérience Pommery, is now being organised for the fifth time. Last year, the exhibition that was held in the cave complexes was compiled by Daniel Buren, one of France’s most well known modern artists. Now the concept is perhaps even more challenging. Everything shows that the champagne giant Vranken-Pommery has invested heavily in the exhibition and in the works executed on the premises. Because of its demanding technology, the nearly invisible sound installation of Estonian Raul Keller (1973) has already probably had more money sunk into it than the country invests in the Venice Biennale.

The final result may be somewhat strange, but rather impressive. Wide stairs take you deep underground, where a flock of zebra finches flies towards you. They belong to the installation From Here to Ear by the French Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (1961), which consists of a lawn decorated with flowers and waiting to grow, electric guitars, amplifiers, seed cups the shape of a guitar case and reservoirs. Chirping and flying onto guitar strings, the birds generate an unusual acoustic world within the space.

Occasionally, the hallways open into huge arched spaces, which are actually relics from limestone quarries from Roman times. In one of them whizzes Some Airing, a giant propeller by the Luxembourgean Su-Mei Tse (1973), who was awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion five years ago. The propeller creates a slightly threatening ‘vuh’ sound and somewhat of a meditative state mixed with fear.

 The managing editors had to choose, for the exhibition, two young artists that were already highlighted by the magazine. Finland is represented by Terike Haapoja (1974) and the Iraqi-born Adel Abidin (1973), whose virtual The Abidin Travel Agency, which was founded by him, advertises trips to the war zones of his former home country. In Reims, Abidin has turned his gaze slightly inwards and humorously examines the themes of man, woman, desire and love in his installation that is composed of mirrored hallways and animations.

Haapoja is interested in the boundaries of perception and memory. In her work, she has disentangled the estate of a deceased Frenchman and put the most interesting artefacts up on white sculpture bases, or so it seems… It takes awhile before the viewer notices that the artefacts’ shadows that throw themselves on the walls of the dimly lit room are the artist’s creations. The bases are empty.

The works of Haapoja and Abinin do not seek to create sensations merely through sensual pleasure but also awaken one to think, open a perhaps surprising route to wondering about the world and being a human. For me, that is one of the most important functions of art.

It seems that at least many other managing editors have thought the same. The Slovene Maska magazine had invited the Absurd group to come along and the Bulgarian Visual Seminar Newsletter invited Ivan Moudov (1975), who recently participated in the Venice Biennale with his works criticising institutions and who humorously propagates to obtain a currently non-existent museum of modern art in Bulgaria. Moreover, absurdists Jure Legac (1979) and Peter Koštrun (1979) tipped a bunch of shopping carts in the castle’s yard to act as a monument to consumer culture.

In addition to consumption habits, shared beliefs bind people and cultures to each other. A friend of mine who resigned from the church ages ago said he still makes a cross sign when he sees a car crash or other such event. In his Crossroad video, which was recently displayed at the Tate Modern Illuminations exhibition, Romanian Dan Acostioaei (1974) describes exactly these types of situations but does not show who caused the reactions.  

The thinning of brands seems to be one symptom of the Romanian identity crisis in his works. The artist highlights the DORO detergent brand as its symbol. The name has remained, but the content itself, the appearance and ownership relations, changed when the state company was sold to Unilever. Only with this background information does Acostioaei’s The dawn of a new era with its bombastic crosses and alien-faced light box saviours hanging high in the vaults start looking like something else than an easily passed-by pop effect.

 Without any background information, many other works also remain fairly mute, which on the other hand is a problem for nearly all joint exhibitions. The video works of Latvian Katrina Neiburga (1978) and Dutch Renzo Martens (1973) are perhaps the most impressive and communicative works of the exhibition. The work of Martens, especially, who looks like a dandy and defines himself as a Catholic socialist, truly left one wondering. According to the artist himself, the piece of video dealt with the use of power related to representation and especially media image. He had taken the practical example from Africa.

“Most of the journalists and photographers in Africa move according to the programme organised by the government, as one hungry pack, adhering to security instructions. Everyone sees more or less the same things,” he explained as we sat in the quiet Reims Cathedral.

“In these photos, the whites always look like benefactors, not exploiters of natural resources or a malnourished plantation work force, not to mention organisers of riots, assassinations and kidnapping attempts. Photos of poverty are Africa’s largest export,” he says in his restrained style and by this, he means not only the flood of photos from the news agencies but also the mechanics through which the aid agencies operate.

In all its provocativeness and obtrusiveness or despite them, this small piece of video (which in fact is the trailer of Episode #3, which is being produced) ended up among my aesthetic-ethical key experiences. The work is currently also displayed in Manifesta, in the Matter of Fact series that is showing at Rovereto’s old tobacco factory.

During dinner, we sit at the same table with the champagne representatives from our own region. Nathalie Vranken goes on to tell her people about art and tells us about the qualities of the drinks that we have enjoyed. The mix is perhaps somewhat peculiar but absolutely fresh and sophisticatedly sparkling. Even natural. How many companies would participate in an equally massive and challenging project? Would they agree, for example, to presenting a video by Martens or advocate for a museum of contemporary art in Bulgaria? The numbers glowing in the yard of Domaine Pommery, by the way, form the number series +359… By calling that number, you can try pressuring the Bulgarian culture authorities to establish a museum of contemporary art. Complimentary opening champagnes are already awaiting you in the cellar.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki . All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.

Images provided by Nuikki. All rights reserved.