Vineyard Article

Compagni Portis



When Stephen and Natalie Compagni Portis bought ten acres on the northeast side of the city of Sonoma in 1998, it wasn’t because they aspired to own a vineyard. He was an investment banker; she was a psychologist. They were just looking for a place in the country for their son to grow up.
 
As it turned out, they ended up owning part of the first fine-wine property ever planted in Sonoma County: the original Agoston Haraszthy estate. Still, it wasn’t until they had lunch with the farmworkers during their first harvest, Natalie says, that they “realized we were part of this whole other thing.”

Having thus become grapegrowers by default, the Compagni Portises are now preserving of one of the most unusual old vineyards in the North Coast – a role they seem to find very gratifying. “I’ve been involved in lots of industries,” says Stephen. “This one is the most fun.”

The son of physicist Alan Portis – a U.C. professor, Guggenheim fellow, and director of the Lawrence Hall of Science – Stephen grew up in Berkeley in the Sixties and Seventies. While you might not expect that to foster a career in capitalism, as a boy he made money on cinnamon toothpicks, home-engineered firecrackers, and ice-cream cones from his family’s freezer. As a teenager he converted this talent into control of concessions (and 20 percent of their proceeds) at Cal sporting events.

After graduating first in his class at Berkeley High and studying engineering at Cornell, Stephen returned to California to work on wind-energy projects. But the call of commerce soon lured him to Stanford business school, where he got an MBA – after which, he says, “I was unemployable. I never had another job working for someone else.” Instead he did “odd” jobs as a financial consultant while living in Italy, London, Tokyo, and New York City.

After a few years, Stephen decided it was time to settle down and raise a family. He came home and, within six months, was introduced by a mutual friend to Natalie – a marriage and family therapist who had moved to Berkeley from the East Coast to get her master’s in clinical psychology. The two found that they shared a sense of humor. “When our friend said something was ‘heinous,’ Natalie remembers, “we thought he said ‘anus’ and we both cracked up.” Another good joke: Natalie’s notion that Stephen “actually had a job.”

In 1991, they got married and set up housekeeping in Oakland. For several years before and after, Stephen bought, sold, and started companies –a group of Culligan dealerships, chain of high-end grocery stores, and an Internet startup named Yellow Giant, which intended (until the 2000 Nasdaq crash, that is) to take telephone yellow pages online. Amid the savings-and-loan crisis in 1990, he and one of his Stanford classmates started a business called Leveraged Equity Management Inc., buying distressed bank loans from liquidated S&Ls and “helping hedge funds make hay”; when the airline industry went bust after September 11, 2011, he “teamed up with a couple of guys who knew about buying airplanes,” purchased 25 jetliners whose leases were in default, and resold the planes a few years later when air travel revived. “Our business was about insolvency and distress,” he acknowledges. “But I learned it all from cinnamon toothpicks.”

In 1995, Stephen and Natalie were confronted with a different kind of distress as she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 35. “I was probably the healthiest breast-cancer patient you ever saw,” she says. “I was vegetarian, had no known risk factors, and had just given birth.” A year later, after undergoing multiple surgeries – as well as acupuncture, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, various kinds of bodywork and naturopathic treatments (but not radiation or chemotherapy) – she was declared cancer-free; in the meantime, she educated herself and “learned that, whereas one out of 20 women got breast cancer in 1973, in 1995 it was one out of nine. Now it’s one out of eight – and where it used to be post-menopausal, now it’s not, just as young girls are going through puberty earlier. It has to be about environmental exposure – we live in a chemical soup.”

Natalie joined the group Breast Cancer Action, which subsequently nominated her to be a patient representative on the Oncologic Drug Advisory Committee for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The committee made waves in 2011 when it voted to revoke approval of the world’s best-selling cancer pharmaceutical – Avastin, hailed as a “miracle drug” – as a treatment for breast cancer.  “The benefits did not bear out, but it had major side effects such as bowel perforations,” Natalie says. She was quoted in the New York Times saying: “Hope is very important, but to offer hope that isn’t substantiated I don’t think is responsible.” Nevertheless, “A lot of people were screaming at us. Genentech’s stock plummeted.”

After she recovered from cancer (though she stresses that it can always recur), Natalie and Stephen started looking for property in the country. The ten-acre plot they found in Bartholomew Park – nestled in a native oak forest alongside six acres of 50-year-old vines and a 250-square-foot former cookhouse – had once been part of Buena Vista winery, but was since split off by subdivisions. “From the moment I saw it,” Natalie remembers, “my heart said, ‘This is my place. I want to be buried here’.”

Unfortunately, its price was the highest per acre in the history of the county. “That’s exactly what you don’t want to do,” Stephen says, regarding the seller’s lack of distress. They decided to “keep an eye on it,” and after a year learned that two other buyers were interested. At that point Stephen drove back up and spent a “magical” night under the stars, accompanied by a supporting cast of frogs, ducks, deer, hawks, and coyotes. “He called me and said, ‘I get it – this is fabulous,” Natalie recalls. He promptly sold a chain of Kettle restaurants in Texas, turning “Texas land into Sonoma land.”

