Explore the North Bay Winter 2018

2019

Food Drink Arts Adventure PUBLISHED BY THE BOHEMIAN AND PACIFIC SUN

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the north bay

Intro 4

Lost in Napa County 36

Matt Beard 6

Red Devil Records 38

North Marin County 12

Petaluma to Bodega Bay 39

Spearfishing 16

Hog Island Oyster Co. 40

Tannery Bend 23

Western Sonoma County 42

Korbel 27

Acacia House 46

Winery Rides 28

Pot Tourism 47

BottleRock 33

Calistoga 49

Cabernets 34

Sonoma Backroads 50

PUBLISHER Rosemary Olson

SENIOR DESIGNER Jackie Mujica

EDITORS Tom Gogola, Gary Brandt

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Jimmy Arceneaux, Kathy Manlapaz

COPY EDITOR Molly Jackel CONTRIBUTORS Thomas Broderick, Tanya Henry, Stett Holbrook, James Knight, Aiyana Moya, Jonah Raskin, Charlie Swanson, Flora Tsapovsky DESIGN DIRECTOR Kara Brown PRODUCTION OPERATIONS MANAGER Sean George

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Lisa Marie Santos SALES OPERATIONS MANAGER Deborah Bonar ADVERTISING ACCOUNT MANAGERS Danielle McCoy, Marianne Misz, Mercedes Murolo, Lynda Rael CEO/EXECUTIVE EDITOR Dan Pulcrano

Cover and Intro page artist: Matt Beard, mattbeardart.com PUBLISHED BY THE BOHEMIAN AND PACIFIC SUN

847 Fifth St, Santa Rosa, CA 95404 Phone: 707.527.1200 Fax: 707.527.1288 bohemian.com

1020 B Street San Rafael, CA 94901 Phone: 415.485.6700 Fax: 415.485.6226 pacificsun.com 2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

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The North Bay is such an invigorating mecca to indulge the senses—all the senses.

In our many restaurants, specialty kitchens and stores, foodies galore master their craft and serve their splendiferous output, from meats to chocolates, cheeses, breads, vegetables, flowers, oils and

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2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

vinegars, salts and spices, herbs and more herbs—those you eat, smoke and rub all over your body. And the North Bay simply can’t be beat for its array of locally made beverages. It’s truly the land of plenty when it comes to libations, ranging from kombucha, coffee, tea, wine, microbrews and spirits—just about everything is brewing and fermenting here.

Bring your own bike or rent one at any of the numerous bike shops in the North Bay. Take in any one of the region’s epic vistas or shred the various bike trails. Whether it’s hiking, surfing, canoeing, fishing, ziplining—all of those activities are just a

short jaunt from back-country bed and breakfasts, boutique hotels, luxury resorts and cool campsites. While you’re at it: spa, spa, spa! Many of them integrate locally grown and harvested products for the ultimate in pampering and relaxation.

Every town is unique, a shopping haven.

We love to live and write about the North Bay, where the best parts of Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties are defined by the eclectic and industrious people who make it all happen. We extend our rolling invitation for everyone to visit, indulge—and Explore!

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COASTAL VIEWS Matt Beard’s California impressionism catches waves

BY STETT HOLBROOK

Y

ou might call artist Matt Beard a focused drifter. At one time he struggled with what to paint. A still life? A mountain vista? He doesn’t ask those questions anymore. Beard has settled on his life’s work: painting the California coast. It’s his muse.

It’s his mission.

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Sometimes it’s his burden, too, but Beard knows what to do each time he sets out in his white Dodge Sprinter van loaded with blank canvases, acrylic paint and brushes— paint the state’s coastal landscape from the Oregon state line to the steel fence that runs into the ocean separating San Diego County from Tijuana.

“It clicked,” Beard says, recalling a moment shortly after moving to Humboldt County from Long Beach 16 years ago to

begin his painting career. “Now I know what I’m doing. The assignment is clear.”

And daunting. From north to south, California’s coast is 840 miles long. By his estimate, he’s made paintings at about twomile intervals all along the coast. The biggest gap is 46 miles. Barriers to access, be they private property or inaccessible geography, are his greatest challenge. That and fog, his constant nemesis. Beard spends about 60 days a year rambling up and down

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Highway 1, mostly between summer and fall when the weather is most cooperative.

Sixteen years into his project, Beard—who is in fact bearded and wears thick rimmed glasses and shaggy hair—is still rambling up and down the coast with his easel stuffed into a modified external frame backpack. All those trips down Highway 1 and across coastal bluffs have been channeled into a new book, Painting the California Coast: Vol. 1. He crowdfunded the book on Kickstarter where it blasted past his fundraising goal of $7,500 with pledges of more than $40,000. The book was scheduled for release in late 2018, and will be available on his website, mattbeardart.com.

The book will include liner notes that explain what went on behind the scenes to produce the painting. Here’s an example from a painting of a Del Norte County beach landscape called Car Trouble: I seem to remember several occasions over the last 20 years where my van wouldn’t start after a surf here. Probably because it was just an old Volkswagen and that’s kinda how they work. It was as good a place as any for the old van since the road makes a gentle descent to beach level just past the little carpark on the top of the bluff. It was never hard to get it pointed down the hill and pop the clutch to get it going. The day I painted this one, in my fancy big sprinter van, I noticed a foul smell just before arriving. I had hoped it was another car on the road, but it followed me a little longer than I’d liked. Just as I pulled up I saw the old Check Engine light on

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2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

the dash. Nuts. Ah well, let’s hope it’s nothing major. At any rate, nothing to do about here anyway, may as well paint the place.

But most of all the book will feature his distinctive artwork.

As a surfer, Beard’s love of the ocean is what first attracted him to water’s edge, but you don’t see many surfers or any people for that matter in his work. There’s just the interplay of ocean, land and sky. I think his paintings are better for it. The style of the clothes people wear (or don’t) and activities they might be engaged in would date the paintings. Unpeopled, there is a timelessness to his work. Barring landslides, erosion or invasive plants, I imagine the scenes he depicts looking the same as they did a century ago.

Judging by his larger body of work, much of which is viewable by county on his excellent website, he prefers remote, wild places. One of his favorites is the Point Reyes National Seashore.

“You could wander off a trail and be the first person there in 200 years.”

As a surfer he also loves Hollister Ranch, a gilded, private access enclave north of Santa Barbara that’s a kind of surfers’ fantasy land of ruler-edged point breaks. The ranch’s south-facing exposure creates beautiful light that shines across the water.

“All the features light up throughout the day.”

As for L.A., he says he tries to avoid the area but still finds beauty in places like Malibu and Leo Carrillo State Beach.

Early in his career, Beard was taken by the work of the California Impressionists, a group of early

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early 20th-century painters like William Wendt, Edgar Payne and Guy Rose brought classic plein air techniques to the Golden State.

“When I saw them, I said, ‘That’s what I have to do.’”

In addition to their use of color and depiction of light, Beard was enchanted by the artists’ ability to capture the feeling of being there.

“You can almost smell it, it’s so real.”

Beard’s work has that same feeling of place. While his paintings are works of realism and he strives to capture what he sees, his use of color gives his works a psychedelic glow and otherworldly luminosity. It’s as if he sees a place—its mood, its

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colors, its essence—and turns that up a notch or two on the canvas.

That’s all the more impressive given the speed with which Beard works. On site, he gets most of the detail and colors down on canvas in about three hours or less. He does finishing touches in his studio. That’s how it’s supposed to be with plein air painting, a snapshot of time.

Spend much longer and the light and conditions may change, he says. And he never works from photographs.

They don’t faithfully capture what he sees and feels in the moment, he says. “They don’t translate.”

After he chooses his vantage point, he sketches the outline of the landscape in pencil with quick,

confident strokes. Then paints an undercoat, often in brownish reds for the land and blues for the ocean. He never uses black paint.

It’s a deadening color, he says, and his work is very much alive.

Beard respects the cardinal rule against naming surf spots lest he encourage more surfers to crowd the lineup. But for those who know the California Coast’s hidden reefs and point breaks, it’s fun to guess where his paintings depict. The titles often bear clues and double entendres that seem written for the wave-riding cognoscenti. Some enochlophobic surfers say he shouldn’t paint any known surf spots. Beard rejects

that as overly protective.

“My paintings of places that don’t have names aren’t going to tip the scales,” he says.

