Sonoma County
I came over the hill from Napa in the autumn of 1997, on a rare day off , and ate lunch alone on the deck at Kenwood Restaurant. It was the first rabbit dish I had ever eaten. The place closed in 2015 and Salt and Stone is there now. What I did not understand yet was that I had crossed into a different place, not a different part of the same one. Sonoma is not a valley, it is a county. Napa is thirty miles with one grape doing most of the talking. Sonoma runs from the Pacific at Bodega Bay inland to Alexander Valley across nearly twenty appellations, and the fog decides everything. It comes through the Petaluma Gap in the afternoon and pulls back by mid morning. The cool western side grows pinot noir and chardonnay. The warm eastern side, up on the Sonoma flank of the Mayacamas. Some of the oldest producing vines in California are here, head trained zinfandel planted before Prohibition, still farmed by the families who inherited them.
CULINARY ARTS
Sonoma grows what Napa serves. The county is farmland first, and the restaurants here are closer to the source than anywhere else in American wine country. SingleThread in Healdsburg cooks almost entirely from its own farm five miles away and holds three Michelin stars for it. The plaza in Healdsburg has four or five rooms worth crossing the country for, and none of them makes you dress for it. The cheese is local, the lamb is local, the oysters come off the coast an hour west, and the people cooking know the people growing because they went to school together.
CULTURE & LEISURE
Three things here have nothing to do with wine and all of them are worth a morning. Armstrong Redwoods outside Guerneville holds old growth coast redwoods, the oldest of them around fourteen hundred years, in a grove you can walk in twenty minutes. Fort Ross on the coast was a Russian settlement built in 1812, when this was the far edge of an empire run from St. Petersburg. Jack London's Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen still has the burned stone shell of the house he built and never lived in. The coast road from Bodega Bay north to Jenner, where the Russian River meets the Pacific, is the drive I put in every Sonoma trip.
ARTISAN TRADITIONS
.The old vines are the artisan tradition here. Head trained zinfandel and field blends planted in the 1880s and 1890s, no trellis, no irrigation, each vine standing on its own like a small tree, and the growers who farm them are doing it by hand because there is no other way. Bellwether Farms has been making sheep's milk cheese in the Petaluma hills since the eighties, before anyone in America wanted it. Dry farming is normal here rather than a marketing line. These are the visits that make a group understand why one bottle costs what it does.
FROM THE PRODUCERS TABLE
The relationships behind the region. Each profile is a first hand-account from years of direct work with the family.