Will Parrish: Big Wine’s Hired Gun…

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

Artesa of Sonoma, a subsidiary of Spanish wine giant Codorniu, has a public image crisis on its hands, and on a scale few wine companies have ever encountered. Last year, the company received a spate of national media coverage concerning its plan to carry out the largest forest-to-vineyard conversion project in California history, on a 324-acre parcel named “Fairfax” just outside of Annapolis, on the northern Sonoma Coast.

The coverage included stories from the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, North Bay Bohemian, and of course several here in the AVA. Most of the stories focused dually on Artesa’s project and that of Premier Pacific Vineyard, which has proposed to clear roughly 1,800 acres of redwoods for wine-grapes on the ridgetops and bluffs of its nearby 20,000 acre “Preservation Ranch” property. Rarely has any North Coast wine industry entity received so much negative attention, this being an industry that carefully identifies itself with the trope of enlightened small farmers in bucolic settings living in harmony with the land.

Yet, i’s easy to see why the “Fairfax” project has raised international alarm. The project would involve clear-cutting mostly second-growth redwood forest across roughly 154 acres of the total 173 acre project site. After chainsawing the trees, the Artesa crews would cleave the redwood and Doug-fir stumps and roots

Will Parrish: Albion! The History

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

In the introduction to his 1965 book The Making of the English Working Class, English social historian E.P. Thompson described his motivation as being to rescue “from the enormous condescension of posterity” the “lower orders” of people in 18th and 19th century Britain who resisted the brutal emergence of industrial society. In this famous phrase, Thompson was referring to the patronizing treatment oppressed groups of people receive from propagandists for the ruling class, whose main goal in writing history is inevitably to trumpet the virtues of the present order.

A group of Northern California historians, some of whom once studied under Thompson at Warwick University in the UK, set out eight years ago to recover, for the benefit of posterity, a non-patronizing history of Northern California’s communal movements. The culmination of that effort, which originated with a series of conferences at UC Berkeley and on the Mendocino Coast in 2004, is an excellent new book titled West of Eden: Communes and Utopias in Northern California, published last month by Oakland-based PM Press.

“Condescension?” It would be hard to think of a category of people who are more universally treated with disdain than the communards of the ’60s and ’70s. According to the dominant view, thousands of rural “hippies” fled to the country, selfishly seeking refuge from the roiling social conflicts of the time, having little contact with the outside world from that point on. These rustic enclaves were quickly overrun by deadbeats, loafers, and crazies, who bathed only infrequently and commonly became perma-fried on account of too many bad acid trips. Or, at best, the communes were naïve, destined to be short-lived experiments

Will Parrish: ‘Full Court Press’ Or War On Immigrants?

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Ramiro Hernandez Farias

From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

From behind the glass partition in Yuba County Jail’s basement visiting room, Ramiro Hernandez Farias speaks matter-of-factly about the incredible ordeal to which he has been subjected by both Mexican drug cartel paramilitaries and the Mendocino County branch of the US drug war.

Farias, 28, has never been charged with a crime. Yet, for more than six months, he has been confined within a prison cage in the small, economically depressed town of Marysville, on the northern end of California’s Central Valley. He finally departs on February 14th, only to attend a hearing in San Francisco where an immigration judge will determine if he is allowed to remain in the United States – or whether he must return to his native Mexico. If he’s sent back, he will likely be tortured and killed by one of the country’s most violent drug cartels, La Familia Michoacán.

While reciting the events that have led to his harrowing predicament, Farias’ otherwise calm and measured voice becomes tinged with sadness, perhaps also some resignation, as he discusses the fate of his wife, Flor, and their six-year-old son, Eric.

“I think all the time about my family,” he says through an interpreter.

Will Parrish: ‘We Are Stealing Because We Feel Like It’

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

An expedition of Lake County-based Anglo-Irish settlers landed ashore Rattlesnake Island, just offshore the Elem Pomo Indian Colony in Clearlake, this past Saturday — St. Patrick’s Day – and christened it New Ireland. Despite the satirical act’s pointedly white supremacist rationale, it was performed in solidarity with the Elem, for whom the 56-acre island has been the political and religious center for more than 6,000 years.

Jeff Ott of Glenhaven, spokesperson for the New Ireland group, provided this legal rationale for “stealing” of Rattlesnake Island from current paper titleholder John Nady, an exorbitantly wealthy East Bay inventor and entrepreneur: “we Irish are White/European people, and in the United States private property is based on the age-old legal principal ‘White makes might makes right.’ We are stealing [Rattlesnake Island] because we feel like it.”

In just the last few months, Nady has run roughshod over regulations governing developments in archaeologically sensitive areas, even receiving a special exemption from normal grading regulations to begin developing his vacation home and related structures. In a press release, Ott pledged that his group would evict “the criminal Dutch settlement”

Lucy Neely and Will Parrish: Food Localization, Mendo & Beyond — A Dialogue

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Adam Gaska – Mendocino Organics CSA

From LUCY NEELY and WILL PARRISH
Ukiah

On February 10th, on a misty morning at Rain Tenaqiya’s permaculture demonstration site in the hills far above Ukiah, we gathered with four pillars of the local food movement for an in-depth discussion of their respective philosophies and goals.

Mendocino County is home to a diversity of food production and/or cultivation, and one of the reasons that makes this area an exciting place to live for people who value ecological balance and social justice. We sought to reflect this diversity in our choices of conversation participants.

We first approached our mutual friend Mr. Tenaqiya, in whose hand-crafted earthen home on Parducci Road the conversation took place. He has been a permaculturalist and food forester of twenty years. He is zealously committed to reducing his carbon footprint and easing the suffering of all beings. He’s growing out dreadlocks. When we presented the idea of our discussion to him, he enthusiastically agreed to participate.

From there, we invited Doug Mosel of the Mendocino Grain Project, a sage observer of the local food movement, as anyone who listens to his twice-monthly

Will Parrish: A Travesty Of A Mockery Of A Sham

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

The United States government’s “compensation” to American Indians for past and present injustices typically amounts to what Groucho Marx called “a travesty of a mockery of a sham.”  Case in point: In 1974, the California State Legislature voted to pay enrolled members of California Indian nations $0.47 an acre – about $650 per Indian — in exchange for having expropriated all the land of California.  California officials arrived at their $0.47-an-acre calculation because that’s what land was worth in the state, on average, in 1853.

