A small-producer trade group that spent years pushing California to legalize tastings out in the vines is now turning that win into a consumer brand. The Micro-Winery Guild, the rebranded version of the nonprofit Save the Family Farms, announced this week it is launching a Napa- and Sonoma-based collective of family-run wineries that make fewer…
Category: Business & Economy
Business openings, closings, economic development, real estate, employment, and commercial news in Sonoma County.
Four Napa County weeklies go dark May 22 as Highway 29 Publishing pauses operations
Four Napa County weekly newspapers will stop publishing on May 22, the company that owns them announced Wednesday afternoon. In a letter posted to the Calistoga Tribune website and signed “The Highway 29 team,” Highway 29 Publishing told readers that May 22 will be the last day it publishes the Calistoga Tribune, the Yountville Sun,…
Medtronic’s Santa Rosa exit closes a 27-year chapter in Sonoma County medtech
The slow goodbye finally has a date. Medtronic told its 370 Santa Rosa workers on Wednesday that the company will shut its Fountaingrove campus by spring 2028, ending a presence in Sonoma County that began in 1998 with what was then one of the largest medical-device deals in California history.The work — pacemakers, coronary stents,…
Hall Winery in Napa Valley. Roger Coryell/Wine Country Daily
Napa’s wine and farm workers can’t afford to live in Napa anymore. A new study puts a number on it.
Napa Valley runs on immigrants. Its wineries, restaurants, hotels and farms all do. What a new report makes plain is that more and more of those workers can no longer afford to live in the county where they work — and a growing share have left altogether. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group,…
GM sold drivers’ location data for four years. Two North Bay DAs helped shut it down.
If you bought a GM truck anytime in the past decade — a Silverado in the vineyard rows, a Tahoe at the trailhead, a Sierra hauling firewood off the coast — your name, your home address, and a four-year record of where and how you drove most likely passed through a pipeline that ended at…
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Glen Ellen woman accused of $1M-plus contracting fraud across Northern California
A Glen Ellen woman who ran a residential contracting business under the names Lone Wolf Designs and LW Design Build despite never holding a state contractor’s license has been arrested and charged in Napa County in what investigators say is a scheme that has cost victims more than $1 million across Northern California. Christina Daniels…
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For Bodega Bay’s salmon fleet, the season is open. Whether the fishery is back is another question.
BODEGA BAY, CA., 5/5/26 — For the first time in three years, commercial salmon boats are pushing out of Spud Point Marina with king salmon as the target. But the season Sonoma County’s fleet returned to this month does not look much like the one it left behind in 2022. After three consecutive statewide closures,…
Opinion: A quiet scam at the dumps voters own — and pay twice to clean up after
By design, Sonoma County’s $47 dump fee is a customer-acquisition strategy for Republic and Recology When I moved to West County twelve years ago, dropping a load of yard trimmings at the Pocket Canyon transfer station cost $7. Today the minimum charge for the same vehicle, at the same gate, is $47. The per-ton rate…
Photo courtesy Robledo Family Winery
Sonoma’s first Mexican American family winery is in bankruptcy court
Robledo Family Winery, founded by a man whose father was a Bracero, joins the worst quarter California wine has seen in years. In a glass case at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History sits a hat that belonged to Reynaldo Robledo Sr. Next to it, his tools. Next to those, a label from the…
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Pop the cork: Southwest’s Sip and Ship is officially live at STS
April 25, 2026 Two and a half weeks ago, Southwest Airlines rolled into Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport with Snoopy on the tarmac and a teaser tucked inside its press release: a new perk called Sip and Ship, set to take effect later in the month. As of Friday, the perk is real. Eligible Southwest…