Even though he’s put countless miles on Highway 1, there are still areas he’s yet to explore like Humboldt County’s imposing and impassable Lost Coast or off-limits military bases along the coast like the one at Point Magu in Ventura County.

“I’ll never get it all.”

But he clearly enjoys trying, one stretch of coast at a time.

“I always come back to the ocean because the places represent so much to so many people. There’s such a human story in every location.”

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Washoe House, where the Second Civil War abruptly ended before it began, because drinking beer seemed, wisely, a better idea.

ROLL WITH THE HILLS Cow-spotting and hill-hugging through north Marin County

BY TOM GOGOLA

Y

ou can’t swing a llama in northwest Marin County without hitting a cow, but there’s something about the drive along Highway 1 south that stands out in the department of cud-chewin’ glory, even in a county with no shortage of driving epiphanies on tap that feature cows standing around looking cool.

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2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

So let’s say you’re in Sonoma County and staying somewhere in the Santa Rosa area.

You’re hitting a vineyard or two, shopping downtown, maybe plunking some chips at the Graton Casino.

Highway 101 is oftentimes a bloodless and stressful encounter with humanity.

But a quiet drive along the rolling expanse of California Highway 1 as it jags and jogs its way toward the coast? That’s the ticket to a proper exploration of the best of the rural coastline.

Get on Highway 12 in Santa Rosa and get off at the Stony Pt. Road exit. Follow it awhile—the drive will take you past lots of regional features, including the old and estimable Washoe House, one of the great saloons in the region, which boasts a history dating to the Civil War. Every so often, the local media retells the story, and it’s a doozy.

During the Civil War, Petaluma was proLincoln and anti-slavery, while Santa Rosa was no fan of the Republican Abe Lincoln.

When Lincoln was assassinated, in

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newspaper noted that his death was probably good for the country, prompting hordes of Petalumans to begin a march north to Santa Rosa. It was war!

Except that when the Petaluma soldiers got to the Washoe, they had a couple beers and chilled out.

And the battle of the Washoe House was drawn—as in, some pints were drawn, horses were quartered, and men said “Screw it, let’s drink instead of fighting.”

Stop in, have a beer, and continue on your way down Stony Point Road. Keep an eye peeled for the Meacham Road turnoff and take a right and follow it to Pepper Road. Make a right onto Bodega Avenue, which segues into Tomales-Petaluma Road and offers some of the most gorgeously rolling cow-filled country anywhere. You’ll know you’re in total heaven when you pass the Coast Guard Training Station on the left. There are . . . many cows to behold.

Here’s a suggested musical accompaniment: tune in to Froggy 92.9 on the FM dial for the modern-country classics.

Before too long you’re sure to hear a song whose singer is perched on a tailgate, sipping something strong, thinking about a girl and celebrating tractors. Who knows, you might even hear that wickedly cute radio ad for the Washoe House.

It’s all ruggedly agrarian road with numerous moments where you’ll exhale loudly and perhaps sigh joyfully at the sublime beauty of rolling ranch country as you pass numerous front-yard farm stands and craft sellers, and ranch

Hog Island, namesake of the Marshall oyster company—and your view as you wend along Tomales Bay.

houses dotting the scene. There aren’t a lot of destination joints along the way—the drive on Tomales-Petaluma Road is itself a destination—but there’s plenty of good stuff just down the road, don’t worry about it.

Take the Tomales-Petaluma Road to its terminus at Highway 1. Take a right, and you’ll find yourself immediately in the tiny town of Tomales, home to the William Tell House, one of the oldest bars in California and

another worthy place to pop in for a draft and get an earful of local history.

Take a left, and you’ll be swinging through mountainous terrain along the lovely Keys Creek, and like the creek, you’ll soon be flowing into Tomales Bay itself—those first glimmering views of the bay are heartstopping in their own majestic right.

Now you’ll spend the next 10 or so miles swinging along Highway 1 as it hugs Tomales Bay and goes through the town of Marshall, home to Hog

Island Oyster Company and Nick & Tony’s. Stop the car and eat some oysters as you check out the rusted old boats and throngs of tourists angling for choice outdoor seats along the bay.

Before too long—voila!—you’re in Pt. Reyes Station. Highway 1 runs through town, where the highlights are many and include the Bovine Bakery. A wise traveler will stop in for a peanut butter cookie and a large coffee before contemplating the road ahead.

2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

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DAWN HEUMANN

Abalone diving may be off limits, but there are more fish in the sea.

TIP OF THE SPEAR Spearfishing is on the rise in local waters

BY STETT HOLBROOK

I

t’s called spearfishing, but it’s really spear-hunting. The fish don’t come to you. You must go to them, with your finger on the trigger.

That fact became clear as soon as I dove beneath the surface into the 48-degree water in a picturesque cove north of Fort Ross in Sonoma County. I’d been abalone diving before and once I learned to regulate

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my breath and stay calm, finding and prying the mollusks off rocks was relatively easy.

Spearfishing is different. While some fish hole up under rocks and stay put, many species are on the move, which means you have to first spot them and then have the wherewithal to get close enough to take aim with your speargun, all before your breath gives out and you need to surface and start over again.

Outfitted in a seven-millimeter wetsuit,

hood, booties gloves, mask, fins and an 18pound weight belt—and toting a menacinglooking speargun—I dove into the icy water again and again in search of my prey.

But I never fired the weapon. I spotted a few rockfish darting about, but they were too small to shoot. There was no sign of the hulking lingcod I hoped to find. My visions of grilled fish and cold beer were not to be.

It turns out spearfishing is a lot harder than diving for abalone.

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My dive partner, Zeke Cissell, had better luck and plunked two black rockfish. He’s the manager at Seals Watersports in Santa Rosa and a veteran diver. Seals is Santa Rosa’s outpost for spearfishing gear as well as scuba and surfing supplies. Cissell took me on my first ab dive, too, before it was banned. While I was hunting for abalone, Cissell was spearfishing.

He enjoys the challenge and says he likes the taste of fish better than abalone. Cleaning a fish is easier than butchering an abalone, he adds.

A few months after my first ab dive last year, state regulators closed the season to recreational divers this year in hopes of helping the embattled shellfish recover.

Now spearfishing is the only game around for divers who want to capture their dinner.

All you need is a regular sportfishing license. Abalone diving season usually begins in April, but according to local dive shops, interest in spearfishing has spiked as seasoned abalone divers pick up spearguns and newcomers take up the sport.

“We’ve definitely seen an uptick,” says Tom Stone, owner of Rohnert Park’s Sonoma Coast Divers. “We have many people coming in just because of their love of the water.”

While I got skunked, I’m eager to go back. Fish or no fish, spearfishing offers passage into an underwater world most of us never get to see. While I spied precious few fish, I saw iridescent, waving anemones, starfish and more than a few hefty abalone that will be left in peace for at least the next year, poachers notwithstanding.

You’d be hanging loose, too, if you had a stringer of lingcod like spearfisherman and Seals Watersports manager Zeke Cissell.

But mostly what I saw were

kelp, which is abalone’s primary

equivalent of a clear-cut forest.

purple urchins. Thousands of

food source. Aided by the die-off

them carpeted the rocks like tiny

of urchin-eating sea stars and

scene is beautiful to behold,

cacti. The proliferation of the

warming ocean temperatures,

it’s a landscape that has been

spiny buggers is part of the reason

the exploding population of

transformed. Now the nacreous

for the abalone’s demise. The

urchins has transformed what

shells of abalone that starved to

urchins gobbled up most of the

was an undersea garden into the

death litter the ocean floor.

While the underwater

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Fortunately, the urchins (which are edible) have not affected the rockfish population, which Stone says is growing in number thanks to the creation of California’s network of Marine Protected Areas (MPA), zones of protected marine life and habitat.

The North Bay’s MPA is the North Central California MPA, and it runs from Point Arena to Pigeon Point in San Mateo County. In addition to lingcod and black rockfish, sought-after species for spearfishing include cabezon, vermillion and sanddwelling halibut.

For newcomers, Cissell recommends going out with a buddy to spots with easy access, like Stillwater Cove and Fort Ross.

Better yet, take a class. Sonoma Coast Divers and Petaluma’s Red Triangle Spearfishing offer courses that teach diving and breath-holding techniques, as well as water safety.

Parviz Boostani, co-owner of the menacingly named Red Triangle Spearfishing in Petaluma, concurs that interest in the sport is growing following the abalone ban. The shop offers a free-diving (no scuba) certification class.