Another example is an agreement announced last week between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bradley Mining Company, and the Elem Pomo’s US federal government-recognized tribal administrators. As compensation for poisoning the Elem’s land and waters with prodigious amounts of methyl mercury tailings for several decades, thereby causing premature deaths, birth defects, cancers, and bodily deformities among tribal members, while in the process destroying the tribe’s ability to grow food or harvest fish safely (as they have for more than 10,000 years), the Bradley Mining Company would pay the Elem $50,000 and give them five land parcels under the settlement. The EPA says the 380 acres that make up these parcels have been decontaminated.

In exchange, the Elem would never again be allowed to sue the United States government, including the EPA and BIA, or even the Bradley Mining Company, for any reason.

Within days of the settlement agreement’s release, Elem Cultural Leader Jim Browneagle submitted a “public comment” letter to the US Department of Justice and the EPA denouncing the terms of the settlement.

“If the current settlement agreement is approved, it will be a travesty of the federal justice system and violation of Indian Civil Rights Act and Indian Self-determination, while undermining the protection of natural resources and tribal sovereignty,” he wrote. He also called the settlement “a setback of environmental justice [and] a denial of fair and equal compensation to the living surviving Elem members and families for their lifelong pain and suffering and loss of tribal lifeways (gathering of healthy foods and fish).”

Will Parrish: ‘Full Court Press’ Or War On Immigrants?

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA.com

From behind the glass partition in Yuba County Jail’s basement visiting room, Ramiro Hernandez Farias speaks matter-of-factly about the incredible ordeal to which he has been subjected by both Mexican drug cartel paramilitaries and the Mendocino County branch of the US drug war.

Farias, 28, has never been charged with a crime. Yet, for more than six months, he has been confined within a prison cage in the small, economically depressed town of Marysville, on the northern end of California’s Central Valley. He finally departs on February 14th, only to attend a hearing in San Francisco where an immigration judge will determine if he is allowed to remain in the United States – or whether he must return to his native Mexico. If he’s sent back, he will likely be tortured and killed by one of the country’s most violent drug cartels, La Familia Michoacán.

While reciting the events that have led to his harrowing predicament, Farias’ otherwise calm and measured voice becomes tinged with sadness, perhaps also some resignation, as he discusses the fate of his wife, Flor, and their six-year-old son, Eric.

“I think all the time about my family,” he says through an interpreter. “They’re suffering a lot economically, and also emotionally because of the distance between us.”

Until this past July 21st, the family lived together in a small Ukiah home off of South State St. Flor, a US citizen, attended classes at Mendocino College and looked after the couple’s domestic life, including raising Erik. Ramiro put in long hours as a landscaper and laborer for Saul’s Vineyard Contracting of Ukiah, as well as for Rosewood Vineyards in Redwood Valley

Will Parrish: New Real Estate Predators…

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From WILL PARRISH and DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM
Ukiah
TheAVA

“During depressions, assets return to their rightful owners.” — Andrew Mellon, banker, US Treasury Secretary, and intellectual father of “trickle down” tax cut ideology.

“Buy on the fringe and wait. Buy land near a growing city! Buy real estate when other people want to sell. Hold what you buy!” — John Jacob Astor, real estate speculator-cum-fur trader and global opium trafficker.

Throughout much of the North Bay and North Coast, real estate values closely correlate with the value of wine. In recent decades, the wine industry’s relentless development of “raw land” — as industrial agriculturists refer to forests, prairies, savannahs, meadows, deserts, or any other landbase not yet totally subsumed by the industrial economy — into vineyards has markedly driven up regional property prices. The industry has further impacted real estate values via its integration with the real estate economy as a whole. More than any other artifact or image, it is the vineyard and wine glass that have come to epitomize the “Good Life” of Northern California for a global market of real estate investors, vacation-takers, and home buyers. The political and business establishment tout wine’s economic impact in triumphalist terms, virtually never exploring the dark sides of gentrification and growing inequality.

With the 2007-8 collapse of the real estate market, and the attendant decline of pricey “premium” wine brands, new forms of predatory real estate capital have emerged to prey on the “distressed assets” that now pervade the suburbs, exurbs, and countryside. “Distressed” is a financial sector euphemism for assets that have lost significant value due to the fact that the middle class has been gutted by foreclosures, high unemployment, loss of savings and other factors. Most often, of course, those who are truly distressed by this state of affairs are families or individuals who can no longer afford to pay bills, save, or even survive, let alone purchase the growing inventory of foreclosed homes that have glutted the market.

To understand how this development ties into the fate of this area’s wine industry, it helps to recount the rise and recent fall of one of the wine industry’s largest speculative entities of the last decade, Premier Pacific Vineyards (PPV).

Will Parrish: Is Premier Pacific Vineyards Dead?

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

Some of the wealthiest and best-connected land speculators in the western hemisphere came together for a conference two months ago in Miami, from October 19-21, to discuss their accelerating feeding frenzy, more like a hoarding frenzy. Land speculation booms throughout much of the world, even with the torpid state of the global economy, which seems frequently on the verge of an even worse downturn. Persian Gulf states are working out land deals in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe; China is buying up large tracts throughout Africa; and 33 million hectares of the Amazon have been licensed to petroleum companies.

In 1976, economist Susan George noted that only .23 percent of landowners own more than half of all the world’s land (never mind those who own no land at all), a trend that has likely only worsened in the interceding 35 years.

“The Agriculture Investment Summit Americas is a three-day senior-level conference for US, Canadian, and Latin American investors to access global agribusiness and farmland opportunities,” the conference web site reads. The confab was designed as an opportunity not only to gain advice, but as a place to “benefit from intensive networking opportunities” with, for example, potential investors.

One of the featured speakers in this gathering of the global “.23 percent” was Richard Wollack, co-chairman of Premier Pacific Vineyards (PPV) based in Napa. He was the only Northern California resident on the program. Few people in our region understand land speculation as Wollack does.

Premier Pacific, which Wollack operates 50-50 with long-time vineyard developer William Hill, claims to own the largest vineyard portfolio in the country with acreage in Washington and Oregon, and holdings running up California’s coastal zones from Santa Barbara to a massive 30-square-mile (20,000 acre) slice of the Gualala River watershed on the Sonoma-Mendocino border — a project known euphemistically as “Preservation Ranch.” The company owns three large vineyard estates in Anderson Valley, including the parcel of the so-called “Big Dig,” a notorious large pond off Anderson Valley Way.

PPV’s largest project

Will Parrish: Lake County To Elem Pomo: The One Percent Are Exempt

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From WILL PARRISH
Ukiah
TheAVA

As you read these words, one of the Northern California East Bay Area’s wealthiest men is getting away with an act of cultural genocide. Construction crews employed by wireless technology magnate John Nady began trenching grading, excavating, and building atop Rattlesnake Island last week, in the latest phase of Nady’s seven-year-long effort to build two houses on the sacred grounds of the Elem Pomo tribe. Reportedly, private security guards flank the construction area in case of any attempt by the Elem and their supporters to occupy the island, as occurred during a previous developer’s attempt to build there in the early-70s.

