Savoring the Sonoma Difference

The Sonoma and Napa valleys lie side by side, separated by the Mayacamas Mountains, about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. Both are agricultural, easy on the eye and prime spots for touring. Both are devoted to gastronomy and the good life.

And, of course, both make wine, unless you believe this line from comedian and vintner Tommy Smothers, which is emblazoned on Sonoma Valley T-shirts: “Sonoma makes wine. Napa makes auto parts.”

The Sonoma Valley, home of the Smothers Family Winery, has something of a chip on its shoulder because of Napa’s greater fame. But these California wine regions aren’t two grapes from the same vine, as I discovered on a four-day visit here last month, well before the busy summer tourist season.

To begin with, the Sonoma Valley is half the length of Napa’s, just 17 miles from north to south, wedged between the tawny Mayacamas and Sonoma mountains. It is dotted with 22,800 acres of wine grapes, unassuming hamlets like Glen Ellen and Kenwood, and small farms where old-timers and erstwhile hippies grow organic vegetables and make cheese from the milk of contented cows.

While Napa strives for a traditional French ambience, immigrants from Germany and Italy have put their mark on Sonoma. Idiosyncrasy reigns in the Sonoma Valley, whose residents live la dolce vita in bluejeans.

If you’ve been to Napa, the differences are striking. I was there researching a story a couple of years ago, and just to be sure I wasn’t imagining the dissimilarities, I quizzed nearly everyone I met on my Sonoma trip last month. The results of my informal and unscientific survey were completely skewed, of course, but wryly amusing. For instance, at the sophisticated Cafe la Haye, just off the plaza in the town of Sonoma, I met a woman who said that in one valley “everyone has a smile on his face; in the other, they believe their press.”

Perhaps she was biased.

But one thing this town at the south end of the valley can claim undeniably is a unique and compelling history.

Its sweet little Mission San Francisco Solano, founded in 1823, was the last and most northerly Catholic outpost in New Spain. Ten years later, Gen. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a native Californio and newly independent Mexico’s representative in the north, laid out Sonoma’s plaza, a grand eight-acre spread that seems too big for the town.

In 1846, a ragtag band of Anglos seized Vallejo, raised the Bear Flag in the plaza and proclaimed all of California an independent republic, unaware that the U.S. had gone to war with Mexico, partly to gain the beautiful land on the Pacific for itself. Vallejo, by then regarded as the wealthiest man in the region, served on the new state’s constitutional convention and was elected to the first state senate.

This colorful history makes the town a favored field trip destination for California schoolchildren, who generally study state history in the fourth grade, said Shelley Brown, who works at the visitors bureau on the plaza.

Sonoma Valley seems cozier to me than Napa. I was certainly cozy for two nights in the yellow frame El Dorado Hotel on the plaza, built in 1843 as a residence for Vallejo’s brother. Piatti, a stylish contemporary Italian restaurant, occupies the ground floor, with courtyard tables among wisteria vines and splashing fountains. The balcony of my second-floor chamber overlooked the courtyard and had an elegant canopy bed, terra-cotta tile floors, a large distressed-oak bureau and two cushioned rattan chairs.

When I booked my room, the clerk warned me that guests complain about the noise from the restaurant below. But I slept like a baby. I was also impressed by the helpfulness of staff members who even volunteered to make reservations for me at other restaurants around the plaza.

Though Sonoma is the center of activity in the valley, it is essentially a small, walkable town centered by the plaza-a park with shade trees, gardens, playgrounds, benches, duck ponds, picnic tables and a bronze statue of a valiant-looking rebel waving the Bear Flag.

This oasis is surrounded by a beguiling collection of restaurants; shops like Sign of the Bear for cooking accessories and Plaza Books, specializing in rare volumes on California’s mission period; winery tasting rooms like Sebastiani on the Square, where the manager taught me the finer points of tasting wine by swirling it around in the glass, smelling it, holding it in my mouth but not swallowing; and historic sites like the Barracks, built in 1840 for Gen. Vallejo’s Mexican troops.

Sonoma’s Spanish and Mexican heritage is also recalled on plaques that call homes around the plaza “adobes” and signs that label pedestrian walkways “paseos.” Its longtime fascination with wine, first made by the Spanish padres for sacramental use, is revealed at Sebastiani Sonoma Cask Cellars, three blocks east of the plaza (but closed until September for earthquake retrofitting). There, Samuele Sebastiani, who came to America from Tuscany in 1895, started a wine dynasty that endures in the valley, though a family squabble in 1985 resulted in the ouster of Samuele’s grandson Sam as company president. (He went on to found Viansa Winery south of town.)

