If anyone knew how to honor Christmas, it was Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser-turned-philanthropist hero of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Get in the spirit by perusing the handmade wares of more than 70 local artists. Look for jewelry, glass art, ceramics, wreaths, paintings, woodwork and more, as well as lots of good things to eat. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 7, and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Dec. 8, at Finley Community Center, 2060 W. College Ave., Santa Rosa. $2; children 12 and under free. 707-543-3737, ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/departments/recreationandparks.
Lara Flynn of Calistoga makes sure the line of her “train”, a dozen barrels with wheels, doesn’t get tangled as she participates with her 30’s era Farmall tractor in the Napa Valley Tractor Parade on Calistoga’s Main Street. (photo by Kent Porter) 2006
Who needs a one-horse open sleigh when there are tractors, antique trucks and construction equipment all lit up for the holidays? This down-home procession moves down Lincoln Avenue in downtown Calistoga at 7 p.m. Warning: People start lining up early in the morning for a viewing spot, and some even put out their chairs the night before to save their place. Free. 707-942-6333, visitcalistoga.com.
“Let there be light!” at Trentadue Winery’s bright holiday event. (photo by Alvin Jornada)
November 30: Festival of Lights
At Trentadue Winery in Geyserville, the holiday motto is “Let there be light!” And there are thousands of lights all over the buildings and grounds. This popular event ran for 15 years before taking a long hiatus. Last year it returned, drawing an enthusiastic crowd of 500. Again this year, the event benefits the Healdsburg Food Pantry. Expect wine, food, live music, dance and children’s activities, from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Adult admission is $20, which includes wine tasting; $5 for designated drivers. Kids are free. 707-433-3294, trentadue.com.
Ceramics artist Amy Halko working in her home studio near Lake Sonoma. (photo by Erik Castro)
Thoughtfully arranged atop the hand-woven table runner are curved wooden salad servers, a soft cotton towel and a hand-glazed tea cup. This setting is the work of three local artisans, women who work individually yet join together to showcase their wares.
When they met about three years ago at a crafts fair and farmers market, Amy Halko, a ceramic artist; Holly Jordan, a woodworker; and Marilyn Webster, a weaver, quickly understood they had similar sensibilities, an artistic alchemy. All loved cooking and all expressed their passion in handcrafted items for the kitchen and dining room, treasures that were lovely on their own but that took on a deeper allure and beauty together.
Soon, “Clay Wood Cloth, for Gracious Cooking and Dining” was born. It is a simple collaboration that hosts a few sales each year, sometimes with just the three of them and sometimes at larger events. On Dec. 7, they will hold a holiday sale at Stark Wine Company in Healdsburg.
Upon request, Halko, Jordan and Webster also arrange special group sales and donate a portion of their proceeds to a local nonprofit. Typically, the host chooses the beneficiary; local animal shelters and educational organizations have been recipients in the past. When it’s their choice, the women like to support Ceres Community Project in Sebastopol. Ten percent of the proceeds of the December sale will benefit Ceres, which teaches teens how to grow and prepare healthy meals, and also feed those in need.
Ceramics artist Amy Halko working in her home studio near Lake Sonoma. (photo by Erik Castro)
Clay
“I love cooking,” says Amy Halko, who lives off Skaggs Springs Road northwest of Healdsburg, of her ceramics, with shapes inspired by function – a spouted bowl that pours perfectly, for example.
Her handmade pieces are elegant, graceful and sensual, with supple curves and voluptuous lines that in turn inspire the designs that adorn them. Halko is also influenced by Japanese block prints.
Glazes are delicate and minimalist, with fine tight lines and loose, dripping splashes of color against a pearly white background. Small unglazed spots offer a compelling tactile quality and the undersides of lids and bottoms that are glazed and decorated to contribute surprise.
Halko’s delicate line work, sometime punctuated by small dots of white gold, is particularly effective in the way it contrasts with and thus accents the curves. Colors are muted and smoky. Small round holes add an ethereal lightness to some pieces.
