It just got cooler outside, which means there’s an imperative to get cozier. And with activities moving outdoors and remaining so for much longer this season, it’s really important to bundle up. Here are a few finds that will keep us warmer or cozier or both whether we’re in a field, on a hike or curled up on the couch. Click through the above gallery for details.
There is so much beauty in the world. If you don’t believe it, just check out Etsy. A search of Sonoma-based makers could have you Windows-shopping for hours. Etsy also provides an opportunity to shop local, without leaving your home, this holiday season. Click through the above gallery for details. If we didn’t include your favorite, let us know in the comments.
Sixth-generation vintner Katie Bundschu no doubt draws viticultural inspiration from tradition, but it’s evident she also approaches winemaking by looking toward the future. Her newly opened Abbot’s Passage Winery and Mercantile in Glen Ellen is one example of her exploratory spirit — a compass rose emblem on the facade of the circa 1887 building offers an additional hint.
Branching out from her family’s 150-year-old winery, Gundlach Bundschu, Katie Bundschu established Abbot’s Passage winery in 2016 to focus on small-lot blends that “showcase grapes from notable but often overlooked vineyards.” At the time, the winery’s tasting room was housed in a diminutive red barn just off the Sonoma Plaza, which also contained small-but-mighty retail and maker spaces.
Bundschu implemented some big ideas in her small Sonoma store — the new Glen Ellen property allows her to expand on those. Most notably, the new premium tasting experience “The Field” allows visitors to taste Abbot’s Passage wines among gnarly 1940s Zinfandel vines. This private tasting can be reserved for up to four people and includes a flight of wines, a bit of education and a tasting board with house-made items such as kale chips, crackers, and Pt. Reyes cheeses, as well as fruits and vegetables sourced from within a few miles of the winery. To keep visitors dry and warm throughout winter, the winery is installing an open tent and heaters around the tasting tables. If guests would like to pair their tasting experience with a game, they can reserve shuffleboard in two-hour blocks, and the winery’s olive grove offers Adirondack chairs to relax in after the game.
Inside the store, which can only be visited with masks on, there’s a growing collection of wares to browse and shop: vests and bags by Filson, locally-made jewelry by Megan Bo, outdoor blankets, pretty beaded glasses, hats for the dapper hiker, and more. An adjacent shopping space offers pantry items from Gundlach Bundschu’s Rhinefarm estate, which is located on the southwesterly slopes of the Mayacamas Mountain Range, along with Sonoma-made pottery and dried floral swags grown and assembled at Oak Hill Farm just down the road. Cappuccinos will soon be on the menu, a good option for late-morning bikers along Madrone Rd.
During this partial opening due to the pandemic, Abbot’s Passage Winery and Mercantile is focused on establishing its roots while working to expand its offerings. We’re looking forward to the return of workshops—geometric candle-making, feather-drawing and field-inspired watercolor—that took place in the red barn location. Whatever plans unfold, we’re certain Bundschu’s adventurous spirit will keep things moving in an interesting direction.
Abbot’s Passage, 777 Madrone Road, Glen Ellen, 707-939-3017, abbotspassage.com
A pair of large rusted pulleys from an old theater curtain system are intriguing finds in a salvage yard, but most people can’t think of a good use for them. Not so for artist Rachid Hassani, who can turn the find into pedestals for a tabletop of reclaimed barn wood. Got an unused stationary bike? He can keep that out of the landfill, too, by making it the base of your next kitchen table.
After decades as a graphic designer in both Germany and the U.S., Hassani was happy to expand his passion into a storefront in downtown Petaluma two years ago. His shop, Bay’ti, which means “my home” in Arabic, showcases his own creations plus antiques and finds from his native Morocco.
Hassani speaks glowingly of the artistic culture of his childhood home, the medieval city of Fez — from the world’s oldest tanneries to the independent women rug-makers in neighboring villages who cook and care for children and run their own small creative businesses.
For his store, he buys directly from small-scale craftspeople in Morocco, filling a shipping container
each time he visits the country — usually a couple times a year. Hassani says when buyers come to the local village, “they are so happy to see you. It’s like Christmas the other way around.”
It pains him that the pandemic has stopped this exchange. For every item he sells in his store, “a family is eating,” Hassani says. He looks forward to visiting again soon, describing trips out to the desert where the stars are so bright, “it feels like they’ll touch your head.” He talks of exhilarating sand baths and the drink of hospitality, Moroccan mint tea, that’s offered everywhere you go.
