My friend and a friend of his named Irma. World War Two Medicine and the Hollywood crowd in Palm Springs.

Pharmacist Mate Patch

It started with a lunch conversation about World War II with an old friend, then got more complicated with a trip down to Palm Springs to duck out of the rain.  While there, a martini and steak at a place from the twenties called Melvyn’s, led to thinking about early golf courses in the desert and that turned into golf at a place that could be a museum.  That's why the forties and fifties are inhabiting my mind this week.

My friend had served in World War II as a young Pharmacist Mate in Beaumont, California, a few miles west of Palm Springs. Built as a hospital to serve George Patton’s Desert Warfare School, it had been turned over to the Navy as a convalescent center, mainly for people who had been seriously injured in combat or had been treated and needed physical and emotional rehabilitation and other services before discharge. There were many men there who had what the military used to call psychoneurosis, shell shock, or, as the military in 1944 preferred to say, “battle fatigue” and what we now tend to call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The military had thought it had learned a great deal from the psychological effects of combat during World War I and had used intense psychological screening to eliminate nearly a million and a half men from service in World War II. But World War II rates of battle fatigue were two to three times higher than in World War I. Nearly one in five soldiers returned to the continental United States because of emotional damage, overwhelming the psychiatric capabilities of US caregivers. World War I was fought in western Europe and the US forces were there for just a year. World War II was fought over four years, all across the world, sometimes with no time to recuperate physically and mentally. And, of course, better war technology made it more normal for people to break down. There were also far more prisoners of war in World War II.

The transfer of Beaumont from the Army to the Navy likely came about because Navy leadership was looking for resting stations to meet a widely

anticipated order that came in 1944 from President Roosevelt. The President had become upset that men were being discharged from the Army without the full array of care he believed was owed them. His order made it clear that

Beaumont Convalescent Center, 1944

every soldier needed to be put back right. No overseas casualty was to be discharged from the service until he had received ‘the maximum benefits of hospitalization and convalescent care including psychological rehabilitation, vocational guidance, pre-vocational training and re-socialization.’ Former Senator Bob Dole is a terrific example of this policy. He was a Second Lieutenant in 1944 and badly wounded in Sicily. He was not discharged from the Army's care until 1948.

The medical system built to support World War II is still astounding today. As described in a recent Rand Corporation history, the 1939 version of the United States Army had 190,000 soldiers supported medically by 1,100 doctors, 64 administrative personnel, almost 700 nurses and 9,400 enlisted men. Two years later, the Army had 1,500,000 people in uniform and there were more than 10,000 doctors and 5,500 nurses. In 1944, there are 8,000,000 army troops, 45,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and 540,000 enlisted men.  How did they do that?

Over a similar period of time, the Navy troop strength grew from just over 200,000 people to 4,000,000 by VJ Day with a similar rise in medical caregivers.

At the same time, the Army had to address the President’s order and create systems that gave soldiers what their country owed them medically, psychiatricly and educationally. My friend Armand, then a kid of 19, was sent to a barren place called Beaumont, an empty hillside with leaky, spare, temporary buildings. Other facilities that served this function were much better. Some soldiers were sent to the Yosemite Park Lodge, the Hotel Casa Del Ray in Santa Cruz, the Narconian in Corona, California, the Arrowhead Resort in San Bernadino, the Sonoma Mission Inn at Boyes Springs and the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, once a center for the Hollywood crowd who liked to come to the desert for the weather, among other things.

The wartime role of celebrities was largely morale and fundraising and most worked hard at it. Many stars found their way to combat, but most stuck to entertainment of the men and the sale of war bonds. War bonds were a good priority for the military. In three years between 1942 and 1945, Americans purchased $150 billion in war bonds, a major contribution to the cost of the war and much of it due to the celebrity of the sales people.

My friend was in Beaumont in 1945, the last year of its temporary life. Then, it was home to 250 people in convalescent care. He says that many people died there because of their significant injuries and illnesses. By the end of 1945 it was gone -- scrapped and sold off. A Rand Corporation history of the country’s military medicine was published in 2013 and is attached below. It shows, among many other things, that the dismantling of the war was as breathtaking as the run up to it.

At the time of the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, the Army, including the Army Air Force, stood at just over 8,000,000 men and women on active duty and another 4,000,000 in the Navy. By the end of the year, Army and Navy manpower was half of that. Six months later it stood at under 2,000,000.  By the end of 1947 the US Army strength was at 925,000 men and women and the Navy about 400,000.

At the same time, obligations of the military leadership shifted to the Veteran’s Administration. There were more than 16,000,000 World War II vets and another 2,000,000 veterans from other wars who needed the services that veterans need.

The Rand history says:

“To serve this flood, the VA had 97 hospitals in 45 states and the District of Columbia with a capacity of 81,333 beds, including 10,243 emergency beds…To augment this, work was underway on an additional 27,274 beds at 31 new hospitals with another 29,100 beds in planning. The VA employed approximately 65,000 people.”

Amid this cascade of activity as millions of people were moving about the country

figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives, Pharmacist Mate Armand Guarino, a native of Beverly, Massachusetts, decided to go to Los Angeles and look around, maybe catch a play.  He caught a ride to downtown Beaumont and stuck his thumb out where the highway from Palm Springs to LA shot through the town. Marie Wilson, an actress soon to be a star, pulled her little roadster to the side of the road and said "Hey, sailor!  Going to LA?"  She was 29.  He was 19.

He soon found out which play he was going to -- the review Marie was starring in, "Ken Murray's Blackouts," one of the longest running entertainments in theater history, was racking up nearly 4,000 performances over seven years.

Ken Murray's career had a half life of about one week when he coaxed some investors to bankroll an idea that came from his life in Vaudeville.  The blackout was a term that described the lights going out just as the performer delivered a punch line.  The term got a double meaning from the war, where blackouts had a totally fresh and immediate meaning. The show was naughty, sexy and sexist. And it was a smash hit.

