Cultural Exchange: Pacific Vintage Group hopes to capture the huge–though not necessarily ripe–Chinese market with their Sausalito wine.

Red Menace

Introducing wine to China may not be easy, but it’s no harder than bringing Chinese wine to America

By James Knight

Conditions are perfect in the wine country this harvest season. The days are sunny, the nights cool, and thousands of acres of new vineyards planted during the wine boom are ripening in the sun. Conditions are perfect for a wine glut.

It happens every time. Vineyards boom, sales flatten, prices fall. Hardest hit may be the Central Valley, where Chardonnay is practically given away, but this glut will soon be worldwide. Enter a maverick Santa Rosa company with a plan to import wine from the nation that has driven almost every other industry to its shores–China.

Not rice wine or plum wine, not even “red sorghum” wine. Cabernet Sauvignon.

The People’s Republic isn’t exactly on the map when it comes to the king of grapes. China, which has been admitted to the World Trade Organization, may be the origin of your clothes, shoes, barbecue grills, telephones, and countless plastic gizmos. Could a flood of price-busting Chinese Merlot be far behind? Barring a flood, Santa Rosa entrepreneur Kent Godwin is aiming for at least a trickle.

Godwin is president of the Pacific Vintage Group, formed in 1998 to explore the Chinese wine market. Godwin, who studies Chinese language and kickboxes in his spare time–and who appears generally to be a walking advertisement for the wine country lifestyle–is fashioning a marketing program to introduce the pleasures of the fermented grape to the Chinese. In the meantime, he is planning to import Chinese-made wine to the United States later this year. Saying that there might be a market especially in the Chinese community and restaurants, he cautions that “the key is to make sure it’s California-friendly.”

Pacific Vintage Group’s first idea was to sell California wine in China. The French are already getting in on the game: according to Godwin, a French supermarket chain in metropolitan Beijing and Shanghai has an impressive selection of wine, including some of the major Californian players like Gallo and Kendall-Jackson. “They’re not doing gangbusters; they’re keeping shelf space from their competitors,” Godwin explains.

But Godwin and company, among others, are working on inculcating the Chinese with an appreciation for wine. They have developed a Chinese wine with a uniquely American image. It’s called Sausalito, because “it sounds nice and might roughly translate to golden hills.”

Many before have tipsily contemplated that market, stupefied by a hallucination of never-ending sales. If 1.3 billion people had just one glass of wine a year . . . The figures inspire wine marketers to madness, drooling into their stemware. Still a developing country, China’s middle class of young, urban professionals is expected to eventually number 300 million, 10 times larger than the potential market of the United States. If the average Joe–or Chou–were to knock back an occasional glass of California wine after work, demand would race ahead of supply far beyond the setting sun.

But it may be a slow boat to China. Godwin quotes the saying, “China is the land of opportunity, and always will be.” The middle class is actually less than 9 percent of the population, and even in the urban metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, the qualifying income is around $1,200. The top price a bottle of wine can fetch is about $4. Tariffs and duties on imported wine don’t help, almost doubling the shelf price. That will be reduced to 14 percent under the World Trade Organization agreement.

And then would-be wine vendors have to promote dry, grape wine in a culture that is largely oblivious to that genre of refreshment. It’s curious, since grapes have been grown in China for 4,000 years and wine made for almost two millennia. The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, sort of the beatnik poets of the third century, cavorted famously, singing the praises of wine for its loosening effects on the creative mind, and its loosening effects generally.

But most Chinese, being pragmatically inclined, have in the past chosen rice wine or grain spirits–which deliver the most bang for their yuan. Enter the revolution. In the past decade, the government has officially promoted the healthful virtues of wine. The subtext is that moderate wine drinkers are likely to be less soused and more productive workers, and also that hard spirits divert a lot of grain that could be better used as food.

In modern Shanghai, where there is already a Starbucks around every corner, wine has indeed acquired a sophisticated “western” status image. Taste is yet to be learned, however. Wine is often poured into Coke, even at formal banquets.

