Celebrating the 'wholeness of food' -- and wine

<p>Last May, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini of Italy came to Northern California to formally announce the Slow Food Nation event planned in San Francisco for Labor Day weekend. On that visit, his hosts for an intimate Wine Country dinner were Valeria and Agustin Huneeus of Quintessa Estate in Rutherford.</p><p>The evening's menu, prepared by chef and fellow Slow Foodie Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame, highlighted seasonal fare and, of course, ample pourings of Quintessa's sublime Bordeaux-inspired wines.</p><p>Petrini signed a copy of his just-released manifesto, "Slow Food Nation," for each of the guests, who included Atlantic Monthly contributor Corby Kummer (also Petrini's unofficial translator) and artist Eleanor Coppola.</p><p>Seated together at two long dinner tables in the Huneeuses' private home, surrounded only by vineyards and sky, the setting could not have been more fitting.</p><p>The owners of 300 acres of stunning, prime, vine-planted Rutherford land, the Huneeuses, particularly vineyard manager Valeria, embody the Slow Food ethos of producing and consuming food -- and yes, wine is food. As Petrini lays it out, such food is good (healthful and delicious), clean (produced sustainably in ways that are sensitive to the environment) and fair (produced with respect for social justice).</p><p>"Slow Food is not different from what I was already doing, seeing the wholeness of food," said Valeria Huneeus. "That's the energy you're feeding yourself.</p><p>"You're eating dead food when you go to a McDonald's. The lettuce I saw in the Slow Food Victory Garden in San Francisco's Civic Center last week was like a beam of light. You eat that, there's something more that's given to you."</p><p>It's an approach that informed the development of the estate vineyard at Quintessa, land she and her husband took ownership of in the early 1990s. Huneeus was particularly respectful of the fact that, as she puts it, she was invading totally pristine land, an unusual opportunity and challenge in the Napa Valley these days.</p><p>"One of my first things was 'I don't want to move the trees, whatever is here I want to work around,' " she recalled.</p><p>Huneeus studied viticulture and enology in her native Chile but had then gone on to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition and biochemistry from Columbia University in New York. Following that, she spent several years at UCSF researching cholesterol.</p><p>But endless toil in the lab was ultimately not for her, particularly as children were added into the mix and she felt more needed at home. When husband Agustin began running Franciscan Oakville Estate in 1985, after having built successful wineries in Chile, Valeria felt the pull of the land. Once she found this piece of Rutherford land, she was convinced it was time to get back into the dirt and grow wine.</p><p>"It's very hard to start from zero," she said. "After about a year I decided I wanted to go organic. It was five years later that I was at a dinner in the valley and (renowned French vintner) Michel Chapoutier was there and he's a very respected biodynamic farmer, it's his life. I kept listening to him -- he was passionate about what he was talking about -- but I had no idea. (Biodynamics were) something I had never heard of."</p><p>Afraid to show her ignorance, she just listened. But the moment she got home, she delved into her books, finding one on her nightstand called "Fertile Soil." She remembered Chapoutier discussing a biodynamic soil preparation known as Preparation 500.</p><p>She looked in the index and there it was: a method by which cow manure is stored in cow horns then buried over winter and later mixed with water, stirred and applied to the vineyard's soil according to particular moon phases.</p><p>"From there I went," she said of her own transformation from organic to biodynamic. "It totally made sense of how I wanted to farm."</p><p>What resonated most was the notion of being a part of something bigger. That one doesn't just take care of her own property, soil or rootstock, but that it's important to integrate into your surroundings, all the way to the cosmic level.</p><p>"You see in the vines how they respond to light," she explained. "In spring you start lengthening the days, the buds start swelling and opening, and then they go through this amazing growth spurt and it's related to the temperature. Everything is telling you something."</p><p>When she first studied viticulture, all those nuances were taken for granted, she said: The only thing people were concerned with was a vineyard's canopy, and it was thought that if you simply had a lot of leaves reaching out for photosynthesis, the grapes would grow.</p><p>Since then, so much has been learned about the importance of soil, a topic of utmost interest to farmers applying organic and biodynamic methodologies.</p><p>"It used to be the soil was (just) for holding the vine, that whatever is happening is what you see (above the ground)," Valeria Huneeus added. "When really where life is is in the soil, so that's what we take care of. All of the immune system of the plant is there, the availability of the minerals, all the nutrients. (Biodynamics founder) Rudolf Steiner thought the whole nervous system of the plant was in the soil."</p><p>For Huneeus, whose father passed away last year at a very healthy and happy age of 96, the message of organics, of biodynamics and of Slow Food, is simple.</p><p>"My father never in his life had a cold, and most of his siblings reached into their 90s, too, and there were eight of them," she said. "They had their own farm, grew their own vegetables, never ate fast food; it was unknown.</p><p>"Growing up, I was never allowed to have sodas or sweets. That's the way things were. As a family, we always had dinner and lunch together. It had meaning. We've lost that."</p><p>So in the end, the philosophies behind Slow Food feel to Huneeus no different from what she's been doing all along: appreciating the wholeness of food.</p><p>In growing and making wine, the vintner hopes to bring back a sense of the sacred, to show that slow and steady and healthy can win the race.</p><p>Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com or visit wineabout.pressdemocrat.com.</p>