On California, Part II: Valley & Shiva
Grape vines grow wildly along the Yuba River. Vitis californica, a varietal native to California, is content to sprout through cracks in its rocky banks and up trees and shrubs, or, where there is nothing to climb, in widespread leafy patches. Valley Royce Lee wanted to harvest some of these grapes this fall, enough for a tiny bottling at least, but the spring frost that swept through Nevada County wiped out most of them, along with much of the area’s cultivated fruit.
In early April, tiny buds—would-be grapes—were just flowering when a sudden drop in overnight temperature glazed them with a layer of ice, glittering and entombed. By chance I was in San Francisco that week and saw Valley with Shiva Osteen at Bar Part Time. Valley and Shiva had driven around Chicago Park the day before to visit the vineyards they farmed together, assess the damage and mourn the shocked and browning shoots.
There was a lot of support in the room, with many more empathetic winemakers around than in your average bar, but the mood was full of What-Won’t-Be. This was understandable as it was, with the prospect of a curbed 2022 harvest ahead of them, but there was another layer of heartbreak under the surface. At the time, Valley and Shiva were still Mountain Misery, the winemaking project they started as a couple in 2018, but their romantic and working partnership was on the rocks. By June, along with the first releases of their last vintage together, they announced Mountain Misery’s dissolution.
But this is not a story about a breakup, nor is it a moment frozen in time. While the drama of a split or environmental calamity—or scarcity, generally—might be compelling hooks to sell wine, more compelling is how Valley and Shiva have responded to these shifts. After all this, they are no longer making wine together, but they are both still making wine.
Transition begins with a Before, not far from those vineyards in Chicago Park. Shiva was born to Deadheads, also growers, who moved to Nevada County when she was four. Valley’s family moved often with her father’s work in the military, but she spent formative teenage years in the Sierra Foothills. The duo met in high school, after which they lived together in Wellington, New Zealand, working in cafes. They had their minds set on farms there too, including vineyards, where they found an easy immediacy in their relationships to how and where their food was grown. Their work visas restricted their ability to follow the vines however, prompting them to ask, “How do I stay?”
Visa issues ultimately pulled them from the idyll of the islands and back to their hometown. In some ways, they fell to earth, but the Sierra Foothills are their own inconvenient Paradise. The couple lived with Shiva’s parents while they interned at Oregon House and Clos Saron, the storied estate of Gideon Beinstock and Saron Rice. They were in the thick of winemaking, which, at Clos Saron, means farming. Everything they eat, they cultivate—it was there that Valley learned how to raise rabbits for food—and, apart from years with truly dire yields, all the wine they make is from fruit they have also grown. Like most stagiaire positions though, the work was unpaid, so while their time at the winery provided invaluable knowledge and experience, they found themselves asking again, “How do I stay?”
The Bay Area beckoned, a place where both Valley and Shiva could find work that would sustain a mutual purpose: to farm and make wine. Like so many winemakers in California, this meant a winery in one place and fruit in another. Not by choice, but negociant wine production[1] is the norm in California, to the point that this term is hardly used as a point of distinction among small-scale producers. Land prices can be prohibitively high, so farming full-time on estate-owned (or even leased) vineyards is a rare and privileged position. Out of a combination of convenience and necessity, many of these winemakers live in cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles, particularly while in their early years of production. As a result, a vast majority buy fruit from vineyards that are often hours from where they live, with a smaller fraction farming remotely throughout the year.
Growing their own fruit was a priority for Mountain Misery, as was the specificity of the Foothills, despite the distance. Countless hours on the I-80 and thousands of miles on the odometer, all in an effort to farm the wine that felt closest to home.
After spending some time there, you can see why. Just under 150 miles northeast of the Bay Area, the interstate gradually gives way to hairpin curves through mountains blanketed with evergreen—the Tahoe Forest’s western hem. The Yuba River runs through it all, feeding creeks, dropping into falls, drifting under suspension bridges that date back to the 1800s. Trees, water and elevation are the lungs that temper this inland climate. Even when highs in the summer are extremely high, they are met by a sharp diurnal shift, a cooling breath out at night that brings relief for ripening fruit. And so much fruit: apples, grapes, peaches, manzanita, all grown within a rich historical context of fermenting them. On my last day in town, Valley and I watched as a plaque was hung in the late morning heat to commemorate the County’s First Commercial Winery, established in 1860. Going back even further, the Nisenan Tribe has a long tradition of making cider from manzanita berries. [2]
Backyard vineyards are the norm in Nevada County. Small when compared to most commercial vineyards in, say, Mendocino, but large enough for a fairly robust community of winemakers. The Sierra Wine & Grape Growers Association[3] hosts monthly-ish meetings and post classifieds to their website like “Drip Irrigation Tubing” and “Auburn Grapes for Sale.” Sure, with a well-preserved 19th century hotel and bars like “The Mine Shaft,” Nevada City’s most obvious draw might be its historic place in the Gold Rush, but local agriculture has proven its lasting power.[4]
When Valley and Shiva first started looking for land to work in the area, they took virtual flights through Google Maps’ Satellite View, zooming into promising-looking plots, finding doors to knock on. This led them to Diane Houston, to Alan Tangren, to several acres of vines within a mile of each other in Chicago Park. For a few years, they split their time between vineyards in the Foothills and San Francisco. Long hours of farming—pruning in the winter, seeding ground cover like clover and Queen Ann’s Lace, spraying stylet oil to stave off mildew, leaf pulling, checking and picking fruit in the late summer—with a long drive there and back to their home in Daly City, or the winery in Richmond. Harvest was the most intense, with bins of the day’s pick packed into their van at vulnerable temperatures, with the anxious knowledge that fermentation starts immediately off the vine, especially on a hot day, on a hot drive.
