They must feed the ducks of Sonoma Plaza something special to make them stick around the car-choked plaza rather than flying a few miles north to the serenity of the valley, even with the nice new plaza ponds completed in 2006. Getting out of Sonoma, as fascinating and historic as it is, is the only way to really get an idea of what valley residents are fighting to preserve.

The road north out of Sonoma passes fast-food outlets and a strip mall, and comes as close to urban sprawl as there is. In keeping with the valley’s laid-back nature, it’s a spaced-out, relaxed sort of sprawl linking Sonoma and three spring towns: Boyes Hot Springs, Fetters Hot Springs, and Agua Caliente, all of which look like they could do with a rejuvenating spa treatment themselves.

The towns end abruptly and the serene valley lies ahead. Plum, walnut, and peach orchards once shared the valley with cows that must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven to be grazing here. Now the mighty vine has taken over the valley floor, although that’s far better than subdivisions. There’s really little else but green things along the Sonoma Highway, except the loose-knit community of Kenwood (with the valley’s cheapest gas) and, at the border of Santa Rosa, the retirement community of Oakmont.

Slightly off the main road southeast of Kenwood, the town of Glen Ellen is a wine country town with plenty of fancy restaurants and inns hidden in the surrounding woods yet still with the valley’s nice, laid back vibe. It’s a true one-street town, with a curious dogleg halfway down the main street that is the real center of it all, not that there’s all that much happening. It has managed to remain quaint without succumbing to the fake frills that so many other old towns in the United States get wrapped in. One of the biggest buildings is an auto shop, a sign that real life still takes place in this part of the valley.

The Wines

The volcanic soils of the hot mountainsides and the rich alluvial plains of the valley floor make Sonoma an ideal place to grow a plethora of grape varietals, a fact the missionaries and immigrants of the 1800s quickly discovered. The valley doesn’t have quite the number of different growing conditions and soils of the larger Napa Valley, but winemakers maintain that its wines can be just as good.

In many ways the Sonoma Valley and Napa Valley are more alike than different. Both have productive mountain growing regions, both are proportionally similar, face the same direction and are affected by the same wind and rain patterns. The fact that Sonoma’s early head start in winemaking in the mid-1800s petered out by the early 1900s seems to have had more to do with chance and bad business decisions by the early pioneers like Agoston Haraszthy. The larger Napa Valley wineries established in the late 1800s gained more commercial traction, perhaps due the greater availability of land. Once a critical mass of winemaking ha been reached there was no turning back.

Climate-wise, the Sonoma valley has three distinct appellations. The Sonoma Valley AVA is the largest and includes some or all of the other two. It stretches from the top of the valley near Santa Rosa all the way down to the bay, bordered by 3,000-foot-high mountains on each side and encompassing 116,000 acres of land and about 13,000 acres of vineyards (compare that to the Napa Valley’s 35,000 acres of vineyards).

The valley acts like a giant funnel, channeling cooler air (and sometimes fog) up from the bay, leaving the mountainsides to bask in warm sunshine. Zinfandel loves the higher, hotter elevations, while cabernet and merlot ripen well on hillsides and the warmer north end of the valley. Pinot noir, chardonnay, and other white varietals prefer the slightly cooler valley floor, especially farther south toward Carneros.

The 800 acres of vineyards in the cooler and rockier Sonoma Mountain appellation just up the hill from Glen Ellen vary widely depending on their exposure, but the region is known mostly for its cabernet, although chardonnay, pinot noir, and other white varietals are also grown here.

The newest appellation is Bennett Valley, created in 2003, which stretches northeast from the Sonoma Mountains toward Santa Rosa and only just overlaps with Sonoma Valley. Its 700 acres of vineyards are primarily planted with merlot and chardonnay and generally have rocky, volcanic-based soils. A gap in low mountains west of the Bennett Valley lets ocean air and fog through and keeps growing conditions cool compared to the Sonoma Valley and the mountains.

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