She makes individual pieces, everything from salt and pepper sets, tiny creamers and sugar bowls, to dinner plates, bowls, tall graceful pitchers and full sets of dinnerware.
Woodcarver Holly Jordan with a variety of her hand made spatulas at her home workshop in Healdsburg, California. (photo by Erik Castro)
Wood
Holly Jordan has a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the California College of the Arts and has been a woodworker for more than three decades. She’s designed furniture inspired by the Memphis Movement of the 1980s, crafted reproductions of antiques, and currently designs components for businesses and wooden arbors.
Her work has always produced a lot of scrap, so many years ago she began carving from it kitchen implements for herself and her friends. Now she is the “Wood” of Clay Wood Cloth. Long-handled polenta spoons, spatulas and wooden spoons, pie servers, salad servers and cutting boards are among her specialties.
Many of Jordan’s implements are embellished, too, using the old American folk-art technique of pyro-carving. It employs a metal carver with temperature control and tips of various sizes, allowing her to work on both softer and very hard woods and to design delicate, ethereal images, such as damselflies, dragonflies and bees in midflight, inspired by her love of garden insects. A signature design that she calls “carrot folks” — carrots with compelling faces — adorn graceful curving handles, adding an element of subtle fun. All the implements emphasize the wood’s natural beauty that blossoms with age and use.
Most of the kitchen implements are made from eastern white maple, a very hard wood from the same tree that gives us maple syrup.
“It is important to use woods that do not transfer flavors,” Jordan says, explaining that walnut, for example, imparts a bitter taste. White maple leaches a subtle sweetness but eventually seals itself naturally. Jordan also works with cherry, oak, ash and cherry wood, and old wine barrels, often given to her by friends.
Marilyn Webster with some of her handwoven cloths at her home in Forestville, California. (photo by Erik Castro)
Cloth
Marilyn Webster has sold her hand-woven kitchen towels, napkins and table runners since 2007, yet fiber is a lifelong passion. She learned to knit at age 6, mastered embroidery, macramé and tatting as a teenager, and picked up the Continental style of knitting (with the yarn in the left hand) in college.
Finally, she learned weaving, and as of June 2013, she had sold some 1,000 kitchen towels.
Webster starts a new batch on Mondays, setting up her loom with a carefully arranged pattern of 100 percent unmercerized cotton threads. If she works daily, she has 10 to 12 finished towels by Friday. She averages about 400 towels a year.
Her inspiration comes from the natural world, from things she sees when she walks her dog or strolls the beach, from fused glass, clothing she admires and more. She begins each project with a planned design, but there is also an element of discovery and surprise.
She says the process is more like small-dot pointillism than painting brushstrokes in the way the patterns emerge.
Webster names her designs, too, understanding that customers love a story. “August Walks” resonates with the beautiful browns and golds of our landscape in midsummer. “101 North 2” evokes our dry hills punctuated by trees. “Island Blue 2,” inspired by a photograph of a door in Havana, Cuba, shimmers with intense blue and periwinkle accented by a slash of magenta.
The towels, which soften with use, are as durable as they are beautiful. Webster is still using towels she wove in 2006.
“Other towels tend to get pushed to the back of the drawer,’ she says. They are incredibly absorbent and take on a beautiful sheen as they age.
Webster also weaves napkins, table runners and a few scarves.
“People expect hand-woven scarves,” she says, “and I have one that I love. But my heart is in the kitchen and the dining room.”
Winemaker Paul Hobbs poses for a portrait in the barrel room of the Paul Hobbs Winery in Sebastopol, Calif., on March 8, 2013. (photo by Alvin Jornada)
Paul Hobbs trots the globe from Sonoma County to France to Armenia to Latin America, making wine and advising other winemakers.
The 60-year-old Sebastopol resident is one of the world’s most influential wine consultants, according to Robert M. Parker Jr., the world’s most prominent wine critic.
A New York native who grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario, Hobbs quit his medical studies at the University of Notre Dame after he fell in love with wine. He moved west to study winemaking at UC Davis, graduating in 1978.