“People still love to get out on the ocean,” he says. “The only alternative is spearfishing. It’s a different kind of hunt.”

OK, what about sharks? Well, they’re out there. Stone suggests avoiding drop-offs and pinnacles where great white sharks sometimes lurk. Cue the John Williams score.

Sharks are known to inhabit deep waters and ambush prey in shallower depths. But Stone says attacks are rare. “You’re more likely

to die driving off a cliff getting up there” to Fort Ross, he says.

Cissell tries to not think about sharks, given the low odds of an encounter. Diving at shallower depths can further minimize the risk.

“You don’t have to go super deep to get what’s on our coast.”

Even though I was diving at 25 feet or less, I felt better facing into deeper water with the shore behind me, lest I get surprised with my back turned.

“That’s the risk,” says Boostani.

“You’re in their world.”

Boostani likes to go deep and hunt in waters he knows are sketchy. After his friend was attacked by a shark in Monterey in 2017, he now wears a Shark Shield. The $500 device is worn around a diver’s ankle and sends out an electromagnetic pulse that is supposed to deter a hungry shark.

“That makes me feel a heck of a lot better,” he says.

For Stone, the risks and enjoyment that come with spearfishing are worth the risk, especially if you go home with dinner.

“Fresh seafood is more expensive than ever,” he says, Heck yeah, it is.

Back in the cove with Cissell, he looked like an underwater commando with a flashlight strapped to his wrist and knife on his ankle. He uses the light to peer into dark holes and crevices in search of lunkers.

“You’re looking for a pair of eyes looking back at you.”

I saw no eyes. Cissell took pity on me after I came up emptyhanded and gave me his fish. I got to enjoy fresh fish and cold beer after all. The fish were small, and made for great tacos.

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ROAD HOUSE

Hide away from wine-sodden Napa at Tannery Bend

BY JAMES KNIGHT

T

annery Bend appears out of a sleepy south Napa neighborhood like a vision from a dream.

I’m not talking about the kind of dream with fairy-tale castles and sugar-plum Cabernets—you can find that upvalley.

This is the kind of dream where a room filled with interesting things suddenly appears in an unlikely place—and those

interesting things are beers! Or like the wistful dream I once had in which I found a secret doorway in Sonoma County that led directly to Portland, Ore. If there’s nothing outlandishly dreamlike about this little suds shop in the repurposed Sawyer tannery by the Napa River, there is something of “Portlandia” about it, if only because it does not scream “Napalandia.”

Inside, the space is light and bright, but not antiseptically so, and dominated by a

concrete bar, a big chalkboard announcing current brews and board games available, and . . . big game. Vintage taxidermy animal heads collected by co-owner Tyler Rodde’s grandfather stare down from the rafters.

Rodde and his wife, Lauren, also run Oenotri restaurant up the street, giving Tannery Bend an edge on the usual pretzels-andpopcorn taproom fare—their “bottomless popcorn” ($4) comes with a choice of bacon salt, house-made when the restaurant

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roasts a pig. Also on the menu: Italian pork sausage ($10), grilled cheese ($9) and Reuben ($12) sandwiches, green salad ($6), kimchi jerky ($6) and curry spiced nuts ($5).

It took a three-year odyssey just to open a small brewhouse on a quiet street in the city of Napa, says brewer and co-owner Matt Cromwell. “If you see any gray here,” he says, rubbing his beard, “it wasn’t here in March.”

Cromwell formerly brewed at the now-defunct and repurposed-forwinetasting Silverado Brewing Company, and later at Napa Smith.

Since he’s only made some 30-plus batches here since opening in April, he says he’s still experimenting with house favorites.

All of the beers are named for Napa roads and landmarks:

Brewed with redwood tips, Franklin pale ale has a woodsy aroma; Imola session IPA satisfies the bitter-lover at just 4.8 percent alcohol, while Salvador saphir IPA pulls fresh-peeled Valencia orange aromas out of an esoteric German hop; made with local cherries, Jack’s Bend Belgian dubbel is a cola-colored, leathery, tangy experiment gone right.

But as low-key and unaffected as this friendly brewhouse is, if the wine-industry talk overheard around the bar is any indication, alas, there can be no escape from wine-sodden Napa. Dream on!

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REAL BOHEMIAN The rebellious roots of Guerneville’s signature sparkling wine BY JAMES KNIGHT

I

f you’re looking at a map right side up, the namesake river of the Russian River Valley viticultural area appears to hang a sharp left right in the middle of the region, and weaves toward Guerneville through the redwoodforested canyon like a tipsy but determined tippler through an increasingly dark and crowded bar.

You might guess that, as a wine region, this artistic enclave and vacation wonderland would harbor the kinds of wineries founded by real bohemians, and you’d be right about that in the case of Korbel Champagne Cellars, whose estate vineyards have hugged a bend in the river since the latter quarter of the 19th century. Korbel was founded by three bohemians from Bohemia, proper.

Confused? Long before the term “bohemian” was associated with impoverished artists drinking absinthe in louche company, it

mainly applied to a region of hardworking German-speakers in the western part of what’s now the Czech Republic. Not that student Francis Korbel didn’t get himself into a spot of radical fallout in 1848, the tumultuous granddaddy to 1968’s Prague Spring, with similar results.

For his part, Korbel was sent to the Daliborka Tower prison in Prague Castle, a fate that might only seem romantic if you’re drinking cheap Czech beer and scribbling in your notebook about it circa 1992. Still, long after Korbel got out, allegedly sauntering out the gates in civilian clothes, he memorialized his dreary imprisonment by building a brick tower reminiscent of Daliborka at his winery on the banks of the Russian River.

You’ll learn all this and more on the free tour at Korbel, which includes a smart, Ken Burns–esque documentary screened in a little theater with wooden pews for seats—sweater-vest-wearing historian narrator not optional! The tour starts in the railway station of the Korbel brothers’ own stop on the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad—something to think about on your drive west on River Road, which was originally built as a railroad, not an auto road.

Once was the time that bohemian folk loved the retro stuff, and you can hardly get more retro than the delightfully dated tasting room at Korbel (aside from the sadly shuttered but amazingly time-frozen Italian Swiss Colony tasting room in Asti), where cool, sparkling wine is called “California champagne” by decree of, well, the inheritors of that bohemian legacy. Of course, Bohemia is better known for its beer, and the same might be said of the Russian River these days—Russian River Brewing Co. got its start at Korbel, and the deli here still has beers that are coveted elsewhere on sale for your picnic lunch: Pliny the Elder, Damnation and a few others.

Korbel Champagne Cellars, 13250 River Road, Guerneville. Tasting Room open daily, 10am–4:30pm; tours, 11am–3:45pm.

707.824.7000.

2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

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GREAT RIDES TO GREAT VINES Tasting Sonoma County on two wheels

BY JAMES KNIGHT

SONOMA VALLEY’S ROSSI RANCH It’s a short ride back in time to Rossi Ranch.

One of Sonoma’s surviving vineyards from the old school of field-blended wines, Rossi was planted in 1910 in the back roads above the Valley of the Moon. It’s best rediscovered on a 20-mile bicycle ride.

Let’s begin this two-hour ride at Spring Lake Regional Park, heading out southeast on shady Channel Drive. Back in 1910, a railroad ran along this same route to the city of Sonoma. After a mile plus, look for a turnout on the left and a narrow footbridge and path to Stone Bridge Road. Turn right, and then right again at Oakmont Drive.

At Valley Oaks Drive, follow the signs to Pythian Road, and take in a dramatic view of Hood Mountain on the gentle descent to a wide-shouldered stretch of Highway 12.

It’s just under a mile to Lawndale Road. Near the east entrance to TrioneAnnadel State Park, the climb begins. This forested area was hit hard by the Nuns fire in October 2017 and the route is still in the burn zone when, rounding a bend, bright green grapevines swing into view, backdropped by the mountain vineyards of Kunde to the north. After longtime farmer Val Rossi died in 1999, many of these old

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to the signal and back to Highway 12.

Winery Sixteen 600 2014 Val Rossi Hommage Sonoma Valley Red Blend ($64) The Coturri family has a long history with Rossi, and now farm it organically for the current owners. This wine focuses attention with vibrant blackberry juice color, drizzles raspberry syrup over a fanciful aroma image of charred chocolate cookie with oak sprinkles, sweetens a gravelly palate with blackberry licorice and brushes by like dried velvet—soft, but a little grippy.

