Praising Copia, and Ogier Côte-Rôtie

[MaxH]

Copia

I’ve spent little enough time in the Napa area in California despite growing up nearby, and visiting family on the other side of it, and that little time was, anyway, mostly before the shift from agricultural to recreational renown. By 1987 in Napa wine country, “one is treated as a tourist,” complained David Yee on a Bay Area Internet newsgroup (message 10276@cgl.ucsf.edu) which I answered that generally one IS a tourist, so where is the problem?. By 2003 a wine Web-site contributor would cite offhand “the hordes of tourists just looking to get schnockered on the weekend” along Highway 29 as justifying winery tasting-room fees. (Both were uncommon in times now past.)

I was a tourist this weekend, with some friends of whom one was involved a little in the design of museum exhibits at the Copia center in Napa (www.copia.org) and she was eager to show us the place. (Also, it was her birthday.)

I was pleasantly impressed viewing Copia, and would happily return. The grounds seemed serene and relaxing. (One of our group, arriving early, hiked for an hour on the trails behind the building.) The displays on US food and wine history, which could so easily have been shallow or commercial, actually reveal some of the complexities, the bite. Irony is not overlooked. For example the account of a Mr. Graham, a 19th-century preacher of the health benefits from whole grains and vegetarianism, giving the US the idiom “Graham flour” to fine whole-wheat (UK “wholemeal”) flour [1], ends with the unpolished reality that despite his own therapy, Graham remained sickly all his life and died relatively young.

Classic US cookbooks appear in hands-on facsimile editions, starting with Eliza Leslie’s influential 1837 Directions for Cookery (still regarded by people who know it as one of the very best US cookbooks written) [2]. The display on wines does start with an introductory paragraph on wines being non-mainstream in US habits (labels unfamiliar to many people, sommeliers and rituals intimidating, etc.) but then the text makes as if to depart from this picture today, though I believe that many people would still call it apt. At the end of the exhibits, a visitor-comments display raises thoughtful and provocative points.

We heard some inside bits about the displays (one of them has 144 forks, contractor staffers went out for fast food all over to get the wrappers in the wrapper display, the large wine bottle that serves as a video screen with selectable labels was technically hard). The building has two floors, with exhibits upstairs, and meeting and demonstration facilities scattered around. The large and partly volunteer staff, all of whom seemed enthusiastic on that day, were preparing for an evening function in the facility as the museum closed we left.

Ogier Côte-Rôtie

Even with California’s wine accomplishments, highlighted at Copia, US consumers can get wines of many countries and need not limit themselves. So too with the long wine list in a popular restaurant at dinner in nearby Yountville (whose chef was especially kind to my friend with the birthday). As designated wine geek at this dinner, I checked the list and marked prospects with the wooden clothespins lying around (they had been napkin holders). As I discussed wines for the meal, the sommelier too was enthusiastic about the 1995 Ogier Côte-Rôtie. And with reason, we all saw later. The nose was amazing even for a good Côte-Rôtie. Lush with wild raspberries, surprisingly Burgundian anise, and complexity. A wine to match the one in Rouff’s Passionate Epicure that “blew into the soul like a good ocean wind into a sail, all the sunshine it had stolen, all the fervour of that baked earth of the Rhone Valley, its spiritual mother-country, and which, in waves of enlaced tannin and raspberry, brought to the brain a marvellous lucidity.” I bought the 1997 of this wine when it was current in the market; how I wish I’d bought the 95 too.

Details:

[1] Among the dialect differences between US and UK English, most are more important and better known than “Graham cracker” vs. “digestive biscuit” -- the two are not quite equivalent, either -- but few have a longer history online. (An example is currently publicly archived here.)

[2] Eliza Leslie’s book is readily available today new or used in the Dover facsimile edition as ISBN 0486406148.

[milla]

Copia

I’ve spent little enough time in the Napa area in California despite growing up nearby, and visiting family on the other side of it, and that little time was, anyway, mostly before the shift from agricultural to recreational renown.  By 1987 in Napa wine country, “one is treated as a tourist,” complained David Yee on a Bay Area Internet newsgroup (message 10276@cgl.ucsf.edu) which I answered that generally one IS a tourist, so where is the problem?.  By 2003 a wine Web-site contributor would cite offhand “the hordes of tourists just looking to get schnockered on the weekend” along Highway 29 as justifying winery tasting-room fees.  (Both were uncommon in times now past.)

I was a tourist this weekend, with some friends of whom one was involved a little in the design of museum exhibits at the Copia center in Napa (www.copia.org) and she was eager to show us the place.  (Also, it was her birthday.)

I was pleasantly impressed viewing Copia, and would happily return.  The grounds seemed serene and relaxing.  (One of our group, arriving early, hiked for an hour on the trails behind the building.)  The displays on US food and wine history, which could so easily have been shallow or commercial, actually reveal some of the complexities, the bite.  Irony is not overlooked.  For example the account of a Mr. Graham, a 19th-century preacher of the health benefits from whole grains and vegetarianism, giving the US the idiom “Graham flour” to fine whole-wheat (UK “wholemeal”) flour [1], ends with the unpolished reality that despite his own therapy, Graham remained sickly all his life and died relatively young. 

Classic US cookbooks appear in hands-on facsimile editions, starting with Eliza Leslie’s influential 1837 Directions for Cookery (still regarded by people who know it as one of the very best US cookbooks written) [2].  The display on wines does start with an introductory paragraph on wines being non-mainstream in US habits (labels unfamiliar to many people, sommeliers and rituals intimidating, etc.) but then the text makes as if to depart from this picture today, though I believe that many people would still call it apt.  At the end of the exhibits, a visitor-comments display raises thoughtful and provocative points.

