“The whole story started on a $2,500 book advance,” says Jack Cakebread, who about three decades ago was under contract to do photographs for Nathan Chroman’s “Treasury of American Wines.” He and Dolores were running Cakebread Garage, a car repair shop in Oakland. During the photo shoot in Napa, they learned of the chance to buy some land there from friends. Doing so, they were simultaneously growing grapes, making wine, fixing cars and doing a little photography work. Bonded as California winery number 38 (Robert Mondavi was number 32), they never looked back. Today they own 245 diverse acres from Howell Mountain to Carneros to Anderson Valley.

The wines from Cakebread have always had a strong presence on restaurant wine lists. Restaurateurs immediately recognized that these wines were crafted to work precisely with food. The Cakebread family has always ranked food highly in the wine equation. Delores has always kept a vegetable garden within the Napa vineyards, the produce destined for their in-house chef, Brian Streeter, or to be vended to the public from the winery. A discrete sign is hung at the winery's entry along Highway 29, when produce is available. Jack Cakebread jokes about the cost of his wife's passion, realizing that prime vineyard land in Napa now sells at a price similar to the cost of a parcel in downtown Tokyo.

"In 1986, I met Bill Shoaf, then Beverage Director of the Remington Hotel in Dallas, and over a glass of wine, we quickly fell into conversation about American cuisine and the challenges of bringing together chefs and food purveyors," recalls Jack Cakebread. During that conversation, the vision of the American Harvest Workshop was constructed.

"We decided to create a nonprofit, educational effort to increase the appreciation of wine, viticulture, and the nutritional and aesthetic qualities of American farm products. To support this effort we established an annual event for chefs, farmers, food artisans, and media to interact, with a focus on developing programs that promote and improve the quality, availability, and marketability of American wine and food," explains Cakebread.

The following August, in the midst of the grape harvest, Cakebread Cellars held the first workshop. The guest chefs were Dean Fearing and John Makin from Dallas, Robert del Grande from Houston, Mark Miller from Santa Fe; and the bay area's Bradley Ogden. "They were very excited to be here and to be a part of the harvest," remembers Cakebread. "I remember walking into the living room of the winery at 3:00 a.m. to round up the troops for night harvesting only to find Dean Fearing sitting straight up on the sofa, sound asleep. He didn’t want to miss the harvest. Now that’s dedication."

"Since the workshop’s inception we’ve had close to 100 chefs from all over the country visit the winery," says daughter-in-law Karen Cakebread, the catalyst behind the yearly execution of the workshop. "Each year we hold a farmers’ market of sorts in the courtyard where local purveyors offer samples of their cheeses, lamb, sausages, mushrooms, venison, endive, dried fruit, honey, and chocolate for the chefs to try. After a thorough tasting of every ingredient, the chefs create menus from which they prepare exceptional dishes over the course of the next two nights."

The recipes from previous American Harvest Workshops are available in "The Cakebread Cellars Napa Valley Cookbook" ($35 hardback), as well as through their website at www.cakebread.com. In this space next time, look for reviews of the many of the current release Cakebread Cellars wines.