Raised a small town in upstate New York, Natalie – an accomplished cook – had been raised among immigrant relatives from southern Italy. “Everybody grew and canned things,” she says. “I grew up in the garden with my grandfather.” Hence, the first thing she and Stephen did was put in a garden, pulling out the blackberries and poison oak by hand without chemical herbicides. They applied the same attitude toward the vineyard, which had previously been farmed with conventional pesticides.

“I did a lot of research [on chemicals] and presented it to the ranch manager,” Natalie says. “He said, ‘We’ll just use Roundup,’ but I knew about Roundup. We’re on well water here, and I’d just had cancer. I didn’t buy this land to poison myself.”

All of the old, deep-rooted vines were growing white grapes, which were thought to be mainly gewürztraminer. Farmed without irrigation, they produced less than a ton of fruit per acre. The Compagni Portises were advised to pull them out and plant pinot noir or zinfandel. “I said, ‘No, there’s something right about this,” Natalie reports. “We wanted to honor the history of the property; we weren't into it for making money.”

Eventually they hired Phil Coturri, Sonoma Valley’s premier organic vineyardist, and connected with Will Bucklin of Old Hill Ranch to buy the grapes. Bucklin selected out the identifiable vines and bottled the wine as gewürztraminer – a tough sell, which eventually forced him to abandon the enterprise. But he passed the baton to Morgan Twain-Peterson, who was known to be interested in heirloom vineyards – and when Morgan analyzed the grapes, he found that fewer than half were gewürztraminer. The rest was a mélange of berger, chardonnay, French colombard, green Hungarian, riesling, sylvaner, trousseau gris, and others still to be determined.

In the tradition of California field blending that he’s helping revitalize, Morgan co-fermented all the grapes and aged them in neutral oak. The result was a beautiful, beguilingly fragrant wine that fairly sings of blessed origins in a venerable location. Bedrock and Coturri have since upgraded the vineyard’s farming practices, adding posts and wires to the original “California sprawl,” making the vines a bit more fruitful. Half the grapes now go to the Arnot-Roberts and Carlisle wineries, which render their own intriguing versions of Compagni Portis.

Today Stephen seems almost surprised to be enjoying the wine industry, which he describes as “a kinder and gentler kind of business. It’s a combination of science, art, and nature, which nurtures all kinds of quirky eccentrics – interesting and intelligent people who aren’t just about money.” Maybe that helped spur the recent direction of his own work, which has turned back toward renewable energy, as it did when he first got out of college. A few years ago, after hearing Dan Kammen – the noted chairman of U.C. Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory – speak, Stephen made an appointment to talk to him in his office; this culminated in Stephen’s appointment as a visiting scholar to the lab, and soon he and Cisco DeVries (former aide to the U.S secretaries of energy and transportation, and chief of staff to Berkeley mayor Tom Bates) gave birth to PACE: Property-Assessed Clean Energy, a program enabling homeowners to upgrade their houses through bonds, which are paid back via property taxes with PACE handling the administration and financing.

After beginning in Berkeley, the program – which was chosen one of 20 “world-changing ideas” by Scientific American, written up in one week by the Wall Street Journal, Economist, New York Times, and USA Today, and embraced by the Obama administration as an eco-friendly way to generate jobs – spread throughout California and 28 other states. In 2010, however, the government mortgage companies Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac threatened to redline participating communities, saying that PACE-associated property liens presented too much risk to lenders. Since such an action would torpedo the real-estate market in any PACE-using area, it effectively brought the program to a halt. Sonoma County and the State of California sued the Federal Housing Finance Agency in protest; as of this writing, a U.S. District Court has directed the FHFA to investigate new rules that would allow the program to proceed with adequate protections.

“It’s a whole mechanism for how to do tens or hundreds of millions of dollars [in energy upgrades],” Stephen says of PACE. After working on the program full-time for a year, he stepped down as CEO, and is now developing wind projects on islands that previously relied on diesel fuel. Meanwhile, Natalie’s psychotherapy practice has evolved to focus on trauma, “from very young children exposed to violence to adults experiencing recent loss to people dealing with cancer in themselves or their families.” In the course of this work, she’s counseled clients in the aftermath of earthquakes, the Oakland Hills fire, and September 11 (the latter through the Red Cross).

“Natalie is first and foremost about people and relationships and connection,” says Stephen, adding, “You can do that here in a way that’s hard to do in the city. Because wine is such a big part of the Sonoma economy, it gives us a connection to the community in one more way. There’s really a sense of place here – growing up in Berkeley, I didn’t have that sense of being part of a small town. You didn’t know who raised your chickens.”

“A lot of it is about the earth,” Natalie agrees. But although the ostensible topic of conversation is the grapes in Compagni Portis wine, she might be speaking about her clients when she says, “They’ve come into their own now, because someone’s loving them and doing right by them.”

- David Darlington