Marketing dry wine in China requires an unconventional approach. “How do you get the attention of 1.3 billion people?” Godwin asks. Sausalito has captured 1 percent of the market in Shanghai–a huge achievement for a $6-$7 wine in the ultrapremium category. Some of its success may be due to its unique image.

Sausalito comes in a handsome package, with a real cork. The label reads “Presidential Selection,” and below, Thomas Jefferson sits in presidential repose (U.S. presidents are highly regarded in China). Jefferson seems to have a small cocktail table in front of him, using possibly an early draft of the Constitution as a place mat. Across from him the Statue of Liberty is unmoored in space, and in the background is some scenery that Godwin admits is more evocative of a Chinese estuary than Virginia.

The label bears a stamp that reads, “Napa Sonoma California Vineyards,” yet the wine is made in northeastern China, with some bulk French hooch to top it off. This is not unusual–in China, you can pretty much put anything you want on a label, and in the bottle.

Even with their success with Sausalito and their more price-competitive brand, Red Angel, Godwin says they are basically positioning for the future. At best, results will be slow in coming. But when they come, everyone will want to be there.

About the prospect of cheap, Sino-Franco wine flooding the shelves of a supermarket shelf near you, Godwin just doesn’t see it happening. He points out that it never happened with the much better quality South American wines. Anyway, hoping that the economy of the giant across the Pacific continues to grow, the upbeat Godwin says, “We’ll just sell them our good stuff!”

From the September 12-18, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

A Slave to the Seasons: Neil Dunaetz, whose produce once graced the tables of Chicago’s Ritz Carlton, lets his melons grow large while he remains small.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

For Neil Dunaetz, growing the best produce is rewarding but bittersweet

By M. V. Wood

Neil Dunaetz is not particularly good at social niceties. He’s like one of those people who treat the greeting “Hi, how are you?” as a question. It’s not that he’s mean. If anything, he’s quite kind. But of course, being nice and being adept at niceties are two very different–and often diametrically opposed–conditions.

So he’s standing here before me, the passion in his voice, his eyes, and his very stance radiating forth, and he’s telling me that he and I and everyone around here have blood on our hands. Oh, perhaps the exact words he’s using aren’t so dramatic. But the voice and eyes and stance make up for that.

Along with the metaphorical blood, Dunaetz has a cantaloupe in his hands. He picked it from his farm just hours ago. It’s ripe and fragrant, organically grown and pure. He cuts into it, and perhaps that juice running down his fingers is good enough to wash away the bloody sins.

He finishes slicing, wipes the blade on his shirt, and hands the bowl to me. We’re sitting on his one-acre farm in Sebastopol, which seems to hold about six acres worth of produce. Tomatoes, green beans, and other vegetables are growing high up on trellises. There’s hardly any room to walk between the rows of corn. Melons cover the ground. Cosmos and other flowers that lure beneficial bugs dot the landscape. Everywhere you look, the land is teaming with life, with color–with food.

Upon seeing the small farm, it’s hard to believe that all that produce, growing in such compact conditions, could possibly receive enough sunlight and nutrients and care to live, let alone thrive. But I had tasted it before. So I know that the exceptional flavor of this cantaloupe is no aberration. Satisfied customers at farmers markets have been know, to stand in front of Dunaetz’s table directing other buyers to his stand.

Sarah Stegner, the dining room chef at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, still remembers Dunaetz. “That man grew the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted in my life,” she blurts out as soon as I mention his name. Dunaetz grew produce for the Ritz before moving to Sonoma County. “We still miss him,” Stegner says. “I mean, there are definitely good growers still around here, but Neil–he’s something else. He’s absolutely fanatical about the care he gives his plants.”

“I don’t sell produce I’m not proud of,” Dunaetz says. “If something is just good enough, I’ll sell it with apologies. If it’s really good, then that’s fine. If it’s so good that you wouldn’t mind dying right there and then because you had a chance to taste it–well, then I’m happy.”