Rattlesnake Island is a lush 56-acre expanse in Clear Lake located just outside the Highway 20 town of Clearlake Oaks. For more than 14,000 years, the Elem’s home has encompassed an area in and around southeastern Clear Lake. For more than 6,000 of those years, Rattlesnake Island has been the Elem’s cultural and religious center.

Elem Cultural Leader Jim Browneagle best summed up the significance of Nady’s project to his people in a Free Speech Radio documentary that aired on Thanksgiving. The documentary borrowed its title from a previous piece I published here in the AVA and at counterpunch.org, “The Struggle for Rattlesnake Island.”

“If there’s a home built right there, it’s gone — the sacredness of it,” Browneagle said. “We’re going to do the best we can to prevent that. We want to preserve it as it is, without homes. It’s really the last sanctuary of our nation.”

Will Parrish: The Logic Of Occupy Mendo

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
TheAVA

By casting 99% of the US population as collective victim of a miniscule minority’s monumental greed, the American branch of the Occupy Movement has provided a brilliant framework for bringing together a broad coalition to take on the worst manifestations of what, for the past 35 years or so, has been an almost entirely one-sided class war waged by the ruling elite. Students, their grandparents, heretofore apolitical people, the employed and unemployed, veterans, the housed and the homeless, and people of all ages and colors have partaken in the Occupy Movement (all, of course, to varying degrees).

This framing has profound limitations, however, which are evident in places like Mendocino County, where the vast majority

Will Parrish: The Logic Of Occupy Mendo

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
The AVA

By casting 99% of the US population as collective victim of a miniscule minority’s monumental greed, the American branch of the Occupy Movement has provided a brilliant framework for bringing together a broad coalition to take on the worst manifestations of what, for the past 35 years or so, has been an almost entirely one-sided class war waged by the ruling elite. Students, their grandparents, heretofore apolitical people, the employed and unemployed, veterans, the housed and the homeless, and people of all ages and colors have partaken in the Occupy Movement (all, of course, to varying degrees).

This framing has profound limitations, however, which are evident in places like Mendocino County, where the vast majority of those who identify themselves as being on the “left” seem to have little interest in delving deeper into the local class structure. As a result, the political interests of a large segment of the so-called 99% — needless to say, the bottom 50% or so — are almost entirely marginalized. It’s difficult to graft the Occupy framework onto each and every place.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve lived in inland Mendo for over three years, and I’ve almost never heard of or participated in a public discussion about structural inequality. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Occupy Movement so far is that it has changed the focus of political conversation, opening up the national discourse so that frank conversations about class in America are actually possible. A a cursory look at the state of Mendo’s housing, employment, healthcare, education, and politics — in other words, its economic and social structure — is an important point of departure.

Will Parrish: The Real Frost Protection Conspiracy [Local]

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
The Anderson Valley Advertiser

The primary mandate of the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), a division of the California Environmental Protection Agency, is to ensure adequate water for California’s fish populations. Its actual function, however, has proved to be altogether different.

In recent decades, the SWRCB has presided over the near-extinction of California’s salmonid population. An unprecedented collapse of Central Valley salmon, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, threadfin shad, young striped bass, Sacramento splittail and other fish populations occurred from 2007-2009, with record water exports out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from 2003 to 2006 being the principal culprit.

One major sub-set of the larger problem of collapsing fisheries involves the North Coast wine industry, which has increasingly depleted, polluted, and sedimented the Russian River and other North Coast waterways across the past few decades, using an amount of water merely to frost-protect grapes in spring that Rodney Strong, patriarch of a famous eponymous wine label in Healdsburg, even referred to as “horrendous.”

Another is that the SWRCB is blithely ignoring one of the greatest, ongoing collective water heists in the history of California. There are currently more than 800 illegal water reservoirs in the Russian River basin alone, out of a total of roughly 1,700 in the North Coast region of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties. The Control Board is aware that a massive quantity of the state’s water is being stolen, yet does virtually nothing.

In a 2007 study, the consulting firm Stetson Engineering estimated the capacity of these water impoundments is 48,515 acre feet, amounting to 3,234 surface acres of illegal reservoirs. The reservoirs submerge stream reaches and headwaters, thereby drying up spawning habitat critical to fish. As Arcata-based fisheries biologist Patrick Higgins observes, these “reservoirs are ideal habitat for bull frogs, which decimate native amphibian populations.

Will Parrish: A Day Of Infamy In Lakeport [Local]

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
The Anderson Valley Advertiser

If you’re a First Nations tribe in Lake County, California, United States of America, you can provide 100 painstaking pages proving under the federal government’s own property laws that you own a piece of land, and the Board of Supervisors still vote against you on grounds of “protecting private property.”

It happened on September 6, 2011 in Lakeport — a date that will live in infamy in the oft-bloody annals of regional aboriginal-settler relations.

The land at issue is an island known traditionally as Elem Modun, now commonly referred to as Rattlesnake Island: the cultural and spiritual center of the Elem Pomo, who have lived in and around southeastern Clear Lake for at least 10,000 years.  For 6,000 years of those years, if not far longer, Rattlesnake Island has been a burial grounds, site of several villages, and ceremonial area for the Elem.  Archeologists have dated artifacts

Will Parrish: The Great Thirst & The North Coast

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From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA
Laytonville

Capital is mired in its greatest slump since the 1930s. The ecological fabric that sustains life throughout much of the world is being brutally eradicated; around 200 species go extinct every day, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In a saner system, these dire circumstances might lead those who steer the ship of state to try heading in a dramatically different direction.

Instead, we get news like the following: On August 11, the administrations of California Governor Jerry Brown and US President Barack Obama issued a joint statement touting an “aggressive schedule” to move ahead with that monument to destruction and folly known as the California peripheral canal, a multi-billion plan to export more of Northern California’s water to Southern California’s corporate agribusinesses and water agencies, which had previously been a pet project of the Schwarzenegger administration.

The enormous concrete structure would divert the Blue Gold from the Sacramento River around the periphery of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. From there, it would enter the largest network of water storage and transfer systems ever engineered: the already existing water infrastructure, that is, the water infrastructure

Will Parrish: The Struggle For Rattlesnake Island

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Elem historian and cultural leader Jim BrownEagle speaks at the Glen Cove sacred site outside Vallejo

From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
TheAVA.com

The oldest human remains so far discovered in California belong to the Elem Pomo Nation who have lived on the eastern and southern shores of the Clear Lake basin for at least 10,000 years, also inhabiting much of the peninsula between eastern and southern arms of the lake. For a minimum of 5,000 of those years, the Elem’s way of life has centered on an island, roughly 56 acres in surface area, located just off the north shore of the lake’s eastern arm. The island has been the home of five documented Elem village sites, as well as dance houses, cremation pits, and human burial sites — in short, the major hallmarks of the people’s religious, cultural, and political life.