Carlisle 2015 Rossi Ranch Sonoma Valley Zinfandel ($47) Talk of wine with a “lifted palate” smacks a little of lofty winespeak, until I sip a Zin like this. There’s an herbal character that Carlisle founder Mike Officer calls “Rossi garrigue.” It’s a sweet, bright red fruit flavors of strawberry liqueur and maraschino cherry, and then it just sings skyward, not insubstantial, but ethereal all the same. It’s a gift from the last century to the next. vines were rehabilitated, while new Rhône variety grapevines were planted in the traditional, head-trained style.

Watch your speed on the steep descent to the left turn at Warm Springs Road. Follow the road into Kenwood, past Kenwood Plaza Park (where wine is allowed at picnic tables)

DRY CREEK VALLEY’S RIDGE LYTTON SPRINGS The age of the motorcar had hardly begun when the vineyards at Lytton Springs were first planted on benchland above Dry Creek Valley.

Back then, wine-country visitors might first glimpse this new planting of

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Zinfandel, mixed with other varieties in the old school California style, at the pace of a horse cart—and that’s about the speed that I can push my bike uphill to rediscover this treasure from the past that’s still putting out great wines every year, thanks to the team at Ridge Vineyards.

To better appreciate the vineyard’s context, I start this ride in downtown Healdsburg and take a spin around Dry Creek Valley. From Grove Street, venture into the new roundabout and take the right at Mill Street, which becomes Westside Road. After the bridge at Dry Creek, it’s a right turn at Madrona Manor onto West Dry Creek Road, a quiet, lightly trafficked and meandering back road.

Before West Dry Creek deadends, it’s a right at Yoakim Bridge to busier Dry Creek Road. (Road Warrior option: turn left for a steep out-and-back detour to the great vines of the Rockpile AVA.)

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A ways past the Dry Creek General Store, look for Lytton Springs Road, which wends east into the hills. It’s an easy climb through woodland and pastureland, past the Healdsburg airport, until the view opens to a hillside of gnarled old vines, standing by themselves without trellis wires, leaves flecked with gold in autumn.

Founded in 1959 by a gang of Stanford scientists, Ridge first gained fame for their Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon from the Cupertino area, but they soon discovered venerable Zinfandel vineyards like Lytton Springs, which they purchased in 1991 and farm organically.

With 69 percent of the blend, Zin takes the leading role in the Ridge Vineyards 2016 Lytton Springs ($44). A supporting cast of Petite Sirah, Carignane and Mataro (also known as Mourvedre) adds inky color, grippy tannin and other, complexing elements until the wine doesn’t scream “Zin” from the nose, but rather comes off something like a well-mannered claret that could pass as a Bordeaux Right Banker. It offers a toasty undertone with hints of graham cracker, pencil lead and creamy red-fruit aromas. It would pass for a Right Banker except for that heady hit of boysenberry and the liqueur-like heat revealed after a little time in the glass.

The scenic route back to Healdsburg is a right turn on Chiquita Road, leading back to Grove Street. Look for the lefthand turn into the Foss Creek Pathway just after Dry Creek Road, and we’re on the home stretch of this easy, twenty-mile

ride spanning over a century of wine-making.

SONOMA COAST’S SMALL VINES WINES I should call this Barlow-to-Barlow bike loop in West County a small ride to Small Vines: it’s an easy, 7.5mile ride, mostly over an off-street paved path and through quiet country lanes, that passes points of interest to viticulture geeks and heritage apple fans alike.

The Barlow center in Sebastopol, where the namesake family operated an applesauce cannery, is a fitting starting point for this ride.

Today, it’s a post-industrial haven for a post-ride nosh and a brew.

Small Vines, Sebastopol Find Morris Street at the east end of the Barlow and take a left. Morris curves west toward the entrance to the West County Regional Trail.

Follow the signs at High School Road to pick up the trail. This is a former railroad grade, so it’s not steep, but if a pick-me-up is required after the arduous climb, stop for coffee at Andy’s Produce Market.

Turn west at Occidental Road.

Just before the next leg of the West County Trail, make a left on little Barlow Lane. It’s a slow, pothole-

laced but picturesque climb past Taft Street Winery, and vineyards and apple orchards in just about equal measure. Where the road doglegs, there’s a vineyard that’s not quite like the others.

At the former Barlow family homestead, once a blackberry farm and apple orchard and now Paul and Kathryn Sloan’s Small Vines Wines, the Pinot Noir vines are truly pint-sized, planted in rows just four feet wide. Very Burgundian, but also a winning strategy in this Goldridge soil, says Paul Sloan.

It’s expensive to farm this way— they imported a French tractor that looms above the rows—and it’s a financial commitment to visit (three-bottle purchase, or $100 per person, by appointment only), so today let’s roll on down the lane, past a side-by-side comparison with a conventionally farmed vineyard, and some amusing sculptural sights as well.

The road ends at Mill Station Road: right to choose your own adventure in the Sebastopol Hills; left to reconnect with the West County Trail at Highway 116.

Small Vines 2014 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay ($55) Grown on the other side of the winery and tasting room, which is fashioned from the Barlow’s original apple storage barn, the Chardonnay wows with its exotic juxtaposition of caramel, toasty butter cookie and spicy, hazelnut liqueur aromas with lean, lively citrus flavor. The Pinot Noir here, too, has fresh intensity, and far from being a vintage on the way out, has plenty of time to age. Good thing the Sloans saved a pallet of 2014, as 2015 is already sold-out— naturally, it was a small crop.

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BEYOND THE ROCK Revisiting BottleRock’s place in the North Bay

BY CHARLIE SWANSON

W

hen Dave Graham, Justin Dragoo and Jason Scoggins attended the inaugural BottleRock Napa Valley music festival in 2013, the Napa natives didn’t know what to expect.

“We had a great a time, and we saw what was special about it if you took into consideration what people think of wine country,” says Graham.

The business partners also had no idea that the first BottleRock would end up millions of dollars in debt and that the organizers would file for bankruptcy.

When the event bottomed out, Graham,

Dragoo and Scoggins bought the assets for the festival under their company Latitude 38 Entertainment, paid off several million dollars of the outstanding debt and set about turning BottleRock into an annual showcase of Napa Valley.

Last year marked the fifth year for BottleRock Napa Valley under Latitude 38’s direction, and tickets to the three-day music, food and wine experience sold out faster than ever before. But BottleRock is more than just a three-day party. Since 2014, Latitude 38 has supported several local organizations like Michael Franti’s Do It for the Love Foundation, through the BottleRock brand.

The 2017 wildfires in Napa and Sonoma

‘BottleRock Napa Valley is their bread and butter, but their effort to make meaningful community contributions is their pride and joy.’ counties prompted BottleRock to go into relief-fundraising mode.

“Prior to the fires happening, we were in the thick of planning the festival,” says Graham, whose family evacuated from his home in the middle of the night and stayed at the Napa River Inn. “We knew immediately that we needed to figure out how to help.”

In addition to donating supplies and promoting other fundraisers, BottleRock hosted three North Bay concerts at the end of 2017, featuring Franti at Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville, Counting Crows at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park and Train at the JaM Cellars Ballroom in Napa.

Those shows raised $422,000 for the Napa Valley and Sonoma County community foundations, the North Bay Fire Relief Fund and NomaGives.

“BottleRock Napa Valley is their bread and butter, but their effort to make meaningful community contributions is their pride and joy,” Napa Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Travis Stanley says. “That was again on display immediately following the [2017] fires.”

“We’re all about our community,” says Graham. “What makes us most proud is that our community is proud to be associated with BottleRock.”

2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

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BITTER SWEET

What’s not to love about Cabernet, the bitterest of wines?

BY JAMES KNIGHT

T

he real language of the love of wine—point-of-sale data from retail, that is—tells us that Cabernet Sauvignon, which is bitter in youth and weedy with age, is the bestloved wine in the world. Travelers to the North Bay—keep an eye peeled for these Cabs:

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Raymond Vineyards 2014 Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($40) This bottle has winning looks and offers tactile pleasure before it is even opened: Raymond’s staid label design was gingered up with red velvet for the 40th anniversary edition, evoking the winery’s plushly furnished Red Room (currently closed for renovation), and perhaps enhancing its utility as an accompaniment to a romantic

dinner. Anyway, it’s hard to resist just petting the bottle. Once in the glass, it’s conventional and well-behaved, showing discreet aromas of dusty spice rack and the Cabernet suite of oak, graphite and cassis.

