Not Your Father’s Car Show

I’ve spent gobs of time in my life looking at mechanical contraptions on display. Car shows, truck shows, heavy equipment displays, aircraft, boats, motorcycles; you name it. When I called the folks at Ironstone Vineyards in Murphys, CA and said I wanted to take pictures at their annual car show, they seemed a bit put off. They use fancy French words and call it a Concours d’Elegance. It seemed pretentious to me, but after spending last Friday and Saturday at what I thought would be a “car show,” I get it. This ain’t your father’s car show!

Most importantly, Ironstone uses the event to raise money for education. Cultivating grapes for wine is agriculture, so the funding goes to 4-H and FFA and California State Fair Scholarships. Nice to know deserving young people are being helped to understand and participate in creating the food we all need to survive. Auctions, both open and silent, are used as opportunities to provide more educational funding. Vacations, hunting trips, wines, art, even a ZZ Top guitar hit the auction block.

The Ironstone event comes a month after the well known Pebble Beach Concourse d’Elegance, arguably the leading fine car event in the country. Some of the vehicles competing at Pebble Beach make their way over to Ironstone so there is a synergy, perhaps even a little competition brewing. Gail Kautz, matriarch of the Ironstone family operations, says Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler loved this event in his lifetime; he told her it was his “absolute favorite.”

The grounds at Ironstone are visually splendid. You walk perfectly manicured lawns. Backing up the finest mechanical creations in the world is a landscape of lush green shrubbery, flowers, shade trees, a lake – and the backdrop to all this is the incomparable beauty of California’s Sierra foothills. The garden-variety car show has you walking around on blacktop or concrete at best, dirt and mud at worst, and the backdrop can be anything from a fairground pavilion to a row of stores in a strip mall.

Despite the old age of equipment on display, no show brimming with old cars has ever tried to transport me back through time. Apparently, it never occurred to their organizers. Ironstone creates a reality so different that it really is possible to feel you have moved back in time. The pristine condition of the vehicles opens the trip. Great music piped all over the grounds creates a timelessness. Pausing to watch artists with easels painting the people and cars and grounds takes you back to a time when things existed outside of television and computers. For me, the leap came when I passed through a small grove of trees and abruptly came face to face with a bevy of women dressed as if they were going to a royal ball. Brilliantly colorful dresses and parasols expressed me back at least 100 years. I stopped in my tracks, and when I asked if they were for real, they said Gail Kautz asked them to come dressed that way to provide “color” for the event. Well, Ms. Kautz and Ironstone won my heart in that moment.

Next year maybe I’ll go to Pebble Beach – see what kind of car show they put on. A month after that I’ll surely be back here for the Ironstone Concours d’Elegance. And don’t ever try to tell me it’s a “car show.”

Following are a few pictures of the event. Lots more are on my photo site:

http://wetracy.smugmug.com/Wheels/Concours-Ironstone/13935567_tceBo#1024088453_RBADT

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