Marie played the dumb blond, an idea she migrated to when she made a shrewd observation that to survive in show business, she had to distinguish herself from the hundreds of other attractive women in Hollywood who also possessed voluptuous bodies like hers.

She had a comedic temperament and played to that strength.  So while the dumb blond was a tough strategic decision to make, it was an easy one to implement. She wanted in the business and the cost of entry at the moment seemed small.  She ultimately found her place, smart as she was, and it both made and possessed her career.

In the show, Murray was the wry, cigar smoking commentator who would leer at Marie and lead the audience to Marie's breasts through the dialogue. Here’s an example of one scene on the show. Murray asks her “what’s new?” She would say that she had been reading a study about the advantages of using mothers’ milk over bottled milk. When prompted to tell what they advantages were, she’d reply:

"Well, it doesn't need refrigerating — the cats can't get at it — and, best of all, it comes in such cute containers."

Blackout!

Armand and Marie became pals. He’d come to LA and the doorman at the El Capitan Theater knew to let him in and he’d watch the show from the wings.

She was married then to her second husband, Allan Nixon, but living apart and seeking a divorce in 1945, something that required residency in Nevada, a complicating factor for a woman performing ten times a week in Los Angeles and trying to advance her career in movies. Nixon was a former Washington Redskins football player and sometime actor who sold gossip to rags like Photoplay and Confidential. He was also rough with his women and likely was with her.

She had friends in Palm Springs and would dash out to the desert when she could get away from the show. On the way, she’d pick up her little sailor and bring him along for the ride. He remembers particularly Ralph Bellamy at a Palm Springs party, the soon to be black listed writer Dalton Trumbo and his wife on a visit to Los Angeles. Over his year at Beaumont, he met the full Hollywood crowd that Marie Wilson knew. And the crowd loved young men in uniform.

“I don’t recall ever buying a drink while I was in the Navy,” he said. “And damned few meals.”

Once free from the “Blackouts of Hollywood,” Marie went on to real stardom

playing “My Friend Irma” on the radio starting in April of 1947. That role also also had a long run, seven years on radio and finally closing in 1954 as both a radio program and a television series, both strong ratings performers. They were the first films to feature Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, a night club act that needed national exposure and did pretty well with it.

There were two movies. “My Friend Irma” in 1949 and “My Friend Irma Goes West” in 1950. Marie plays Irma Peterson, a Minnesota native. Her roommate, Jane Stacy and Irma are young single women sharing an apartment and many misadventures with men. Jane is the narrator of Irma’s bewildering life as a secretary who can’t be fired because the filing system she has created is intelligible only to her. Natch, she has a deadbeat boyfriend who is trying to get rich quick and not commit to Irma. Jane, on the other hand, is sweet and smart, and on the edge of marrying a wealthy boyfriend.

“Irma, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I became Mrs. Richard Rheinlander the Third?”

“What good would that do if he has two other wives?”

Palm Springs has been synonymous with Hollywood since the earliest days of

the last century. The silent movies used Palm Springs backgrounds extensively for stars like Rudolf Valentino and Theda Bara. Clara Bow was a silent movie regular in Palm Springs.

In the thirties, forties and fifties, Palm Springs exploded in celebrity. Hollywood movie contracts at the time required actors to be available within two hours of notification by their producer that they were needed for some task. At eighty miles, Palm Springs was enough distance from LA's insanity and close enough to honor your contract, especially with the cars getting better and better roads built.

As the colony developed there, particularly around the Movie Colony District

Bob Hope's First Home in Palm Springs

out near the airport, homes were relatively modest. Bob Hope’s first home, built in 1936 and about 2,000 square feet, for example, sold for just under $500,000 in 2012.  

Taking into account that the Hollywood residents were young, talented and relatively well paid young men and women in the entertainment business, the lifestyle was relatively simple as well -- alcohol, sex, golf, tennis, horseback riding.  Sure they had great fun surfing the hotel bars, but they were mostly appreciated by the locals and were rarely hassled. Palm Springs was the kind of little town many of them were originally from, and they found a sense of community there, staging golf and bowling tournaments for their causes, most of them local. They cared for the soldiers and sailors like Armand who were thrown into their midst, some of them bewildered and terrified by combat and some, like Armand, off to Harvard, MIT, Tufts and a career in biochemistry.

While we were there, we spent a couple of nights at the bar of Melvyn’s, a

place with great forties and fifties cred and attached to the Ingleside Hotel, a small, elegant place built as a private estate in the late twenties for Henry Birge, the owner of the Pierce Arrow Company. It was later purchased by an energetic woman named Ruth Hardy and converted to a twenty room hotel. The hotel didn't take reservations unless the guests were invited by Ms. Hardy. It is there that Howard Hughes, registering as his pilot, spent several nights with Ava Gardner, by far my favorite celebrity, who also spent time in Palm Springs with Frank Sinatra, whose home, Twin Palms, she shared for a time.  Gloria Swanson's house was just down the street when the Ingleside was constructed.

Sorting out the relationships of the movie colony could be confusing. In Esther Williams’ Memoir, “Million Dollar Mermaid,” she describes a dinner event. Fernando Llamas comes in escorting two of Bandleader Artie Shaw’s ex-wives, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.

"Ava and Lana were pals," Williams writes, "and Ava at this time was in the midst of her stormy marriage to Frank Sinatra.  About six years early, however, Lana had been labeled a "homewrecker over her involvement with Frank, when he was still married to his first wife, Nancy. Both Lana and Ava had been ardently pursued by Howard Hughes, and Lana had had a brief affair with Victor Mature.”

But what happened after that dinner reveals the tortured path of Hollywood Colony matrimony.