Hassani’s old world-meets-modern aesthetic is rooted in inspiration from his two homes, that of his artisan-rich childhood alongside the one he’s built in Petaluma. Click through the above gallery for some of his favorite local spots.
Imagine a portal to the past and future at your disposal, answers to all the questions in the universe. Where do you start?
“How old is Santa Claus?” one curious child wanted to know. So she deposited her question into the golden mailbox currently parked at the south edge of Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square.
The idea behind the mailbox public art project, an endeavor by three local artists, is to allow people to — symbolically — send messages through time and space.
The mailbox was installed on Sept. 4 in the downtown square to encourage people to support the U.S. Postal Service. It accepts “questions, grievances and love letters to the past or future.” With the help of a dedicated team of “portal professionals,” it supplies responses, too.
Local artist Jessica Rasmussen came up with the idea for the “Portal Service.” Using a grant from the Open & Out program in downtown Santa Rosa, she called on friends and fellow artists Julian Billotte and Anna Wiziarde to help coat a USPS mailbox in solid (imitation) gold.
“Using a full-size post box and making it gold was an homage to the post office, something we were feeling was really important at the time,” Billotte said, noting concerns about decreased funding for the USPS.
“Part of it for me was to make something that symbolized the sacredness of the post office and its importance,” he added. “As we talked about it, the idea of a solid gold box became iconic.”
Now, the original team of three have recruited a group of 35 “responders” who reply to any mail received with a return address. Many letters describe a sense of worry about the present or the future, from pandemic panic to election unease.
“The community did not shy away from going deep into a lot of touching subjects,” Wiziarde said. “Things people were concerned about, anxiety about the future. So it was a good conduit for people to address their concerns and their worries and their fears.”
Sometimes, responders struggle to find the right words of comfort for letter-writers, Rasmussen said, such as when a mother asked for a response from the future about whether her children’s safety would be threatened by climate change.
“I’ve had more than one responder receive questions to the future and (ask), ‘Can I be over-the-top optimistic?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, go for it. Go for your heart,’” Rasmussen said. “Some (responders) have done videos; some have done artwork. It’s not necessarily a direct response. Sometimes it’s a little bit more vague.”
The Portal Service posts all the letters and responses from the mailbox on an Instagram page. The project has resulted in a lot of engagement from the community, though in different ways than the artists anticipated.
“I feel like it’s living a life out there,” Billotte said about the golden mailbox. “As an object, it’s just getting abused and tagged and the skaters are thrashing on it. But standing out there, it still looks great. That’s something I really enjoyed, watching it.”
In addition to inquiries about climate change and Santa Claus, people have left offerings like dollar bills, a teddy bear, bags of marijuana and a package of Top Ramen.
“People are using it like a wishing well,” Wiziarde said.
Although the artists intended the project as a tribute to the Postal Service, the federal agency had a different take. The artists received a cease and desist letter from the USPS on Nov. 9, requiring them to take down the portal on Dec. 4, the date the project was already planned to end. While it recognized that the Portal Service was meant to elicit support for the Postal Service, the USPS said the project is too similar to the Postal Service’s collection boxes and could cause confusion.
As for the curious child asking about Santa’s age, after some research by the Portal Service, she received a response:
“A little older than the Easter Bunny.”
Going into the giving season, the coronavirus pandemic has amplified the needs of a community still reeling from years of devastating wildfires. Nobody understands these challenges better than Lisa Carreño, CEO of United Way of the Wine Country.
Through over 20 years of social advocacy and nonprofit leadership, Carreño’s compassionate influence has woven its way through many sectors of our community. Before her appointment to head the United Way, she worked to help low-income students get to college through the organization 10,000 Degrees and advocated for victims of domestic violence with the YWCA, and she remains a member at large of the Community Foundation Sonoma County.
Here, Lisa Carreño shares her thoughts on what charitable gifts matter most this year.
The most extraordinary gifts this year are going to be gifts of cash that are pooled together with a whole lot of other gifts and leveraged and invested intentionally in equity building and resilience-building activities that improve family financial stability and improve and expand the community’s access to information, resources, and support. To me, that is smart money.
We have underinvested in, if not divested from, poor communities and communities of color. We have too few leaders of color making decisions. It has caused me to question whether the solutions in which we are investing are really the right solutions. We have an opportunity with this growing awareness to change how we invest and to invest in equity and climate resilience building leaders.