Supple and velvety, with red Cabernet fruit and a slightly tangy finish, it’s sure to add to a memorable meal.

Frank Family Vineyards 2014 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($55) Accents

This quality yet closed up Cab says, let’s stay together long enough to enjoy the wine.

of oiled oak, lava pumice and sandalwood provide a classy cover for this Cab’s generous rations of blackberry liqueur and dark chocolate aromas and flavors.

Singularly focused, this dark-fruited wine doesn’t punish the palate for its revels with too-gritty tannin.

Silverado Vineyards 2013 Solo Stags Leap District Cabernet Sauvignon ($125) Set the table to impress with this pricey (but not really, for the neighborhood) number, which whispers, rather than shouts, of black olives and fresh, delicately scented raspberries.

More sweetly fruited than its mate, the Geo below, it’s a convincing harmony of red-fruited Cab flavor and drying, yet like dried velvet, tannins.

Silverado Vineyards 2013 Geo Coombsville Cabernet Sauvignon ($75) Plainly intense, leaving an impression of iron and bitter ornamental berry, this quality yet closed up Cab says, let’s stay together long enough to enjoy the wine after a few years in the cellar.

Educated Guess 2015 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($22) Some like it hot, some like it smokin’—the oak here is reminiscent of the hickory liquid smoke I’ve been using to jazz up stir fry, but if that sounds tempting, this delivers the tannic Cabernet goods for a good price, and a conversationstarting label, for chemistry geeks.

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Play bocce ball while the food cooks at Pizzeria Tra Vigne.

TRIPPING

Even if you get lost in Napa County, that’s an adventure too

BY JONAH RASKIN

G

etting to and from Napa County from Santa Rosa is

a trip in the literal and figurative sense: There’s no direct route, but, rather, several roundabout ways of making the journey.

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So here’s the plan: Get on 101, then get off at Mark West Springs, continue on Porter Creek Road and hang a left at Petrified Forest Road where exist some of the largest petrified trees in the world. Check out the trees awhile and continue on Petrified Forest Road to Calistoga. Sometimes I go to the Calistoga Spa Hot Springs, though

there are others just as hot and just as cool.

There’s usually an inexpensive day rate.

Here you can be with yourself, or socialize with some of the friendly Russians who love hot tubs and who may have some great stories to share.

I might hang out in Calistoga and suggest that out-of-towners do the same, just

‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.’

—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

because it’s a quaint town, and just because the name comes from a combination of the two words “Saratoga" and “California.”

The Cafe Sarafornia on Lincoln Avenue is as good a place as any to have coffee, tea or hot chocolate and check out the delightful surroundings.

Calistoga is Robert Louis Stevenson country. The English writer and world traveler roamed around the town and across much of Napa in the 19th century and wrote about his adventures with his bride, Fanny. I recommend a visit to Copperfield’s Books just down the street from the Cafe Sarafornia, where you can buy a copy of Stevenson’s travel memoir Silverado Squatters, and see Napa as Stevenson saw it in the 1880s.

It’s a literary trip that hasn’t aged.

The next destination is St. Helena, where there’s a Robert Louis Stevenson Branch Library and a Robert Louis Stevenson Museum which pay homage to the man who said famously, “There are no foreign lands It is the traveler only who is foreign.”

With that idea in mind, head south on the Silverado Trail toward St. Helena. You’ll have to cut over to Route 128. Google Maps will provide the best route. My favorite day to visit St. Helena is Friday. That’s when the farmers market takes place

and I recommend a stop at Long Meadow Ranch Farm Stand; if Laddie Hall is there, introduce yourself and tell him Explore sent you. “There‘s a sense of community,” she says. “It’s a social event. Customers become friends.”

Laddie is a trip.

There are many good places to eat in St. Helena. There’s the Clif Family Bruschetteria on Main Street where you can eat salad, soup, roasted chicken, Cajunstyle hot links and a variety of bruschettas. If you want a real sit-down meal, I suggest Pizzeria Tra Vigne, which is popular with both locals and tourists (the restaurant recently installed a bocce ball court near the dining patio) for its specialty and createyour-own-pizzas.

From Tra Vigne you might stroll along Main Street, window shop, head for the post office, go inside and see the murals from the 1930s.

They’re well preserved and they provide another view of Napa history. To get back to Santa Rosa or onward to San Francisco, go to the city of Napa and then on 121 to 12 to 116 and then to 101.

You’ll have made a big loop and you’ll have seen some beautiful countryside, rolling hills with grapevines, a herd or two of cattle and big sky overhead. You can’t get lost, and if you do? That’s an adventure in itself.

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A POSITIVE SPIN Vinyl records make a stand in San Rafael

BY CHARLIE SWANSON

F

irst it was being called a revival; now it’s being hailed as a renaissance.

Vinyl albums, once on the verge of obsolescence, just marked their 12th year in a row of growing sales numbers, with Nielsen Music reporting 14,320,000 records sold in 2017, the highest number since the company started tracking vinyl sales back in 1991. In fact, 2017 also marks the first year since 2011 that physical album sales topped digital downloads.

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It’s a staggering comeback for a medium that was all but dead 15 years ago when the internet opened the floodgates of digital music streaming, downloading and pirating. That came after the advent of the vinyl-killing CD in the 1980s.

How did this resurgence come about? More new artists are releasing their music on vinyl, and classic records are getting deluxe reissues, like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 2017’s No. 1 selling vinyl record.

Add to that, major retailers, like Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Noble, have started racking vinyl in their stores.

Then there’s the renewed interest in the independent record store that’s grown since Record Store Day began 10 years ago, an annual event that celebrates the country’s nearly 1,400 indie record retailers as cultural hubs.

In the Marin County, the local record store lives on in shops like San Rafael’s Red Devil Records, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2017.

The record-buying bug bit Barry Lazarus as a teenager driving around to record stores in his native Los Angeles, and he’s been a music fanatic ever since. Moving to the Bay Area at 19, he’s lived in the region for 40 years, and recently marked 20 years of owning and running Red Devil Records.

“I lived in San Francisco back when it was a lot rougher than it is now, and I had a stressful job, and I was trying to think of what would be the opposite of that,” Lazarus says. “I decided opening a record store in the North Bay would be the opposite of having a stressful job.”

Originally, Lazarus opened Red Devil Records in downtown Petaluma in 1998, at 170 Kentucky St. near Copperfield’s Books. The store spent six years in Petaluma, until a nearby restaurant fire and long-running construction basically halted all foot traffic at the same time digital music sales were killing the record industry.

Once the store’s lease ran out, Lazarus moved to downtown San Rafael.

“San Rafael has more of an arts and music downtown vibe than I knew about,” Lazarus says. “I just had a feeling it would be a good

place, and I happened to find a fantastic location.”

Now located at 894 Fourth St. in San Rafael, in the heart of the city’s retail district, Red Devil is thriving thanks to the local community of music lovers and collectors. For the store’s 20th anniversary, San Rafael mayor Gary Phillips issued an official proclamation praising the store as a valuable business and declaring Lazarus a steward of downtown San Rafael.

Red Devil Records has earned a reputation as the go-to source for serious, old-school LP enthusiasts.

“The number one advantage of having the store here is the quality of used records brought in,” Lazarus says. “Because Marin County has such a rich musical history, there are just endless record collectors who’ve pretty much been supplying my store with used records, and the flow doesn’t stop.”

Adorning the store’s wall of fame is a massive assortment of original pressings and hard-tofind LPs from bygone eras, and the store’s social media shows off an ongoing Record of the Day series that includes gems like Jeff Beck’s Beck-Ola 1969 original pressing in mint condition, or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” gold-colored, 12-inch vinyl promotional pressing. Lazarus gets a lot of people coming up from San Francisco or the East Bay and beyond to get their hands on these albums. “I’m really lucky to get a lot of rare records here,” he says.

“That’s what we are known for.”

Red Devil Records, 894 Fourth St., San Rafael. Monday–Friday, 11am– 7pm; Saturday–Sunday, 11am–6pm.

415.457.8999.

2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

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The Bodega Bay nuclear power plant site is now a big pond full of water.