It felt as unsustainable as it was. Even without the distance, farming can feel if not thankless, then sometimes fruitless, especially in recent years. During their last harvest together in 2021, Valley and Shiva had to be escorted to one of their pickings by fire marshals, and the year before that was also uneasy with wildfires. Then came April of 2022, when Nevada County experienced its worst frost in ten years. What could have been Mountain Misery’s largest harvest to date suddenly looked dire, with easily half or more of the potential fruit lost overnight.
Again, “How do I stay?”
This refrain is also the name of Valley and Shiva’s first cuvée, and one of my favorite wines that they made together. When I first drank the 2020 vintage, Mountain Misery was still intact, joining Sam and I on Gay Wine[5] for an interview centered on their sources of fruit. Both Valley and Shiva wanted to make it clear that their choice to farm is a constant dance of questioning—of negotiation with themselves, with landowners, with access and with the cards dealt to and by the vines year-by-year.
“Not everyone has access to farming, especially if you’re just getting started,” Shiva acknowledged. “Even if you’re not farming,” she continued, “don’t be disconnected from the vines. Be as close to the vine as you possibly can.” Buying fruit is its own dance, its own negotiation. The lack of agency over the quality of fruit necessitates a lot of questioning, both of each vineyard’s farming practices and one’s own values—what you will and won’t take.
There was a bit of the After in this thought. Once their relationship changed shape, so did each of their relationships to the fruit they’d found together. Over the summer, they moved out of their shared apartment. Valley found a place in Apple Valley, just twenty minutes from the vineyards in Chicago Park. With a blank slate on a couple’s wooded property, she started a small winery. Shiva stayed in San Francisco and found her own place in a new Richmond winery, hosted by Diego Roig and Shaunt Oungoulian of Les Lunes. In the split, they decided that Valley would continue to work with the farming contracts in Chicago Park, while Shiva would work with the fruit from Mountain Misery’s one negociant arrangement, the gewurztraminer vineyard that lent itself to the fan-favorite bottling, “Kiss Your Friends,” along with farming a plot of chardonnay just outside Nevada City.
For Shiva, after years spent in intimacy with her fruit sources, this change was a difficult one. One morning during harvest, I went to the Foothills with her to pick grenache. We arrived just after sunrise, only to turn around after half an hour in the vines. The fruit was billed as organic, but looked to be over-cropped and, after a few pressing questions from Shiva, turned out to be sprayed with fungicide as well. It was her second experience like this in the span of a week, and we spent the drive back talking about, what else, how to stay.
Shiva ended up with less fruit than she might have expected when this year began, but—from sources through Diego and Shaunt, from places closer to what is now home—good fruit is what she got. For different reasons, equally out of her hands, Valley worked with less too, but with enthusiasm. The grapes that did survive this year make up one of Valley’s best vintages—she remarked over and over how beautiful the fruit was. Rather than buying grapes to supplement the frost-stricken crop, she simply made fewer wines. Most of the fruit from Alan’s vineyard (formerly “Spider Garden Red” and “Spider Garden White”) will go into a single cuvée, a one-off and a marker of a significant year. Don’t let a scarcity mindset take hold though—one project has now become two. Sometimes to stay is to move on, to stay is to stay close to one’s values over expectations, to stay is to meet the fruit where it is. Maybe there will be wild grapes to pick next year.
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[1] Negociant is a term used more commonly in France to refer to producers who buy grapes, as opposed to farming the vines themselves.
[2] The ‘little apple’ trees live up to their name; tiny, tannic berries cluster along the plant’s luminous red branches.
[3] In general, SWGGA is somewhat leery of natural winemaking, but with a burgeoning interest. Diane Houston, the owner of one of Valley’s larger fruit sources, has been dabbling with native yeasts and is a vocal supporter of Valley’s work.
[4] It should be noted that some efforts have been made to revive the area’s gold industry, not locally, but by would-be prospectors from out of town. When I was there for harvest, I saw countless signs in protest of the mine’s reopening, out of concern for its potential threat to groundwater in an already drought-stricken area, among other environmental impacts. .
[5] Gay Wine is the online talk show and collaboration that lends its name to this column, where Sam and I talk about wine, food, and our experience of the culture around those things. Watch new and previous episodes on Instagram (@gaewhalen) — the interview and tasting with Mountain Misery was posted on January 27th, 2022.