Attaining happiness, it seems, has never been a simple feat for Dunaetz. He has found it difficult to be happy as long as he knows that others in the world are suffering.

Dunaetz, 47, spent most of his years in Chicago crusading for social justice. He paid his rent and bills by cleaning other people’s homes. But the bulk of his time and spirit went toward attempting to educate others about the wrongs of the world and trying to correct them.

The pressures, burdens, and sorrows of that way of life took their toll on Dunaetz. Feeling drained and depressed, he took a year off to travel around the world. And then he went back to the family farm in the Midwest and helped his father there for two seasons.

“And that was it. I knew that this is what I need to do. It’s what I want to do,” Dunaetz says.

“Out here in nature, you realize how huge it all is and how tiny you are. But if you can just let go of ego and let yourself be small, then there’s so much more you can be a part of. And when you finally see how insignificant you are, it’s such a wonderful, liberating feeling. Then you see it’s not up to you to save the world.”

“Being out here, growing food . . .” Dunaetz has the tendency to stop in midsentence to think and search for the right words. Sometimes he thinks out loud, circling the point he wants to make until he zeros in on it. Other times, like right now, he considers it silently. And then he finally continues. “These past five years I’ve spent farming, I’ve been the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

I suspect it’s this very sense of happiness that leads him to cultivate some of the best produce around. I assume that at some point Dunaetz made a deal with the universe. A deal that many of us make.

No matter how much we may believe in social justice and equality, we look around and see that things aren’t equal. And it very well might be a simple stroke of luck that Dunaetz and you and I were born in a time and place where we have the privilege to choose to do that which brings us joy. But you look around and wonder, “At whose expense?” So the deal is made.

And I imagine Dunaetz deciding that he would give up his draining crusade on behalf of the world’s suffering people and enjoy some happiness of his own. But in return, he would provide his community with the best possible food he could grow. Perhaps the privilege of choosing self-fulfillment just fell in his lap. But he would work to deserve it. Or at least that’s the way I imagine the deal going.

Dunaetz tries to tread lightly on the planet. These days, the word “consumer” is used as a synonym for “American.” But I don’t believe that would be correct usage in his case. He owns a sparse wardrobe consisting mostly of T-shirts, shorts, and jeans. He buys some food, but usually eats from his garden. He rents a place. But most of the time, he lives outdoors on the farm, inside a tent he set up in a clearing near the tomato plants. There’s a sleeping bag in there and a number of books. Right outside there’s a hammock, a couple of chairs, a cooler, and a table made out of four old garbage containers with a piece of plywood on top.

He likes to have a little extra cash so that he can go to a conference here and there. Other than that, most of the money he makes goes right back into the farm. But then there’s the car. He has to use plenty of fuel to take him to all the different farmers markets in the county so that he can sell his produce and make enough money to allow him to keep farming. He finds so much joy in farming, but I’m sure he sometimes wonders, “My happiness at whose expense?”

“Our policy in the Middle East has everything to do with getting cheap fuel and sustaining our way of life,” he says, with that passion in his voice and eyes and stance. Following the Sept. 11 attacks last year, Dunaetz gave away his produce for free at the next Sonoma Farmers’ Market. At the same time, he also gave everyone an earful of his take on U.S. foreign policy. That talk, I believe, must be pretty similar to the earful I’m getting right now.

“Our country imposes injustice and unhappiness on so many people around the world, and we’re keeping quiet about it because we’ve been bought off,” he continues. “We don’t want to change our lifestyle.”

What saves Dunaetz from sounding condescending and self-righteous is that, if you listen carefully, you can hear the sorrow in his voice when he adds: “If we had to pay the real cost of gas, I, for one, wouldn’t be able to go to all those farmers markets and sell my produce.”

Neil Dunaetz sells his produce at the following farmers markets: Napa and Healdsburg on Tuesdays; Sonoma on Fridays; Oakmont on Saturdays; and Sebastopol on Sundays.

From the September 5-11, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.