In spite of nearly 200-year history of Euro-Amaerican encroachment into the Pomo nation’s ancestral territory, no development has ever taken place on the island. It has been called “arguably the lushest place in Lake County.” Located a mere 60 yards offshore the Elem’s current 50-acre reservation, just outside the sleepy Lake County town of Clearlake Oaks, it is one of the last pristine sacred places to Native Americans in California.

Without it, the Elem Pomo would cease to be who they are as a people.

Will Parrish: ‘Destroying The Beauty Of Our Place’

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From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA
Laytonville

Last week’s People Who Belong To The Land was the first part regarding opposition by members of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians to the enormous Spanish wine corporation Codorniu’s proposal to deci­mate one of their sacred sites, located just outside the northwest Sonoma County town of Annapolis.

The land in question is located amid a complex of 3 documented ancient village sites that the Kashia inhab­ited prior to the arrival of European and Euro­american colonizers. Until recently, the Native inhabitants of the area still used this land to continue to practice their tra­ditional way of life, as you will read below.

The land is mainly a redwood forest, slowly recover­ing following several clearcuts across the past 150 years. Codorniu wants not just to clear-cut more than 150 acres of this land, but also rip out the roots and virtually drench the resulting barren land with chemicals so as to destroy the remaining microbial life. As part of that process, the wine industry giant would deep-plow the ground

Will Parrish: People Who Belong To The Land

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Violet Parrish Wilder & Vivian Parrish Wilder; The Artesa Site

From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
Anderson Valley Advertiser

According to Violet Parrish Chappell, 82, traditionalist and historian of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, her people’s name – their real name, not the arbitrary handle imposed by the white man’s society in the 1870s – has always been Wina∙má∙bake ya: “People Who Belong To The Land.” To be exact, the land to which the Wina∙má∙bake ya belong spans the coast and hills at the mouth of what is today known as the Gualala River, located just outside the town of Gualala, reaching as far south as the area below the mouth of the Russian River, also extending roughly eight miles inland.

The name reflects the integral relationship of the Kashia to their landbase. It is a relationship that manifests in ritual and religious practices, as well as materially in traditional land stewardship practices developed over the course of exceptionally long land tenure. Unlike the people of European origin who have supplanted them in the area, the Kashia long ago attained an intellectual apprehension that they are part of the natural order, rather than apart from or superior to it.

According to the traditional Kashia worldview, whatever happens to the land also invariably happens to the people.

This perspective is worth bearing in mind, because one of the greatest instances of harm ever wrought on the Kashia’s ancestral land is on the verge

Will Parrish: Trees Don’t Read The Press Democrat

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From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA.com
Laytonville

During the three-day period June 11-13, a story published on the Associated Press wire concerning a pair of massive redwood forest-to-vineyard conversions in the northwestern corner of Sonoma County, just outside the small town of Annapolis, was featured by newspapers, internet periodicals, and business trade publications throughout the United States.  It was a rare instance of at least one aspect of the wine industry’s ecological impact receiving national attention, if only fleetingly.

The main conflict in the story, written by long-time AP reporter Jason Dearen, was captured by one of headlines that accompanied it in several publications, “Redwoods or Red Wine?”  While many of the North Coast’s leading politicians and entrepreneurs would prefer to remain blissfully unaware of the fact, it strikes most people in this country as strange that hundreds of acres of redwood trees are on the verge of being cut to make way for wine grapes. That’s particularly so given that this a region of the country where vineyards already dominate the landscape, and where there is such a glut of grapes that farmers are still having trouble unloading last year’s crop at a decent price.

The two “conversions” the piece focused on, which we have

Will Parrish: The Mendonoma Coast’s Second Spanish Invasion

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Courtesy Friends of the Gualala River

From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA.com
Laytonville

Spanish wine corporation Grupo Codorníu is accustomed to doing things in a big way.  It is reputed to own a greater expanse of vineyard acreage than any wine company in Spain, which in turn has more land under grapevine cultivation than any nation in the world. It is perhaps the world’s largest distributor of the Spanish sparkling wine Cava, producing more than 100 million bottles of it annually at a wine factory in Barcelona, which are distributed en masse to over 100 countries spanning the globe.

Codorníu’s portfolio also features what may well be the world’s largest vineyard, a 4,000-acre span of tendril and vine that acts as source of grapes for one among the many wineries in its portfolio, Raimat – “recognized,” according to the company’s web site, “as Spain’s preeminent wine estate.”  At 6.25 square miles, this monolithic grape plantation covers a surface area equivalent to nearly one and a half Ukiahs.

With such grandiosity in mind, it is not at all surprising that in one of the various Wine Country regions where Codorníu is invested, it is proposing to carry out the largest conversion of designated forestland to vineyards

Will Parrish: Paul Hobbs & Ken Wilson — Wine Country’s Clearcutting Crooks

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Hobbs’ Vineyards

 From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
TheAVA.com

Paul Hobbs, internationally renowned winemaker with headquarters in Sebastopol, is described in his web site biography as a “trailblazer” and “prospector.” Those are fitting designations, if not always in the ways his publicist intends. Formerly the winemaker at two of the most prestigious wineries in the country, Opus One and Simi, Hobbs currently “crafts” — to use the term of trade — numerous acclaimed vintages under his own self-titled label, also working as a consultant on 30-35 other wines at a given time, in as many as six countries spanning three continents. By advertising Hobbs’ association with their brand, those who hire him automatically see a boost in sales.

Kenneth C. Wilson, real estate capitalist and winemaker with headquarters in Healdsburg, is not the first person wine industry observers would typically associate with Hobbs. Whereas Hobbs is widely regarded for his winemaking artistry, as a veritable winemaker’s winemaker, Wilson

Will Parrish: Sustainable Viticulture?

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From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA
Laytonville

In the fall of 2008, the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources devoted an entire 88-page edition of its quarterly magazine, California Agriculture, to profiling a trend known as “sustainable viticulture.” Broadly speaking, the “social movement” the magazine’s editors were pointing to consists of efforts by wineries and vineyards to mitigate their impact on the natural environment ranging from reduced use of certain toxic chemicals to conserving water to not chopping down as many trees and replacing them with vines.

