Thumbs up: Wine Country’s Hall of Famers

Most of the headlines went to filmmaker Steven Spielberg and comedienne Lucille Ball, but Wine Country is well represented in the newest group of California Hall of Fame inductees. The class of 2017, announced this week by the governor, also includes Napa Valley vintner Warren Winiarski and Mabel McKay, a native American artist and medicine woman.

Winiarski is the founder of Stag’s Leap Cellars, whose cabarnet sauvignon won the famous Judgment of Paris blind testing in 1976, establishing the Napa Valley as a major player in the wine world.

McKay, a member of the Long Valley Cache Creek Pomo tribe and a native of Nice, was a world-renowned basket weaver whose work was collected by the Smithsonian. McKay died in 1993.

The North Bay has a small claim on one other new member. As a quarterback for the Oakland Raiders, Jim Plunkett attended training camps it Santa Rosa for several years in the 1970s and 1980s.

The new Hall of Famers will be inducted Dec. 5 at the California Museum in Sacramento. Thumbs up.