By Catherine Jameson

Sonoma County in winter is a special place apart. The insanely passionate, eccentric, and loving people who devote themselves to making great wine knock themselves out to share their stories, unveil new vintages, and welcome you into their homes and their lands. This invitation meant more than usual to me this year. Having until recently been exiled to a dreary urban galaxy far, far away – where the locals imbibed mostly beer and bad wine (or worse, did not imbibe) – on the weekend of January 15th and 16th, I found myself happily returned & perched in Healdsburg, with Sonoma County’s bounty flung at the foot of my fog-slicked deck: The Russian River Wine Road’s 13th Annual Winter Wineland. Visit 94 wineries in the Alexander, Russian River, and Dry Creek Valleys in two days! I did the turbo-tour math: 10 hours over two days, 94 wineries. Simple – 9.4 wineries per hour and I would have sipped it all! Oh my. Be careful what you wish for.

The gods and goddesses of weather and wine conspired to suspend the winter deluge that weekend and bestow upon Sonoma County a much appreciated respite, with soft & dreamy skies and break-outs of sunshine. The vineyards sang along with a dazzling display of emerald green aisles – the first sightings of mustard and poppies, a sure sign of exciting new vintages to come. Faith may be somewhat of a loaded word here in the bluest of the blue states, but even the agnostics among us must surely be inspired by Nature’s reassuring wink, a sign that She will once again allow mere mortals to make wine out of water. Or at least a damn fine Pinot.

How many wineries could we realistically and enthusiastically visit in six hours without the day taking on the urgency – not to mention the physical excess – of a marathon? Life-coaching methodology might suggest prioritizing your priorities. For a lover of all things wine, this could include: curiosity about a hot cult wine, an urge to check out the terroir of a new fave rave, a craven desire to touch fingertips with an esteemed winemaker. To add another layer of much to the already overflowing muchness, all 94 wineries filled the Winter Wineland brochure with promises of something for everyone, and I drew expectant circles around each winery’s come-hither pick-up lines in my program. Live blues. Barbeque. Sausages. Soup. Reggae. Chocolate. Tapas. Chocolate, again. And yes, FOOTBALL. After all, it is January in America, and some things are sacred to us all. Even one of the most genteel of the bunch, the esteemed Robert Young Estate in Alexander Valley, turned out to have a rabbit-eared old woodie-TV at the entrance, respectfully tuned to the game(s). Had we time enough, along with the love, we’d have high-tail-gated it over to Armida Winery, where TVs – TVs plural – were promised in abundance, complete with tapes of past Super Bowl highlights.

But on to duty…Saturday, we arrived at our check-in winery, the lovely Seghesio Family Vineyards, at a leisurely 1 p.m. We had surmised that no one would be out tasting wine before noon – propriety, you know. Judging from the folks spilling happily out into the nearly-edible parking lot (lined with citrus and lavender and rosemary), things had been in full, roaring swing since 11 a.m. A hearty couple hailed us and recommended that we head straight downstairs to the cellar, “where there’s a lotta good food!” Inside the gracious, old, leafy building, a vibrant and congenial (but not overcrowded) crowd mingled at the broad, sumptuous tasting bar. We were greeted warmly at the door and, once again, directed straight to the cellar, where Peter Seghesio was reportedly doling out the aforementioned good food.

I had met Camille Seghesio at a wine show in Vancouver, British Columbia, last spring, and was impressed by her love of family, not to mention her fabulous Zinfandels. Now I understood literally where she was coming from. Down in the cellar, surrounded by barrels, her brother Peter was pouring yet more fabulous Zinfandel (the 2002 Seghesio Sonoma County Zinfandel was Wine Spectator’s Number 11 of the Top 100 for 2004) and guys you wished were your brothers-in-law dished up hot ziti & sausage with a luscious light tomato sauce. Back upstairs, the family matriarch, Rachel Anne Seghesio, chatted with friends who surrounded her in circles three friends deep. I yearned to stick around for her talk about the influence of Italian families in Sonoma County, but 93 more wineries awaited, and we reluctantly forsook a pyramid of Scharffenberger brownies stacked on the tasting room plank and forged ahead.

The night before, at a fund-raiser for the Healdsburg Dog Park, a local couple insisted we check out their favorite winery, Siduri. Who could turn down a hot tip from insiders? We headed south down 101 to Santa Rosa, plunging ever deeper into the concrete darkness of industrial architecture and parking lots, to spill, finally, into the warehouse winery of Adam and Dianna Lee.

Inside the front door, Adam Lee, the young owner/winemaker of some of the most-desired Pinot Noirs in America, greeted us cheerily from behind one of several temporary tasting tables, which was dwarfed by pallets of wine and barrels and tanks. Pausing just momentarily to reflect that a Pinot conversation with Adam Lee is a rare and tasty treat in itself, we nearly climbed over him to start tasting the gargantuan Siduri Pinots made from grapes sourced over a 2,000-square-mile region, from Oregon’s Willamette Valley to the Santa Lucia Highlands. The Lee’s love of winemaking is obviously contagious – their young and devoted staff could not have seemed happier than to be in that chilly, concrete-floored, industrial warehouse space surrounded by some of the finest wines in the country.