Today, Paul Hobbs Winery farms 25 acres of grapes in Sonoma County and 63 acres in Napa County, and Hobbs is a partner in an Argentina winery, Viña Cobos. He crafts Cabernet Sauvignons, Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs, Merlots and Malbecs that sell from $20 to upwards of $300 a bottle and win him fame and admiration.
“He’s probably one of the most talented winemakers in the world,” said John Balletto, president of Balletto Vineyards & Winery and a respected leader in the local wine-grape industry.
But when Sonoma vintners talk about Hobbs, it’s not always because of his world-class wines. He has become a lightning rod for controversy amid robust public condemnation for how he has treated his land. Hobbs has infuriated officials, neighbors and industry peers by clear-cutting trees and, most recently, ripping out the intricate network of bushes and brambles that filter dirt from creeks and prevent soil erosion. Three times the county ordered him to halt work on his land.
Hobbs declined several requests for interviews for this story, saying he was busy with the grape harvest.
The public outcry over Hobbs’ actions further unsettles a wine industry already nervous about perceptions that it is too powerful and that vineyards have become too pervasive. Some grape growers fear the actions of one man will trigger a backlash of stricter regulations for all.
“The outsider looking in, a non-agrarian, sees this as an indication of what’s wrong with the entire industry and all growers must be behaving like this,” said Duff Bevill, founder of Bevill Vineyard Management, who farms about 1,000 acres of grapes.
“That is just not the case, it’s not even close,” Bevill added. “Something like this is insidious to the entire industry. It’s one incident with one person.”
This year, Hobbs was pilloried for efforts to convert an apple orchard to vineyards next to a Sebastopol elementary school. Parents who feared their children would be exposed to vineyard toxins demonstrated at his Paul Hobbs Winery, built in 2003 in Sebastopol.
Then, once he had permission to start the work, his crews ripped out hundreds of yards of blackberry and bay laurel growing along a stream bank. The action was illegal. And because erosion-protection measures weren’t put in place, sediment slid into a creek — another violation. Sonoma County officials hastily slapped Hobbs with a stop-work order.
But Hobbs’ actions triggered more demonstrations and anger, as well as calls for a moratorium on new vineyards in the county or, at the least, tighter rules.
In the wine industry, “There is some concern that these sorts of incidents bring negative attention to the program we have worked so hard to build,” said the county’s agricultural commissioner, Tony Linegar, referring to Sonoma’s vineyard ordinance adopted in 2000.
Those rules were imposed in reaction to the environmental damage by another grower, Ken Wilson, who captured public attention. The planting of vineyards, which until then had been largely unregulated, was put under county scrutiny and regulation.
In 1998 Wilson, a Healdsburg grape grower, failed to install adequate erosion control at a vineyard development on Stewarts Point-Skaggs Springs Road; nearly 2,000 cubic yards of sediment washed into a stream.
Wilson was fined $50,000 and given a 90-day suspended jail term, and the incident spurred that vineyard ordinance, which prevented planting on the steepest hillsides. Grape growers at first resisted and then helped to craft what they say are adequate regulations.
“One individual in that particular case was, ‘I’ll do as I please,’ and we all paid the price for it,” said Bevill, a Sonoma County Winegrape Commission director. “I just don’t want more regulations when it’s one incident with the one person.”
Protesters of the Watertrough Road orchard conversion picket outside Paul Hobbs Winery in Sebastopol, California on Monday, July 29, 2013. (photo by Beth Schlanker)
Even the most politic of men, former Sonoma County Winegrowers President Nick Frey, drew a clear distinction between Hobbs’ actions and the larger grape-grower community. “It’s not reflective of the industry in general. It’s a conscientious industry,” the soft-spoken Frey said.
When Hobbs’ name comes up in conversation, it is as an example of “how not to do things, how not to get along in the grape-growing community,” said industry doyenne Saralee Kunde, a longtime Russian River Valley grower.
“For the rest of us who are trying to do things right and be good stewards of the land, it doesn’t do a lot for us,” Kunde said.