If you can’t read and nobody you talk to understands you, you are lost. You are powerless. You feel that no matter how hard you’re working at it, life is perilously uncertain. To not be paying attention to language and culture as an aspect of our service delivery system does a great injustice to our whole community.
Our first priority is that we need to take care of ourselves and recognize that when we do, we’ll have a far greater capacity to take care of our families, our co-workers, and our communities. It is critical we recognize this is a moment to pause and reflect on what is really important in our lives and prioritize those things. And if you have the resources, invest in equity and climate-resilience building strategies that are genuinely going to create a Sonoma County that is long-term resilient, sustainable, and gives everyone who resides here the opportunity to thrive.
It’s always been about art and design for Andrew Akufo.
One year after graduating from the University of Central Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, he moved from his hometown of Oklahoma City to New Mexico to pursue a career in arts administration. He soon found a job as the head of a local cultural organization there. And five years later, he moved to Sonoma County to take over as the first executive director of the Healdsburg Center for the Arts.
During his tenure in Healdsburg, Akufo reconnected with Toja Hodge, a friend from New Mexico, and the two started talking about launching a new luxury fashion brand. They wanted the brand to be fashion-forward. They also wanted it to help create Black wealth—for themselves and for others in their respective Black communities.
So the duo joined forces and created Gapelii Brand (pronounced jap-el-lee). The name is an acronym for growth, ambition, prosperity, elevate, lifestyle, innovation, and influence.
The brand launched in August 2019. Since then, despite the pandemic, it has expanded its inventory to include t-shirts, hats, denim jackets, shoes, infant onesies, zip-up hoodies, and a women’s collection. The company also sells branded face masks.
Philanthropy is a big part of the Gapelii Brand mission; Akufo and Hodge give 10% of all proceeds to nonprofit organizations and local families who have been affected by Covid-19.
Pride is another driving force for the 31-year-old Christian. “The widely publicized deaths of African Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have shone a spotlight on America and society’s need to support not only Black Lives Matter, but also Black businesses such as our own,” Akufo says. “I consider my current position a blessing.”
While Hodge designs the merchandise, Akufo manages operations and handles production, marketing, and customer service from his apartment in Santa Rosa.
Here’s how Andrew Akufo spends a day.
7 a.m.
I start my day by checking and responding to messages and notifications on social media. I finally get out of bed around 8 a.m., open the blinds, pray, and read chapters in my 365-day Bible lesson plan.
9 a.m.
I listen to YouTube playback videos of sports talk shows such as Undisputed with Skip and Shannon, First Take, and Jalen & Jacoby during my home workout. Around 9:30 a.m., I conduct meetings on Zoom and do a virtual interview with a Bay Area news reporter about our business.
10 a.m.
I have a brief phone call with my business partner to discuss product samples, customer questions, new promotional opportunities, and forgotten passwords. I usually eat breakfast around 11 a.m.
12 p.m.
This is my errand time- taking out the trash and recycling, checking the mailbox, and grocery shopping.
2 p.m.
In the afternoon I schedule social media advertising posts for Gapelii Brand on Facebook, and share posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. I also conduct Zoom meetings with my small business coach/advisor, Lance Cotrell.
4 p.m.
I follow up with photographers, models, and venues about upcoming photo shoots in Sonoma County, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. One of my favorite spots to shoot locally is Goat Rock Beach, near Jenner.
6 p.m.
This is when I check daily traffic and customer data on Gapelii Brand’s online marketplace, and review reports on subscriptions to our digital newsletter through Mailchimp. I update information on the website, add photos to our online gallery, and ensure all links and videos work.
7 p.m.
I’m winding down for the day. I review and select photos from previous photo shoots for editing and promotion. I follow-up with Toja about potential new products, supplier options, and sales in New Mexico. We also discuss new collaborations and the overall progress of shipments.
8 p.m.
I take a shower, eat dinner, and wash the dishes. I also research civil rights and social service organizations that serve families impacted by Covid-19 to receive Gapelii Brand contributions.
11 p.m.
Time to end my day. I brush my teeth, take vitamins, open the windows, pray, watch random videos on Instagram and YouTube, troll my friends on social media, and finally go to bed.
Long before she got her nursing degree, or even her driver’s license, Yudith Vargas was logging hours at Santa Rosa Community Health.
