Bounty beyond the vines

<p>Josh Thomsen, executive chef at Berkeley's venerable Claremont Hotel, is eagerly awaiting a shipment of lamb.</p><p>It's not a commercial truck that will trundle up to the gracious white landmark hotel on a Thursday, bearing the goods. It will be Chris Benziger of the eponymous winemaking family, who drove down from Glen Ellen with a personal delivery of both meat and vegetables grown at his family's winery — produce so fresh it is still dressed in Sonoma Mountain's volcanic dirt.</p><p>These will become the ingredients for a special Vineyard to Table menu at the Claremont's Meritage restaurant featuring both Benziger Wines and inventive dishes created from ingredients grown on the winery estate, right beside the grapes.</p><p>“There's something to be said when Chris Benziger shows up with onions and fennel. He's going to pull it up and put it in a box and drive it to me,” Thomsen marvels, still in awe of the variety of foods now being produced by wineries that long considered and marketed themselves strictly as “vineyards.”</p><p>The chef, named by the online 'zine Starchefs.com as a “rising star,” offers an ongoing series of Winery to Table meals, sourcing from 22 different winery farms everything from honey from Far Niente in Oakville to fresh jack cheese from Frog's Leap and lamb from Tres Sabores in Rutherford.</p><p>More and more wineries are extending the bounty of their soil by increasing the diversity of their crops. In recent years many began planting little potagers to feed their kitchens and to illustrate the sensory experience of tasting wine. But as the public enthusiasm for vegetable gardening has exploded, an increasing number are growing their display plots into bigger production gardens.</p><p>The same fertile soil that yields premium Chardonnay, Cabernet and Syrah is now also supporting a delectable array of vegetables, fruits, nuts, eggs, herbs and even meat. Chicken coops, orchards and grazing livestock are cropping up beside the vines, remaking the image of the winery into something closer to a real farm. Visitors to the Quivira tasting room in Dry Creek Valley are apt to pass the pen of Ruby the feral pig, whose job is to root through the orchards in spring, thwarting the larvae of pests like the codling moth.</p><p>And the bounty coming out of this second harvest — sometimes going on just as crews race to bring in and crush the grapes — is in some cases now more than the wineries themselves can consume at their own events and tastings. This abundance is finding its way to restaurants, farmstands and farmers markets.</p><p>Medlock Ames opened its own tasting room and farm store in Alexander Valley this summer, selling wine as well as freshly picked produce, preserves, tomato sauce and pickled vegetables put up right at the winery farm from produce grown and picked by winery staff, including winery partner Ames Morison.</p><p>The Clif Family Winery in St. Helena is now producing such an embarrassment of riches from the Clif Family Farm in Pope Valley — everything from stone fruit to turkeys — it is experimenting with its own small CSA (community supported agriculture) program, where subscribers receive a weekly box of whatever is freshly harvested.</p><p>“It's really important to look at our food systems holistically,” says Kit Crawford, who co-owns Clif Family Winery and Farm with husband Gary Erickson. “I like the idea of a fruit tree planted next to a vineyard planted next to a garden with sunflowers and butternut squash and lemon cucumbers.”</p><p>Both grew up in Fremont, back when the remnants of orchards mingled among the new tract houses. She learned at a young age how to preserve. She wants to keep most of her 130 acres natural, but four acres are given over to fruit orchards and a half-acre for a vegetable garden, not to mention three goats, 25 chickens and 40 turkeys that are sold at Thanksgiving to raise money for charities like Heifer International.</p><p>Steve Litke, executive chef at the Michelin-rated Farmhouse Inn in Forestville, gets tender microgreens and other hard-to-find ingredients from the prolific gardens and greenhouses at Kendall-Jackson winery in Fulton. Chef Douglas Keane from Healdsburg's Cyrus also sources from K-J. Sonoma's El Dorado Kitchen gets produce from Benziger.</p><p>“I love their stuff,” Litke all but sings in excitement. “I think I am one of the special people in the world because I get to buy from them. ... When you buy from a produce company, the grower picks the product and puts it in a refrigerator and waits for someone to order it. On the other hand, when I call up K-J in the afternoon, in the morning it will be picked and I'm there before 11 to pick it up. You can't beat that.”</p><p>Kenny Rochford, general manager of Medlock Ames, 335 acres of rolling woodland and vineyards straddling Alexander Valley and Chalk Hill, did the spadework for a ¼-acre certified organic garden that has become an important part of the winery culture. A core group of five to seven staff members, from groundskeepers to managers, gathers Friday mornings to work in the vegetable garden.</p><p>“It's one time when we're all doing the hard work, side by side, at the same task,” says Rochford in his Scottish brogue. “And it's a fun task. It's a level playing ground and the banter is good. You find out how people are doing and how happy they are. After an hour or so they let their guard down. Maybe we're just picking tomatoes and arguing about when the watermelons are ripe or not ripe, but we're working together.”</p><p>They knock off by lunch, making fresh pizzas in the wood-fired oven with ingredients they picked that morning. The kitchen looks like grandma's, with open shelves lined with pepper vinegar, romano green beans lightly pickled, ragu of roasted tomatoes and pickled carrots.</p><p>The Medlock Ames gardens are going all year, but they try to time the summer harvest so the bulk of the bounty comes in August, to avoid a clash during crush. Inevitably, some weeks the grape harvest is so intense the vegetable garden gets neglected. That's when Rochford calls in volunteer gleaners who gather as much as half a ton of tomatoes, peppers, onions and carrots during peak season to donate to food banks.</p><p>Quivira, Benziger and other wineries have vastly diversified their farming in keeping with their commitment to biodynamic agriculture, which views and treats the land as part of an interdependent organic system. </p><p>Andrew Beedy, who oversees the farm at Quivira, just added two Jersey cows for compost manure. He also manages 56 laying hens, has two meat goats and hopes to bring in sheep for weed control in the vineyard. In the not-too-distant past, this all would have been seen as messy and unglamorous, something to conceal from the public. Now intrigued visitors walk past the gardens on their way to the tasting room and can stroll among the 120 raised beds stuffed with chard, potatoes, cucumbers, pole beans, fennel, spinach, culinary herbs, peppers, squash and even organic alfalfa for the chickens and cows.</p><p>Several of the beds are contracted out to various restaurants like Barndiva, Dry Creek Kitchen and Bovolo. Chefs get to pick what they want to be grown in their personal bed but instead of paying the winery, they are asked to donate to the Northern Sonoma Health Care Foundation.</p><p>Chris Benziger, whose family estate now has three acres of gardens as well as 100 sheep, chickens, olive trees and fruit orchards, said the winery is not making money from it. But the rewards are still great.</p><p>“In the best of times, you break even,” he says. “But we have to do it for the biodynamics. More importantly, we want to do it. It's a great way to help sell the story of the wine.”</p>