In the minds of California Agriculture’s editors, these efforts add up to an unmitigated success. “Since the early 1990s,

Will Parrish: Vineyard Frost Protection’s Chilling Impact

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From WILL PARRISH
The Anderson Valley Advertiser
Laytonville

In the next few weeks, the California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is slated to release its final draft of new regulations governing water pumping for frost protection by the biologically invasive vineyard species of the Russian River basin. A debate concerning the wine industry’s impact on watersheds generally, and on the Russian River basin particularly, has intensified accordingly.

For their part, local environmental organizations have been pressing for much stronger regulations than the perennially agribusiness-friendly SWRCB has been wont to consider. To a large extent, the environmentalists — not to mention the the fish who reside in the river — have been aided by the federal government’s National Marine Fisheries Service, representatives of which have documented numerous fish killings and strandings

Will Parrish: Wine Mogul Jess Jackson’s True Legacy

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

It was a striking display of the corporate media’s capacity to dumb down and mislead: A billionaire wine mogul who perpetrated vast environmental harm and perhaps contributed more overall to the rural gentrification of California’s north and central coast regions than any single individual, during a period spanning more than the past two destructive decades, had passed away. The largest daily newspapers and television news programs universally failed to mention any of these controversial aspects of the billionaire’s legacy, instead hailing him as a fallen hero, paragon of the American system of free enterprise, and unswerving steward of the land. To the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, he was “a man of the earth, who walked the land in his grandfather’s boots, talked of farming as a spiritual experience and quietly gave back some of his vast wealth to the local community.”

The man in question, of course, is Jess Jackson,

Will Parrish: What BoxCo Does Best

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DB

From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

For most of the past 150 years, the California North Coast has had a clearly defined role in the state’s political economy.  The region was blessed with vast, nearly impenetrable forests of huge redwood trees and accompanying great stands of douglas fir.  As Ray Raphael noted in his 1974 book on regional history, An Everyday History of Somewhere, an early historian of the Redwood Empire wrote with regard to timber’s economic importance, all the way back in the 1870s, that “at every available point for shipment stands a saw mill turning trees to lumber, furnishing employment for labor and investment for capital.”

For close to eight decades, one of the regional lynchpins of the pervasive timber trade was a spur of the Southern Pacific rail line called the Northwestern Pacific Railroad.  Beginning in 1914, freights ran up and down the line with remarkable consistency – remarkable because they had to  traverse the choppy mountains collectively known as the Coast Range.  The line originated at a point just outside Eureka and bustled along on stops down to the San Francisco Bay Area.  Though the railroad provided commuter service for most of these years, its greatest function was as a ready route to San Francisco’s markets, which have ACTED for upwards of a century as commercial hubs on behalf of much of the United States and many nations across the Pacific.  At any given point, timber made up roughly 80 percent of the cargo on the Northwestern Pacific line; in many years, greater than 90 percent.

The present economic period – call it “neo-liberal globalization,” or simply “the offshoring of the US economy,” if you prefer a more parochial framing – brought about wrenching changes on the North Coast. During the 1980s and ’90s, the process of converting

Will Parrish: On The Roosting of Nuclear Chickens

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

Less than a decade after the United States visited a nuclear iki-jigoku (“hell on earth”) upon the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantaneously killing at least 150,000 and delivering countless more Japanese people to the grim reaper of gruesome radiation sickness, three of America’s leading nuclear technology boosters embarked on a promotional tour across Japan. Their purpose was to help swing Japanese public opinion in favor of the country’s infant civilian nuclear power industry, which was poised for a windfall of technological and financial assistance from the United States.

The international liaison was part of then-US President Dwight Eisenhower’ “Atoms for Peace” program, a Cold War diplomatic offensive aimed at providing nuclear technology loans and exports to so-called “developing” nations, so as to render them reliant on western capitalism for development of their energy infrastructures, rather than on the Soviet Union. A 1955 National Security Council directive framed the matter thusly: “[Atoms for Peace will] strengthen American world leadership and disprove the Communists’ propaganda charges that the [US] is concerned solely with the destructive uses of the atom.”

The American promotional contingent in Japan, which arrived in May 1955, was comprised, respectively, of the man perhaps

Will Parrish: Sovereignty, Not Localization

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

The most exciting aspect of Mendocino County’s civic life is the popularity of efforts geared toward creating a more ecologically-sane, human-scale economic system.  These activities commonly fall under the rubric of “economic localization.”  The basic idea is that people living in a given geographic area should produce what they use for themselves, rather than depend on purely self-interested corporations and wealthy absentee land owners to furnish these things for them.

In recent years, Mendocino County’s far-flung assortment of activities that are consciously geared toward achieving this end has been growing in breadth and depth.  The majority of efforts by localization activists encompass the areas of food cultivation and distribution (e.g., locally owned organic farms and farmers’ markets), transportation (e.g., Cars Are Evil), energy production (e.g., solar panel installations at private residences), and education about the tenuous state of the global economy.

One strong measure of California North Coast’s emergence as a national localization hub is the regional prevalence of sharing organic, open-pollinated heirloom seeds and seed saving.  Heirloom seeds are those handed down by families and tribes over generations.

Earlier this month, I participated in annual seed exchanges in both Boonville and Laytonville, which gatherings featured a broad assortment of seeds that local people cultivated in their organic gardens, ranging from Zapatista Blue Corn to chili peppers from Sri Lanka.  At the Anderson Valley Seed

Will Parrish: Goldeneye — Anderson Valley’s Mercenary Vineyard?

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

If you want to mark a point-of-no-return in the Anderson Valley’s transformation into a full-on satellite of the Napa-Sonoma industrial viticulture complex, as good a choice as any is Duckhorn Vineyards’ takeover of three properties outside of Philo and Boonville in the late-’90s. Founded by a Napa investment banker named David Duckhorn in the 1970s, Duckhorn had by then established itself as one of St. Helena’s most successful vintibusinesses. Wine Spectator put it thusly: “Duckhorn Vineyards’ arrival in Mendocino County… caps the emergence of the Anderson Valley as a prime, Pinot noir appellation.”

In one of the wine industry’s characteristic superficial nods to local cultural artifacts and the natural environment, Duckhorn named its local wine label Goldeneye, after the black and white seaduck whose northward migratory pathway includes the Anderson Valley.

Duckhorn/Goldeneye quickly demonstrated, though, that its expressed interest in cultural heritage extends little beyond its brand name.

In 2000, long-time local resident and Anderson Valley Advertiser contributor David Severn rented an airplane and flew over the expanse of the Valley, snapping pictures and filming video of the landscape located in the portion of hills that are tucked away from view along the valley’s two main highways. The video that Severn packaged together, as Mark Scaramella wrote at the time, revealed “the frighteningly sudden extent of vineyard development and irrigation ponds all over Anderson Valley.”

