When you head to California wine country, go to Sonoma, where there’s less traffic, less pretension, and more soul.
As you leave the Golden Gate and drive toward the fabled California wine country, you cross the hills and come to a fork in the road that demands a decision: which California wine country? Stay on the straight and obvious road and you hit Napa, high-profile home of the big wine guys like Mondavi and Coppola. (And Mondavi. And Mondavi.)
Some critics call Napa Valley (in verbal quotation marks) “gracious wine country living.” The grapes are real, the wine is good, Robert Mondavi is a genius. But there’s an absence of soul in Napa, and the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Highway 121 does little to offset the theme-park feeling you get when you stand in line to pay 10 bucks for a taste of California Cab.
But curve off to the left and you reach the Valley of the Moon. This is Sonoma: wine country with attitude.
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One small mountain range to the west, Sonoma Valley defiantly offers an alternative experience. The town of Sonoma still feels more like a community of farmers than celebrities—grape farmers, but farmers nevertheless. Proud of their unpretentiousness (if that’s possible), Sonoma vintners still don’t charge for tastings—a fact I hesitate to publicize. The annual Sonoma wine auction is a down-home affair, satirizing the high-falutin’ Napa event. The small town (about 8,000 souls) clings stubbornly to its small-town ways, from the fire-engine-led Independence Day parade to the rosebush- and lavender-lined streets and folksy farmer’s market. Somehow Sonoma remains quaint without dissolving into the saccharine cuteness of so many potpourri communities. The town is small so the pace is slow; the lights are few so the stars are bright; the weather is perfect for grapes so it’s perfect for people.
Sonoma County officially extends all the way north to the Russian River and west to Point Reyes and the wild Pacific coast. You can’t reasonably visit the whole county in one trip unless you want to spend most of your time in the car. But the fast roads are ugly and the scenic roads are slow. Instead focus your fun more finely and narrow your trip to Sonoma Valley, the area around the town of Sonoma, extending up through Kenwood to Glen Ellen and out to Schellville. This is the land called the Valley of the Moon, supposedly from some Native American meaning of “So-no-ma,” but more famously from the title of the Jack London (Glen Ellen’s most famous resident) novel. The road from the highway empties into Broadway, which dead-ends into the middle of Sonoma Plaza, the heart of town and the site of its most famous act of rebellion. On June 14, 1846, the flag of the Bear Flag Revolt was raised in the plaza and the 20-minute Republic of California was born. (It ended July 9, when California became part of the United States.) It’s all part of Sonoma’s attitude problem: this is a place that seems to nurture rebels of all kinds. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo laid out the town. Sent to secularize the mission, he had a grand design for Sonoma. He built an 8-acre plaza—the largest in California—barracks for his soldiers, and the adobe church on Spain Street. The living antiques still stand around the square with its duckpond, amphitheater, huge eucalyptus trees, rose garden, and the egalitarian city hall with its four identical facades (so no plaza business feels he should pay less rent because he’s facing the back of the building). And most of those plaza businesses are home-grown, such as the Sonoma Cheese Factory (home of the famous Sonoma Jack); the old Sebastiani Theatre (still locally owned and run); and the Swiss Hotel, where locals gather to dine, drink, and gossip. There’s no Gap, no Disney store, no Pizza Hut, and the most popular coffeehouse could be called the anti-Starbucks. At Basque Boulangerie, a real Sonoma morning begins. The place is tiny and organizationally challenged—stand in crisscrossing lines to place your order and pay; serve yourself coffee; gather napkins, silverware, lids; and, finally, pick up your order. But this is the world’s best cinnamon raisin toast: fresh-baked, inches thick, buttered hot. And this is where Sonoma regulars meet in the morning from 7 a.m. on. (Lunch is also excellent.) If you can’t find a table, cross the street, sit at a table in the plaza, and give your crusts to the ducks. Down Broadway, another off-the-wall Sonoman has set up shop: Stanley Mouse, the artist who made the Grateful Dead graphically famous. Mouse was a prolific poster artist in the heyday of ’60s psychedelic art and the Dead’s iconic skulls and roses are Mouse’s idea. Prints of his Grateful Dead designs, as well as other posters from the same era and the traditional landscapes Mouse has painted since settling in Sonoma, are all available at Rontor Presents, a little gallery in a Broadway streetfront.
You go to Sonoma for wine, and Sonoma has its own take on that subject, too. The mission fathers planted vineyards as early as 1823, but the Hungarian adventurer Count Agoston Haraszthy made history in 1857 by planting the first vitis vinifera (European wine grapes) in the country. That makes beautiful Buena Vista, the count’s winery, the oldest premium winery in America. White wood signs at nearly every intersection point the way to all the wineries—more than 40 in Sonoma Valley alone, far too many to reasonably visit unless you have an unreasonable time for vacation. Just choose a few and pay attention, rather than race around from glass to glass. In Sonoma, Zinfandel is the grape to pay attention to. Nowhere does Sonoma’s resistance to trends and tradition of cussedness show up more than in the cult of Zin.
Photo: Courtesy of the Sonoma Valley Vistor’s Bureau
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In the ’70s, Sonoma winemakers adopted this grape—a favorite of the early Italian settlers and descendent of the Italian Primitivo grape—and going against the California Cabernet flow, made its big, spicy flavor into huge, all-American wines. “No wimpy wines,” remains the slogan at Ravenswood, whose winemaker Joel Peterson was in the vanguard of Zinfandel rebels. Weekend barbeque and Zinfandel at Ravenswood is a summer tradition, but any time of year is a good time to visit the winery where you can see wine being made the hard-headed, traditional way using wild, natural yeasts and open-tank fermentation. “Old vines” Zinfandel is a Sonoma specialty: rows of ancient, twisted black trunks against springtime fields of bright yellow mustard signify Sonoma the way bluebonnets do the Texas Hill Country.
