Berger: Trefethen soldiers on after Napa quake

It’s been just over six months since a devastating earthquake hit Napa, the country’s most famous wine region, which was then treated to literally weeks of TV and newspaper coverage.

Now that the stories are all but gone, with most of the immediate after-effects long ago reported, the behind-the-scenes cleanup continues for dozens of wineries.

And costs continue to pile up. Not only was a lot of precious wine lost, but so were expensive French oak barrels that needed replacing. Contractors are still in full repair mode, and many tasting rooms are but a shadow of their former selves.

Perhaps no Napa property suffered as much - and continues to suffer - as did Trefethen, the family-owned estate in the Oak Knoll area south of Yountville, whose main building is probably the most-photographed illustration of the devastation.

Built in 1886 as a winery, one of the first in California, the classic Trefethen multi-story building housed wine-filled barrels on a second level. When the quake hit at 3:20 a.m. last Aug. 24, workers arrived by 5 a.m. to see a building leaning west, but still standing.

Barely. Were it not for the rapid arrival of the workers and a crew of contractors who added steel support beams, the building may well have collapsed.

With steel beams still in place propping up the western edge of the property, Janet Trefethen takes a deep breath each time she walks past the handsome building that sits on a gorgeous property ringed with classic trees and a landscaping that includes fruit trees and flowers.

“It’s hard to look at,” she said.

Trefethen and her winemaker, Bryan Kays, have made a number of changes in their daily routines. For Trefethen, it is the time spent dealing with repairs that robs her of time as one of the nation’s top cutting-horse competitors.

The first order of business after the wine was saved, she said, was to deal with a new tasting room, since the old building in which it was housed was no longer habitable.

Despite the devastation that was widely evident around the valley, one local resident told me that county officials did little to expedite emergency tasting room permits.

“It took them [the Trefethens] a month to get a permit to put up a temporary place for the tasting room,” he said.

Janet acknowledges that that kind of facility is crucial to the company’s bottom line. Part of the company’s business strategy is tasting-room sales. With no tasting room, the company had zero income from that resource for weeks.

Today, Trefethen relies on an elegant portable tent-like structure that has tables and chairs for visitors’ tasting. Since it will take perhaps two more years to get the original building back in operation, the Trefethens are renovating a classic 1921 Craftsman building to house the new tasting room as well as offices.

Meanwhile, Kays has recrafted some of the Trefethen wines into a modern style that still hearkens back a bit to the winery’s first efforts three decades ago. The new lineup is impressive and includes a dramatic new merlot (2012, $40) and a forthcoming line of reds called Hillspring.

Contractors’ trucks now are now a temporary part of the landscape, but the wines are better than ever.