Once again, we had to tear ourselves away from the wine, the cheery expertise of the staff, and the stellar cheese, because another 92 wineries beckoned and time was tick-tocking away. As it turned out, there were not enough ticks or tocks in Day 1, because by the time we drove up to the gates of the Marimar Torres Estate in Graton – not far from Walker Apples, one of the last Graton farms to hold out for apples in the age of grapes – the doors were locked. This wine touring stuff apparently requires focus while at the same time sapping focus.

Here was one benefit to starting Saturday late and ending early: We began Sunday with a clear head and clear plan. Sunday morning at 11 found us zipping north into the picture-perfect Alexander Valley, a cinematographer’s dream of wine country. Just when we thought the valley vista had satisfied our every primal need for agricultural aesthetic innocence, we came upon the big white New England-y house of Robert Young Estate Winery, complete with black shutters and a circular driveway. Think Hamptons-In-The-Vineyard. Perfection. My husband, Bill, and I instantly developed an acute case of ancestor envy. The tasting was held in the wine-barn as well as the cave. Five minutes in the company of the Youngs and you were wishing you’d married into the family in 1858, when the farm was founded. Chestnuts roasting by an open fire, mittens, the Young Estate’s Scion Bordeaux blend & a pedigreed Chardonnay, and a 360-degree view of vineyards, distant hills, and fields shaped just so promised ever-lasting happiness. It was tempting to melt into the scene and pretend to be a Young, but there was more.

Ninety-one wineries more. Right down the road, past the poppies and past the cute Wedgwood blue VW bug convertible with the “For Sale” sign, past the little white church and up the lane to the hillside perch of Hanna Winery, we found ourselves in a sun-drenched temple of wine, with spicy hummus made from a (Syrian) family recipe and vibrant Wine Country watercolors by Healdsburg artist Richard Sheppard. A Dale Evans-style Californian named Rebecca offered us a barrel tasting of Malbec, along with a riveting tale of planting Hanna’s nearly vertical vineyard atop rocky Mount Veeder from which the Malbec came, which required dynamiting eight feet down into bedrock to plant the vines. These are determined people.

Monday the 17th was Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, offering the chance for some wineries to extend the weekend’s festivities with small tours and special tastings. Once again I found myself in Hanna-land, this time hustling to a tour of Hanna’s Russian River vineyards on Occidental Road near Sebastopol. Running a few minutes late, I zipped into the tasting room fearing the tour had left without me, only to find that no one else had shown up. Most of the weekend’s revelers had trudged back home the night before. Mary, the gracious tasting room host, picked up a phone and asked someone, in a hopeful tone, whether they’d mind giving a tour for one.

“Someone” turned out to be none other than the award-winning winemaker himself, Jeff Hinchcliffe. Luck had sent me straight to the top. A lovely, warm, bear of a man, Jeff stood at the spot where the vineyard meets the winery presses and went into an ecstatic trance as he patiently described just how things work. Winter tasks. Bottling. Yeast. Feast. Famine. Pestilence. Pressing. Filled with the love of his life’s work, Jeff put up with my newbie questions without a hint of annoyance, and indulged my tendency to get off-topic (have you noticed?) in my enthusiasm for the greater gestalt of the Wine Lifestyle.

All around us, the work-a-day winter work of winemaking unfolded. Fleece-bundled men on forklifts moved barrels while another man hosed them clean. Hulking white tanks gleamed in the weak winter sun. We ended the conversation with a stop in the cellar, where old French oak uprights, as solid & certain as your grandmother’s dining room table, stood to the side, reassuring us that things were as they should be. I thanked Jeff profusely for his generosity of time and spirit, and he ambled off to a lovely bungalow whose windowsills appeared to be lined with empty wine bottles – tributes to a lifetime of preserving those moments when you know you’ve come upon – or, better yet, created – something out of the ordinary.

There ended my Winter Wineland extended weekend. Didn’t make a dent in the 94 offerings, but what I did do, I really loved. My advice: Right now, put Winter Wineland on your calendar for the third weekend of January, 2006. You have a whole year to think about where you want to visit, and perhaps develop a method to sample more than 90 wineries in just two days. I know I could not do it, and I’m glad I couldn’t.

My lasting impression of Winter Wineland 2005 is that, after a recent exile to a distant land, I am very glad to be home. As a wise old Alexander Valley hand said during Wineland weekend, these are the good old days in Sonoma County Wine Country, and we would be wise to drain them to the dregs now, before they are gone forever. The good news is that we really needn’t wait until January 2006. I see that March’s barrel tastings are right around the corner….

Catherine Jameson is a wine enthusiast and writer who lives in Healdsburg.