At DaVero Farms and Winery, the grays of winter give way to spring’s unfolding palette. First come yellow acacia flowers and red-breasted robins on sloping green hillsides, followed soon by pussy willows at the edge of the pond, a snowy white frenzy of wild plum blossoms and the soft hues of narcissus, hyacinth and lilac. They all evoke memories of DaVero co-owner Colleen McGlynn’s childhood in Wisconsin, where every farm has a row of lilacs and day lilies.

“You can spot the bones of old farms by the flowers,” she said.

DaVero, near Healdsburg, stepped onto the culinary stage in the mid-1990s with the release of an extra-virgin olive oil, a blend of five varieties imported from Tuscany. Over the years, other DaVero products — olive oil soap, condiments from estate fruit, an estate Meyer lemon olive oil and a selection of wines from purchased grapes — joined in and before long, a small vineyard of Sagrantino was added above the olive orchards.

A few years ago, DaVero opened a tasting room on Westside Road in Healdsburg, and in 2013 completed construction of a small winery adjacent to the tasting room. There are herb and vegetable gardens, an orchard of Meyer lemon trees, white Alpine strawberries, persimmons, hens for eggs, sheep and a few pigs. What began as a foray into the world of olive oil has blossomed into a diverse family farm.

With all the pruning done and bud break in the vineyards likely still weeks away, there’s a bit of leisure. Tiny olive blossoms will begin to appear soon, but there’s little to be done except to hope it doesn’t rain during pollination. DaVero’s monthly Sunset Suppers start on the final Friday of May. These dinners, open to club members and the public, are sweet and intimate, with about 30 guests sitting at one long table in the tasting room, savoring estate wines and the garden’s bounty, along with ranch eggs, estate pork and lamb, and seafood from the coast. (Dinners typically cost $85, with discounts for club members.)

“You can plan your day a bit,” McGlynn said of this time of year, “and, if you’re lucky, take time for dinner.”

Dinner is often with Loretta Keller, owner and chef of San Francisco’s Coco500 restaurant. Keller is a longtime friend of McGlynn and her husband and DaVero co-owner, Ridgely Evers, and has a cabin near their ranch. She comes up frequently from San Francisco to relax and enjoy the season.

“Because everything is budding, you can feel the garden and the woods stirring under your feet,” Keller said of spring in Sonoma. “It is so full of promise. And the first asparagus, sweet and tender in an omelet!”

With spring afoot, the braises of winter and McGlynn’s beloved clay pots give way to lighter techniques, though fire is still central to her style. She’ll fire up the wood-burning grill for fresh favas, garlic scapes, asparagus and, perhaps, a butterflied leg of lamb massaged with spring herbs. The living room fireplace has a Tuscan grill. Evers, whose business resume includes leading the team that developed the QuickBooks bookkeeping software program for Intuit, can be found at the grill, turning homemade bread for bruschetta or cooking a spatchcocked (butterflied) chicken. An outdoor wood-burning oven, built on the north end of the farmhouse’s wrap-around porch, is at the ready when more than the two or three gather around the table.

The farm fills most produce needs year-round, along with eggs from hens that roam freely and the occasional lamb from a small flock of sheep that keeps weeds in the olive orchard and vineyard in check.

The gardens, overseen by Mary Foley, are not quite a full acre, with one patch at the farm and another at the winery, about an eighth of a mile away. A mix of perennials, vegetables and herbs, the gardens produce enough for McGlynn, Evers and their employees, who are free to harvest what they like. Some of the bounty goes to local food banks, and now and then the harvest makes it into the tasting room, where it used for the monthly suppers and sometimes sold to visitors.

“An onion is a hard sell,” McGlynn said, “but tourists can manage ripe tomatoes. They don’t typically have kitchens (where they stay) but can imagine taking a ripe, juicy tomato on a picnic.”

The tasting room at DaVero Farms and Winery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. 766 Westside Road, Healdsburg, 707-431-8000, davero.com.

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SPRING VEGGIES

Not long after those first brave shoots of asparagus poke their tiny tips through the warming soil, spring’s harvest begins to unfold. Soon there are piles of spring onions and garlic, garlic scapes (the curly green tops) and tender fava beans begging to be shelled.

