An old renewal
Medlock Ames winery readies renovation of landmark Alexander Valley Store and Bar
Medlock Ames Winery owner and winemaker Ames Morison, left, and Kenneth Rochford, general manager, purchased the former Alexander Valley Store and Bar and plan on remodeling it and opening it in November as a farm store, tasting room and local watering hole.
JOHN BURGESS / PDPublished: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 9:17 a.m.
When a place has been around for 100 or so years, it takes time to turn it into something new.
So when the boys of Medlock Ames, winery owners Ames Morison and Christopher Medlock James, bought the landmark Alexander Valley Store and Bar where Highway 128 and Alexander Valley Road meet, they figured they’d take their time thinking about its next iteration.
When the previous owner put it up for sale four years ago, Morison and James bought the fading landmark, with the goal of eventually turning it into a tasting room for their wines. Morison and James first came to the area in 1998, buying a 320-acre property off Chalk Hill Road, within the Alexander Valley AVA.
Three years in, they harvested their first merlot grapes, adding cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay later, and attaining organic certification. Medlock Ames is all about sustainable farming practices, using solar power, driving electric and biodiesel vehicles, deploying weed-eating sheep, and growing blocks of vegetables that they sell to local chefs.
The purchase of the Alexander Valley Store and Bar also included the existing house and various storage sheds, all within the property’s one-acre parcel. For a while Medlock Ames retained the existing tenants, one of whom was running the store while another ran the bar.
“We wanted to keep everything as it was until we knew the plan,” noted Kenneth Rochford, Medlock Ames’ general manager and the man tapped to head up this project.
“It was alive, blue-collar, not $10 sandwiches. Some of the Twinkies were out of date,” he added. “It could have been better. It served a purpose but we needed to do something different.”
Eventually those leases were bought out and Medlock Ames staff quietly ran the bar over the last 3½ years; the store for about a year. The last day of business for both was March 31.
“I’m thrilled,” said Carrie Brown, proprietress of the neighboring Jimtown Store, gourmet mecca for locals and tourists alike. “It’ll be a wonderful addition to the greater Jimtown community, complementary and symbiotic to what we do. I think the bar might be the kind of place I would like to go.”
In the meantime, Brown is trying to expand her menu to accommodate many of the Alexander Valley Store and Bar’s previous customers, many of them vineyard workers on a budget who she hopes will now come to Jimtown for lunch, beer by the glass and a Spanish-speaking staff.
“We’re trying to welcome former customers and the people who are sad that it’s gone,” she said.
Renovation on the Alexander Valley Store and Bar may not be complete until the end of the year. Working with Earthtone Construction in Sebastopol, which had renovated Morison’s wife’s store in Healdsburg, Arboretum Eco Apparel, Medlock Ames’ plans include a complete remodel of the store, which will eventually sell local produce, much of it grown on or canned from the winery’s acreage. It will also serve as a tasting room and meeting spot, with lots of communal tables.
Striving for mindful restoration and eco-renovation of the building, Earthtone will repurpose as much as it can from the existing structures and aim to exceed state regulations on heating, lighting, the choice of windows, anything having to do with energy efficiency. Solar power will be tapped, the landscaping designed for low-water usage, holding tanks put out to collect rainwater for use in irrigating.
“We were interested in this project for its visibility and its challenges,” said Andy Bannister, Earthtone’s founder and CEO. “It’s tricky working with these old buildings. People don’t always want them to change. We wanted to bring respect to that intent.”
The bar, forever next door to the store, will be moved to the back, speakeasy style, and remain a full bar with plenty of what’s been popular all along — Bud, Coors Light, Korbel Brandy — complemented by the addition of local microbrews on tap, local artisan spirits and a representative selection of Alexander Valley wines.
Rochford hopes to keep some of the bar’s more colorful accoutrements, including a totem pole and another floor-to-ceiling pole between barstools that was used to playfully demarcate locals’ and tourists’ seating areas. The jukebox, which Rochford describes as “99 percent country, 1 percent Madonna,” is also going to stay, though its selections may get a tweak. Ultimately, they hope for it to be a place for locals and tourists alike to rub shoulders and get to know one another.
“If this is your first trip to Sonoma County and you come in and stumble across this bar or someone tells you to go check it out, wouldn’t it be cool if you got to have a beer next to some winemaker whose wines you just had or read about?” asks Rochford. “It’s going to make a memory for you as a visitor and locals will love it too because everyone will be buying them drinks.”
The house, which essentially can’t be lived in or used given current usage requirements on the property’s septic, wastewater and well-water systems, is slated to be moved away. Medlock Ames has publicly offered to give the house away for free to whomever could come and get it.
Once the house and some of the sheds are gone, the space will open up to views of some of Alexander Valley’s oldest vines, views Medlock Ames wants to encourage people to enjoy by putting in a fire pit, bocce ball court, more communal tables, benches and plenty of raised beds, olive trees and native plants.
Though historical information has been hard to come by, Rochford has pieced together a bit. For instance, at some point the main building’s primary purpose was as a gas station, which is why the front has an area for a car to drive in. Structural engineers digging around recently seem to have found evidence of a workshop where cars could be fixed. At some point it became a store.
“The bar is a fairly recent phenomenon,” figures Rochford. “It kicked off here in the late ’60s, we think. It’s a little bit blurry.”
He adds that the local landmarks commission has asked that whatever building renovations go on, the landmark is preserved to look like a gas station, at least in front, and that Medlock Ames keep the façade to maintain the integrity of this particular building type.
“Most people remember it for how it’s been over the last 20 years,” Rochford said. “It’s been a bar hangout more than anything else. We want to bring it back to its agricultural roots, where everybody feels welcome.”
Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com or visit wineabout. pressdemocrat.com.
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