“Lana and Fernando broke up and she married Lex Barker after he divorced Arlene Dahl. Following his affair with Lana and Arlene’s divorce from Lex (likely for messing with Lana's daughter), Fernando married Arlene, who became the mother of his son, Lorenzo. Arlene eventually divorced Fernando and then he and I were married.”  It's really pretty simple, though it does require a focused mind.  

The state of Washington has numerous connections to Palm Springs, but the one that interests me most is the relationship developed by Monrad C. Wallgren, a former Washington state Congressman, Senator and Governor. An Everett optometrist and jeweler, Walgren was the ultimate joiner, very popular and a terrific athlete.  He was a low handicap golfer and a national class billiards player, winning the national amateur championship at the Everett Elks Hall in 1929.

He’s the only politician in the state's history to serve in the US House of Representatives, the US Senate and as Governor of the state. Despite the

The President and Wallgren at a parade in
Tacoma, 1948. Note Warren Magnuson
just above Truman's hat.

strong Republican tilt to the Second Congressional District, Wallgren was elected in 1932 and served four terms in the House. It was his bill that approved creation of the Olympic National Park in 1938. He was appointed United States Senator in 1940 after Senator Lewis Schwellenbach was picked to be a federal judge.  Wallgren's greatest accomplishment in the Senate was to become close friends with then Senator Harry Truman with whom he served on the committee investigating military contracts during the war.

After service in the Senate, Wallgren ran for governor in 1944 and beat the dour Arthur B. Langlie. Even though his friend Harry Truman’s great upset in 1948 had coattails across the country, Langlie turned the tables and defeated Wallgren that year. 

Immediately after the 48 upset, Wallgren was very prominent at the West
Palm Beach vacation White House and apparently with good reason. Truman appointed him Chairman of the National Security Resources Board, a very big

Senator Stuart Symington on Truman's right
and Wallgren to his left.  Palm Beach vacation
White House ten days after the 1948 upset.
A young Clark Clifford, the campaign manager, is
just behind Symington.

job then. Many considered it too big a job for someone whose qualifications were based on his friendship with Harry Truman. Also, it should be said, most southern democrats used the appointment to send a message to the President – 'moderate your civil rights agenda.'

After several months, the appointment seemed hopeless and Wallgren withdrew. Though a safer appointment to the Federal Power Commission followed, his political career was over.

The digging of dirt during the Republican effort to derail his nomination unearthed a charge that ended up with a Drew Pearson commentary, leaked by Washington Senator Harry Cain, a republican, that claimed Wallgren had won $50,000 in a crap game at a Palm Desert Resort named Shadow Mountain and was spending a lot of time in the desert.

While he did have a place there, Wallgren claimed the charge was specious.

His wife, Mabel, had sinus issues and the dry weather helped. Wallgren was certainly early to the desert.  I found an old newspaper that had a picture of the Wallgren house under construction. It is the only thing other than desert in the frame.

After reading this about Wallgren, I called and got a 2:30 tee time and drove out to his early course, Shadow Mountain, and enjoyed the scale of the forties and fifties development there. It is quite different from desert development now. The golf course layout, designed by professional golfer Gene Sarazen, is short but tricky. The greens are small, most sitting atop a sharply slopped mound, very hard to hold unless you can bounce it along the fairway and trickle the ball on.

The houses located around the course are modest as well. Low slung, 1200

Wallgren's former home in Palm Desert

square feet or less. It was created at a time when the income gap between the middle class and the upper class was relatively smaller. And developers played to the middle class. An Associated Press story in 1949 said the annual golf course membership fee was going to be $100/year and that the bungalows around the course were available at $10/night. The headline of the piece says “Desert Club Offers Loafing For Middle Class – and Millionaires.” Celebrities who invested in and joined there in 1949 included Bette Davis, Robert Montgomery, Edgar Bergen, Dick Powell, Harold Lloyd and Kay Kaiser. Two years ago, the course and neighborhood became the first designated Palm Desert Historical site.

Today’s club has its drawbacks, including its 8 to 5 hours, highly unusual in the golf world. I found Wallgren’s address, two blocks up the street, and walked over to check out the house. It is also modest in scale, even with what appears to be a significant addition.

When we got back from Wallgren’s old house, golf course staff were scurrying to close the gates at five. Walking back to our car near the now empty

clubhouse, I came upon a boulder with a bronze plaque on it near a poorly traveled corner of the building. I could barely make out the words.

In memory of Mon. C. Wallgren
Founder
Shadow Mountain Golf Club
July, 1959

They got the plaque on the rock just in time.
Walgreen was driving to Olympia in 1961 and had a flat tire at the southern edge of the Nisqually Bridge. A Fort Lewis soldier stopped to help out. The soldier was killed instantly when the drunk driver’s car plowed into them. Wallgren died two months later.

Marie Wilson also had a tragic death, too young, at 56, from cancer, never really breaking free of the caricature that made and stifled her career.

When Beaumont closed, the Navy sent Armand home to Beverly, Massachusetts and paid for his tuition when he got into Harvard University. It cost $400 a year. He retired as Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio and now lives in Port Townsend with his wife, Sally.

Rand Corporation History of Military Medicine

My Friend Irma Radio Broadcast

My Friend Irma Movie Trailer

List of Celebrity Homes

Looking for Millennials in Santa Barbara Wine Country

We had rented a place in Santa Barbara in the Mesa neighborhood on the other side of Highway 101 from the downtown.  We’d never visited there so we had some anxiety about the VRBO house we had rented for the long weekend.  Everyone in the car was saying it was going to be a loser which would mean we’d spend half the weekend going over the missed clues in the website description and blaming me, the guy who picked the house, for missing them. 

But the place turned out terrific -- a little house, a bit odd -- but leafy, private and completely delightful.  We soon had the wine out and were chatting happily over the buzzing hummingbirds and some lovely cheese and salami.  A Scrub Jay who apparently owned the yard insisted on getting some of our bread but soon shut up when we tossed an almond his way and he flew off to a fence post where he puzzled over what to do with it.

