Wine – Sonoma County Blog

Sonoma County Harvest Fair

Sonoma County Harvest Fair Logo

It’s time (Sept 30-Oct 2) for the 2011 Sonoma County Harvest Fair. Right on schedule the vineyards around the county are laden with ripening fruit that give testament to the bounty that Luther Burbank loved about Sonoma County. You can’t see the densely grouped clusters without appreciating the gift that nature bestows on us.

The Harvest Fair is a great opportunity to get in touch with local growers and wine makers and to share a weekend of food, music, fun, and games with your fellow food and wine enthusiasts.

Congratulations are due to these Harvest Fair award winners:

Kenwood Vineyards – 2010 Pinot Gris – Russian River Valley:
Sweepstakes Winning White Wine and the James Guymon Memorial Award

Wilson Winery – 2009 Zinfandel – Dry Creek Valley – Sawyer
Sweepstakes Winning Red Wine and the George Cooke Memorial Award

Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards – 2007 Brut Rose – Carneros
Sweepstakes Winning Specialty Wine and the Mike Lee Memorial Award

Dry Creek Real Estate

Dry Creek Valley has always been a favored address for permanent and part time wine country residents alike. These days, in addition to the famed Dry Creek zinfandel carpeting the valley floor and hillside vineyards, the valley is home to the dark blue of Healdsburg Sotheby’s International Realty signs (and others) marking some beautiful properties.

Wine Country Lifestyle — Wine Country Living

There are lavish wine country estates, more modest view acreage overlooking the valley and surrounding hills, and some excellent vineyard land that occasionally may include turnkey operating wineries. Exemplifying the diversity of Dry Creek Valley, Pug’s Leap Farm is also available. Pug’s Leap is a dairy operation making superb and widely appreciated goat cheese.

Property values in Dry Creek Valley are driven by the standard real estate factors starting with location. Healdsburg is the main attraction in the wine country. Properties closer to town will always have a higher valuation than more distant properties. You can measure in miles or in minutes, but you will pay more to be closer to Healdsburg. Anything along Dry Creek Rd or W. Dry Creek Rd with an address under 1000 is considered close to town. Of course, locations close to town can have drawbacks due to traffic noise, so each property has to be looked at in context.

A second key valuation factor is the utility of the land. In a famed appellation, the potential to grow grapes is a major contributor to the price of the property. The valley floor and gently sloping hillsides are the main beneficiaries of the agricultural value of plantable land. Of course, you may find existing vineyards for sale and the question then isn’t about plantable land but about the quality of what is already there. Within the vineyards already planted, value is based on whether or not the grapes are under a contract for purchase of the grapes, which varietals, rootstocks and clones are planted, the age of the vines, and the quality of historic growing practices such as pruning, irrigation, and frost protection.

Here’s a slideshow of Dry Creek Valley homes and land for sale:

Sonoma County Wine Tweeters

I set out to create a list of all the Sonoma County wineries that are active in various social media. My problem has been that there is so much great wine in Sonoma County that it’s hard to know where to start blogging about it. One of the solutions I came up with is to pass through a lot of information from the wineries themselves. Most of them are excellent communicators about everything from events to special sales to vintage announcements. I’m going to try to keep up with the best of what the wineries are promoting, but I thought a list of all the tweeting wineries might be useful.

Here in no particular order are some Sonoma County wine related tweeters:

drycreekvineyard.com
johntylerwines.com
millcreekwinery.com
aristawinery.com
aristawinery.com
bedarravineyards.com
capturewines.com
cellarrat.org
chalkhill.com
DaVero.com
DiablitaWines.com
dirtysouthwine.com
drycreekvineyard.com
EsterlinaVineyards.com
EverettRidge.com
familywines.com
ferrari-carano.com
foppiano.com
hauckcellars.com
hawkeswine.com
hawleywine.com
hobowines.com
hopkilnwinery.com
jimtown.com
jordanwinery.com
jwine.com
kokomowines.com/
lancaster-estate.com
lavenderhillvineyards.com
macphailwines.com
magnanimuswines.com
michelschlumberger.com
mountswinery.com
murphygoodewinery.com
murphygoodewinery.com
papapietro-perry.com
portalupiwine.com
quivirawine.com
relishculinary.com
ridgewine.com
ridgewine.com
rodneystrong.com
rodneystrong.com/
rondobley.com
rosenblumcellars.com
sausalwinery.com
simiwinery.com
skipstonewines.com
thewinespies.com
vergewine.com/blog
whalehead.com
whiteoakwinery.com/index.php
winesandmakers.com
zinrestaurant.com

Give Thanks for Wine

We celebrated Thanksgiving with our daughter’s extended family of winemakers. It was as good as we thought it would be with a wide array of delicious food including a couple deep-fried turkeys to go with the traditional oven roasted bird. It was a grey, fall day in the Green Valley appellation. Not unusual for a November, and just right for a couple of the dads to be tossing a football around with their kids.

The venue was in the main barn/office. It’s a first for me to have the backdrop for the food to be a welding outfit and a great looking meetal shop, but grape growing is farming before it is wine. Jeans and not linen are the order of the day for the farm families that bring in the crop that makes wine.

The most interesting part of the meal for me was the wine. We got to taste many wines that have never seen a distributor’s shelves and the picture leading off this article gives an indication of the variety of offerings. With the exception of the Clos du Bois, most readers will not recognize many of these bottles. All I can say is that should visit Sonoma County and start touring some of the smaller wineries.

Sonoma Wine Country Dreaming

In Healdsburg, the real estate dreamers have wine on their mind. Folks wander in off the streets after a long day of wine tasting, great food, beautiful weather, and gorgeous scenery. They ask about ten acres in the country suitable for a vineyard and their dream home. Most of the last decade we would have had to say, “Sorry, don’t have anything like that right now. Let me put you on our list.” There may have been one or two marginal properties that suited them, but pickings were scarce and gems were rare.

: Healdsburg Vineyard Land

Eric Drew, broker at Healdsburg Sotheby’s International Realty, and I listed three country properties this year that sold to smart buyers looking for country estates. Since then, we have assembled one of the best selections of wine country land that I have seen in many years. We have ready-to-plant vineyard land. We have existing vineyards. We have country property from 20 to 600 acres ready for the dreamers to fill in the raw canvas the land provides. We even have some of the most beautiful steelhead-spawning, waterfall-lined stretch of creek on the west coast.

One of our fellow agents has a spectacular vineyard property with a lake outside Sebastopol. Like many of our special properties, it’s not listed, but is available for sale. We also have acreage that is one narrow service/hiking road from being lake frontage property.

Sonoma County Harvest Fair

Dry Creek Real Estate

Sonoma County Wine Tweeters

Give Thanks for Wine

Sonoma Wine Country Dreaming

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Home Buyer’s Guide

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