VINTAGE AND CONTEMPORARY

Wine

Donald Hess's Napa winery combines great Cabernets and modern-art masterpieces

JOEL L. FLEISHMAN

Over the two decades during which Northern California's serious wine industry has burgeoned, several hundred new winery ventures have been launched, mostly by "outsiders" who have braved eyebrow arching, shoulder shrugging, tut-tutting, as well as occasionally passionate criticism from the small, tightly knit community of grape growers and winemakers. But one of the most ambitious of these new enterprises seems, quite remarkably, to have avoided all the usual backbiting and carping. It seems, in fact, to be gamering nothing but praise. Such unmitigated laudation is all the more unusual because the venture, the Hess Collection winery, is owned by someone who is not only an outsider but a foreigner. It is also vast—nine hundred acres of prime land in all. Most tricky, however, is the fact that the Hess enterprise is a combination of art museum and winery—something that should surely have lent itself to at least a bit of snickering.

The man who brought all this off is Donald Hess, a wealthy Swiss businessman who has gone about creating his winery with the meticulousness for which his watchmaking compatriots are legendary. The land he chose on the lower slopes of Mt. Veeder, in the southwest comer of the Napa Valley, is now thought to be extremely promising for grape growing, although that was not the case when he bought it in 1978. His vines began to produce creditable grapes in the fourth year, but, to reach his own quality standard, he did not release his first Chardonnay under the Hess label until the eighth vintage, in 1986. He also used the first decade to get to know his Napa neighbors, and to recruit a vineyard and winery staff of highly skilled wine professionals.

From the initial release of the 1983 Cabernet Sauvignon, both Estate and Reserve, Hess wines have been, without exception, of superior quality. The 1984 Reserve Cabernet became an instant legend for its combination of softness and power, with rich, concentrated blackcurrant flavors, leading wine stores to ration it to customers. The lush, forward blackberry and raspberry flavors of the 1985 Estate Cabernet made it a best-seller, too. The 1986 editions were exceptional as well, as have been all vintages of Hess's Chardonnay. On the quality of its wine alone, the Hess Collection earned a place on most well-informed lists of the best California wineries, and it did so in record time. But while wines and the winery are obviously the essence of the enterprise, it is the art collection that has been seized upon by the press for attention. As far as I know, it is the only first-class museum of art affiliated with a winery in one of the world's great grape-growing regions. Bordeaux may have the extraordinary Chateau MoutonRothschild museum in its commune of Pauillac, but that collection is devoted solely to art concerning the making or consumption of wine. Owners of vineyards and wineries all over the world, such as Chateau Petrus proprietor JeanPierre Moueix, have well-known collections of old masters, but theirs are on the walls of their homes and not routinely displayed to the public.

About 130 paintings and sculptures, only part of Donald Hess's personal collection, are displayed. Twenty-nine artists are represented, each by several works from different periods. "I'm a private collector of the artists who interest me,'' says Hess, and that he has chosen well is evident. On exhibit now are pieces by people such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Gilbert & George, Rolf Iseli, Per Kirkeby, Henri Michaux, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, and the Zurich group of Concrete artists: Max Bill, Fritz Glamer, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, and Richard Paul Lohse. They are displayed so as to increase their drama; two Bacons, thirty years apart, hang directly opposite one another across the entire expanse of the gallery.

Hess says that the credit for combining a museum with a winery belongs to his wife, Joanna, and it is clear that he doesn't intend the enterprise to be a tribute to his own ego. "I told the architect [Breuer-trained Beat A. H. Jordi],'' he recalls, that "it cannot be a monument for you or for me, but rather a monument for art and for wine.'' Take, for example, his winery building. Instead of adding an eye-poking, self-glorifying new structure to the landscape, he found a modest existing winery that he could restore. It was a venerable building, and, with the aid of a team of California and Swiss architects and engineers, he went on to refashion it, at much greater expense than entirely new construction would have entailed, into a handsome, clean-lined, light-filled, understated contemporary space that is spectacular without making itself a spectacle.

It is almost as if Hess wished to slip unnoticed into the Napa Valley hills, become a local fixture, and then win acclaim for what ultimately matters there—the quality of the wine. That is a decidedly different path from the one taken by many other wealthy newcomers, who have sought to attract attention with a fanfare of trumpets and Ozymandian landworks well before their wines had the opportunity to prove themselves, which sometimes they never did.