As Sonoma County continues to ease pandemic restrictions and Wine Country reopens, local wineries are thrilled to finally be able to offer a wider variety of in-person tasting experiences to their guests. And wine lovers have reason to be excited, too. In addition to finally being able to enjoy their favorite wines from someplace other than their homes, they have a variety of new food and wine pairings to look forward to. Click through the above gallery to see what some of our favorite wineries are serving up right now.
Mike Kopetsky is a landscape designer and owner of MIX Garden in Healdsburg. (Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
As many of us realized last year, growing our own food provides a sense of control and safety in a world that sometimes seems to lack both. Planting, watering, weeding, and processing home-grown vegetables brings peace and purpose by renewing our connection to nature.
Mick Kopetsky, a lifelong plantsman and the owner of MIX Garden in Healdsburg, expects another busy spring this year. His nursery grows veggie starts at an off-site facility in Dry Creek Valley, cultivating some 300 varieties of vegetables throughout the season including many rarities — and 88 types of tomatoes. “It’s pretty intense in that mid-April timeframe,” Kopetsky says. “It gets crazy how many plants go out and how many plants have to come in.”
6:30 a.m.
The first thing our staff does in the morning is check on our plants, seeing what’s in stock and what’s out of stock. Based on that first walk-through, we drive out to our off-site facility in Dry Creek Valley — we call it “the farm” — and pull from the stock out there and load it up. Those trips tend to be 30 to 50 flats a day during the spring. The farm is also where our olive trees are, so that’s where we get the store’s olive oil. And we grow ornamental and edible squashes and pumpkins for the fall out there.
7:45 a.m.
Back at the store, there’s a morning meeting to assess priorities. At 8:00, the store opens, and the staff greet the first rush of customers, mostly residential gardeners shopping for plants. It’s amazing how many people have started gardening during the pandemic and want to grow a little food. We’re really well positioned to support that.
8:45 a.m.
We return with the plants from the farm and proceed to unload as well as “front” and “groom” the stock, pulling plants to the front of the flats, taking off yellow leaves, inspecting everything, doing remedial staking of plants that might be tipping over, just getting the place looking really crisp. It’s kind of an allhands- on-deck situation.
11 a.m.
We receive a delivery of a curated assortment of indoor ornamental plants. We unload them, check them in, tag them, and arrange them around the store however they look best. We’ve also just recently started importing terra-cotta pots from Italy, and we have our own line of organic seeds.
A kokedama for sale at MIX Garden in Healdsburg. (Christopher Chung / The Press Democrat)
12 p.m.
I tend to go home for lunch because I’m so into food, and I live just two minutes from work. For lunch, it’s mostly salads and sandwiches, or I’ll roast vegetables the day before and have that with a little piece of grilled meat or something.
I love vegetables — it’s probably why I do what I do. I have a quarter-acre of vegetables of my own out at the farm where we grow our nursery stock. If I’m going out for lunch, I love the farro salad with vegetables at Campo Fina. We used to farm produce as well as veggie starts, and the restaurant was our biggest customer — we used to sell them an immense amount of produce.
3 p.m.
Midday during the week, most of our customers are contractors. During the second half of the afternoon, we tend to get home gardeners back again. Around this time, we may also restock plants, and I may place an order for another delivery of ornamental plants.
5 p.m.
At the end of the day, it’s just closing things down, making sure everything got watered, and locking up the carts. Then we head home and get ready to return the next morning.
Evening
Honestly, I generally like just hanging out with a friend and making some food together. The thing about Sonoma County, of course, is we live in this amazing climate and this beautiful spot, so it’s good to enjoy that.
Colorful flowers bloom at MIX Garden in Healdsburg. (Christopher Chung / The Press Democrat)
What’s growing this spring
Mick Kopetsky says he’s seen a ton of interest from Sonoma residents looking to start a small cutting garden for flowers to bring into their homes — cosmos, sunflowers, and zinnias are especially popular.
Tomatoes, of course, are also a mainstay. Kopetsky currently loves “Red Pear,” a meaty tomato that’s great for making sauce and paste, and several types of pink tomatoes, including “Caspian Pink” and “Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye,” both of which he says have a wonderful flavor.