Severn’s overflight noted Duckhorn/ Goldeneye’s recontouring of the earth on a property just south of Philo, near the confluence of Rancheria, Anderson, and Indian Creeks – where the Navarro River forms. As per the wine industry’s usual custom, Goldeneye was developing a series of large water storage ponds, all of them slightly smaller than 50 acre-feet, which is the cut-off for requiring a permit. After investigating the development further, Severn obtained a copy of an archeological report directly from the vineyard’s manager, Bruce Regalia.

Will Parrish: Our local water commons has been stolen from us by Globalized Corporate Wine Colonizers to produce high-end booze. Does anyone care? (Updated)

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Frey Family Vineyards: A Better Way

From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

[Update: Investigative reporter Will Parrish will discuss his controversial recent series on the ecological toll of California's wine industry, with a special emphasis on rapacious vineyard development in the Gualala River watershed: The North Coast Wine Industry: Draining Our Rivers Dry]
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Don Sanderson: Will, your articles have been quite interesting. Alas, this has been happening in other agricultural sectors all over the country as, for example, in dairying. I can even trace the roots back to seventeenth century England. As long as cities made demands, there have been those who saw an opportunity for wealth if they could control all aspects of production and delivery. Those of that color eliminated my prospects for succeeding as a farmer way back in the fifties.

Still, there are many small vineyard owners who are attempting to make it with great difficulties, out in the fields doing their own work. There are also small proprietor-owned wineries scattered around the county providing employment for quite a few and making honest wine from those vineyard owners’ grapes. It is important not to tar and feather them with the same brush.

Will Parrish: Thanks for your kind words on the series, Don. Because your critique is basically the same as a few other people have offered, I’ll address it at length here….

In my work as an investigative journalist, I try to act as an interlocutor with current orthodoxy, expressing forbidden silences and demonstrating how the interests of rapacious power are served when certain things get omitted from public discourse.

Will Parrish: When They Came For The Navarro

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville
Via theAVA.com

The North Coast wine industry has long acted out a pathological conviction that it is entitled to virtually every single drop of water in every watershed it touches. As in the case of Sonoma County’s recent frost protec­tion ordinance, which I detailed in the December 14 Anderson Valley Advertiser, the industry routinely rises up as one — along with their local government allies — to quash any restrictions on its ability to draw water with accustomed impunity, though that particular ordinance is now threatened by disagreements, it seems, about the degree of non-regulation the big corporate growers find acceptable. Yet, there are few industries more in need of restrictions on their water use.

In the past 20 years, the North Coast’s alcohol farm­ers have dried up countless creeks and streams, while choking off rivers and filling in their spawning pools with monumental amounts of sediment (entire hillsides worth). They have, moreover, poisoned what water remains with the full menu of chemical fertilizers, soil fumigants, growth hormones, herbicides, defoliants, fun­gicides, pesticides, and systemic poisons most growers use to ensure the bounty and sterility of their crops.

The Napa River — once teeming with life — is now little more than a collection of stagnant pools during many summer months, making it often resemble a breeding ground for mosquitoes more than for fish. The Russian River — regarded until a few decades ago as the greatest Steelhead trout fishery in the country, is now almost entirely devoid of life. As I documented in the November 25th AVA, the river’s historically most important salmonid spawning tributary, Mark West Creek, now runs dry every summer as a result of rapa­cious vineyard development. And the Gualala River — heavily under siege by vineyard prospectors like William Hill and Richard Wollack — has seen its Wheatfield Fork running dry

Will Parrish: Anderson Valley, Tentacle of the Winegrape Octopus

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From WILL PARRISH
TheAVA
Laytonville

“When at last the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would have all made fortunes.”

— Frank Norris, The Octopus, 1901

One of California agribusiness’ oldest traditions is clearing huge swaths of land to plant orchards and vineyards. On the western slopes of the Santa Clara Valley, the newly-arrived class of prospector capitalists felled the dense chaparral and oak savannah to make way for the state’s first commercial vineyard in 1850, as well as the apple, date, prune, and apricot trees. The valley was the west coast’s banner fruit-producing region up to the 1960s. In the 1870s, out-of-towners arrived on the newly-constructed Southern Pacific rail line in the hamlet of Los Angeles,

Will Parrish: On Memory & Forgetting in Wine Country

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

Soon after I became outspoken in my criticism of the regional wine industry, I began having conversations with local people for whom this issue is deeply personal. Across recent decades, the sprawling North Coast booze sector has recklessly reconfigured landbases, sucked waterways dry, killed off scores of wildlife, drenched the land with chemicals, and imposed its particular brand of sterilized country life on previously more vibrant pastoral settlements — all of this on the basis of exploited migrant labor, which comprise the industry’s main contribution to the local job base. Although you would never know it by reading the Santa Rosa Press Democrat or tuning into local TV newscasts, these practices have not actually endeared Big Wine to most people — especially those who have experienced them first-hand. Some North Coast residents refer to the pervasive change from forest and rangeland to vineyards as “grape rape.”

Yet, for all of the deep-seated resentment

Will Parrish: California — Epicenter of the Great Unraveling

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

When the Great Unraveling of the world financial system began in earnest three years ago, the the term “Wall Street” instantly emerged as the main shorthand for big business interests that pull the strings of global politics and the economy. In the US’ increasingly impoverished political discourse, the phrase is often used interchangeably with “Corporate America” now.

Politicians from both major parties have recently issued forth countless verbal blusters about the undue economic influence wielded by “Wall Street” mega-firms — all the while helping enrich those same firms with nearly every figurative stroke of their legislative pens, as with the “tax cut” compromise measure just passed by the US Congress.

To the extent that this overriding focus on the activities of Wall Street bankers reflects some sort of new class struggle in the US, it is a fine and righteous tendency. In recent decades, America’s class war has been almost entirely one-sided. Two-thirds of the income gains made between 2002 and 2007 went to the top one percent of U.S. households. By contrast, real wealth among the bottom half shrank in that same period, having stagnated since the mid-1970s. To say that most people would benefit from a renaissance of American working class militancy, ala the massive upheavals in the fields and factories of the 1930s, would be a gross understatement — particularly with Medicare and Social Security now inching ever closer to the chopping block.

But the popular narrative that suggests “Wall Street” as the source of all global economic woes obscures more compelling explanations for the financial crisis. It also serves to disempower those who might otherwise strive to combat the ongoing

Will Parrish: The North Coast Wine Industry’s Latest Coup De Grace — Draining Our Rivers Dry

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

The latest in the North Coast wine oligarchy’s long series of legislative coups de grace occurs on December 14th. In what will surely be a 5-0 vote, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors will rubber-stamp new regulations on frost protection in the Russian River water basin, now in its death throes after having been continuously ravaged by several generations of extractive enterprise.