On the road from Petaluma to Bodega Head

BY THOMAS BRODERICK

I

n Sonoma County, spring and fall days are the perfect time for a day trip between Petaluma and Bodega Head. Set out just after 9am in Petaluma, and turn west onto East Washington Street.

After crossing the freeway, there are many places to fuel up before starting your adventure.

As the morning might be chilly, visit Taylor Lane Organic Coffee (617 E. Washington St.) for a cup to go. Taylor Lane, a Sonoma County institution since 1993, sources single-origin beans from throughout the world. No matter when you visit, it’s likely that the

shift manager serving you traveled to at least one of the company's partner farms to ensure the beans’ fair-trade status. Don’t forget to grab a cinnamon bun or other fresh handmade pastry from famed Northern California bakeries as far away as Berkeley.

Continue west on East Washington. In just a few minutes, homes and shops turn into rolling hills and dairy farms.

The 30-mile drive out to the coast includes multiple pull-offs where you can snap a few pictures or just soak in the scenery while sipping your delicious coffee.

Near the small town of Valley Ford, the road becomes Highway 1, California’s mother road that

extends the state’s entire length.

Just after 10am, you drive through Bodega Bay. The town may seem asleep, with the popular tourist shops and restaurants still shuttered.

This is the part most people miss; just after the town is a dull brown sign on the right side of Highway 1: “Bodega Head” and an arrow that tells you to take the next left, Bay Flat Road. Once you make the turn, keep going until the road dead-ends.

Bodega Head straddles the San Andreas Fault, and for this reason, it remains one of Sonoma County’s untouched natural havens. Park at the mouth of Campbell Cove and visit the Hole in the Head to see the nuclear plant that might have

2019 EXPLORE THE NORTH BAY

CREDIT

BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT

been, if protesters hadn’t halted it, and where cranes and other majestic birds now nest.

Getting back in your car, take the narrow and winding road up the Head to the overlook parking lot, where a million-dollar view greets you. To the north, rugged hiking trails extend up the coast.

Casual walkers can explore the trail around the head. Walking the dirt path requires only sandals, although you may want to wear shoes if the weather report calls for cooler temperatures. Small signs along the trail explain the local area's history and wildlife.

From December through February, keep an eye out for humpback whales making their annual migration.

After your hike, it’s time for lunch. On the drive back to Bodega Bay, stop at Fisherman’s Cove Bait and Tackle (1850 Bay Flat Road). An institution that caters to the area’s crab fishermen, the restaurant serves grilled and barbecued oysters, homemade clam chowder, and many other dishes made with sustainable seafood, much of it caught by the restaurant's boat.

If the oysters at Fisherman’s Cove don’t fill you up, you have an excellent opportunity to buy a dozen or two more—along with clams and mussels—on your way back to Petaluma. At Bodega Bay Oyster Company (12830 Valley Ford Road), a truck delivers fresh bivalves each morning to the small storefront situated halfway between Petaluma and the coast.

There you can also stock up on an oyster knife, lemons, and anything else you need for a seafood feast back in Petaluma or wherever you’re staying in the North Bay.

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Before becoming a chef at Hog Island Oyster Co., Mariko Wilkinson spent seven years learning from local restaurateur Heidi Krahling.

COASTAL EATS Enjoying oysters in scenic Marshall

BY TANYA HENRY

G

rowing up in Forest Knolls with a father who was an avid hunter and fisherman, Mariko “Ko” Wilkinson and her identical twin sister recall eating meals of wild boar sausage and pheasant while chewing carefully to avoid any buckshot residue.

“I think [home] is where the food thing all started happening for me,” says Wilkinson, who has been a chef at Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall for the last three years. Though she went to cooking school in Oregon and spent some time in San Diego, Wilkinson

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has returned to her hometown and now relishes her morning commute to Marshall.

“Every morning is like a music video—it’s so beautiful; Mt. Vision and the fog are like nowhere else on Earth.”

The 31-year-old Marin native earned her culinary degree from the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon, and went on to compete in an American Culinary Federation (ACF) competition where her team won the state championship. In addition, she appeared on the television show Chopped. But it was under the tutelage of restaurateur Heidi Krahling, at Insalata’s, where Wilkinson really learned her craft. “Heidi was my true mentor,” she says.

With Hog Island’s focus on picnic fare, Wilkinson began pickling, smoking and curing meats to augment the oyster, charcuterie and cheese offerings. She now creates seasonal specials that have included a quinoa and sushi rice salad with pickled shiitakes, grilled pink scallops, smoked egg yolks over crudo, and d’Anjou pears with house-made pomegranate molasses and aged gouda.

Wilkinson’s inventive creations offer added incentive for making the trek out to tiny Marshall, located along Tomales Bay in Marin County.

Hog Island Oyster Co., 20215 Shoreline Highway, Marshall. hogislandoysters.com.

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EAT THE MAP West County’s profile rises

BY STETT HOLBROOK

W

estern Sonoma County— known to locals as West County—is the most delicious place in America. It’s still something of a secret to the outside world, but that will soon change as more Explorers catch on.

West County is America’s Tuscany—a land of word-class wineries, cider houses, artisanal cheese-makers, heritage breed goat and cattle ranches, family-owned

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organic farms, wild mushrooms, fresh Dungeness crab, wild abalone, king salmon and, thankfully, an absence of pretense.

Nowhere else in the country has as many great raw ingredients and food products in one place. That bounty has inspired generations of chefs, home cooks, foragers, fishermen, winemakers and brewers who celebrate West County’s abundance.

“In Sonoma’s West County, we know that food quality and abundance are within arm’s reach—we almost take it for granted,” says Heidi Herrmann, seaweed harvester,

farmer and agro-ecology instructor at Sonoma State University. “This little pocket of land on the left edge of the continent is a culinary wonder.”

In spite of all this great food, the region still flies under the radar. Back before I knew better, I filed West County under “Need to check that place out; seems cool.” Before I relocated here in 2011, I’d pass through Sebastopol a couple times a year on weekend drives out to the Russian River to escape cold San Francisco summers or during a search for affordable housing, a game my wife and I

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used to play called “Should we move here?”

Each time we drove through Sebastopol—the commercial if not spiritual heart of West County— and the surrounding vineyards, apple orchards and redwood forests, I’d inhale deeply. I slowed down. There was something about this place I couldn’t quite identify, a rugged charm and bohemian spirit I found alluring.

As a food writer, what really haunted my dreams was an unconfirmed belief that West County was an authentic source of great food and drink, raw ingredients and craftspeople that hadn’t been spiffed up and reconstituted to appeal to a mass audience. It was the un-Napa: a land of milk and honey and exceptional Pinot Noir without the bachelorette party limos.

That’s what my foodie radar told me. But I knew my short forays there weren’t enough to confirm my suspicions. And anyway, if West County was this culinary nirvana, why wasn’t it already overrun with visitors and celebrity-chef steakhouses?

Fast forward 10 years. Life, kids and work had taken me in different directions, but I was still, consciously or not, on the trail of West County. I was researching a documentary series for PBS about Americans reforming our food system called Food Forward, traveling in a 26-foot, refurbished 1966 Airstream trailer with my wife and kids. As I put together the itinerary of farms, dairies, ranches and restaurants to visit, I knew I wanted to include a stop in West County to see once and for all what was up with that place.

Long story short, we showed up

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and never left. It was the place I had been looking for.

I’ve spent the years since exploring West County, turning down new roads to see where they go, pulling over at farm stands, eating at new and old restaurants and drinking my share of local wine, beer and cider. One of my first dining experiences in West County was at Lowell’s in Sebastopol. I think it was over a bowl of their beans and greens for breakfast that I realized I was on to something good. Founder Lowell Sheldon—who went on to open Handline with partner Natalie Goble in 2016 and recently opened a third business called Fern Bar, a cocktail lounge and small-plates restaurant in Sebastopol—has long been a champion of West County as a culinary region with his rigorous local sourcing and commitment to sustainable agriculture.

But he’s not alone. Restaurants like Ramen Gaijin, Zazu, Farmhouse, Fork Roadhouse, Casino Bar and Grill, Hazel, Boon and others all raise West County’s profile.

To raise awareness of West County’s community of likeminded businesses, Lowell Sheldon and his team created a map of the area’s many splendid things. It’s a must have. The West Sonoma County Field Guide is a piece of marketing, but it’s more than that. It’s the first document to draw a circle around the region and showcase its many delicious things. It puts West County and its unique business and destinations on the map—by creating the map.