MIX Garden is known for its vigorous vegetable starts, which Kopetsky says comes from an approach that works from the soil up. He uses a special potting mix that contains beneficial mycorrhizae, tiny fungi which help plants’ roots absorb more water and nutrients from the soil. “Twenty years ago, people didn’t even know about mycorrhizae,” he says. “They’re an amazing vehicle for boosting plants’ health and productivity.” But in all honesty, he says, home gardeners shouldn’t worry too much about a less-thanideal set of veggie starts in spring.
“The truth is that no matter how terrible your starts might look, with a little bit of organic fertilizer, they’ll do just fine.”
Cheese, it is said, is milk’s leap toward immortality. As true as that may be, butter takes it at least halfway there. Butter was discovered, not invented: a container of raw milk, carried by horse or a rickety cart over a bumpy road, turns itself into butter, as it is the simple process of agitation that causes the cream to separate and solidify.
In Sonoma County’s earliest years, dairy farmers made their living by selling butter, not milk, because of the lack of refrigeration needed to distribute fresh milk. The whey, sometimes called buttermilk, was fed to other farm animals, especially pigs.
Butter concentrates milk’s flavors, and its character depends on what the cows, sheep, or goats eat. Animals that graze on fresh grass produce the richest, most nutritious, and most delicious milk. It is a gift of sunlight, captured by tender blades of spring grass.
Sonoma currently has three commercial butter producers: Clover Sonoma, Straus Family Creamery, and Petaluma Creamery. Local butter is truly one of our sweetest, freshest treasures in spring.
Butter Mochi
Makes about 24 squares Butter mochi highlights the voluptuous texture of spring butter better than almost any other sweet, and it is very easy to make at home. It’s also naturally gluten-free.
• 2 teaspoons butter, at room temperature, to line baking pan
•1 pound mochiko (sweet rice flour)
• 2 ½ cups granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 12-ounce cans full-fat coconut milk
• 5 large farm eggs, well beaten
• 4 ounces local butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Cut a sheet of parchment or wax paper to fit the bottom of a 9 x 13-inch baking pan and secure it in place with a dab of butter. Lightly coat the paper as well as the sides and corners of the pan with butter.
Put the mochiko, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a medium mixing bowl and stir with a fork to blend well.
Put the coconut milk into another medium mixing bowl and whisk until smooth. Add the beaten eggs, and whisk together. Add the melted butter and vanilla, mix thoroughly, and add the dry ingredients, whisking or mixing with an electric mixer until very smooth.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan, set on the middle rack of the oven, and bake until the mixture is set but not too firm, about 1 to 1 ¼ hours. The mochi should have a golden crust over the top. Remove from the oven and cool until you can handle the pan. Invert the butter mochi onto a wire rack, remove the parchment paper, invert onto a work surface, and slide back onto the rack.
Let cool to room temperature, cut into squares, and arrange on a platter. Enjoy right away or refrigerate, covered, until 30 minutes before serving. Butter mochi will keep refrigerated for about three days.
After nearly losing their fledgling truffle business during the pandemic, two former French Laundry chefs recently charmed billionaire Mark Cuban into investing $501,000 in their revamped cooking class and meal kit concept — which, of course, includes plenty of truffles.
Tyler Vorce and Jason McKinney, who starred on a recent episode of ABC’s reality show “Shark Tank,” are the owners of Bay Area-based Truffle Shuffle, along with McKinney’s wife, Sarah, who also worked at the Michelin-starred Yountville restaurant. “Shark Tank” introduces budding entrepreneurs to multimillionaire and billionaire tycoons, “sharks,” who are willing to invest in the entrepreneurs’ businesses in exchange for equity — if they are sufficiently impressed by their pitches.
The two Truffle Shuffle business partners spent months rehearsing their pitch to the “Shark Tank” investors before participating on the show. Once they were on the show, they got several nibbles. But it was Cuban who ultimately offered the $501,000 loan in exchange for an 18% stake in the company.
Vorce and the McKinneys launched their business in 2018 as a way for chefs to ethically source truffles from Italy. Things were off to a good start until March 2020, when all of their restaurant accounts dried up and the team was left with 20 pounds of highly perishable truffles worth $1,000 per pound, according to Jason McKinney.
A serendipitous request from a private club for an online cooking class, featuring home-delivered ingredients for truffle risotto, turned things around. The online event sold out in a few hours and so did Truffle Shuffle’s entire inventory.