I spent two days in this pleasant town, shopping, dining, tasting (and, yes, of course, drinking) wine, visiting a pasture just off the plaza where two stolid Clydesdales grazed, and jogging on the tree-lined bike path. It runs along the boundary of Depot Park, north of the plaza, where I saw purple baby broccoli and ostrich eggs at the Friday morning farmer’s market and learned from a member of the local club the rules of petanque, a French bowling game like boccie.

Walking east on the bike path is a delightful way to get to award-winning Vella Cheese Co., where I bought a chunk of Italian-style toma, soft and smooth, for a picnic. I also chatted with Ignazio Vella, the son of Thomas G. Vella, who founded the company in 1931. Ig, as he’s known around town, says the difference between Napa and Sonoma dates to the 1850s, when rich San Franciscans arrived in Napa by boat via San Pablo Bay and the partly navigable Napa River. Sonoma was harder to get to and eventually was settled by small landholders-’hewers of wood and drawers of water,” Ig Vella calls them.

Town father Vallejo was decidedly not one of these, as evidenced by Lachryma Montis (‘Tear of the Mountain,” which refers to a spring on the property that still provides water to Sonoma), his orchard-shaded Gothic Revival home. It can be reached in a 20-minute stroll west along the bike path. Vallejo was a true Californian, devoted to the new state, progenitor of a Sonoma dynasty and famed for his hospitality. In the old storehouse at Lachryma Montis, I took in displays about the Vallejo family; in a glass case in the house I saw the general’s white satin wedding vest.

Almost inevitably, meals were the main event of my days here. I ate pancakes and Sonoma sausage for breakfast at Meritage on Broadway. I lunched at the busy Wild Thyme Cafe just west of the plaza, where a fellow diner told me that restaurants don’t survive in Sonoma if they aren’t good, and I had a light dinner of goat cheese and fruit, accompanied by a glass of Cline Cellars Zinfandel, at the Girl and the Fig.

My favorite meal was dinner at Cafe la Haye, where I ate at the bar so I could watch the action in the open kitchen. After a refreshing salmon and potato pancake appetizer, I dug into a hearty grilled pork chop, surrounded by baked apples, red cabbage and squash. The vegetables were luscious. They tasted of fall and lingered in my mind as I drove north the next morning into the heart of the Sonoma Valley, where much of the produce served in local restaurants is grown.

There’s an ugly commercial patch along California Highway 12 just outside the town of Sonoma. After that, though, neat vineyards and fields take over, blanketing the valley and climbing the mountain flanks on both sides of the road, as they do in Napa. But where Napa was elegant, Sonoma seemed its countrified cousin, with fruit trees just beginning their springtime burst and sunbeam-yellow mustard blooming around the vineyards.

“I have almost always lived near vineyards. That’s where I have been happiest,” M.F.K. Fisher told a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1991. Fisher, one of my favorite writers and a great teacher of the art of living well, lived in the Sonoma Valley before her death in 1992. I was delighted to find that her home was just down the road from my destination, the Beltane Ranch Bed & Breakfast. Here was where I planned to spend the last two nights of my stay in Sonoma, with the bonus of sharing Fisher’s view of valley and vineyards. I could never have dreamed up a more bucolic place to stay than the 1,600-acre Beltane Ranch, with olive trees, 90 acres planted in grapes and a lovely two-story ranch house built in 1892. There’s an herb and flower garden out front, and a west-facing porch with rocking chairs and a swing for watching the sunset. Inside the main house are a kitchen, parlor, dining room and five simple but perfect guest rooms. I got one on the ground floor, graced with a queen bed, lamps aplenty and two upholstered reading chairs. I also got a black Lab named Stretch and a golden retriever named Joe Ely for companionship on walks into the vineyards and over the hills.

Roughly equidistant from funky little Glen Ellen and Kenwood, the ranch was a convenient base for touring the north end of the valley. I got blissfully lost on country lanes like Warm Springs Road, which takes a circuitous route from Glen Ellen to Kenwood, and spent a morning in nearby Jack London State Historic Park, where the writer lived with his wife, Charmian, from about 1910 until his death in 1916. Charmian’s enchanting fieldstone home is now a museum full of London memorabilia. From it, a path leads about a half-mile through the forest to the ruins of the couple’s dream home, destroyed by fire days before the Londons could move in.

I had more good food at pretty little Saffron in Glen Ellen and the Kenwood Restaurant on California 12, where dinner started with Vancouver oysters and starred Petaluma duck in piquant ginger kumquat sauce. At breakfast I didn’t have to go anywhere, because elaborate morning meals like oatmeal pecan waffles with homemade raspberry syrup were prepared by chef Paul Larsick (who lives in the Beltane Ranch water tower and owns Joe Ely).