Rather than list restaurants and businesses by price, the field guide is built around a shared ethos of local sourcing and

environmental sustainability, very West County values.

“It’s the community of businesses that I want to associate with,” says Gia Baiocchi, owner of the Nectary in Sebastopol and now Healdsburg. She likes it because it’s a collaboration between businesses rather than a competition.

The guide, which features a detailed, hand-drawn map, offers a curated list of restaurants, wineries and businesses, as well as hikes and must-stops along West County’s long and bumpy roads.

If you’ve got out-of-town guests looking for something to do, hand them this. It’s a good resource for locals, too.

Sheldon is eager to see if the map drives more interest for sustainably minded businesses like those in the field guide.

“Hopefully, it will have some lasting impact,” he says.

West County’s left-of-center, countercultural spirit, born of hippies who relocated here in the 1960s and ’70s, still reverberates in the hills and back roads and accounts for some of the area’s low-profile and slow-growth politics. Add infamously potholed, winding roads and a relatively sparse tourist infrastructure, vast forested wildlands and sprawling cattle ranches, and West County can feel unknowable.

Of course, West County isn’t really a secret. In a 2017 article on coastal Sonoma County Chardonnays, New York Times wine writer Eric Asimov called the area his favorite place in the world. If Napa is pink polo shirts and loafers, West County is flipflops, flannel shirts and Patagonia

fleece. The area attracts a different kind of visitor, those with a DIY spirit willing to make their own discoveries. It hasn’t become another Napa Valley—wall-towall grapes and development that often leave locals choking on the dust and stuck in traffic—but the threat looms large as smallscale farmers fear rent increases and another apple orchard or oak grove falls to vineyard development or, more recently, cannabis cultivation.

West County’s farms and orchards have supplied San Francisco with fresh produce, butter and milk for more than 150 years. Until the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, steamboats and other vessels moved apples, berries and dairy products down the nearby Petaluma River into San Francisco Bay. An electric train used to travel down Sebastopol’s Main

Street loaded with fruit for the big city to the south.

Famed botanist Luther Burbank developed many of his prized plants, including the Shasta daisy, the Santa Rosa plum and the russet Burbank potato—for better or worse, the main potato now used in McDonald’s fries—in an experimental garden that still stands in Sebastopol. West County produce travels down Highway 101 in box trucks now, but is still as revered by San Francisco chefs as it was in the 1800s.

Geographically, West County is easy to define. To the east it’s bound by the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a vast wetland that rises and falls with winter rains. On warm mornings, a band of fog rises from the Laguna like a force field, exhaling vapor into the sky before the gathering day. The Laguna serves as a flood relief valve for the Russian River, the northern boundary of West County.

The favorable climate for Pinot and Chardonnay is due in large part to the Pacific Ocean, West County’s western border.

And, finally, to the south is the Petaluma Gap, a break in the coastal hills that draws in roaring wind and fog from the coast, a perfect climate for more cool-weather grapes and the region’s dairy ranches and artisan cheesemakers.

There is something more elusive about West County, a culture and a state of mind that is harder to define. And that’s part of its appeal. But what single image could do capture West County?

An orchard of the region’s famed Gravenstein apples? A lone salmon boat returning to port at sunset?

A weathered, surfboard-topped VW bus chugging up Highway 1? Rather than one image, I think West County is defined by its food and people.

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to appeal to a broad common denominator, with a nice balance of vegetarian options and classic, well-loved entrées like lamb and pork.

The seemingly endless supply of excellent housemade breads and whipped butter are easy to love. The bread, multigrain and olive, is so addictive you’ll have to stop yourself before the appetizers arrive.

None of this, however, means that Cosentino came to Napa to kick back and tone it down. On the contrary, it seems as if the Napa Valley’s casual, farm-to-table aesthetic has brought out a softer, playful side of him, without sacrificing flavor.

The hamachi crudo appetizer ($18) is a good example. Easily found on dozens of While Chris Cosentino’s San Francisco restaurants showcase offal, Acacia House is more mainstream.

CREDIT

ST. HELENA LUXE

Chef Chris Cosentino’s Napa outpost

BY FLORA TSAPOVSKY

I

n Bay Area foodie circles, chef Chris Cosentino doesn’t need an introduction.

The man behind San Francisco’s carnivore temples Incanto and Cockscomb and winner of Bravo TV’s Top Chef Masters, Cosentino is a charismatic star on the local skyline, known for his love of nose-to-tail cooking, cured meats and Italian cuisine.

His Napa County project, with partner Oliver Wharton, is the spacious Acacia House, part of the Las Alcobas resort in St.

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menus across California, crudo, as made at Acacia House, is unexpected and delicious, combining fatty slices of amberjack with cubed strawberries, pink watercress and serrano pepper. Seasoned with flaky sea salt, this is a triumphant starter.

The mains include pork schnitzel and Kobe beef rib-eye, and it’s tempting to try at least one vegetarian dish: the porcini rigatoni ($26), strongly recommended by our server, is the night’s surprising hit. The sturdy rigatoni incorporates wheat flour and dried porcini powder. The pasta is earthy and flavorful, swimming in an indulgent cream sauce flavored with nettles, pine nuts and hemp

Helena. While the rest of the resort is earthy browns and grays, Acacia House fronts the property with a picturesque white shingled house with a sweeping front porch.

The restaurant’s decor and menu strive for a light touch. The dining room is finished in wood and cream colors, and the waiters wear beige and green uniforms that are part golf fashion, part gardening club.

The menu is tidy: two snacks, seven appetizers, eight entrées and no specials.

Acacia House caters to both hotel guests and locals, and there is a conscious effort

oil. With a heap of freshly grated Parmesan cheese on top and more mushrooms in the sauce, the lemony and herbal notes liven up the overall richness, resulting in a dish you just want to keep on eating. The check arrives stashed in a vintage cookbook, Bill Rhode’s 1942 The Business of Carving. Full of gruesome illustrations, it’s a fun reference to Cosentino’s no-nonsense, meat-loving ways.

Acacia House, 1915 Main St., St. Helena. 707.963.7000.

RAISA YAVNEH

GET IN THE

CANNA-VAN!

Pot tourism on the rise in the North Bay

BY STETT HOLBROOK

W

e were packed and ready to board when a couple hustled over to our idling Mercedes Sprinter cargo van at a Rohnert Park parkand-ride lot. “Is this the van for the beer tour?” asked the man.

Our tour guide, Brian Applegarth, chuckled a bit and greeted the eager beer drinkers. “This is a cannabis tour,” he said.

“It’s the first of its kind in the North Bay.” Applegarth, co-founder of Emerald Country Tours, California’s first cannabis tour company, explained what the tour was about and where we were going, and by the end of their conversation, the couple wished they could get on our bus and skip the beer tour.

The exchange was a bit of a vindication for Applegarth, who has been working with partner Jeromy Zajonc to get the tour company off the ground for the past few years.

With recreational cannabis now legal and growing mainstream interest in cannabis culture and products, Applegarth is poised to capitalize on Sonoma County's unique location in the middle of what he calls “Emerald Country”—a region from Santa Cruz to Arcata that's home to decades of cannabis cultivation, culture and history.

The Emerald Triangle (Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties) is the heart of California's marijuana cultivation,

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but the larger region outlined by Applegarth has great stories and characters, and Applegarth wants to guide pot tourists there just as they now flock to the North Bay for wine-tasting and beer tours.

“Our goal is to empower people with information, promote a sense of wonder and let them feel transported.”

Applegarth is not creating a booze cruise for stoners. There is no smoking or vaping on the bus. Cannabis consumption is not allowed for legal reasons ( participants can partake off the bus where permitted), but Applegarth also wants the tours to focus on cannabis culture, heritage and health and wellness, not clouds of smoke. He’s also working on a self-guided tour with key stops along cannabis’ road to legalization, with a focus on the people who fought for the plant's acceptance as a health benefit for those with chronic illness.

“The history is deep,” he says.

Applegarth has traveled extensively internationally and gone on many sightseeing tours himself, and he likens his tours to Vietnam’s Cú Chi Viet Cong tunnel tours, a window into a formerly secret world.

Our first stop was Rohnert Park’s notso-secret OrganiCann, a dispensary that bills itself as the first and biggest outlet in Sonoma County. Guerneville’s Riverside Wellness might dispute that claim to being first, but OrganiCann is certainly the biggest. The 30,000-square-foot warehouse retail space is the largest in California.