“I started volunteering at 14, stuffing letters, numbering charts — essentially, anything that needed to be done.”
Fast forward to 2020, and Vargas is back at SRCH, the health provider for some 50,000 uninsured and underinsured Santa Rosa residents, as the clinic’s associate director of nursing. When the pandemic hit, she pivoted from an administrative role to the front lines, running a Covid testing site and doing outreach.
Vargas and her colleagues soon noticed two disturbing trends: cases in Sonoma County were skyrocketing, and the Latinx community was hit hard, accounting for 75% of cases, despite comprising only about 27% of the population. “As we started seeing those community numbers, and ourselves reflected in them, that really had an impact on us,” Vargas says.
In the excerpts below, read some of Yudith Vargas thoughts on the Covid-19 situation in Sonoma County.
We’re definitely seeing our community struggling with the social determinants of health: financial stability, housing stability. When you look at somebody who may be new to this country, they’re forced, because of the high cost of living, into larger households. Also, our Latinx population sometimes doesn’t have the same benefits, whether because they’re working undocumented, or they have employers who don’t follow the law to provide sick leave. And if you’re diagnosed with Covid, you’re literally in isolation. So what incentive is there for people to stay home, with these things working against them? They’re isolated from those they love, losing income, and they might not know what they’re gonna eat the next day. It just feels like one thing after another, playing against our Latinx population.
We’re trying to get back to the roots of medicine: asking the community what they need and getting out there to reconnect and influence our comrades. Providing education to community leaders, so they can get the word out as well. The bottom line is, let’s focus on everyone wearing a mask when they’re in public. If they going to see somebody, everybody wears a mask, right? Having a risk-reduction approach. A parallel is STIs. When you tell somebody, ‘no, don’t have sex,’ we’ve seen the effects of that. What’s the risk reduction? Wear your mask. Like, wear a condom.
My dad is an essential worker, so I’ve been trying to support him and check on my family to see what they need. My partner is also a healthcare worker, so we’re in it together, literally. Still, it’s scary. One self-care thing I do is hike every weekend. Sometimes my partner comes, sometimes it’s just me and my fur child, Frosty. It helps me clear my mind. You know, turn the cell phones off, whatever I need to do to get out there and put some space between me and everything that’s going on.
During the Tubbs fire, we lost our Vista Campus, this beautiful two-story campus which served about 25,000 of our patients. We had a little playground out front, and we think some material in it shot up flames and the roof of the building caught on fire. That set off the sprinklers, which flooded the whole campus. I’ve been through that, the Kincade fire, and now this. The thing that continues to feed my resilience is our patients and our community. I come from very humble beginnings, and so do my immediate family members. I just don’t see myself doing any different work, because of the constant reminder of how important it is to do what we’re doing — to serve those who are most vulnerable during these times.
Top Sonoma, Napa and Marin artisans have been nominated by the Good Food Awards as finalists from among nearly 2,000 cheesemakers, brewers, charcuterists, jam-makers and gourmet food producers throughout the United States.
Seismic Brewing, Bellwether Farms, Ethic Ciders and Cowgirl Creamery were among the nominees this year. Tasting panels select small-batch, sustainable and locally-made products from Maine to California each year to showcase. Though California and New York have long dominated the awards, more and more states are being represented for their outstanding regional food products including North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska and Ohio.
Good Food Award Winners will be announced on Friday, January 22, 2021 in a virtual Awards Ceremony broadcast across the country that offers a behind-the-scenes look inside kitchens and farms. A limited number of special edition Celebration Boxes featuring Award Winning treats and a limited-edition cookbook are available for pre-order.
It’s time for Greg and Lindsay Hamilton to enjoy the rocking chairs on their new front porch. After all, it’s been an intense three years for the Kenwood family, who lost their home in the early hours of the 2017 wildfires and have moved four times over the course of the rebuild, which they managed themselves while working full-time and raising two young children. Not to mention their many home projects and the wine label they launched as a side business. So yes, some time spent relaxing on their porch, overlooking their small vineyard, is entirely warranted.
“As we look back ten years from now on the things the fire took from us, I think the one thing we will regret is it kind of took us away from our kids,” says Greg. “But Covid has forced us to think, ‘How do we slow down?’”
