A ridiculous political dispute in the state legislature made it impossible for the good Colonel to distribute his imported cuttings in an orderly manner, as he had planned. Financial troubles ensued, and although the Colonel's sons, who had been sent to spend an apprenticeship in the vineyards abroad, unquestionably were the most competent wine men in California, Haraszthy eventually lost control of his cellars and vineyard. Indefatigable and undiscouraged, he set up a sugar plantation in Nicaragua in 1868 and a year later disappeared into a river “infested with crocodiles.”
Haraszthy, however, had provided the momentum for the take-off; the rest was comparatively easy. Two itinerant German musicians, Kohler and Frohling, parlayed a little vineyard near Los Angeles, which they purchased in 1854, into a wine empire which included vines in Sonoma, ten great “wine vaults” in San Francisco, a resident agen in New York, and an export trade, around the Horn, to Denmark, England, and northern Germany. Arpad Haraszthy, who remained in charge of the Buena Vista Cellars after his father's departure, produced California's first successful champagne, Eclipse, which became famous. Emil Dresel and the Gundlach-Bundschu Wine Company planted, along the lower foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains near Vineburg, the Riesling, Traminer, and Sylvaner grapes which even today, in their old age, yield some of the best Rhine type of wines of California. The whole fertile little valley was rimmed with vines by 1900.
Most of these, alas, are overgrown today and gone. It is a disheartening sight, as you drive northward from Sonoma to Santa Rosa, to see, on acre after acre of what could and should be some of America's best wine-producing country, the faint patchwork squares of abandoned vineyard. A few hardy farmers continue to grow grapes—they sell them, for a good deal less than they are worth, either outside the Valley or to one of five or six bulk-wine producers in Sonoma or kenwood or Glen Ellen.
Back in the wooded hills west of Glen Ellen are the fire-scarred ruins of Jack London's once celebrated home. And near Glen Ellen is the one winery that offers anything of interest to a thirsty lover of picturesque and ancient buildings. Most of us who are not Californians or who are of more recent vintage are inclined to forget that the great earthquake in 1906 did not stop at the city limits of San Francisco but devastated a whole countryside. Charlie Pagani's Glen Ellen Winery, being as durable as they come, suffered a minor casualty—it was bent, not broken, by the tremors and survives today, incredibly and magnificently sway-backed but as solid as ever.
The little chain of hills that forms the western slope of the Sonoma Valley peters out after a few miles, and once you cross the low saddle at the head of the Valley, you still have the Mayacamas Mountains on your right, but a wide plain on your left. With one exception, in this fertile country of orchards and hops round Santa Rosa, there are no vineyards of consequence. The exception is Fountain Grove.
It is true, of course, that in a country where Germans and Italians and Frenchmen, Finns and Chinese and Russians and New Englanders, counts and trappers, musicians and colonels were all numbered among the original settlers, the extraordinary becomes commonplace. But even in such company, the history of Fountain Grove is unusual. For a number of years it was one of those curious “cooperative commonwealths” that sprouted up like mushrooms, under the guidance of self-appointed “prophets,” all over America during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The “prophet” of Fountain Grove was one Thomas Lake Harris, whose disciples included members of some of the most distinguished families of England and whose principal acolyte was a prince of the Royal House of Japan, Kanaye Nagasawa. It was Nagasawa who created Fountain Grove as it now exists; toward the end of his life, proud of the rolling vineyards that he had planted to Cabernet, Zinfandel, Riesling, and Pinot Noir, he became known as one of the best judges of wine of the West Coast. The vineyard is owned today by Errol MacBoyle and is one of the few in Sonoma which, in grape varieties and cellar equipment and general all-round quality, deserves to rank with the elite of Napa.
This northern half of Sonoma County, from Santa Rosa to Asti and Cloverdale, is, incidentally, the only important part of California's fine-wine country which lies outside the basin of San Francisco Bay. It is drained instead by the Russian River, a picturesque, meandering little stream which rises in the north near Ukiah, flows south parallel to the coast, and then, at Healdsburg, cuts abruptly west through the magnificent redwoods of the Coast Range to the Pacific. Its valley, between Healdsburg and the ocean, is thick with summer cottages and picnic grounds, and there is only one winery of consequence—the old stone champagne plant of the Korbel family, at Guerneville. The Korbels, originally from Bohemia, made a fortune in the lumber business, and some of the gigantic stumps of their original redwoods are still to be seen among the vines.
A high proportion of the early vineyardists in the Sonoma Valley were Germans, and French settlers were largely responsible for the development of Santa Clara, but the Russian River Valley, from Healdsburg north, is a sort of little Italy. Even the Countryside, with its rolling, irregular, reddish hills, looks surprisingly Italian and recalls nothing so much as the Monferrato, the classic district of fine wine southeast of Turin. The wines, too, are much more like those of Italy than of France—strudy, full-bodied, heavy in tannin and rich in color—though it would be hard to say whether this is due to a combination of soil and climate, or to the grape varieties used, or to traditional Italian methods of vinification. In any case, northern Sonoma has always specialized in red wines and concentrated on the production of something sound and honorable and inexpensive, rather than of something rare. Most of the small growers sell their wine in bulk, and almost all those who bottle, like the Italian-Swiss Colony, for example, do so on a very large scale.
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