onoma is a rustic/rural area to the northeast of San Francisco, and just over some hills from the Napa Valley, the most famous wine-growing area in the United States. While Sonoma is less famous than Napa, the climate, soil, and grapes are about the same, so there are tons of great wineries there, and tons of great wine.  I'm not such a big fan of the stuff myself, but my dad is, which is why I accompanied him on a day trip up there when he came to visit in early November, 2003.

On his first visit up here after I moved to the Bay Area, we drove down to Livermore County, which is about 40 miles south, sort of inland from San Jose.  It's an area that produces a lot of quality wine, but it's not as scenic and is far less well-known than Sonoma or Napa, so it's far less crowded.  That's not such a bad thing, since you can get free tastings pretty much everywhere, and they've got chips and other snacks to help with your acid stomach, and there's plenty of time to talk to the people working there, since there aren't 20 other people bellying up to the bar for their tasting.

We saw some pretty good crowds at the places in Sonoma, and they were all far larger than the Livermore Valley tasting rooms, and we were there on a cool and cloudy weekday in November.  I imagine that you can safely multiply the crowding by 10 if you're there on a sunny weekend in the summer or early fall.

I didn't have my camera during the first trip, and never really wrote about it in great detail, but you can see some discussion of what wine tasting is like in the September 4th blog, with other mentions of it at the end of the September 5th blog, and then more on September 6th.

I did remember to take my camera to Sonoma, which is why there's a page here for you to view.  I discussed the Sonoma trip in some detail and featured several of these photos in the update on November 14th.

The photos are captioned below them, and there are a total of 36 photos from Sonoma that were good enough to post, out of the 150 or so I took on my digicam. Since this page would take approximately 14 minutes to load on dial up if I included every single picture, only the most representative/best are inserted here, with other related photos linked to.  The weather was gray and cloudy all day, though it never actually bothered to rain, and I had to up the levels on most of these shots to make them visible, which is why so many shots feature a very light gray sky.  A few pics have had the color balance tweaked as well, if they were especially dark or oddly-tinted.

The shiny sign at the front gate of the Buena Vista Winery, which is the oldest premium winery in California, as you can see.  One thing all of these winerys have going for them is damn nice architecture and landscaping.

A shot of the plaque on the main stone building of the winery.  Bears.

This is the guy who created wine in California, immortalized on a big brass plaque that's cemented to a big boulder outside of the Buena Vista vineyard tasting room. I don't believe he's actually buried beneath it, ready to roar and roll back the boulder, Jesus-like, if ever a wine is served before its time.  But I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility.

Agoston here first brought over wine cuttings from all over Europe (mostly France) back in the 1860's, and if you think about it, that was a hell of a project.  No planes, no cross country trains, and not even a Panama Canal.  He had to tour California, a barely-settled land, find good locations with caves and open land and sun but not too hot weather and good soil, buy land, get it cultivated and irrigated, and then sail to Europe where he rounded up dozens of types of cuttings, packed them and got them all carted to his ship which he then sailed back to North America on, down around South America, and then back up the west coast of South and North America to San Francisco, from where he traveled inland to plant whichever grape cuttings still survived.

The ironic part is that in the early 1900's a deadly virus swept through the vineyards of France and much of Europe, and lots of them lost their entire crop and had to get cuttings from their own plants from California, which they took back to France and replanted to regrow their own wine industry.  So most French wine today comes from plants that were originally grown in California.  You just know that's not a story the French vineyards enjoy telling.

 

A shot of the picnic area at Buena Vista.  The tasting room is to the right (off camera) and the boulder with Agoston's plaque is to the left.

 

Me posing by the outdoor tasting spot on Buena Vista.  Agoston's boulder is just out of sight to the left.  Or possibly to the right. Aren't I jaunty?  Of course I am. I love cool weather.

This look is useful if you want to keep the fucking sweater-wearing yuppies from crowding you at the tasting bar.  It's working so well here that I've even scared off the bartender.

And here's a shot of dad, standing across the sidewalk from me.  Yes, this is too small a pic for you to really recognize him in.  Yes, that's intentional.

Along with the boulder with Agoston's plaque, Buena Vista had a bunch of giant old casks lying around. A good oak cask is only usable for a decade or so.  After that the oakiness of it is all leeched away, and it's useless for aging wine. Cheap wine uses oak chips in old casks, or they nail fresh oak boards inside of casks for the same effect.  No one uses casks this large anymore either. Here's another old cask.

I did not pet the orange kitty; it looked cold and was huddled against the weather, with very sleepy eyes at half mast.

One of the things that made this area ideal for the first viticulture in California were the deep limestone caves.  You need to chill wine in great casks for many months while it's fermenting, and since there weren't many refrigerated warehouses in the 1860's, caves were a great alterative.  This opening looks ceremonial, but trust me, this is a fricking mine shaft, and it's still in active use today; the entire thing was lined with stacks and stacks of wine casks.  It goes back at least 50 meters, possibly farther.  I took some pics inside, but they didn't come out visibly; they're just black with blurs of light from the long string of overhead bulbs.