We heard some inside bits about the displays (one of them has 144 forks, contractor staffers went out for fast food all over to get the wrappers in the wrapper display, the large wine bottle that serves as a video screen with selectable labels was technically hard).  The building has two floors, with exhibits upstairs, and meeting and demonstration facilities scattered around.  The large and partly volunteer staff, all of whom seemed enthusiastic on that day, were preparing for an evening function in the facility as the museum closed we left.

Ogier Côte-Rôtie

Even with California’s wine accomplishments, highlighted at Copia, US consumers can get wines of many countries and need not limit themselves.  So too with the long wine list in a popular restaurant at dinner in nearby Yountville (whose chef was especially kind to my friend with the birthday).  As designated wine geek at this dinner, I checked the list and marked prospects with the wooden clothespins lying around (they had been napkin holders).  As I discussed wines for the meal, the sommelier too was enthusiastic about the 1995 Ogier Côte-Rôtie.  And with reason, we all saw later.  The nose was amazing even for a good Côte-Rôtie.  Lush with wild raspberries, surprisingly Burgundian anise, and complexity.  A wine to match the one in Rouff’s Passionate Epicure that “blew into the soul like a good ocean wind into a sail, all the sunshine it had stolen, all the fervour of that baked earth of the Rhone Valley, its spiritual mother-country, and which, in waves of enlaced tannin and raspberry, brought to the brain a marvellous lucidity.”  I bought the 1997 of this wine when it was current in the market; how I wish I’d bought the 95 too.

Details:

[1] Among the dialect differences between US and UK English, most are more important and better known than “Graham cracker” vs. “digestive biscuit” -- the two are not quite equivalent, either -- but few have a longer history online.  (An example is currently publicly archived here.)

[2] Eliza Leslie’s book is readily available today new or used in the Dover facsimile edition as ISBN 0486406148.

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Well, well, well...

Welcome to eG MaxH.

[MaxH]

Welcome to eG MaxH.

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Thanks milla, that's very kind. I am new to this particular site, though know a number of regulars in person. (I posted food-wine information, when I had some to post, on the Internet for many years, but backed off around the time eGullet and Chowhound got going.)

[tanabutler]

Well, howdy, MaxH.

A lovely and informative post: I look forward to your contributions on the California board. Welcome!

[MaxH]

Thanks tanabutler.

Concerning French Laundry, I should mention that when my friend chose to try to get a table on her birthday, she just called up on the designated day (two months ahead), and persisted, and scored. Luck was important of course (it was the last table to book, they said).

As with some other places today, this business of demand exceeding capacity alters the whole nature of a diner's experience of the restaurant. Two decades ago in the Bay Area, Chez Panisse in Berkeley had precisely the same fashionability status that FL acquired a few years ago. Precisely. Bookings opened and closed on a designated advance date, and people were preoccupied with the issue of getting "in." Sometimes this overshadowed the food. That particular restaurant was very different in details from FL, of course, lower key and so on, but the national attention that it received attracted all sorts of diners. Those who simply relaxed and looked for what it did well; others eager to fault it for missing their own expectations of Grand-Palace touches, such as cocktails (permitting them then to return home far away and reassure their buddies that they weren't fooled by the place -- I saw some of this). Thus, many people got something from their visit, each according to style. The same restaurant had, of course, been doing comparable cooking for years before it started to attract out-of-town celebrity diners (I remember Danny Kaye and Donald Sutherland, for instance, in the late 1970s) and later to sell out. So the substance of the experience had been available to diners who really sought it, without the fame baggage. For a time, anyway. Then again, some people may be drawn as much by the fame as the substance of the experience. It certainly happens with wines and other things.

[alexhills]

My favourite Chez Panisse celebrity story is one my parents told me. One of their friends was a sous-chef there right when it opened (they got to eat there in the first week) and Francis Ford-Coppola came to eat there while she was cooking. He walks straight into the kitchen at the end of the meal and, without introducing himself, just says, 'you're hired'.. She did go to work for him but lasted about 2 weeks, as it rapidly became clear he wanted a slave not a personal chef...

[MaxH]

My favourite Chez Panisse celebrity story is one my parents told me. One of their friends was a sous-chef there right when it opened (they got to eat there in the first week) and Francis Ford-Coppola came to eat there while she was cooking. He walks straight into the kitchen at the end of the meal and, without introducing himself, just says, 'you're hired'.. She did go to work for him but lasted about 2 weeks, as it rapidly became clear he wanted a slave not a personal chef...

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Even restaurant chefs have been known, just occasionally, to be difficult. (If you haven't already done so, read the various accounts of Fernand Point in, for example, Wechsberg's book that Amazon advertises here.) But can you imagine a successful chef charging onto a working movie set and commanding an up-and-coming assistant director to come along and work privately?

[jschyun]

Okay, this is somewhat off topic, but has anyone seen the ad for the new Copia tomato, in the tomato growers supply catalog? One of the most stunning things I've ever seen.

Look different from the other pics I have seen, however. I don't recall seeing this kind of fine striping in the tomatofest.com pics but I am too lazy to look and must get back to work.

click on the tomato pics to see larger pic

--the name is no accident, it is named after the Copia center.

Edited December 22, 2004 by jschyun (log)

[Carolyn Tillie]

I missed this thread earlier and would also like to welcome MaxH -- as a member of Copia, I enjoy it often and like taking visiting guests. I think I am one of the few that don't mind eating at Julia's Kitchen and the artist in me appreciates the different exhibits.

I'm getting over the fact that they never hired me... ... but only because I really like my job at Ladera and appreciate what Copia is trying to do.