We talked our way through the early evening, watched the sun alter the Santa Ynez Mountains by the minute, cooked perfectly moist chicken breasts on the nifty adjustable level barbecue and tossed almonds at the Scrub Jay until the can was empty.  Later, we went to the other side of the yard with our strawberries and clumsily slid into the hot tub as the last light fell, calling it a fine day.

We had just a handful of items on the agenda.  We wanted to hang with our friends who were headed back to Ireland and its weather after three years in sun rich Santa Monica.  We wanted to cook some delicious food at our now favorite VRBO house in the Mesa neighborhood.  We wanted to visit the wine country on the other side of those lovely mountains.  And, a bonus, it was close enough to Barbara’s birthday to call the trip a present.

Santa Barbara uses the term “America’s Riviera” to describe itself, but really, the true comparison to the Riviera is only the climate.  Santa Barbara has a much more survivable scale than the French Riviera version.  In 2012, 800,000 people went through Santa Barbara’s Airport while the Nice Airport handled 10,000,000 passengers.  

Santa Barbara is small – about 85,000 people.  Combined with nearby municipalities -- Summerland to the north and Goleta to the south -- this narrow strip between the Pacific and the Santa Ynez Mountains has a population of about 120,000 people.  At the far north end of the county and a bit off the coast is Lompoc, about 45 miles from Santa Barbara. 

Santa Barbara’s unique geology is, in part, an interaction between the rising and falling of the sea and the rising and falling of the land.  For the past 20,000 years, beaches form at different sea levels and later the land is pushed up, starting the beach on its trip to the mountain top.  Each new sea level and new upthrust create a series of uneven steps leading up to the oldest events, now the eroding peaks of the Santa Ynez Mountains, lines of sedimentary rock reaching upward. 

Santa Barbara rises, on average, from two to five millimeters a year.  The hummingbirds, the Scrub Jay and we four are located on one of those old beaches at our mesa house, perhaps 125 feet in the air, as we have coffee and cantaloupe on our ancient beach and prepare to head out.  We’re headed for the downtown farmers' market that turned out to be as good as we had heard.  The markets move around the county and even across the Santa Ynez Mountains into the Northern part of the county and are in Santa Barbara two days, Tuesday and Saturday.

It is every urban market you see, white tents crowded with earnest people selling mostly organic.  It is distinguished by its wonderful products.  The agricultural bounty of Santa Barbara County is headlined by the strawberry, a crop that brings $450 million a year with many, many small organic growers growing with the big guys.  It’s a year round crop there and the market was full of them and they were very good. 

We also found some Shishito Peppers, a Japanese varietal that I’d just had for the first time on this trip.  They were fantastic, sweet and thin-skinned, simply prepared by blistering in a little oil, squeezing lemon over them and sprinkling with sea salt.  They had an amazing taste though we found one of them whose genes overrode the pepper’s sweet, gentle taste and was as hot as any Jalapeno.  Turns out that about one in ten Shishito carry the heat and this little genetic risk makes them taste even sweeter.

The melons were astounding and you could find Rock Crab, rare up in the Northwest, but common here where there are few Dungeness.  We bought mussels and bread, a big sack of Shishitos and headed up to our ancient beach on the hill for lunch.  Though the mussels were fabulous, I regretted not getting a couple of Rock Crab. 

California’s agriculture, like much of the agriculture in the west for the past several years, seems to have hardly noticed the Great Recession.  After a down year in 2009, in which California’s agricultural output dropped about 6% in value, it returned to its steady, China-like growth rate.  In 2012, California was generating agricultural products worth $55 billion dollars annually, more than 70% of them crops and the rest cattle and other animal products.  By comparison, the Boeing Commercial Airplane Division reported 2012 revenues of $49 billion in 2012.   Santa Barbara ranks 14^th  in agricultural production of the 58 counties that make up California, but still provides nearly $1.5 billion a year in farm income, four times less than the state’s powerhouse, Fresno County, but still substantial.  After strawberries, you’d think wine grapes.  But you’d be wrong.  Humble broccoli beats out the grapes for second place in the Santa Barbara agricultural pantheon.

After all those mussels at lunch, we thought twice about going back to town but wanted to check out what Santa Barbara calls the Urban Wine Trail which led us directly to the Funk Zone, a chaotic 16 block area of low slung commercial and warehouse buildings near the beach, bisected by one of the two North/South rail lines serving the state.

In the mid-eighties it was zoned for hotels and related tourist uses and the pressure was building for major development.  Artists always find these cool, yet endangered spaces and were moving in and putting art not only on the inside of their studios but on the outside walls of the buildings containing their studios.  In the mid-nineties it had truly become an artist colony, home to one winery, surf and marine

equipment shops strung along its dark streets.  As the pressure to tear down and build grew, some members of the council and the mayor began to advocate for a new kind of zoning that would protect the funkiness of the place.  Ultimately, they adopted a code that requires activities there to be mixed use residential/commercial, tourist serving and marine light manufacturing. 

Three or four years ago the wineries began moving in and with them the food trucks, the restaurants and the music that flows after the wine.  From one winery tasting room back in the old days to more than 20 today, it has evolved from funky to cool.  A similar set of events is happening in Lompoc, creating a warehouse district there called The Wine Ghetto.  Places like these are growing up all over wine country and they demonstrate just how volatile and adaptable the retail side of the industry has become, seeking, as it does, more direct sales to its customers.  It is what happened to Woodinville outside of Seattle in the last five years and what has happened in downtown Walla Walla. Washington state law changed to allow wineries an additional tasting room outside of where the wine was actually made.  Soon, 120 or so wineries and a few distilleries took over those little mini-mart mini-malls, warehouses, old bungalows and storefronts.  It created an easier destination tasting experience and consumers like us in Seattle don’t have to drive several

hours to try new wine.  Though Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone is small with lots of change ahead, all of them are terrific and authentic.  We focused on the young people in those places, the family atmosphere, the young tasters lounging on a wicker couch, their kids at their feet with crayons marking up some old wine cases.

