Imagine a private tour of a significant contemporary art collection with the curator, followed by a sumptuous tasting of some of Napa Valley’s most prestigious wines in a beautiful garden up on the mountain. You can have it all – and here’s how.
Swiss-born entrepreneur Donald Hess came to Napa to expand his mineral water business but fell in love with the wines and began his winery on Mount Veeder about six miles northwest of the city of Napa. This land is historically important, too, as the early German winemakers in Napa started producing wines on Mount Veeder in the 1860s. Hess shared the Romans’ belief that the best wines grew on hillsides, and he bought the vineyard property in the late ’70s adjacent what is now the Christian Brothers Conference & Retreat Center , Mount La Salle.
The Christian Brothers were pioneers among California vintners, and in the late 1980s, when the order sold its vineyards and left winemaking, Hess worked out a lease agreement to continue production at the Mount La Salle location, launching the Hess Collection and the land that today produces some of its most distinguished wines under the Mount Veeder appellation in Napa.
The estate is out Redwood Road along hairpin turns and a creek toward Mount Veeder. A steep driveway leads up to Hess-Persson Estates. Among the Hess brands, this land produces the most distinguished Hess Collection and Lions Head Collections wines, elegant, sustainably grown and often limited small-block productions that are choice in flavor and structure. (The widely distributed grocery-store variety, Hess Select wines, are grown in California’s Central Coast region.)
Hess, who died earlier this year, “had two passions, wine and art,” according to Rob Ceballos, director of art for the Hess Collection Contemporary Art Museum.
Inside The Hess Art Collection
After passing through the tasting garden and along lily ponds, we entered the ivy-covered fieldstone building the houses several of the estate’s experiences for visitors.
We walked through the museum with Ceballos, whose intimate knowledge of the collection, after working with Hess for three decades, comes through in his lively and detailed storytelling about the artists, their inspiration and visual messages. Ceballos, who grew up in Napa, is also an artist as well as a landscape designer and his knowledge is shared with genuine intimacy, authenticity and reverence. Hess, he noted in so many words, was a provocateur in his artistic choices – he gravitated to works that make you think.
In 1966 Hess bought the first painting and soon built a discrete, selective, yet powerful collection, which is world-renowned for showcasing lesser known artists highly recognized in their genres. They include Andy Goldsworthy (whose works are created in large open-air spaces with natural materials, including melted stones). His “Surface Tension” is a screen of horse chestnut stalks held together with hawthorn thorns. In Alan Rath’s kinetic art (he was educated as an engineer), natural and technological worlds intersect.
The flaming typewriter by Argentinian Leopoldo Maler at the entrance of the second (of three) floors stopped me short as a writer. Titled “Hommage,” it was inspired by the artist’s uncle, editor-in-chief of El Dia, who was kidnapped and assassinated by Peronists for “incendiary writing.” The gas fire replaces a sheet of paper. (I couldn’t help reflect on the virtual “book burning” that is going on today by prickly politicians in our nation’s libraries.)
Headless, faceless forms in fiber (jute, burlap, rope, sisal) – “Crowd I” by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, were among the uncomfortable, arresting images in the collection depicting post-war Europe, in this case, according to the artist, the impact of Socialist Realism art which “deprived us of identity”).
The diverse collection includes global perspectives from others such as Francis Bacon (British-Irish), Robert Rauschenberg (American), Frank Stella (American), Howard Mehring (American), Katsura Funakoshi (Japanese), Anselm Kiefer (German), George Baselitz (German) and Rolf Iseli (Swiss). From another Swiss painter, Franz Gertsch’s massive Johanna II in tempera (nearly 11 and 10 feet) seems to follow you around the vast exhibit space with her penetrating eyes.
Hess-Persson Estates is located at 4141 Redwood Road, Napa. There are several different types of tastings and tours.Â
Among them, you can walk through the museum with Rob Cevallos by checking out this link.