Greg and Lindsay, who work from home for the same tech company, and their two kids Alba, 7, and Abhainn, 5, moved to Kenwood from Berkeley in 2016. Greg, who grew up in Scotland, met Lindsay, a native Californian, in a Glasgow pub while Lindsay was still in college, and the two married young. “I grew up in a very average suburb, with the differentiator that across the street from us was the moors— thousands of acres of open space at our disposal,” says Greg. They moved to Sonoma to give their kids that same rambling, outdoorsy childhood. “We basically ate outside every single meal for the first six months here,” laughs Lindsay.
In their new small-town life, they quickly found others who shared their family values. “The day of the fires was the Glen Ellen Village Fair,” remembers Lindsay. “We ran into all these friends there, and I was thinking, ‘We have a community. We have friends; we really know people here now.’”
Just a few hours after getting home from the fair, they looked out the window to see a huge wall of fire blowing across Adobe Canyon Road just a few hundred yards away. They quickly grabbed a few things, got the kids out of their toddler beds, then drove to a neighbor’s house to wake them up. The next morning, those same neighbors sent Lindsay and Greg a video of what remained of their property. The house and a historic water tower were gone, along with several old trees and some vines. A barn and small carriage house remained. “It was awful, but at the same time, the video was the perfect thing because we were able to just start grieving and start processing right away. So many people were in that unknown for so long, which I think has to be worse,” says Lindsay.
Friends and colleagues rallied around the family, even making a spreadsheet to organize donations of furniture and household goods. And a fellow parent at their kids’ nursery school in Sonoma, an architect named Steven Moseley, stepped forward to donate his time to design their new house. They met early on to talk over design priorities, and when they met again a week later to review the architect’s initial ideas, they realized that what he had sketched was the exact house Lindsay and Greg had roughed out in their minds. “It was amazing,” says Lindsay.
“At first, we were like ‘That’s too easy, how do we know this is the one?’ So he came up with two other ideas, and we were like ‘Nope, this is it!’”
Their former home had been a two-story brick Colonial. But the new home Moseley designed has a traditional farmhouse look, sitting lightly on the land next to the carriage house and barn. A large great room with a sliding glass wall out to the deck connects to the open kitchen, which has a pass-through window to an outside bar table. “The thing that we love about the farmhouse is that it’s timeless,” says Greg. “And the finishes are timeless, like the subway tile. It doesn’t look bad in houses from a hundred years ago, and it won’t look bad in this house a hundred years from now.”
Important, too, was the sustainability of the rebuild, especially to Lindsay who studied environmental science at UC Santa Cruz. They participated in PG& E’s Advanced Energy Rebuild program, which offered partial rebates for meeting energy efficiency standards with appliances and windows, extra-thick insulation, and solar panels.
It’s an easy-living home, one where the sliding window wall in the living room often remains open all day while Alba and Abhainn build massive pillow forts or have ice cream at the bar table at the passthrough. Greg can pull the kids into a late afternoon pizza project, helping them roll out dough on the kitchen island, then baking the pizzas on the grill out back. “We went in on a third of a cow with some friends, so we’ve also been eating a lot of steak.
And one of the things we want to do a lot more of together is baking,” says Greg. “We love to watch The Great British Baking Show, so lots of lemon bars and brownies, and I love pies.”
Though they’re longing to slow down, September and October will also be busy this year with harvest.
In Berkeley, they were enthusiastic home winemakers, and when they moved to Kenwood, they hoped it would be in the cards someday to launch a small family wine label. “But then after the fires, Lindsay and I were sitting there one night, and we were were just like, ‘what are we waiting for?’” explains Greg. While still settling into a temporary rental, they met with a consulting winemaker, who has helped them source grapes and find a custom crush facility in Sonoma. In the future, the couple hopes to create a small tasting room in the barn to share their wines. Says Greg: “Life can throw you a curve ball at any time, so sometimes you just have to jump in with both feet, even if you don’t know where the bottom is.”
With the rush of harvest, it might be a few more weeks until there’s time to take up those rocking chairs on the front porch in earnest. But Greg and Lindsay are holding a long view, reveling in building their new life after three years of unsettledness—and thinking a lot about the concept of home. They remain reflective about what their family has been through. “It would be easy to get too caught up in the idea of ‘If only I had a perfect home, my life would be perfect.’ I think it’s a lot more complicated than that,” Greg acknowledges. “But I do feel like there is something in being able to create your own home. It’s an incredible gift. And I think we do see that future now.”