This is at the second vineyard we visited, and the first that we tasted at.

All of the larger grape vintners I've visited so far have had picnic areas outdoors, and they apparently do damn good business with them.  One place we visited in Livermore last time said they rented their spot out to over 300 weddings a year, and that they had upwards of a six month wait to rent it.  The one at this vineyard was pretty small, but very scenic.  The architecture and landscaping at these places is exquisite, in a natural, outdoorsy sort of way.

• Click here for another view.

Here's a shot of the tasting room/warehouse/gift shop at another place, the second one we visited. All of the old buildings look like this; ivy covered, made from rough stones and mortar, and surrounded by lush plants. If you could just ignore the UPS deliveries outside it would really be quite lovely.

Click this to see a shot to the right of this, showing their nice brick patio area, where they have outdoor tastings.

 

Tragically, I didn't get any good shots of the actual grape orchards (Say that to wine guys and they fall all over themselves trying to correct you with "vineyards." It's fun.) on this trip, mostly since there were always trees or bushes or power lines in the way.  All of the grapes were picked by this late in the season, but the vines grow for years, 80 or 100 or more in some cases though the yield goes down a lot on vines that old until they become uneconomical to keep alive.  If you have to ask if the taste of the wine varies depending on the age of the vine it's growing from, you really are a newbie to all of this.

We saw some awesome vineyards from the expressway, but there was nowhere to stop.  The pity was that the leaves were changing color, and vineyards are all filled with different types of grapevine in blocks and swaths. So they were changing color in the autumn, and lots were yellow like you see here, but others were orange, others red, and lots a really awesome purple. And with the mixture of vines in most of the vineyards there'd be a huge field of yellow with one stripe of red or purple in the middle, or all purple across one side and then yellow in a cluster in the middle, before lots of orange or red to the other side.  It was gorgeous, and if we'd ever had any sun at all, it would have been breathtaking.

And I probably still wouldn't have gotten a good picture, so this page would look pretty much the same.

This place is just half a mile or so from the historic park/plaza in the middle of Sonoma, and as you might expect, it's ridiculously touristy.  I took to calling it Disneywineland. The building on the other side of yon bougie fountain is their tasting room/gift shop/exhibit hall, and it's about three times as long as you see in this photo, and far deeper than you expect.

Part of it is nice, a dimly-lit series of back rooms that are upwards of three stories tall, and entirely filled with gigantic old wine tanks.  I'm talking water tower size, for the biggest.  There were also various side rooms that had actual burning fireplaces in them (gas with artificial logs, but hey, at least they tried, and yes, it was damn nice to warm the hands on that cold day).

Unfortunately the main room was basically a gigantic gift shop with the undistinguished vineyard's logo on basically everything you could imagine. All of these places have t-shirts and wine openers and wine glasses and other such thematically-related junk for ridiculous prices, but this place had everything.  Jackets, candles, fine china, lamps, refrigerator magnets, picnic baskets, cook books, binoculars, and on and on, all customized with their logo and name, of course.

They wanted like $8 to taste five bottles, and since their wine isn't any good in the first place and they had all the ambience of a corn dog stand at the mall, we took off.

This field faced the parking lot of the last place we went to, and it frightened me. It's just a little bit too Blair Witch Scarecrow for my taste, though I couldn't quite tell you why. The random twist of corn stalks in the middle of an empty, dead field, with the overcast sky and gloomy shadows beneath a long line of trees all add up to equal creepy.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I'd just tasted something like 22 types of wine in about a 30 minute period and was reeling slightly.

The park in the middle of Sonoma is nice.  Pretty small, but heavily wooded with this duck pond area in the middle and lots of giant trees. The whole Sonoma area is good for big trees, come to think of it.  Not redwoods, but lots of very old eucalyptus galore.  Of course many of them are around vineyards, and apparently eucalyptus gives wine a minty smell and taste, so much so that a lot of the vineyards in California have taken to cutting them down or thinning them out around the grape orchards.

All around this park in Sonoma are little shops, restaurants, boutiques, hotels, and more.  You can get a nice lunch for about $20 a plate in any number of places, and yes, that's about 3x what it would cost in a non-touristy area.

• More ducks in the park photos.
• And here's more.
• And yet more, with dad.

Did I mention the ducks? There were a nice variety of colors, with the one on the left clearly the ugliest, and the one on the right the most amusing.  It's hard to make out in the photo, but he had a flattop, with the feathers on top sticking up a good inch from his head, for no apparent reason.

I enjoyed the Sonoma trip.  There was nice cool weather and scenery, lots of picturesque vineyards, and pretty good wine to taste as well.  Plus I enjoyed doing it with dad, who I seldom see since I moved up here in July.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.