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: Wine & Agriculture
Sonoma County wine industry, vineyards, farming, agricultural business, and food production news.
Grand jury gives Sonoma’s open-space agency a clean review — and flags a 2031 cliff
A Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury report released Sunday May 10 says the agency that has spent 35 years buying up farmland and open space across the county is, by and large, doing the job voters paid it to do. The report’s title — “It’s On Their Website!” — is the jury’s broad answer to…
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,…
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…
Word Junkie: A flight of obscure wine words
The bâtonnage is done, the foudre is breathing, and the cellar smells like rancio, brett, and Tuesday. The pourriture noble has set in on the late-pick Sémillon, gloriously and on purpose, and somewhere in the back a saignée tank bleeds off rosé like a politely punctured artery. (Roger Coryell / Wine Country Daily) Wine has…
Photo courtesy City of Cloverdale
Cloverdale’s own water plan says the city doesn’t need the Eel River dams its vice mayor is fighting to save
Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands has spent the better part of this month working the phones with the Trump administration, lobbying USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and her staff to derail PG&E’s plan to tear down the Potter Valley dams. He told the Press Democrat last week that 750,000 people in the Russian River basin depend…
Photo by Letícia Alvares on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/celebratory-wine-toast-at-indoor-event-30539613/" rel="nofollow">Pexels.com</a>
Sonoma County just rewrote the rules for big events: Here’s what changes June 9
Throwing a wedding on a vineyard? Hosting a charity 5K on a ranch? Running a summer concert series on a winery lawn? If your event happens in unincorporated Sonoma County, a new ordinance is about to reshape how you do it, and most of the people affected have no idea it exists yet. On June…