So what is there on the tour that’s not available to the public? Access. While the nature of the tour will likely evolve once it's open to the public, our stop at OrganiCann featured a behind-the-scenes tour of the business operations and plant nursery. It would be an eye-opener to anyone who has never entered a dispensary before—more than a hundred kinds of edibles—but probably not particularly illuminating to those who have. Applegarth says his tours are aimed at anyone with interest in the history, culture and medical benefits of cannabis.

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Emerald Country Tours takes participants to secret grow sites.

“It’s an exciting time because we get to invent what cannabis tourism looks like,” he says.

For newcomers and old hands alike, visits to cannabis farms will probably be the most interesting part of Emerald Country’s tours, since these are the places that were hidden and off-limits until we entered the new legal era. And to be sure, many operations still want to remain hidden. Applegarth says he reaches out to growers looking to build brands and stake a position in the new legal marketplace. He’s in contact with about a dozen growers for the tours.

On the way to visit a grower in Forestville, Applegarth unfurled a poster of “cannabis man,” a medical chart that described how the human endocannabinoid system works and how cannabis affects the body. It was a short tutorial, just a hint of some of the health and wellness information he will be imparting on the tours, one of which is focused just on that subject.

For a bit of fun, Applegarth invited us to don blindfolds as we neared the grow site to recreate the experience of “trimmigrants” being shuttled to clandestine gardens to trim and process freshly harvested pot. Back in the day, some growers hid the location of

their grows, lest some trimmers come back and rip them off.

Turning off Highway 116 near the Blue Rock Quarry, we bumped up a dirt road and passed a Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy handcuffing a Latino man. Was this a pot bust, we all wondered?

It turns out the man was an undocumented worker arrested on an immigration charge and headed to the clutches of Immigration Customs Enforcement. But as we drove up the road, we were reminded that even growers who comply with state and local authorities can still face arrest and destruction of their crops.

The grower we met was Oaky Joe Munson. Joey grows cannabis for AIDS patients free of charge and has been doing so for years, even after raids by the sheriff that led to the confiscation of his plants. From Munson’s farm, we headed to Guerneville for a catered lunch on the Russian River and a visit to the shoeboxsize Riverside Wellness, a densely stocked dispensary that caters to the Russian River community. It was a pretty idyllic end to the sneak-peek tour.

Northern California has its own Old Faithful Geyser, in Calistoga.

SONG OF FIRE AND ICE A short trip through fiery history on a cold day in January BY JAMES KNIGHT

T

here’s a portal to another world at the very top of Napa Valley— that’s how I like to think of it.

It’s a frozen world of snow and ice, a world apart from the sunny Napa Valley of mellow, red wine and bottled poetry fame, even if it’s nothing out of the ordinary on a winter day in colder country. Here, this ephemeral world is made in a day and disappears in two or three, only once every few years. When the portal opens, I try to drive over the hill from Sonoma County and get there by the quickest route possible—bypassing the town of Calistoga via Tubbs Lane.

Alas, Tubbs. The name, puts one in mind more of fire than ice. Poor Tubbs Lane earned infamy by dint of standard wildfire naming protocol: the Tubbs fire of October 2017, sparked in the vicinity of Tubbs Lane.

Tubbs is now so much a synonym for grief that it was a strange kind of revelation to take the familiar right-hand turn down Tubbs Lane in January 2018 and find that Tubbs Lane . . . is the same.

Here’s Bill’s Liquor, a plain, white-painted, roadhouse-style convenience store, trimmed in red, set under Valley oak trees, same as always, same as dozens of country stores

across California. Vineyards and horse stables stand here yet, along a lane studded with an unusual windbreak of sap-laden pine trees.

Tubbs abides, as does the routinely restive hole in the ground known as the Old Faithful Geyser of California. For $15 (there’s a two buck discount for seniors, military and bicyclists) you get to see what the earth can do when it has the fire in its belly—it spurts a bit of water in the air—behind a brushy screen of bamboo and palms that screens the roadside attraction from unpaid view.

Further on, here’s the gate to Chateau Montelena, shaded by a dense stand of one of California’s most controversial trees, eucalyptus.

Built of thick, stone walls in 1888 by one Alfred L. Tubbs, Montelena stands. Not so much his own manorial home, which was removed from the landscape in the 1964 Hanly fire.

Tubbs Lane ends at the junction with Highway 29 and at certain, or maybe most, hours of the day, a fearsome death-ride to Lake County. Why the hurry, really—this is also a timeless mystery to me, as is the question of why the bare-bones turnout to Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, still situated in tony Napa Valley, home of the silk-smooth paved road, remains unimproved.

No matter. Onward, the climb calls. First over fallen branches, tree trunks, and over rock outcroppings to visit the one-time honeymoon home of the 19th-century author.

Nothing to see here, but is it growing colder?

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,340 feet, something changes. A bit of ice in a rut on the side of the road. A crunch underfoot.

And then the scene unfolds, step by step rather surprisingly, like a short trip through wardrobe into some kind of land of Narnia, I’m trudging through thick snow at the top of the world—well, at the top of Napa, anyway.

Ice crystals, frozen in the clutches of fir needles, fall at random and make eerie music, a high-hat to the drumming of giants up ahead—melting ice and snow falling on the kettledrums of communications equipment at the top of the mountain.

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DRIVING THE COUNTY The epic vistas of one Sonoma County road

BY AIYANA MOYA

I

fell in love with the bumpy back roads of rural Sonoma County in my adolescent afternoons, driving my friends to beaches and hikes. During this time I developed an inner map that could put Google to shame.

This inner map could design at least three different routes to a given destination, depending on the time of day and the amount of available time for a proper road trip. This map has since expanded to include back roads that I can’t find by name, only by a feeling, an embedded instinct. I suggest an exploration that includes improvised turnoffs and taking your time driving it not only to let the beauty of the lumbering trees and rolling hills soak in, but also to help your gas mileage.

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Starting in downtown Occidental at the Bohemian Market, grab some coffee, snacks, a sandwich from the deli (definitely snatch extra napkins as these sandwiches tend to seep sauce and squish out the sides). Pull out of the lot and drive across the street to Coleman Valley Road, snuggled between the old video store and Negri’s Restaurant.

The drive will start shrouded with tightly packed trees, yielding only occasionally to small patches of open farmland and shimmering wheat fields. Pay attention at the transition from dense forest into open space, where fields reach out and stretch as far left and right as you can see, and the colors switch from mossy green to tans and golds.

On the left, a lake and large boulders snag the smooth wheat landscape, and a sign with sweeping handwriting will announce elegantly: Ocean Song. This is a nonprofit wilderness garden open to the public. Enjoy

their bright organic garden at the end of the dirt road. They offer occasional educational programs and events, so check their website before going. Talk to one of the workers about various hiking trails leading off into the rugged canyons and grassy fields, before enjoying your picnic overlooking the vibrant flower-dotted hills.

Pulling back onto Coleman Valley Road, slowly weave your way up the coiled route. Beautiful, rustic houses are sprinkled alongside the road, along with cattle roaming the golden fields. Drive with care, as it is not unusual to have to stop for a herd of sheep meandering through.

On the left, hills roll up and down until they are met with a thick mass of trees in the distance. You are at the highest point of the road here. Hawks glide softly over the valleys, and on a clear day you can see Mount Tamalpais and Point Reyes in Marin.

On your right, the ocean winks from a distance. Cows graze on either side, dotting the hills black and white.

As you cut down the road, with forest and hills on your left, the ocean becomes more visible until it transforms from a small glimmer into a long streak of blue-gray, mingling with the sky, sweeping out as far as you can see. Eventually a huge rock appears on your right with a small pull off: jump out and feel the wild gusts of ocean wind. Stay for as long as you can before the chill sends you back into your car for shelter.

The contrast between the green valleys meeting the sharp blue ocean, the rocks tearing through the sheet of blue water, the jagged coastline, this view from Coleman Valley Road is the landscape locals take such pride in—and a reason to keep coming back.

The road continues its descent and ends at Highway 1, where taking a left will lead you into the town of Bodega Bay and taking a right will bring you to majestic, often deserted beaches, like Marshall Gulch or Schoolhouse Beach. Each direction is worth exploring, and inspires a love for driving that only the landscape of Sonoma County can provide.

2018–19 SEASON WEILL HALL | SCHROEDER HALL

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