And did I mention I visited a few wineries?

The Sonoma Valley has three grape-growing microclimates, or appellations, which are designated by the federal government. (At least 85% of the grapes used in making a wine must be from the area in order for winemakers to use the name of the appellation on the bottle.) The Sonoma Valley’s appellations are Carneros/Sonoma, with 8,000 acres of vineyards and 22 wineries; Sonoma Valley, with 13,000 acres of wine grapes and 42 wineries; and Sonoma Mountain, a minuscule up-valley region with just 800 acres of vineyards and three wineries. I tasted from all three. The Merlots and Cabernets at Arrowood, which makes Sonoma Valley appellation wines and is east of Highway 12, were divine, and the view over the valley was just as good. I walked through the cave at Gundlach-Bundschu, another Sonoma Valley appellation, which is run by scions of two German immigrants who started the winery in 1858. At nearby Buena Vista I took a history tour dedicated largely to Count Agoston Haraszthy, who invigorated the California winery business by bringing 100,000 European grapevines to the West Coast in 1862. I found a museum on the art of winemaking at Bartholomew Park Winery, another Sonoma Valley appellation, and took a 30-minute trolley tour at Benziger Family Winery in the Sonoma Mountain region near Glen Ellen, where I finally bought wine: a 1998 Pinot Noir and a ’97 Zin.

When I open them, I will think back fondly on the Sonoma Valley, which really is different from Napa. I like it better, for its lack of pretension.

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Guidebook: A Taste of Sonoma

* Getting there: I flew into Oakland and rented a car. The drive to Sonoma takes about 90 minutes. Nonstop service from LAX to Oakland is offered on United and Southwest; restricted round-trip fares begin at $82. Or you can fly to Santa Rosa, about 25 miles from Sonoma, nonstop from LAX on United; restricted round-trip fares begin at $152.

* Where to stay: The El Dorado Hotel, 405 1st St. W., Sonoma, CA 95476; telephone (800) 289-3031 or (707) 996-3030, fax (707) 996-3148, Internet https://www.hoteleldorado.com, has a lap pool and 27 rooms on the Sonoma plaza, above the Ristorante Piatti. Rates for doubles from April 1 to Oct. 31 are $205 to $215 Sundays through Thursdays, $235 to $245 weekends and holidays; Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, $165 to $180 Sundays through Thursdays and $195 to $210 weekends and holidays. The rates include continental breakfast and a bottle of wine. Across the street from the El Dorado is another excellent in-town choice: the Sonoma Hotel, 110 W. Spain St., Sonoma, CA 95476; tel. (800) 468-6016 or (707) 996-2996, fax (707) 996-7014, https://www.sonomahotel.com, with 16 pretty French country-style rooms priced $95 to $195 for doubles, including continental breakfast. Up-valley, I stayed at the Beltane Ranch B&B;, 11775 Sonoma Highway, P.O. Box 395, Glen Ellen, CA 95442; tel. (707) 996-6501, https://www.beltaneranch .com. It has five rooms and a cottage, priced from $130 to $220, including breakfast. Another lodging option in the northern part of the valley is the beautiful Gaige House Inn, 13540 Arnold Drive, Glen Ellen, CA 95442; tel. (800) 935-0237 or (707) 935-0237, fax (707) 935-6411, https://www.gaige.com, with 15 chambers priced from $150 to $550 and a pool.

* Where to eat: In the town of Sonoma, I can vouch for the Girl and the Fig, 110 W. Spain St., local tel. 938-3634, https://www.thegirlandthefig.com, a charming plaza spot with dinner entrees from $10.95 to $20.95; the Wild Thyme Cafe, 165 W. Napa St., tel. 996-0900, https://www.wildthymecafe.com, serving breakfasts, smoothies and modestly priced lunches and dinners to eat in or take out; and the Cafe la Haye, 140 E. Napa St., tel. 935-5994, https://www.cafelahaye.com, a small, stylish restaurant with entrees from $11.95 to $19.95. In Glen Ellen, I enjoyed Saffron Restaurant, 13648 Arnold Drive, tel. 938-4844, a quiet boite with a dozen tables and dinner entrees from $14 to $26; and the Kenwood Restaurant, 9900 Sonoma Highway, tel. 833-6326, where the food makes up for the undistinguished decor; main courses run $18.75 to $26.50.

* For more information: The Sonoma Valley Visitors Bureau, 453 1st St. E., Sonoma, CA 95476; tel. (707) 996-1090, fax (707) 996-9212, https://www.sonomavalley.com.