Hobbs’ environmental missteps at his Watertrough Road property in Sebastopol are under investigation by the District Attorney’s Office. That conflict with county officials and residents was not his first.
In 2011, Hobbs came under fire three times for clear-cutting trees: on a Sebastopol Christmas tree farm, in Graton on land he bought at a fire-sale price after winning a court case against a neighbor, and on property on Pocket Canyon Road near Guerneville. He had proper permits in two of those cases, and blamed faulty advice for the third. But critics accused him of skirting regulations and also of disregarding environmental concerns.
The charges stung the vintner, whose website characterizes his wineries’ role as being “custodians of the earth.”
“That’s a defamation of our good reputation and I think there’s been too much of that,” he said in 2011, responding to charges that he was behaving arrogantly and causing “environmental harm.”
For a man who has misstepped so publicly in recent years, Hobbs has a reputation as hands-on to the last detail, keeping a watchful eye on every bit of work done in his name.
Forbes Magazine this year dubbed him “the Steve Jobs of wine” for his devotion to detail and quality. That characteristic can make for sometimes prickly relationships, former associates said.
“It was both a pleasure and a pain in the ass at times,” said Scott Morrison, Hobbs’ assistant winemaker from 2008 to 2012, who was promoted to winemaker of Hobbs’ Crossbarn label in early 2012.
“He is very, very demanding. He is very picky, as with anybody who gets to those very high levels. He knows what he wants to do and how to do it,” said Morrison, who is now chief winemaker at William Harrison Vineyards and Winery in St. Helena.
Hobbs was contrite following this summer’s orchard-conversion project, after which Linegar, in unusually strong terms, said, “Hobbs let everyone down here.”
“I feel bad for putting the county through this,” Hobbs said after the stop-work order was issued. “I take full responsibility for this and I’m going to make the changes I need to make to fix it.”
He changed vineyard management firms and sat down with a group of Sonoma County winemakers and grape growers, including Balletto, who asked to meet with him.
“We shared our concerns and shared our values of how much we value Sonoma County as a community and how important it is that as farmers and growers we need to protect our land and sustain it for future generations,” said Balletto. “We’ve worked really hard to have a good relationship with our politicians and county government and we don’t want to mess that up. That’s how important this is to the grower community.”
The meeting went well, he and others in attendance said.
“He seemed genuinely concerned about what he’s done and trying to make it right,” said Douglas Mcllroy, director of winegrowing at Rodney Strong Wine Estates in Healdsburg.
In August, the stop-work order was lifted and Hobbs resumed work on his 48-acre vineyard conversion project. He declined to be interviewed at the time but his publicist issued a statement saying the winery had hired experts in the field, and was planting native vegetation. The conversion would be “thoughtful and undisruptive” to the community, the statement said.
“We at Paul Hobbs Winery have worked diligently with the county to prepare the land for a vineyard conversion that is environmentally sound,” it said.
In other worlds, Hobbs has earned a reputation as a generous community supporter, making sizeable contributions to causes like education and parks.
“It was among the largest grants we’ve received since I’ve been here,” Sonoma County Regional Parks Director Caryl Hart said of Hobbs’ donation, which is used to improve hiking trails, camping sites and parking areas. Neither she nor Hobbs would disclose the amount of the gift.
In October, county supervisors accepted an offer Hobbs made in 2010 of a conservation easement to permanently protect 117 wooded acres on the Pocket Canyon property. He also agreed to make a $175,750 endowment to cover the cost of managing the land.
The board accepted the offer despite critics’ worries that it would influence future decisions about Hobbs’ vineyard developments.
The donation “hopefully will be a first step in rehabilitating what some in the public think about Paul,” his attorney John Holdredge, said to the supervisors. “Clearly some mistakes were made out there. This is a first step in rectifying those mistakes.”
It’s too soon to tell whether Hobbs’ mitigation efforts, both for the land and his relationships with other growers, will be enough.
“I think he’s gotten the message now that you can’t just do stuff,” Balletto said. “You have to remember that you’re not just affecting yourself when you make a mistake of this magnitude, you’re affecting the whole industry and also the community. Let’s not forget our neighbors.”
