Hitting the road to Sonoma's wine country

Thursday, 7 April 2016 

We hit the road to go to Sonoma wine district.  We drove up along the coast which was really beautiful, but the weather had turned a little cold.

We were driving along and saw our first road kill. “What is that?” we thought. A crow was trying to drag it off the road. Trevor says “it’s a skunk” and then he said “oh my god it !@#$@ stinks!” so we opened the windows to try and clear it, but it was rancid for at least 300 meters down the road. We talked to people who said when you actually get “skunked” i.e. sprayed directly, you can’t get the smell out for weeks. It smelled like burning tires mixed with some nasty, toxic chemical spill. You hear about skunks but you think they couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that – well, we can tell you, it is - and worse.

Then we went to a famous winery along Sonoma's Russian River Valley, Williams Selyem, which is quite exclusive and very hard to get access to. You can’t go unless you’re on their mailing list and have bought some wine. Well we ordered some wine, sight unseen from Australia, so we could go there. It was excellent. Picked up our wine and had a tasting. 

We saw the workers in the field.  All Mexicans – and they want to build a wall to keep these people out; who will pick the grapes?

Then onto another excellent winery, Littorai, which we had also booked for a tasting and tour of the vineyard. We have tried their wines in Australia and knew they were excellent (famous for their pinot noir and chardonnay). We had a 90 minute tour and tasting. The winery is completely biodynamic and so we were shown around all the special things they do to keep it that way so they don’t have to use any pesticides or commercial fertilisers and can be as fully self-sufficient as possible. They had big compost heaps and boxes for barn owls to deal with their gofer problem that dig holes through the ground and hurt the vine roots. They plant sunflowers next to the vines to give the birds something to eat so they don’t eat the fruit.  While we were there we saw them handpicking chamomile petals to make a ‘tea’ infusion for the ground which helps for a calming effect for the plants (who knew?)

For dinner we were hoping to get some of the famous Dungeness crabs which were just in season. We went to Bodega Bay where the fishing fleet comes in to try and get fresh crabs but there was nothing open – how disappointing. But it was a beautiful inlet.

We ended up going to an excellent restaurant called Peter Lowell’s in Sebastopol near where we were staying which was recommended to us by the lady that ran the Airbnb place we stayed at.  The suburban street the restaurant was on was full of great street art.  One of the residents on the street was a sculptor and he made a sculpture for the front yard of every house.  It was pretty cool – every sculpture represented the particular occupation or hobby of the owner of the house.