Meet Bill Hill, mountain man

Wines & Vines, Oct, 1992 by Richard Paul Hinkle

"Here, if you go above 30 clusters per vine, there's a slow, steady diminishing of intensity and complexity. On the other side, when you go below 20, there's no further increase in quality. Thus, if you use a high vertical trellis, irrigate and fertilize at the beginning of the growing season, with our lower humidity there's no reason why we can't get over eight tons per acre of top quality fruit with closer spacing."

Here's how that factors out. First, you've got 2,050 vines per acre, leaving 24 to 28 clusters per vine. And that means upwards of eight tons per acre, using all of the available sunlight. There is a kicker. Development costs (exclusive of land costs) are high. Very high.

"Yes, we are looking at $40,000 per acre just to develop the vineyard," admits Hills almost sheepishly. Almost. There's the fox's slyness behind those lensed lids. "When you're getting upwards of $20 the bottle, for top quality wine, and the higher yields, it pencils. I know that typical development costs here in the Napa Valley are less than $20,000, and it shocks people when I say 40. But when I say eight tons, there is disbelief. But with clusters that only weigh a quarter of a pound, or thereabouts, that's balanced, quality fruit."

Figure it out. If you're making wine that sells for upwards of $20 a bottle, and production costs are under $1,000 a ton, well, as Hill puts it, "There's a comfortable amount of profit there, more than enough to justify initially higher costs of development. And that's what it takes to make the finest wines, the willingness to pay up front for a profit that doesn't show itself until the second decade of operations.

"That's where I think we have the advantage, is a sense, over the big guys, the Gallos or the Seagrams," assesses Hill. "You see, the most important decision I ever make as a winemaker is buying the property. And I can spend the time crawling through the poison oak in Anderson Valley or the Eola Hills to find this or that 40 acres. And that is definitely to my advantage." Crawling through the poison oak to get to the top of the hill. It pencils.

(Hinkle's latest book is "Beyond the Grapes: An Inside Look at Napa Valley," written with L.A. TIMES wine columnist Dan Berger. He is currently finishing his fifth book, a history of Chateau Montelena, wrote the script for the video "Wines of a Place" |narrated by Raymond "Perry Mason" Burr~, and is the author of Hinkle's Law, which holds that there are only three responses appropriate to any glass of wine: (1) I like it; (2) I don't like it; and (3) I'll drink it if somebody else pays for it!~