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49 When Jack and Jamie Davies moved to picturesque Napa Valley in 1965, they purchased the abandoned yet historic Schramsberg winery, a dilapidated winery celebrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Silverado Squatters. The gardens were overgrown and the Victorian house was in disrepair, yet the extensive wine tunnels dug by Chinese laborers in the 1800s had stood the test of time. The caves were still good from a structural standpoint. As the years passed, the tunnels began to fill with Schramsberg's beautiful Méthode Champenoise sparkling wine. By the time Alf Burtleson Construction was creating the tunnel for Gil Nickel at Far Niente, Jack was calling him to come up and discuss expanding the tunnels at Schramsberg Vineyards. Alf saw immediately that conventional drill and blasting would be inappropriate, not only because of the proximity to all those bottles of sparkling wine, but also because the geology where they wanted to extend the caves was volcanic tuff, a type of rock consisting of consolidated volcanic ash ejected from vents during a volcanic eruption. It is one of the easier rock formations to grind through, yet it has an integrity and strength that can let it stand without shotcrete. Thus Alf leased a Dosco MK2A roadheader to create significant expansion to the cave complex. The late Jamie Davies remembered the day it arrived: "At that time, it looked a little like something from outer space because it was a machine that was on tracks; it had very long tracks, like a tractor, but much more spaceship-looking somehow. To get it up here they had to lay planks on the roadway so as to not gouge out the road." In these caves where the sparkling wine is made, there are no barrels, only bottles—over two million of them. Inside the dark tunnels are cave rooms 13 feet wide, 13 feet tall and 45-60 feet long, in which it takes the cellar workers two weeks to stack 250,000 to 300,000 bottles of wine. Stacked deep in the earth the wine will age from two to six years or longer, depending on the style, before being touched again by human hands when the riddling process commences. From deep inside the darkness of the cave come rhythmic volleys of drumming, kindling a vision that somewhere down one of the tunnels a secret ritual is being conducted. There, cellar workers lift the sleeping bottles from the enormous stacks and rap them in fast patterns on hard rubber mats to loosen the yeast in preparation for the final riddling process. Unique to this cave is a dedicated team of men, with an average tenure of more than 20 years at Schramsberg Vineyards, who have gone into the earth every day to work. This cellar crew of Felipe Martinez, Efren Torres, Ernesto Herera, Miguel Moreno, Isidro Ceja and Ramon "the Riddler" Viera—the true cave men—is the heartbeat of the Schramsberg Vineyards caves. Daily, Ramon the Riddler moves throughout the vast cave like a honeybee in a garden hovering briefly from flower to flower gathering nectar. His hands deftly move up and down the bottles in racks, twisting the bottles one-eighth of a turn each day and every day for six weeks, working the yeasts gently into the neck in preparation for the final steps of making the sparkling wine. And always is Ramon's little boombox filling the chambers with his beloved classical music. Jamie shared: "The cave, I think, goes back to our roots, and if you walk in a cave, there is an air of mystery about it. I think that back in the recesses of the mind somewhere you connect to those early beginnings of man. And you may not put a name on it, but it creates an emotional sensation; it's romantic because of the shades 1982 Schramsberg Vineyards

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