It also remains to be seen how much that matters to the Steve Jobs of wine.
“I don’t think he runs from controversy,” said Morrison, his former winemaker. “Sometimes, I guess, he doesn’t do a lot to avoid it.”
Jeremy Hay is a staff writer. He can be reached at jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com
Elias Fotou, 13, of Petaluma makes a gingerbread house at the Gingerbread Doghouse Workshop at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. (photo by Ramin Rahimian, 2011)
December 1-31, Sonoma Valley Winery Gingerbread Contest
The traditional gingerbread house goes way upscale, with architectural confections constructed from fondant, marzipan and an amazing variety of candies. Wine tasting takes on a holiday flavor in this friendly, annual contest, with participating wineries competing against each other. Sample some of Sonoma Valley’s finest wines, pick up gifts and vote for your favorite gingerbread creation. Ballots are available at each winery; every time you vote, you’re entered in a drawing to win a case of wine. 707-935-0803, sonomavalleywine.com.
The Petaluma Holiday Lighted Boat Parade illuminates the Petaluma River Turning Basin. (photo by Kent Porter, 2012)
Put on a parka, gather the clan and pick your spot on the Petaluma River for one of the most charming holiday parades you’re ever likely to see. A flotilla of decorated, lighted vessels, from canoes to much larger craft, gathers at Petaluma Turning Basin at about 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 7 for a graceful glide into Petaluma’s historical downtown district. The lighted boats remain docked downtown throughout the night behind the Great Petaluma Mill. 877-273-8258, visitpetaluma.com.
Selma Blanusa (center) and her children Annika (left) and Gavin (right). (photo by Rebecca Gosselin)
When Selma Blanusa purchased a 93-year-old house on the rural edge of Sonoma’s east side, she was confident she could mesh its olden-day beauty with some contemporary splash. Blanusa’s renovation skills are chiseled – this is her 16th redo and the second time she’s revived an aged home. All the others were in the rainy Northwest, where she once worked for Microsoft and began investing in real estate.
This is Blanusa’s first renovation in Sonoma, the home where she and her children, Annika, 13, and Gavin, 11, live, and where she wants to be rooted for a long, long time. So along with bringing all the pipes and wires that ran on the outside of the house up to indoor code, she infused their roost with window seats, wainscoting and marble.
“I honored the old character and then lit it up with fun, colorful, unique features,” Blanusa says, including contemporary ceiling fixtures she collected from around the world on business trips. She kept all the original windows, wood flooring, plaster and hardware, and stayed with the same floor plan while restoring everything to like-new splendor. She and her team fixed windows cut into the walls with no structural headers, and found and reused white pickets from an original fence that had been covered over with plywood. They even discovered honeybee combs inside old walls.
The only room substantially changed from its original feel is the kitchen, which was last remodeled in the 1960s, with confining built-ins everywhere and a massive stove hood. Blanusa opened it all up, making a bright, airy heart of the home with painted, Shaker-style, wall-hung cabinets, a stovetop with a downdraft vent, recessed stainless-steel appliances, and a large farmhouse table with upholstered chairs.
She put together a Sonoma-centric professional team, working with architect Robert Baumann, Chris Grippi of Horizon builders, and landscape architect Penney Magrane, who’s also a neighbor. Many of the people who worked on the home live in or near the town of Sonoma. “I take a lot of pride in trying to use Sonoma trades first,” Baumann says, “It makes it feel like a community house.”
Wanting to know who was there before her, Blanusa scoured records to learn that hers is only the fourth family to reside in the 3,200-square-foot home, surrounded by nearly five acres. At that, it was the first house built on her very long block. After moving in two years ago, she uncovered a historical surprise – after tearing siding off an old barn at the back of the property, she found a redwood stick-frame structure with scraps of wallpaper and other clues, and realized it was once a home. Built in 1863, it was inhabited by Oliver B. Shaw, his wife and three children.
“We have to decide how to honor this home and make it work for our little family,” Blanusa says, eager to preserve her private window into history while exploring a functional use.