Cooking becomes simpler than in the dead of winter and when it comes to seasonings, chef Colleen McGlynn relies on little more than her DaVero Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil, fresh lemon, crunchy Maldon sea salt and herbs from the garden. Here are some of her favorite ways to enjoy the delicate harvest of spring:

Artichokes: Braised, with peas, mint, lemon and olive oil

Asparagus: Grilled (“Of course,” she says.)

Fava beans: Grilled whole, in their pods, drizzled with olive oil, lemon and Maldon salt; shelled, in risotto, with peas and pea shoots

Baby beets: Roasted, slightly smashed, with a splash of balsamic vinegar

Baby fennel bulbs: Braised in olive oil; shaved into a salad

Garlic scapes: Grilled, drizzled with olive oil, lemon and Maldon sea salt

Spring herbs: Green Goddess dressing with mint, tarragon and parsley over Little Gem and butter leaf lettuces; massaged into leg of lamb

Nettles: Pasta with nettle pesto; soup

Spring onions: Grilled

Pea shoots: Wilted; in pasta; in stir-fry; in risotto

Sorrel and spinach: Sauteed with shallots and spooned onto grilled bread; in soup

Radishes: Shaved, lightly dressed and topped with soft-boiled farm eggs

Rhubarb: With strawberries, in pies and galettes

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WINES

Unless you’re an aficionado, the wine aisle can be a daunting place. Columns of glass soldiers stand silently, unflinching as Buckingham Palace guards and without so much as a wink that says, “Pick me.” With hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of wines on store shelves, it’s no wonder some would-be buyers run for cover.

Marketing minds say that getting a customer to pick up a wine bottle is half the battle; once it’s touched, the chance of that bottle going into the shopping cart is high. How the bottle looks is just as important as the taste of the drink inside (there are very few “bad” wines these days), so wineries seek to create eye-catching labels and vessel shapes to impress younger wine drinkers, and the young at heart, who are unexcited by Chateau This and Domaine That. If it looks cool, it’s cool to drink.

Healdsburg’s Truett-Hurst Wines is at the forefront of producing wines with quirky, cutting-edge, evocative packaging. While most of the company’s 30 brands come in traditional glass bottles with paper labels, it has a division devoted to finding avant-garde ways to present wines in chain stores such as Safeway and Total Wine.

Two years ago, Truett-Hurst launched a series of 10 wines at Safeway stores, each variety wrapped in wildly illustrated paper that tells a story about the wine, includes a recipe, or makes suggestions for what to serve with the wine. The wrap for Schucks White Wine, for example, has fish swimming around the bottle, suggesting that it goes with seafood.

Then came California Square wines in, yes, square-sided glass bottles reminiscent of old-time spirits and hair tonic. Ever so tongue in cheek, Truett-Hurst marketers claim that the California Square bottle is not only recyclable, it’s reusable (and thus green), and suggest using it as a vase, water carafe or olive oil container once the bottle is empty. California Square Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and a red blend ($20), appear to target the wine drinker furnishing his or her first apartment.

Late 2013 saw Truett-Hurst’s delivery of Paper Boy, which it says is the world’s first paper wine bottle. It has a recycled cardboard shell in the shape of a wine bottle, with a plastic bladder inside holding the wine (Mendocino County Chardonnay and Paso Robles red blend, each $15). At 1.5 pounds for a 750-ml “bottle,” Paper Boy is significantly lighter than a standard glass bottle (3 to 4 pounds) and is 67 percent more efficient in its production carbon footprint. All of its parts are recyclable.

Green is good, of course, and the unbreakable bottle makes Paper Boy easy to put in a backpack or tote to the beach or tailgate party. The same is true for Flasq Wine in St. Helena, which fills sleek 375-ml, brushed-aluminum cans with Chardonnay and Merlot made from California grapes. Each Flasq ($5 to $6), which holds two glasses of wine, is shatterproof, chills wine five times faster than glass, reduces carbon footprint 35 percent due to its light weight, and has the sporty look one would be proud to display on the golf course, after a hike or out on the ocean. Think of it as wine in beer clothing.

When it comes to taste, these wines won’t bowl over the critics, yet they’re well-made, easy to drink and fairly priced. They don’t just wink. They shout, “Pick me!”