In recent decades, the once-simple act of protecting new bud growth on grape vines from frigid temperatures has become tantamount to a war on rivers. The predominantly corporate alcohol farmers who wield executive authority over the North Coast’s land and politics almost universally combat frost damage via systems of overhead sprinklers that sprawl out across each row of grapes, dowsing them with a continuous coat of water on spring nights when local temperatures drop into the 20s.

Due to the sheer volume of water this advanced industrial system of frost management requires, the growers opt not to draw their water from wells — which would be harmful enough to the level of the water table — but instead pump straight from streams, creeks, and rivers. According to an estimate by David Koball of Fetzer Vineyards, a subsidiary of the multi-billion dollar multi-national alcohol conglomerate Brown-Forman, a 20-acre vineyard requires 1,000 gallons per minute for frost protection.

There are more than 3,000 of these 20-acre swaths of wine-grapes in the Russian River basin alone (60,000 acres). In other words,

Will Parrish: Sonoma County, Banana Republic of Wine-Grapes

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

In 1993, American wine industry goliath E&J Gallo (annual revenue: $2 billion) founded its first subsidiary dedicated solely to producing high-end, “premium” vintages: Gallo of Sonoma. The move reflected a dramatic shift for the Gallo empire, which accounts for one in four bottles sold in the US wine market.

For several decades, Gallo’s forte was cheap, fortified jug wines such as Thunderbird and Night Train — each at least 18 percent alcohol by volume. The company initially cornered this dubious market in the ’50s and ’60s, via clever ad campaigns complemented by aggressive promotions in so-called inner-city “colored bars” (a process described by journalist Ellen Hawkes in her book Blood and Wine) and off-reservation American Indian communities. The dislocation, poverty, and alienation endemic to many of these areas provided fertile grounds for alcoholism, which the Gallo patriarchs Ernest and Julio shamelessly bred and profited from.

By the early-’90s, the American wine market was moving increasingly upscale. With its wide variety of favorable microclimates and soils, as well as relatively low land prices vis-a-vis Napa County to the east, Sonoma County emerged as the epicenter of the “premium grape rush,” a finance-driven speculative bubble that has accompanied the shift in consumer taste. In keeping with the prevailing market trend toward high-end varietal wines — that is, those made from a single named grape variety — Gallo moved its center of gravity out of the urban ghettos once and for all, and into the sleepy north county town of Healdsburg, a 17 mile drive up Route 101 from Santa Rosa.

Before long, Gallo of Sonoma had amassed a collection of sprawling

Will Parrish: Booze, a Banker, & The Bailout: The Murder of Mark West Creek

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Henry Cornell’s 120 acre parcel, seven miles northeast of Santa Rosa

From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

As the Director of Merchant Banking at America’s most politically well-connected investment firm, Goldman Sachs, Henry L. Cornell is accustomed to reaping the benefits of political oligarchy. (Webster definition: “a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”) His company exerts a profound influence in the corridors of both national and global power, not only by shaping legislation to the benefit of the interlocking financial, real estate, and investment industries, but by helping set the rules under which policy battles are waged in the first place. The multi-trillion dollar 2008 bailout of the banking industry, authored by then-Treasury Secretary and former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson, is only the most famous example.

As with the US in general, the County of Sonoma is controlled by a disproportionately small group of people. On the whole, their purposes are selfish and corrupt. Whereas the political oligarchy that calls the shots nationally consists mainly of representatives of the financial, real estate, hydrocarbon, military-industrial, and agribusiness sectors, the oligarchs who set the overall agenda at 575 Administration Drive, Santa Rosa, are primarily representatives of a single business: wine.

Corrupt? Virtually all of Sonoma County’s pertinent regulatory agencies function as handmaidens to large corporations like Kendall-Jackson and Gallo Family Wines, as well as to somewhat smaller industrial viticulture firms like Robert Young Vineyards, former employer of County Supervisor Paul Kelley.

Selfish? In its narrow drive to convert grapes into dollars with the greatest possible speed, the wine enterprise has clearcut vast sections of forest, sucked dry entire creeks and streams, reduced the once mighty Russian River to a trickle during many springs and summers, helped drive the river’s trout and salmon populations nearly to extinction,

Will Parrish: Mendo’s Biggest Wine Country Corporations

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

“We have chosen as our first topic of discussion the reality of the business — cash. Everything we do eventually finds its way back to this common denominator. That is, cash in and cash out. … At Duckhorn Vineyards, we earn approximately 24% cash profit. … Our bank, Bank of America, is more willing to support our growth because of our relatively high cash profit levels, our confirmed reinvestment of earnings and our shareholder support.” — newsletter to shareholders, Duckhorn Vineyards, 1998 (now owned by CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest real estate conglomerate)

“The Problem Now: What To Do With All That Cash,” a 1995 Business Week headline intoned.  It could well have been describing the impetus for the California North Coast’s premium wine-grape bubble.  Throughout the 1990s and up to the present, the battalions of bankers, lawyers, and business magnates who presided over the boom-time economy in the San Francisco Bay Area (and elsewhere) have plunged a huge portion of their surplus wealth into upscale wine culture – pricey tasting room tours, $50,000 collections of high-end vintages in home cellars, and $230 bottles of, for instance, ’93 Opus One.

Many of these regional economic elites went a step further by purchasing their own North Coast wine-grape plantations, those monocrop slices of the “bucolic” wine country lifestyle running from the Russian River Valley to Napa Valley to the Anderson Valley.

Silicon Valley tycoons landscaped their vacation homes with

Will Parrish: Who Really Rules Mendo Wine Country?

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

The North Coast wine industry is a sprawling, multi-billion dollar enterprise.  It encompasses  hundreds of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, Marin, Lake, and Solano counties; commands millions of acre feet of the area’s ever-more scarce water resources; and frequently operates on a scale so industrial that at least one Sonoma County vineyard developer has shared heavy machinery with trans-Alaska oil pipeline builders (all the better to scalp the trees and vegetation from small mountains).  In addition to vineyards, the industry’s main ingredients range from a barrage of tasting rooms — those upscale-rustic environs omnipresent in downtown areas from Sonoma to Napa to Philo — to manufacturing services such as crushing, processing, bottling, labeling, storage, and shipping.