Real estate in Santa Barbara is now back to full throttle and property in the Funk Zone is changing hands in all cash, asking price deals.  All of this makes the artists anxious as they look at their relatively short leases and see all this success around them. It will be tough to stay.

We sat in the tasting room at Kunin Winery, owned by Seth Kunin and his wife Magan Eng, and tried their wine.  They made big boys, plenty of alcohol, though they managed to keep the tasty fruit around that they started with.  Kunin came from New York to UCLA and its medical school, but veered off into the restaurant business and then wine via the Gainey Vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley where he first signed on as a volunteer at crush.  Eng comes from Chicago’s retail wine world and the newspaper business -- growing up, her Mom had a long relationship with the late Roger Ebert, the film critic.

In 2009, Kunin was one of a handful of wineries offering tastings in the Funk Zone and recently doubled down with a new concept tasting room called AVA Santa Barbara, just around the corner from his first place.  Kunin and Eng will offer very small batch wines – 120 cases or so – from the American Viticulture Areas in Santa Barbara County and from other areas that will, over time, qualify as AVAs.  This will allow customers to have wines from the many different micro-climates in Santa Barbara County in one place.

 

These places seem to have captured one of the elements that bring in the Millennials, the generational cohort on which the future of the wine business

in large part depends.   The idea of pulling together many wineries in a relatively small geography seems to really work with their generation.  Born between roughly 1982 and 2000, a little more than half of them are now drinking wine legally.  By 2021, all 70 million of them will be legal drinkers.  Just as the boomers discovered wine and nurtured the industry in the sixties and seventies the Millennials will shape wine’s future by the tastes and preferences they discover themselves or learn from winemakers and marketers.  The bad is that every day, 10,000 Boomers retire.  The sort of good news is that they are replaced by 15,000 Millennials.

They are a make or break generation.  Without the Millennials, John McCain would have been President of the United States.  More Millennials voted in 2012 than citizens over 62 -- 16% of the electorate versus 14%.  In 2020, 40% of the electorate will be Millennials.  As in political life, the wine industry is struggling to figure out what to do about the Millennials, how to gauge their impact and what kind of wine to make, package and sell to them.

While the research shows that many Millennials like wine, there is a substantial debate about whether Millennials will buy good wine or buy wine on the cheap.  Rob McMillan, who writes a breezy “State of the Wine Industry Report” for Silicon Valley Bank, believes that the Millennials don’t have the kind of net worth that justifies the purchase of premium wines over $20 a bottle and that other, older generations will have to foot the bill for better wines, reducing market share for them.  He’s down on the Millennial contribution to the wine industry at the moment, and I wondered reading his report whether a child has moved back into his house.  He believes they are

Silicon Valley Bank

all about "caring about color, price and varietal."  He thinks they have little respect for where the wines come from.  He observes that millennials buy a lot more imported wines, cutting into US market share.

However, California’s Wine Market Council says that Millennials are driving the growth in wine consumption in the US.  More of them drink wine daily, 28%, considerably more than other generations.  Because of the high percentage of Americans who say they do not drink any kind of alcohol, 43%, the rate at which Millennials drink is important.  Driving the abstemious number down to 30% means a great deal to the US wine market.  By comparison, only 5.3% of Germans don't drink alcohol and 6.3% of French. Millennials drink on more occasions and in non-traditional venues and they drink more per sitting, all good news to the industry.  Other consultants think that the food lovers populating the Millennial generation will have good food be the gateway to premium wine consumption. 

A problem in the Millennial population is that it is so racially and ethnically diverse.  It has a large Hispanic segment, a particularly difficult group to attract to the wine life, if not the picking part of it.  

The amazing generational research done by the Pew Charitable Trusts tells us this about the Millennials:

“Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”

Despite a rough time entering the job market in recession, the Millennials tend to be confident about the future, according to Pew.  They are on-line, green, educated and say they have enough money on hand to meet their financial goals, despite the fact that 37% in 2010 were out of work or not in the job market.

They have, according to Pew, a quiky kind of self expression.  Four in ten of them have a tattoo and half of that number have multiple tattoos, though most say their tattoos are obscured by their clothing.   A much larger number than other generations reports a body piercing other than in their ear lobes.  More say they want to help other people than say they want to own a home or have a high paying job. 

Along with the financial factors, marketing wine to them is a challenge and the industry seems a bit perplexed about how to meet it.  The branding I’ve seen “OMG Merlot” and the Be. Brand – “B. Flirty, B. Radiant, B. Bright” -- seem to be trying to take the pretension out of wine with a condescending tool.    

I think of my Millennial daughter’s friends and, to them, the scene at Kunin would work, starting with the gobs of red wine being served.  But also fun.  No pretension.  No hard sell.  Authenticity.  Forget the pear and pomegranate finishes.  Remember that price, for now, matters.  The crowd at Kunin was a Millennial outfit and they were indeed having fun.  It was as much drinking wines, as tasting wines, bottles on tables, full wine glasses sloshing about.  One couple sat on the stairs leading up to the porch, a bottle of Syrah between them, sharing a store-bought salad from a plastic container, one plastic fork working just fine for the two of them. 

As five o’clock came, no one was scurrying out.  Most of the tasting rooms stay open at least until 6PM and some to 7PM, another feature of the urban wine zones.  We went back with a couple of Kunin Syrahs for dinner and, despite the blood oath we took on the way to the airport in Seattle, we had a new wine club membership.

