Wine Country Lifestyle a label that still fits

Lifestyle. That’s a label, liberally applied by East Coast writers who discovered Sonoma County wines in the 1980s and made a “Wine Country Lifestyle” sound better than a summer ?in Provence.

While the citizenry seemed a little surprised by the news that they had a lifestyle, they couldn’t deny the part about the wines. A quick count of wineries currently operating with a Santa Rosa address today is 64 (in the county, closer to 500). That number doesn’t include the wine wholesalers or the wine equipment businesses, label printers and barrel makers who call the city home. Wine is definitely the biggest part of today’s business equation.

Since the early 1970s another catch phrase, the “Wine Renaissance,” was applied to a dramatic change in North Coast agriculture that put Santa Rosa square in the midst of a region capitalized as Wine Country - the next new thing.

In fact, it wasn’t new at all. It was just different. Santa Rosans had been making wine since Barney Hoen - he who had created the town square and engineered the election that brought Santa Rosa the county seat in 1854 - sold his 1860s vintage in Baltimore through the good offices of his merchant brother. In the 1870s, Isaac DeTurk’s winery beside the railroad tracks processed grapes from his Belle Mount Vineyards at the foot of Bennett Peak. And The Brotherhood of the New Life’s winery at Fountaingrove was shipping vintages to New York, London and Glasgow in the 1880s.

By the turn of the 20th century, the growing immigrant population, particularly from northern Italy, many of them stonecutters working in the basalt quarries east of town, were planting small vineyards and using the skills learned in Tuscany to make their own wine and, eventually, sell wine shipped in small barrels to immigrant populations in eastern cities.

In 1920, there were 256 bonded wineries in the county, more than any other in California. But many, if not most, disappeared in the half century of Prohibition, the Depression and world wars that followed.

So it wasn’t until the 1970s, when wine came off the immigrant dinner tables and marched militantly into the national consciousness that the valleys surrounding Santa Rosa became Wine Country, capitalized.

In the 2000s, wine drinkers from all over the world still crowd our hotels and tasting rooms.

Even before the craft revolution, Santa Rosa had a long beer history. In 1897, brothers Frank and Joe Grace bought William Metzger’s brewery at Second and Wilson Streets only to have the wood frame building burn in the first year. They rebuilt - a four-story brick building - and supplemented their sales with a beer garden on upper Fourth Street. They supplied Northern California with GB’s “Happy Hops” and multiple store labeled beer for nearly 70 years. The Westside neighborhood came to rely on the brewery whistle, marking noon and 5 p.m. Grace Brothers was sold to a Southern California brewery when the last of the next generation of Grace brothers died and the brewery closed in the 1960s.

In the 21st century, beer is back in town in a big way. Downtown streets once dominated by traditional department stores (The White House on the west and Rosenberg’s at the east end) now offer a lineup of brewpubs. Streets that once were empty after the stores closed at 5 p.m. are now filled with craft beer drinkers - many of them with palates as sensitive as wine tasters.

Santa Rosa has a good name in the craft beer community. A great name, in fact. It’s become a winter tradition for beer lovers - again, from all over the world - to line up downtown, very early on often rainy winter mornings, to wait for a chance to taste a beer called Pliny the Younger, made by Russian River Brewing Co. and deemed by experts as one of - if not the - best craft beer in the nation.

May we offer you a taste of a pleasing pinot? Or how about a brewski?

What does the future hold for these competing lifestyles? Currently, with the laws that govern such matters still to be clarified, it appears that cannabis, with a lifestyle all its own, is waiting in the wings.