Copia, The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts
Report by Barbara Santich
Copia, The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, opened in November 2001. A. Lynn Martin attended the opening and reported on the event previously. Barbara Santich visited Copia in mid-2002 and filed this report.
Copia (originally the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts) sits on the flat flood plain above the Napa River – in late summer brown and sluggish, though at this point, only about 20 km north of San Pablo Bay, the river is still influenced by tidal movements. In the language of the original Wappo tribe of Native Americans, the name "Napa" reportedly means "plenty", which makes for a happy congruence with Copia.
Napa is the main town of a relatively small wine region in California, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. The wine industry in the Napa dates from about the same time as South Australia’s, but this narrow valley produces only 4% of California’s total wine harvest – while nonetheless supporting over 230 wineries. It is a prosperous town – average household income around two-and-one-half times national average – that has boomed, along with the wine industry, in the past twenty years. It (the region) attracts a similarly affluent breed of tourist – mean household income almost twice the national average, and this includes the 8% of retirees aged over 65. Curiously, for all its hype, tourists to the Napa region don’t necessarily come for the wine experiences: according to data from the local Chamber of Commerce, 69% of leisure visitors nominate relaxation as the main reason for visiting the region, while almost half (49%) come for the shopping and 17% for the spas and mudbaths (at Callistoga, at the head of the valley).
Copia opened in November 2001 (Lynn Martin attended the opening weekend, along with thousands of other members). It seems to attract reasonable numbers on any ordinary day, many more when special events are scheduled – as was the case when we visited at the end of July, at the beginning of the celebrations to mark Julia Child’s 90th birthday.
Although the building appears modest in scale it is surprisingly spacious, and the number and variety of exhibitions and activities reinforces this impression of spaciousness. At the time of our visit exhibitions included the opening (and long-term) Forks in the Road which illustrated the history of food, cooking and eating habits but also featured products, inventions and gadgets peculiar to (or at least developed in) the USA. Many of these, especially those dating to the early twentieth century, were testimony of a kind of naive ingenuity that seemed to value time-saving above almost anything else.
Smaller galleries housed changing exhibitions, such as teapots as works of art – the bizarre and the beautiful, the whimsical and the wacky. Most came from the collection of one individual (who also has in his garden a little house in the shape of a teapot for his grandchildren to play in). Similarly the exhibition of toasters – contraptions from the late nineteenth century to the present – was on loan from an idiosyncratic collector.
On a Thursday the indoor theatre was simply screening a sequence of films and documentaries relating to food, but at weekends a varied program of concerts and performances is scheduled for both the indoor and outdoor theatres (summer evenings only for the latter). At the opposite end of the building are the educational facilities, lecture theatres and demonstration rooms where you can learn about wine, attend cooking classes or demonstrations and tastings – a tasting of heirloom tomatoes at the time of our visit. I preferred, however, to visit the gardens and see the tomatoes in all their live splendour, and thanks to Dr Daphne Derven (Assistant Director for Public Programs and Curator of Food) we were able to participate in a guided tour of the gardens by curator Jeff Dawson.
Thanks to the generosity of benefactors and members, Copia has been able to plan on a scale that we in Australia might only dream about – which includes the transplanting of mature olive trees and 15-year-old fruit trees to create an instant orchard. The garden – unabashedly modelled on the famed vegetable gardens of Villandry in France – is for the most part arranged in squares, each square depicting a different theme and typically combining ornamental plants, herbs, vegetables and fruits, all grown bio-dynamically. Interestingly, the mulch was made of the shredded husks of cocoa beans (available commercially in USA) which, according to Jeff Dawson, was absolutely the best mulch to use. In addition to the square plots is the kitchen garden that supplies the restaurant, Julia’s Kitchen; the experimental plots (for example, comparing different varieties of pepper); the seed saver plots; and the rows of espaliered fruit trees which gave me the opportunity to sample a plumcot (apricot-plum cross) and a pluot (plumcot-plum cross). Give me straight apricots and plums any day!
Julia’s Kitchen is the main (and formal) Copia restaurant, leased out to a catering company which is required to meet the standards expected in an institution such as this. Next to it is the American Market Café where selected foods – cheeses, olive oils, spices – are on sale; it’s like a Simon Johnson shop on a smaller scale, with both local and imported ingredients. Finally, there’s Cornucopia, the store, with an excellent range of cooking and gardening books (almost all American) and cooking and gardening paraphernalia, from tea strainers to kneeling cushions.
Daphne Derven tries to explain Copia by saying that it’s not a museum, not a educational facility, not an entertainment centre – and yet it fulfils the same functions, and more. It’s a prestigious asset for the region – though I suspect it has a long way to go before it competes with the mudbaths. I left impressed but faintly disgruntled: where are the philanthropists to sponsor a similar centre in Australia?
|