For those of us who love Walla Walla but don’t like the 4-1/2 hour drive, the 39 mile drive North and West of the city and across the Santa Ynez Mountains into Santa Barbara’s rural wine country is a gift.  The unique land forms create many different micro-climates and soils that help distinguish Santa Barbara wines.  The county sits in a westward bulge in the North American land mass that gives it a south facing

shoreline running east and west.  Most of the valleys have the same east/west orientation due to the way the mountains have folded over time.  All this makes it easier for the marine air to move in and out of many of their vines, creating hot weather in the day and cool, even cold weather at night.

The variety of soils is also fairly dramatic.  Some vineyards are perched on seabed limestone and sandstone and decomposing clay rich in magnesium.  Others are in a smooth, loamy mixture, on which stand those noble California oak trees, solitary in some places, in others bunched together as if sharing a secret.

The movie “Sideways” is still playing in Santa Barbara’s wine country.  The story of Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and their tour of the the valley prior to Jack’s wedding is memorialized in several maps and marketing initiatives.  You can get the same room, sit in the same booth at the Clubhouse Sports Bar and, if you want, take a swig from the spit bucket at Fess Parker’s Winery.  We saw a couple of large banners flapping “As seen on

Sideways.”  Released in 2004, the residual value of “Sideways” helped the valley get through the Great Recession.  And, the hits just keep on coming.  A Japanese version of Sideways was made in 2009 although, it was shot in Napa.  The author of the novel "Sideways" is Rex Pickett and he's playing the movie again as well.  After writing "Vertical," where he travels with his Mom through Oregon and to Wisconsin, he's now got a new project.  He's in Chile. 

There are 90 wineries in the county and some 16,000 acres of wine grapes, a slightly higher acreage than Washington’s Yakima Valley.  Nearly half the grapes are Chardonnay with another 20% in Pinot Noir. 

We stopped at a couple of the older wineries, Sunstone, where barrels are stored in caves and the wine dispensed in a lovely building.  They make a really good Merlot and we shared a glass, smacking our lips as if Miles might hear us. 

We drove to Solvang, an old Danish settlement that is the largest town in the

grape growing country, though we never stopped once we saw the crowds of tourists, the mall-like look of the place and the fake building fronts tarted up in some kind of Danish village theme. 

We did stop at a place called Los Olivos for lunch.  A wide spot in the road, but to me, it looked like what a village in wine country should look like.  It had several storefront wineries, among them Longoria, another wine pioneer.  

A college kid at UC Berkeley, Rick Longoria and his friends would drive up to Napa and Sonoma on weekends and soon were falling in love with the wine life and the beautiful landscapes in which it thrives.  In the early seventies, he was a cellar man for Buena Vista Winery in Napa, one of those kids you see hanging around the winery at the end of the day, eating a tuna sandwich and drinking a glass.  After some courses and a couple more years, he moved on to the Firestone Vineyard as a cellar manager and began the process of becoming a winemaker by borrowing gear and buying grapes from others and making a few bottles.  Among the wineries he worked as a winemaker was Gainey Vineyard, the place Seth Kunin threw his hat in as a volunteer.  He began producing his own label in 1982, though he continued to work as a winemaker a several wineries.   

He worked for others until 1997, always making a few hundred cases of his own.  Finally, in 1997, he and his wife began working full time for their own label and purchased his tasting room storefront in Los Olivos in 1998.  He planted his first vineyard in 1998.  If you are counting, that is a 23 year apprenticeship. 

After he built his first vineyard, in the hills above Lompoc, he needed a place to make his wine that was nearby and inexpensive.  He leased space in a Lompoc warehouse with aluminum siding and soon others like him were moving in, creating the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, a country cousin to the Funk Zone.

Among his wines are those that call up his Spanish heritage and we decide to eat lunch in his side yard that is home to three simple tables and the shade of a plum tree on a day that has become just a bit hot.

We choose a bottle of Alberino, a Spanish favorite of ours, to go with the wheat thins and a couple of salads from the deli in the small grocery store across the street.  We took the cold bottle to the side yard and, in a moment of weakness, joined the wine club.

After, we asked the couple at the next table to take a picture. We then ate a couple of plums off the tree for dessert and picked a couple more for the ride back to Santa Barbara. 


Silicon Valley Bank, State of the Wine Industry 2012-2013

Nice Video on Funk Zone

Touching the Millennial Funny Bone -- Judd's Winery Video

Trailer for Japanese Version of Sideways

Other Wine Reporting: Woodinville Wine Country

San Francisco for the New Year and a Return to Healdsburg

British Columbia Wine Country

Woodinville: The Wine Country Next Door

About four years ago we wandered into a quiet wine bar called Purple in a strip mall near Woodinville’s old Hollywood School building. It was a fun spot, we had a terrific late lunch, a wonderful conversation with the bartender and vowed to return soon. Of course, we did not. Last week, we finally did return and found that the entire strip mall and a couple of houses nearby had been taken over by wine tasting rooms, Purple was jammed and wineries had moved into the historic grade school nearby.

In the four years we procrastinated about returning to Woodinville's Purple, an additional seventy wineries set up shop in Woodinville, most in the Hollywood District and what the wine community calls The Warehouse District, where much of this wine is made. Others are dotted about the landscape though well concentrated around the city.

Later, we’ll get into some of the reasons why they are all here, but the outcome is terrific. I’ve always envied the close-in wine experience that northern California has where a dash from San Francisco to Sonoma is an hour and a half, or the experience in Walla Walla where many of the tasting rooms are located in the downtown. Now we have something close by as well, even if I wasn’t paying attention to it.

We’ve always had good wine close by in Woodinville, just not enough variety. Since the 1970s, Ste. Michelle and a bit later Columbia Vintners and DeLille Cellars provided a lovely nearby wine experience, but wine tasting needs lots of new tastes.  Tasting is about discovery.