In a daring move, the company began pivoting to weekly online cooking master classes with meal prep kits sent in advance. At around $99 per class, they soon became popular; Sarah McKinney said they’ve cooked in front of more than 100,000 viewers since last year. (You can watch the classes for free on Instagram or on Truffle Shuffle’s YouTube channel.)
The pivot paid off. Shuffle Truffle now employs more than 40 people who work out of the company’s new Oakland headquarters. Their virtual cooking classes are hosted by special guests such as Snoop Dogg.
Truffle Shuffle has a number of upcoming classes planned, including one on how to make the Crepes Suzette shown on “Shark Tank,” Spiced Lamb Loin and Kurabota Pork Belly. On-demand classes ship out ingredients for Black Truffle Risotto, Lemon Ricotta Gnocchi and a Truffle Cheese Board with cheeses from Cowgirl Creamery and Cypress Grove along with their Truffle Honey.
Two kinetic sculptures designed by artist Ned Kahn to move in the wind in the temporary “Air Garden” on the site of the future Hotel Sebastopol on Friday, December 11, 2020. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
Ned Kahn’s uniquely engineered kinetic artwork — all hinged squares, flapping chain mail, patterns, and shapes — is displayed in public places around the globe and someday soon it could fly aboard the International Space Station. Though usually constructed on a grand scale — resulting in huge, reflective expanses that respond to wind and shifting air currents — Khan’s latest endeavor treats his Sebastopol neighbors to a temporary collection of smaller pieces right downtown, on Depot Street.
On the site of the future Hotel Sebastopol, artist and MacArthur genius grant winner Ned Kahn has created a kinetic installation called the “Air Garden.”
Kahn and his “trusty right arm,” Santa Rosa artist and ceramicist Todd Barricklow, erected the sculptures on the future site of Hotel Sebastopol — a development project currently on hold because of the pandemic. Kahn and Barricklow are calling the 1¼-acre area the “Air Garden,” a tribute to Kahn’s fascination with structures that make air visible — and, he hopes, render it more vibrant in the consciousness of those who see his work.
The sculpture garden is temporarily enclosed by a chain-link fence, for safety and security reasons, but Kahn hopes there will soon be opportunities to invite the public to experience the work up close. And when his crew is done moving heavy equipment and cranes around the lot, he plans to seed native grasses and flowering plants, creating “a little oasis of nature, kind of embedded in the heart of the town.”
Looking upward through a 30-foot “Twisted Tower” covered in laser cut teflon squares designed to move in the wind in a temporary “Air Garden” created by artist Ned Kahn on the site of the future Hotel Sebastopol. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)
Already there’s a 30-foot twisting tower of white Teflon pieces, a large “wind hammock” stretching 44 feet across, a series of sunset-colored panels, and a suspended circular piece that looks like a dream catcher. Passersby “have been so nice,” says Kahn. “That’s been probably the funnest part of the whole thing. All the feedback has been super positive.”
Kahn, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2003 (winning what’s commonly known as the “genius grant”) is best known for huge, shimmering arrays of metal and other materials set in motion by the air. He wants to do more than make strikingly vivid artwork, however. He hopes to inspire love for the air that animates it.
His work has always shown a fascination with physics and movement — the ways in which fog and light, sand, or even seeds can be coaxed and manipulated into intriguing scenes of beauty. “If you could alter people’s sense of stewardship and love for the Earth and the atmosphere and the air, then maybe you could change the way they feel about the air. Because the air, being invisible, it’s so easy to forget about it,” explains Kahn. Make it visible, he says, and people will remember.
“I guess my hope — and maybe it’s just a fantasy — is that some small number of people, when they see the air, how beautiful it is, it will shift their thinking, their relationship with the air and kind of fall in love… You love your kids so much you would do anything for your kids. If you had that same feeling, or even a trace of it, for the air …” he says, his voice trailing off.
Mom may have told you she has everything she needs, but was she thinking about spectacular geode coasters when she said that? This Mother’s Day, give her that little thing of beauty she didn’t know she wanted or needed — a visit to a few Sonoma County boutiques might reveal just the perfect gift. Of course, that doesn’t get you off the hook for spending the gift of time together. But as far as giving things goes, here’s a list of some of our favorites, all under $100. Click through the above gallery for details.
H2hotel in Healdsburg is an eco-friendly design gem. The boutique hotel — one of four in the Piazza Hospitality collection — opened in 2010 and showcases an innovative approach to both sustainability and aesthetics, blending the two by incorporating natural elements in the design.