These activities are capital-intensive. For those with enough pre-existing wealth to shoulder the heavy up-front costs, the profits can be enormous.  Thus, as as the Redwood Empire has turned to the Red Wine Empire, with wine grapes supplanting timber as the kingpin of area agribusiness, ownership of the industry has grown increasingly concentrated.  Most vineyard acreage in the region is ruled by a small collection of massive multi-national corporate conglomerates, which typically boast annual revenues greater than a billion dollars.

Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”

To hear the patriarchs of the wine industry tell it, by contrast, the typical area wine-making operation is a “bucolic,” family-owned business (“bucolic” being the most well-worn adjective in the NorCal wine industry lexicon).  All these monocrop wine-grape plantations wrapping around mountains and running endlessly along ludicrously expensive tracts of land in the area’s hyper-inflated real estate market, we are led to believe, are actually locally-owned mom-and-pop ops, guided by ancient oenoligical traditions and steeped in small-town neighborly values.

The Mendocino County wine-growing enterprise, in particular, thrives on this subterfuge.  The front-page of the Mendocino Wine-Grape and Wine Commission’s web site touts the “multi-generational hands-on family farmers and winemakers” that ostensibly characterize the local industry.  Heidi Dickerson, paid aide to Wine Country Congressman Mike Thompson, writes a weekly column for the Ukiah Daily Journal in which she studiously avoids mention of the monolithic corporate underpinnings of the companies she profiles.

In reality, while there remain some area vineyards that arguably fit the Wine Commission web site characterization, a huge portion of Mendo’s vineyard acreage is owned by corporate conglomerates that belong to the billion-dollar-a-year set.  Most of the other wine-grape plantations are remotely controlled by decidedly non-local corporations with revenues of at least $50 million a year.

Take one of the wine industry’s biggest vertically integrated multi-national firms: Constellation Brands.  With revenue of roughly $4.7 billion in 2009, the scope of Constellation’s economic activity is greater than many of the member states of the United Nations. An integrated wine, beer, and spirits firm, it is both the largest wine company in the world in terms of sales by volume and the largest importer of beer to the United States.  It owns several large vineyards here in Mendo, along with an even larger number in Sonoma and Napa.

Constellation Brands, in short, is about as opposite from a “multi-generational family farmer and winemaker” as Lockheed-Martin.

Yet, the “History” section of the company’s web site features the story of how its Clos du Bois vineyard division founder Frank Woods’ children selected the name of the vineyard. The web site of one of of Constellation’s many enormous subdivisions, Robert Mondavi Winery Corporation, leads off with the phrase “Robert Mondavi started in his family’s wine business…” before extolling at great length the philanthropic deeds of Mondavi and his wife on behalf of the small rural town where they used to live in Napa Valley.  Nowhere is there any indication that Robert Mondavi Corporation or Constellation Brands is a multi-billion dollar multi-national.

Over the years, wine industry robber-baron Jess Jackson has gone to perhaps the most absurd lengths of all to garb his company in a rustic wine-maker mystique.  The company no longer refers to itself as Kendall-Jackson, but rather as Jackson Family Wines.  In 1992, Jackson even elbowed his way into the position of inaugural president of the trade organization Family Winemakers of California (FWC).  That’s in spite of the fact that the organization was created the year before for the expressed purpose of promoting the “little guy’s point of view.”  A representative of Kendall-Jackson remains on the FWC board of directors to this day.

“Little Guy” Jackson landed in the upper half of Fortune magazine’s 2003 ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, with personal wealth of $1.8 billion.  Needless to say, he owns a prominent wine-grape estate in Philo, Mendocino County.

Unfortunately, with regard to the impact of these companies on the local economy and ecology, there is frequently little difference between mega-firms like Constellation Brands and smaller-scale outfits like, say, Beckstoffer Vineyards, a Napa County-based outfit that has been buying acreage all over southern Mendo in recent years, or Alder Springs Vineyards in Laytonville, which clear-cut 133 acres of oak forest to fill with new vines and trellises in 2002, causing a massive steelhead trout die-off in the Ten Mile Creek watershed due to resulting erosion.

In any case, relatively “local” vineyard operations such as these are usually only a degree removed from massive concentrations of corporate wealth.  Beckstoffer, though his company is nominally “independent,” is one of the top 20 owners of vineyard acreage in California. Alder Springs owner Stuart Bewley raised the capital for his current vineyard by selling his previous one, California Cooler, Inc., to the $3 billion Brown-Forman Corporation for $72 million in 1984 dollars.

More to the point, the profits generated by local vineyards accrue almost entirely to the wine industry big boys.  Merely seven global wine conglomerates purchase the vast majority of wine grapes grown in the United States.  The majority of these are grown in California.  These companies produce 82 percent of all wine sold throughout the country.   The majority of these enormous companies are integrated with other units of Big Alcohol; namely, spirits and beer.

The upshot? Regardless of who runs the actual grape production side, it’s the large multi-nationals that ultimately reap the benefits of the local wine-growing economy – just as with virtually every other sector of America’s agribusiness enterprise – at the expense of, well, just about everyone and everything else.  That is, especially if you count the future generations who will reap the greatest consequences of wildlife habitat destroyed, forests clear-cut, water stolen and diverted, pesticides laden, and alternative futures foreclosed.

Mendocino County has a thriving economic localization and food sovereignty movement. AVA publisher Bruce Anderson has aptly called it “the most interesting thing going” in this area.  If this movement takes its own stated goals seriously, it will inevitably have to confront the concentrated power of the local wine business (not to mention, coming soon, the consolidated marijuana industry).  Nearly 17,000 acres of Mendocino County’s best agricultural land is currently committed to wine-grape production.  Most of that is controlled by enormous financial interests that seemingly could care less about the well-being of Planet Earth, much less Mendocino County.  As long as such a circumstance exists, the possibility that Mendo Island will ever truly be a localized economy will remain a distant dream.

As Wendall Berry has written regarding the corporate agribusiness model in general, “To put the bounty and health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error.  Whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people.  If history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that.”

In the coming weeks, I will publish a series of investigative pieces on the North Coast wine industry.  My aim is not only to inspire a greater number of people in Mendocino County to radically rethink the role of the “local” wine industry, but also to begin the process of compelling more organized opposition to it.

The second part of the series, coming next week, will feature short profiles of the eight largest corporations that own vineyard tracts in Mendocino County, in order from largest to smallest.  In precisely the sense that Berry means, these are some of the main companies that currently determine the fortune of Mendocino County, or lack thereof.  After that, I will present a history-from-below of the destructive effects the corporate wine industry has wrought on local bioregions, small farms, and people.  Finally, I will overview several particularly egregious local vineyard projects currently in development — all the while presenting an analysis of the actual consequences that have resulted from tethering North Coast economies to the concentrated global wine trade.

Contact Will Parrish at wparrish[a]riseup.net.
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