Vines & veggies

Colby Eierman will be awake early for a 3 a.m. “meet time” at Benziger Winery's De Coelo ranch. Here on a rocky hilltop in Bodega, five miles from the Pacific, Eierman will hop aboard a tractor pulling a picking bin and help bring in the pinot noir by sunrise.

As soon as the vineyard lights start to dim, Eierman, the director of gardens and sustainability for Glen Ellen's Benziger Winery, will be ready to share a homegrown snack with his workers. He'll pull out a big box of heirloom watermelons, freshly picked from the winery's gardens on Sonoma Mountain. Called “Moon and Stars,” they have skin like the night sky and a sweet juiciness that will slake thirst as well as hunger.

Let the winemakers fuss over sugar content. Eierman declares that he and the picking crew are going to feast.

As the North Coast slips into fifth gear in a race to bring in the grapes ahead of the weather, a smaller harvest is also taking place. From the same soil that yields premium chardonnay, cabernet and syrah, wineries like Benziger, Preston, Quivira, Medlock Ames and Long Meadow are also pulling tomatoes, beets and peppers.

Environmentalists have long bemoaned how the economic pressure to grow grapes has resulted in an unhealthy monoculture. But ever so slowly, some wineries are starting to swing back, becoming more like multifaceted farms, with big vegetable gardens and orchards and even barnyard animals such as chickens and pigs.

For some, like Benziger, growing a diversity of food crops is part of their commitment to biodynamics, an agricultural philosophy that, among other things, sees a piece of farmland as a balanced, living organism.

But having fresh food available for picking is also part of a growing ethos of sustainability and a natural next step as the region's culinary tastes and reputation gain in sophistication.

Restaurant patrons sitting down to a fine meal in Healdsburg or Sonoma now may find themselves dining on eggplant, red peppers or basil that came from the same winery that produced the wine in their glass.

“There's a disconnect in talking about taking care of our land and responsible husbandry. You really can't do it by having a single crop. Monoculture leads to the requirement for chemical farming, the intensive farming that really isn't good for the soil or for the environment,” said Lou Preston, a pioneer in the practice of diversity. His Dry Creek farm is known as much for its fresh breads and foccaccia, olives, pickles and compost-nourished vegetable gardens as it is for its petite syrahs, sauvignon blancs and Rhone-style blends.

Kenny Rochford was a baby when the bearded and Birkenstocked young Preston began his revolution back to more traditional farming practices. But the Scottish-born general manager of Medlock Ames, 335 acres of rolling woodland and vineyards straddling Alexander Valley and Chalk Hill, shares Preston's passion for honest food.

When Rochford was recruited by partners Christopher Medlock James and Ames Morison four years ago, he set the spadework for a quarter-acre certified organic garden that is now so prolific, the winery is in the process of remodeling the old Alexander Valley Store on Highway 128 into a combination tasting room and farmstand selling fresh and canned produce from the garden that he helps pick and put up.

Friday mornings are set aside for gardening.

“It's a community effort. We all get out of the office or out of the cellar or off the truck and zoom in there. It's like our weekly meeting place.”

Everyone breaks a sweat, starting at 7 a.m. and working intensively for a good five hours. Now that it's harvest, the morning ends with canning: blackberry jam, roasted tomatoes made into paste, pickled scarlet and white, Chioggia beets, pickled peppers and onions. The informal winery kitchen is lined with open shelves stacked with jars.

For wineries like Medlock Ames whose kitchen gardens have gone beyond a few little raised beds, offering estate-grown food is a way of enhancing the experience of tasting the wines and bringing it back down to the earth.

“For a long time, people thought food and wine pairing or the association between food and wine, was something very formal, sitting down with starched linen tableclothes, every wine paired to a particular thing. That's not what we're trying to do here,” Rochford says. “We're trying to do something that is a little more hands on. On the weekend, we had guests touring and tasting and they helped us pickle. That to them was the coolest thing they did in Wine Country.”

Some wineries are finding themselves now blessed with more than they can consume on the estate, creating a need to find markets. On a recent September harvest day, Eierman's crew picked 20 cases of tomatoes, in addition to pounds of summer squash and padron peppers. Eierman delivers to Ubuntu in Napa giant sunflower heads, which chef Jeremy Fox peels down for their meat. The El Dorado Kitchen on the Sonoma Plaza also buys a lot of Benziger produce.

Quivira last year carved out a pristine 1-acre garden of 120 raised beds of vegetables, a greenhouse for seed collection and a chicken coop. It's all part of its commitment to biodynamic agriculture. But farm manager Andrew Beedy says the winery only uses about 20 percent of the riches that come from the 6 feet of fertile Drive Creek topsoil.

So far he's found a market at Shelton's Natural Foods, the Dry Creek General Store and the Windsor Green Grocer. Quivira also partners with the Northern Sonoma Health Care Foundation, putting individual raised beds under contract to area restaurants including the Dry Creek Kitchen, Manzanita, Barndiva and Bovolo. The restaurants in turn donate $500 a season to the Health Care Foundation.

“Our main purpose here is, obviously, diversification,” says Beedy, whose parents were organic farmers in the U.S. and in England. “But for the visitor who comes to the winery, they can learn not only about sustainable grape growing, but sustainable agriculture as well.”

The proliferation of produce now coming off of land that once produced strictly wine grapes is a double-edged sword, some observers say. Most that do it have far deeper pockets and can afford to take a loss or just break even. Spots at the farmers markets can be competitive and the markets, while supportive of more sustainable agriculture, also are concerned about wineries creating unfair competition for small farmers who are trying to make a living off of what they grow.

Paula Downing, manager of the Santa Rosa and Sebastopol farmers markets, said there are a lot more people, period, trying to grow food and searching for markets.

“I've had between a dozen and two dozen calls for each market this year from people who are trying to get in the game, which is an enormous number compared to last year, when I got about six,” she said.

Long Meadow Ranch in Rutherford sells at the St. Helena Farmers Market. Like Medlock Ames, they have created their own markets. In addition to the open-air produce pavilion beside their 6-acre Rutherford Gardens, they're putting the finishing touches on their own restaurant, The Farmstead, which will open this fall on St. Helena's Main Street.

“Everything from here will go to the menu and will reflect what is seasonal and what we have available,” said Laddie Hall, who owns the 650-acre diversified ranch, with its grass-fed beef cattle, wine grapes, olive orchards and veggie gardens. In the spring, they will add a second farmstand beside the restaurant and a new winery.

Eierman sees no better way to convey Benziger's ideal than to serve a meal that came from the same soil as the wine.

“There's really a lightbulb that goes off for folks. We can now sit them down to a meal where almost every single thing on the plate was grown on the property,” he says. “We can't let people jump on the tractor and drive down a vineyard row. But through food we grow, we can have them interact with the land at a very basic level. It's a visceral experience.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.