Architecture firm David Baker + Partners designed the hotel and Marie Fisher Interior Design, a San Francisco based design studio, created the interior design. The hotel is LEED NC Gold certified (LEED NC — New Construction — is a rating system that promotes the design and construction of high-performance green buildings). The decor is modern and pared-down, but a few design surprises — bold colors and patterns, green walls and roofs, artwork and colorful design objects — contribute to a rich visual experience.
A stay at the hotel or a visit to the property’s restaurant, Spoonbar, offers an opportunity to immerse yourself in the hotel’s design. While you can’t stay at the hotel forever, you can take home some design inspiration to apply to your own space. Click through the above gallery for a few design concepts that this beauty of a hotel does so well.
There’s something special about spring in Sonoma County. Wildflowers bloom along country roads and in vineyard rows, with emerald green hills in the background. At wineries, bees start buzzing in culinary gardens while visitors sip wine on terraces and patios. On a sunny day, the whole area looks spectacular but some wineries are especially eye-catching come spring with carefully landscaped gardens full of roses, tulips, daffodils and other beautiful plants beckoning visitors to step outside. We’ve listed a few of our favorite Sonoma County winery gardens in the gallery above. Did we miss your favorite winery garden? Let us know in the comments below.
Oak trees, hikers and cows at Crane Creek Regional Park in Rohnert Park. (Sonoma County Regional Parks)
Click through the above gallery for things to think about when you hike near cattle.
For those in search of a new hiking adventure, Sonoma County Regional Parks boast a plethora of trails that motivate us to get outside more often. From seaside strolls to mountain climbs, there’s something for everyone to explore. Trails with vineyard views remind hikers of how wineries and agriculture shape this area, but there are other reminders of our agricultural roots that like to pop up along the route.
Cows graze in four Sonoma County regional parks: seasonally at Taylor Mountain, Crane Creek and North Sonoma Mountain, and year-round at Tolay Lake Regional Park. The cows are owned and managed by local ranchers, not the park system. Along with providing a share-worthy photo (taken at a distance, of course), cattle grazing in parks help reduce wildfire risk and offer a host of other benefits.
“Well-managed livestock grazing plays a vital ecological role in maintaining California’s grasslands,” says Lulu Waks, Park Program Supervisor, Sonoma County Regional Parks. “Grazing prevents conversion of grasslands to shrublands – a common successional trend in California’s Coast Ranges when disturbance by grazing or fire is absent – and this conversion can cause a loss of grassland plants and animals.”
Grazing also helps prevent the buildup of thatch, or dead plant material. Accumulation of plant matter can stave off the germination and growth of many native species and cause a decline in biodiversity.
Cows roam Tolay Lake Regional Park year-round, but it’s up to Mother Nature to decide when livestock will appear at the Taylor Mountain, Crane Creek and North Sonoma Mountain parks. Cattle are traditionally brought to parks when winter rains set in and stay until the grass dries, approximately December through May or June. But if winter rains arrive late or, in the case of this year, hardly come at all, the timeline can change.
Cows are not aggressive by nature and tend to keep to themselves, but there are things outdoor enthusiasts can do to help humans and animals enjoy their day in the park.
“If cattle are blocking the trail, approach them slowly, speak normally, and allow them to move away,” says Waks. “If they don’t move away on their own, provide a wide berth by walking around them off-trail.”
If you come across a calf that appears to be alone, leave it be. Mom is often nearby; remember to never get between a cow and her calf. If a cow doesn’t look well or is acting aggressive, make a note of the animal’s location and, if you can easily see it, the number on its ear tag. Report what you saw to the park officials and they’ll take it from there.
At first, sharing trails with cows might feel a little intimidating, but with knowledge and time, an encounter with cows can become a memorable experience, while at the same time serving as a reminder of where our food comes from and how grazing can be beneficial to the landscape.
“Livestock, like all wild animals, should be treated with respect – and, yes, watch where you step,” says Waks.
Sonoma County boasts some of the best hiking trails in Northern California. The mild weather allows for year-round outdoor activities but spring may be one of our favorite seasons to explore the area on foot. This spring, local wineries and hotels are offering guided hikes with boxed lunches and wine tastings. Click through the gallery above for three guided hikes to sign up for this spring. Did we miss one of your favorites? Leave a comment below.