Among the reasons for this explosion of tasting rooms was a law passed in the 2003 state legislative session that allowed vintners to have two tasting rooms. For a small winery on the east side of the state that meant your one-to-one relationship with the customer was subject to the limits of Benton City’s charm. A new economic impact study of the state’s wine industry sets out the numerical values of a more urban location. The study reports that about about 30,000 wine country visits occur annually to the central and south central Washington homes of Washington wines in Yakima, Prosser, Benton City and Walla Walla, while 500,000 people a year make their way to Woodinville.

This is valuable to some established desert wineries who now have a visible presence on the west side of the state – Covey Run, DiStefano, Facelli, J.Bookwalter, Silver Lake, Long Shadows, among others. It is also extremely useful to Woodinville wineries with active special event venues, like DeLille, where its winery is completely booked for weddings and other major events that lock out the taster. DeLille tried to make tasting by appointment only but the events still overwhelmed their ability to bring people to their lovely venue and splurge on a few bottles of very special wines.

But the greatest beneficiaries are, of course, the dreamers, the garageistas who want to throw it all in and make 2,000 cases of the best wine nobody has ever heard of – yet.

After lunch– we were just able to get into Barking Frog before it closed its lunch service – we strolled back and forth across the parking lot of the strip mall, meeting some of these people, hearing how they got into the wine racket and how they had thrown everything into the pot, committed to the wine life as nothing before. It was very sweet and we grew attached to them, aided by mostly generous pours.

Later that week, I went to the website called ‘Woodinville Wine Country,’ the association site for many Woodinville wineries, and read through each website, 57 in all. While websites do not necessarily offer a window into the soul, they often speak in the true voice of the owners who put them up. I noted the start dates of the wineries, which showed the growth pattern of the industry here. Of the 57 wineries listed on Woodinville Wine Country site, 37 had started after the year 2000. Of that number, ten got underway after 2006. Ten of the wineries listed on the site started business during the decade of the nineties, four during the 1980s and two before 1980.

Some of the stories of the 57 are lovely. There are lots of love stories in the wine business, and not all centered on a particular grape. Two of the new winemakers described their beginning with a honeymoon in northern Italy, one couple deciding, in a kind of half-baked way to start a wine store, followed by a shrug and a shout – “hell, let’s sell our own wines! ”Another was a corporate pilot who flew a couple of established winemakers back to Seattle and, by flight’s end, was smitten. A guy and his brother-in-law cashed in a Wisconsin dairy farmer’s life and started making wine in Walla Walla. Another story is Guardian Cellars, a winemaker who has a day job as a cop. Many apprenticed somewhere in the wine business, fronting in the tasting room, spending their vacations as a volunteer at crush. Some came from brewing to the vineyard, others were second or third generation wine kids. A large number of them had a combination of University of California at Davis, Washington State University, South Seattle Community College and the Boeing Wine Club associated with their journey.

Best typo of the 57? “Give us a swirt!”

The most common word used, without a doubt, was “passion.” The second most common word would be“quality,” for the kind of wines they want to make. Another very common word of this group was “sourced,” meaning they had no vineyards and would get their grapes from people who did own vineyards and grew the best grapes.

It is easy to like these people, easy to like their wines and easy to worry about how their dreams will work out. They face an array of issues in today’s wine business led by the continued fall out of the recession on the premium wine business and too many winemakers chasing too few grapes.

Among the impacts on the industry of the Great Recession’s was consumers moving away from super premium wines, those more than $15/bottle and ultra-premiums, those over $30. Many wineries either sold lower or held back inventory hoping for a quicker recovery from the recession than we have experienced. While these higher priced wines are making a recovery in 2012, they are still not back at pre-recession price levels. Another recessionary impact is that the value of many properties went down, making it harder to use land to leverage financing.  2010 and 2011 were difficult years for the wine industry, particularly in California. There were 18 defaults of growers or wineries in the Napa Valley in 2010. In 2011, 31 wineries in California, Oregon and Washington sold, some of them distressed sales, though others associated with generational change.

Another major issue is the growing shortage of the fruit these winemakers want to buy. The average cost of a ton of grapes in Washington state is about $1,100 a ton, but the premium red grapes these winemakers want to crush cost four times, even ten times as much, because of the quality of soil they grow in, their well-earned name and cultivation techniques that reduce the volume of fruit but concentrates the flavors in the remaining clusters.

One rule of thumb says that a ton of grapes will make about 600 bottles or 50 cases of wine. For a winemaker trying to make 2,000 cases a year, that means 40 tons of grapes, or about $160,000 just for the fruit, assuming you can get it. Once you’ve bought fruit, you then have to get it across the state to Woodinville. 

The size of the California industry and demand for fruit have made shortages a major issue. Last year, California added 400 wineries and very few new vineyards.  The good side of this phenomenon is that recession struck wineries desperate to sell will be let down gently –provided they own grapes.

Even in a time of high demand, we are not growing enough grapes because new grapes take lots of time to reach maturity and require a lengthy financial commitment, expensive land and don’t forget the water. All of these things are in very short supply. It takes three years before you can harvest a grape and five, even six years before the vines are in full production. According to a University of California at Davis study, a generic 35 acre farm with existing vines that you want to take out and replant with 30 acres of a more desirable grape, will cost $160,000/acre over three years to produce just one ton of grapes/acre in year three. Assuming $4,000/ton for those grapes, your income over three years is $120,000 against $4.8 million in cost. By the way, the UC Davis study doesn’t count the cost of the winemaker's salary.

