Alexander Valley, here I come!
I’ve long had a soft spot for Alexander Valley, the AVA in Sonoma County that stretches up from Healdsburg to the Mendocino County line, at Cloverdale.
I came to know the valley especially well during the year I spent writing my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River. I got it into my head to describe how the Russian River first “turned on,” and found that a description of its physical beginnings had never been written–at least, so far as I could tell. So I spent a great deal of time on and along the River, and talked to a great many geologists (none of whom agreed with the others), and then came to my own conclusions, which you can read in the first chapter, “Out of the Pangaean Mists a River is Born.”
It’s one thing to get to know a region through books and maps. It’s quite another to trek it. And I did trek the Alexander Valley, in all seasons. I got drenched in winter rains, almost died capsizing a canoe on a whitewatery part of the river just outside Asti, sweated in summer heat on Rattlesnake Hill and Iron Horse’s old T-bar-T ranch, heard the hoarfrost crackle on the cold night ground while I lit a fire in an old cabin in Geyserville, ate lunch and drank wine on a sandbar, crawled through the prickly, poison ivy’d, spider-webby undergrowth of the river’s banks, tasted in my mouth the stones and dirt from Seghesio’s vineyard, climbed to the top of Squaw Rock and got dizzy looking down, met all manner of characters, visited the valley’s oldest burial ground, did tasting after tasting at as many wineries as I could, ate and drank immoderately and in general absorbed the valley into my genes (or maybe it absorbed me).
My feelings concerning Alexander Valley’s wines have not changed a great deal over the years. I always had respect and affection for them, even if the appellation seemed to be missing the excitement and glamour of, say, the Russian River Valley or the Sonoma Coast. Solid wines, you might call them, but the appellation’s boundary’s are stupid beyond recognition. They extend from the shore of the Russian River to 2,800 feet up into the Mayacamas Mountains. Surely we can do better.
There’s a conservatism about the Alexander Valley that is partly explained by its geographical location. Anyone who knows Sonoma County understands that it is divided culturally into east and west. West Sonoma is Sebastopol and Guerneville: hippies, pot, incense, environmentalists, Democrats, anarchists, the counter-culture. Inland Sonoma by contrast has long been the farming community, by nature less open to change. I don’t mean to make this distinction hard and fast–and certainly, the gentrification of places like Cloverdale, and the wine lifestyle that has changed Healdsburg so remarkably, are shifting things. But these generalizations, I think, hold true.
Alexander Valley knows what it does well, wine-wise; it’s done it for a long time, and it would be imprudent to expect it to change course mid-stream (or mid-river, as the case may be). This weekend (May 18-19), the valley hosts the annual Taste Alexander Valley event. Wineries open their doors, there’s plenty of food and laughter, and the weather will be sunny and warm. I’ll be there today and Friday, doing a couple pre-event seminars, and I hope to run into you.
