Partners on the organic frontier

THEY met when they were 4 years old, on their first day in Mrs. Merla’s Nursery School, in the back courtyard of the St. Helena Presbyterian Church. Their mothers introduced them -- “This is my son, Tommy,” “This is my son, Billy” -- and the two boys promptly scampered off.

Bill Davies and Tom Gamble have been close friends ever since and now, at 42, they’re business partners, joining two famous Napa Valley names in a unique venture to produce high-quality organic wine and high-quality grass-fed beef.

The wines are a Sauvignon Blanc, in its second release, and a new, first release of a Merlot-Cabernet Sauvignon blend, both bearing the Origin-Napa label -- a label that features a postage stamp-size photo of Billy and Tommy, age 6, frolicking at a branding party on the Gamble family ranch.

The Gambles have been raising cattle in the Berryessa Valley, east of Napa, since 1916, and Tom has said his most vivid childhood memories are of dirt -- “playing in it, walking in dust behind a tractor, wearing out our jean seats sliding down shale hillsides.”

But in the late 1980s, Tom decided he wanted more from life than dirt and the lifestyle it represented. For the next dozen years, he divided his time between the ranch and Hollywood, where he produced such straight-to-video movies as “Abilene” and “Too Fast, Too Young.”

By 1998, he’d had enough of life in the city. He returned to the ranch full time -- and full of ideas.

“In between making movies, I’d been going to seminars on organic farming,” he says, “and with small ranchers finding it harder and harder to compete with the big boys, I decided we could be truer to the land and add value to our product and carve out a distinctive niche for ourselves by becoming as noninvasive as possible, by having free-roaming, grass-fed cattle.”

That meant no feedlots, no hormones, no pesticides and no antibiotics for almost half the Gamble family’s 300 head of cattle, the ones Tom would start with.

Knowing he would return to Napa, Tom also had been buying modest amounts of vineyard land through his Hollywood years, and he wanted to try the same organic approach with his wine as with his cattle.

Meanwhile, Bill also had decided to take a step away from the family business, sparkling wine. His parents, Jack and Jamie Davies, had founded Schramsberg when they moved to Napa from Rolling Hills in 1965, and just as Tom remembers the dirt from his boyhood, Bill says he can remember his first night in his badly-in-need-of-renovation wine country home.

“The house was full of mice, and the owner we bought from had pie tins on the floor everywhere, with mouse food in them. The last thing she did before she left was point to the pie tins and say, ‘You will take care of my friends, won’t you?’ ”

The Davieses restored the house to its former grandeur -- and then some -- turning it, and the winery and the land around it, into one of the prime showcases in Napa Valley. Schramsberg is arguably the best sparkling wine made in the United States (it’s certainly my personal favorite), and the winery -- long mouseless -- provides the best visitor’s tour of any I’ve had, here or abroad.

Bill is still on the Schramsberg board of directors. But, like Tom Gamble, Bill “wanted to do something on [his] own.”

Well, not quite his own -- his and Tom’s.

Hence, Davies & Gamble, a partnership in beef and wine, with the slogan “From the Land to the Table” (which is better, I suppose, than “On the hoof and in the glass”).

“We’re not officially certified as organic yet,” Bill says. “That takes time. But we’re using native yeasts for the wine and practicing biodynamic farming and doing things as naturally as we can, without chemicals, with the wine and the cattle.”

Bill is the front man -- “the marketing guy,” as he puts it -- while Tom, now president of the Napa County Farm Bureau, is “the farmer and the rancher.”

Davies & Gamble began selling beef and wine last year.

But why did a company that sells beef start its wine production with a Sauvignon Blanc?

Tom had an excellent 12-acre site for Sauvignon Blanc in Yountville.

He says the site, on the valley floor, has more clay in it than he would like for a big red wine -- “We weren’t going to compete with Screaming Eagle” -- and lying at the cooler, northern end of Yountville, he thought it would be especially suitable to Sauvignon Blanc.

He’s right.

I don’t like most domestic Sauvignon Blancs. They’re too grassy, too herbaceous for my taste. But I was impressed with the 2001 Origin-Napa Sauvignon Blanc when I drank it over lunch with Bill on his recent trip to Los Angeles. It’s richer, more textured, more concentrated and more flavorful than most I’ve had -- and I’m not alone in this judgment.

Although Robert Parker hasn’t reviewed the wine formally, he posted a note on a bulletin board on his Web site in February that called it “dazzling stuff.”

“Don’t think I’ve had a Sauvignon Blanc this compelling in many a moon,” he said.

The wine is available in limited quantities -- 725 cases, up from 205 in their maiden 2000 vintage. Not surprisingly, given its quality and scarcity, it’s more expensive than the typical Sauvignon Blanc, $23.50 a bottle.

Bill says Origin-Napa plans to release a second Sauvignon Blanc, Heart Block, next year, with grapes harvested exclusively from the three center rows of the Gamble vineyard. It will be even more expensive (though no one’s saying just how much more).

The 2001 Heritage Sites red -- from four Napa sites -- is much smoother and better balanced, more accessible, than many young California reds. It’s a blend of 55% Merlot, 43% Cabernet Sauvignon and 2% Cabernet Franc.

The Heritage Sites -- 762 cases made -- sells for $35 a bottle. Two more reds are planned, Bill says. One, to be called Paramount, will sell for $65 to $70 when it’s released in August. It will be a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The other, Family Home, will be a single-vineyard Cabernet from a four-acre site on an Oakville knolltop. It won’t be available until next year or the year after.

Somewhat to my surprise, I liked the Davies & Gamble wines better than the Davies & Gamble beef. I ordered their New York steaks from their Web site (napafreerangebeef.com) for $16 or $17 apiece, and grilled them for family and friends. I also grilled New York steaks from my favorite L.A. steakhouse, Nick & Stef’s.

I cut all the steaks in half after grilling and served them side by side, without telling anyone which was which. Five members of our six-person dinner party preferred the Nick & Stef’s steaks. The Davies & Gamble steaks were certainly fine, but we agreed that the Nick & Stef’s steaks were more flavorful and more tender.

But they also cost me twice as much, and since their flavor derives in large measure from the high-fat content that prime-grade, grain-fed cattle are bred for, they probably weren’t as healthful as the free-range steaks.

On the other hand, I don’t think of steak as health food. In fact, I count on the red wine to counteract all that cholesterol. I guess I’ll just wait for the Origin-Napa Paramount and Family Home reds.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.