While the Columbia Valley is one of the most desirable areas for growing fruit in the state, water there is a real difficult part of the equation. It’s very hard to find water for additional grapes in the Red Mountain AVA around Prosser, one of the state’s high end grape producing areas. While there is water in the Columbia Valley, there are many competitors for it, like federally protected fish. The only sure way to use additional Yakima water is to save substantial amounts of it from current uses. The Department of Ecology and the Kennewick Irrigation District have embarked on a plan to divert Yakima water further east into the Irrigation District’s delivery system, establish an aggressive conservation campaign while reallocating former farmland water in urbanizing areas, all to create about 3,000 acre feet of new water that would be used, in part, to irrigate 1,750 acres of new wine grape production at Red Mountain and add some additional water for salmon in the Yakima River. The best case scenario has this being done by 2015 at the earliest with a cost of $15,000,000.

These great wine growing areas are also heavily allocated over significant periods of time to existing wineries, who buy blocks of grapes for long periods of time and have them tended just so. We once bought a wine tasting dinner at an auction donated by an owner of a farm in the Red Mountain AVA. We tasted wines produced from grapes growing within a few feet of one another, but farmed differently and made with the style of the different wine makers. We tasted these grapes as relatively new vintages and ones that were many years old. The way they performed over time, the craziness of wet springs and dry harvest and other weird weather, the style of the winemakers, all conspired to splash, across the tongue, the incredible magic of wine. I guess I digress, but the rather woozy point here is that those winemakers are not going to give up those beautiful grapes anytime soon to a growing group of winemaking newbies. Sourcing great grapes, the single most important step in making great wine, is one of the first problems as they shut the garage door and head for Woodinville.  

The recession shows through in the grape acreage stats. In 2010, just over 1100 acres were planted after several years of 3,000 acre/year plantings.

A consumer squeeze on wine producers, the growing shortage of grapes, the cost and financial risk of producing new grapes, the difficulty of distribution, along with the maturing of the state’s wine industry all come together to induce consolidation. Precept Wine, once a small outfit who then partnered with a wine entrepreneur in 2003, is now making a million cases a year. It recently purchased Canoe Ridge and Sagelands in Washington as well as Ste. Chapelle in Idaho. In addition to these three, Precept owns Apex, Waterbrook, HOUSE, Washington Hills, Willow Crest, Primarius and Sawtooth Estate in the Pacific Northwest. It is the largest private winemaker in the region and has 15 vineyards totaling nearly 4,000 acres, about 8% of the state’s total wine grape acreage and 11.5% of the state’s producing vineyards. Their focus is on the $15 bottle market and further expansion.

In addition to Precept, Gallo has now entered the Washington market with its purchase of Covey Run and Columbia, a company that is the ultimate image for these new young winemakers, a direct descendent of a Laurelhurst garage in 1962. Who knows where it all leads, but Gallo and Precept will certainly acquire more brands in the state, but can they carry the weight of new grape production?

There’s another force for consolidation, coming a bit down the road because Washington winemaking is still a relatively young industry.  Many of the industry’s founders in Washington are getting older and ready to shift the business to another generation or sell to a company that is crazy to get its grapes.

Perhaps the most newsworthy sale in Washington state last year was the Betz Family Winery to an Arizona entrepreneur. Betz wines are among the very best produced in the state and Bob Betz is a Master of Wine, one of perhaps 300 people worldwide with that certificate. Betz is one of the many gifted winemakers who emerged from Ste. Michelle over the years.

A survey of the California growers and winemakers by the California Wine Institute revealed that 60% of them said they contemplated generational or ownership changes taking place by the end of this decade.  We should expect that is well.

On one of our trips across the parking lot of the strip mall, we were holding a tooth brush from Dusted Valley winery, a benefit of being a new member of the Stained Tooth Society, aka their wine club. We talked to a friend of my wife’s from Washington State University, a former tech industry and now wine industry entrant celebrating her one year anniversary of selling William Church wine in the Hollywood District strip mall. We also made a beeline for DeLille, a wine we enjoy. We thought it cost less than it once did and responded in kind, buying a couple of bottles more. 

We left Hollywood to catch JM Cellars before it closed, a lovely space on top Bramble Bump, a hill across the railroad tracks from the Columbia Winery Chateau and capped with a small house in a forested perch once owned by two very serious plant people, who brought home and tended exotics, mostly trees, from around the world.

Margaret and John Bigelow are, in many ways, the success story so many of these young winemakers have in mind. Both were tech business people, both yearned for a better lifestyle – the same hard work but richer emotionally –and started making wine in their basement in 1998. Soon, they were preparing a place to make wine in the light of day, atop Bramble Bump.

They wanted to get to 2,000 cases, a kind of magical accomplishment that carries some respect. But John needed to know more. On top of his voracious reading and seminars at UC Davis and elsewhere, he added work in Walla Walla, apprenticing during the summers to some great winemakers.

Not yet ready, in ‘03 he returned to the tech biz for three years while he continued to prepare and make wines at night and on weekends. In ‘06 he returned to winemaking full-time. The ability to make good wine is the ultimate calling card and, in 06, a call came from the Leonetti people in Walla Walla, Washington state wine royalty, to be sure, and they wanted to know if the Bigelows were interested in owning a piece of a new vineyard they were starting up -- then came a timely call from an investor, Mike Bezos, Amazon Jeff’s stepfather.

Their place is modest, but somehow it shines. You don’t realize that the house is a modest split level home from the early 60’s, but it is painted dark gray and updated with iron work, cool glass and all encompassed by the exotic trees. The fact that the father of one of the owners lives upstairs gives its shine a human scale luster, a glow you won't get in a corporate giant.

The wine, by the way, was wonderful and we set outside with a glass of pinkie boy and let the sun wash over us until the groom and his father-in-law arrived for the wedding that would be happening within the hour. Because of the location, parking is at a premium, so a valet helped shoo us out.  The guy bringing out our car was someone who worked as an analyst at the financial services company where my wife also works.

“I’ve been doing this for years,” he says. “I love anything about the wine business. And the owners are great- they treat us like members of the family.”

UC Davis Study Growing Grapes

Economic Impact of Wine Industry in Washington, 2012

Woodinville Wine Country Website