The property also has a large stable she plans to revive to house a horse or two. A new garage/gym building is almost finished, with a sunshine-yellow entry and reclaimed garage doors. Its top floor will be a homework and hangout room, and a place for Annika to apply her sewing and clothing design skills. Right now the kids have desks and workspace in what will revert to being the fourth bedroom in the main house. Blanusa hopes to use the fourth bedroom to host an exchange student. She was an exchange student herself during college and studied in Japan, a positive and life-altering experience that led to her love of travel.
Blanusa began her career at Microsoft in 1990 as the head of international systems. She was employee number 2,900 and got to travel the world.
“We worked really, really hard but we were totally taken care of,” she recalls. “It was an incredible opportunity to not only build a nest egg, but to be part of the company’s history. But I did come to the realization that, while putting so much into work for so long makes you financially well off, you’re devoid of things that have a lasting impact on the heart.”
(photo by Rebecca Gosselin)
Blanusa grew up in Oregon, the youngest of eight children and with deep love of family. When her older brother died of a brain tumor in his 40s, it rocked her.
“He was totally focused on his family, and I was all about work,” says Blanusa, then unmarried and in her 30s. “I took a turn in a completely opposite direction.”
Her brother died in March 1998 and she quit Microsoft in April, where by then there were 29,000 employees. “Microsoft was not my family,” she says now.
In the early 1990s, Blanusa read the book, “Housewise: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Buying and Renewing Real Estate for Profit,” by Suzanne Brangham, who, as it turns out, also lives in Sonoma. Blanusa started buying a house or so a year, remodeling and then renting them. When she left Microsoft, she took on her largest project ever, a 5,600-square-foot Queen Anne 1906 landmark home in Seattle, every square inch of which she brought back to historical accuracy.
“That house was going to be the nest for my family,” she says, and while she was working on it she met and married her husband, Bob, and they had their first child. Putting a baby in a car seat where it rains nine months of the year quickly became unbearable, and they started scouting for a new location.
“When you can live anywhere in the world, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you want. And this is it, this is the place,” she says of their move to Wine Country.
They lived for a few months in a Napa rental, with frequent trips to Sonoma, before deciding, “Napa didn’t have the character, the heart, that Sonoma has,” she says. They bought a new home in a development where, after several years, they started to feel “a bit squished.” Around that time their marriage struggled, too, and when Blanusa purchased the farmhouse, she was again single. Bob lives in a home so close, she says, that “my kids can tootle out to the back fence, climb over, and get to their dad’s house” – another reason she loves her home.
The only architectural change she made was to add multiple bay windows for increased light and to allow for the cozy window seats, which she even put in the very large attic that she finished and carpeted in a multicolored kaleidoscope print. She used blue, yellow and green as the jump-off point for the palette of the house.
As an accounting major who dreamed about art, Blanusa is active in the Sonoma arts community and has decorated the home with pieces she collected at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art’s “Wet Paint” fundraiser and at the Sonoma Plein Air art festival, as well as with pieces from her travels.
The main house is finished. Work continues on the garage and the stable is up next, as Blanusa ponders what to do with the remains of the 1800s house in back. By next summer there will be a pool, and while her home’s immediate surroundings are charmingly planted, there is much landscaping left to do.
“I’ve made this to last for the next 100 years,” she says. “My kids can come home from college to this home, and eventually bring their families.”
Gluten free basil cake, corn panna cotta, estate honey gel, pine nuts, and buttermilk mousse is served at Partake by K-J restaurant in Healdsburg. (photo by Conner Jay)
Less than a restaurant but more than a tasting room, a new genre of lounge has popped up in the wine-centric towns of Healdsburg and Napa, offering unique approaches to the age-old problem: Which comes first, the wine or the food?
They’re examples of a new species in the steady evolution of food-and-wine pairing. Partake by K-J opened in March as a “Tasting Lounge and Flight Club” just south of the Healdsburg Plaza. The vibe is farmhouse chic, with lots of white wood accented by modern fixtures. It feels like a cafe, complete with a varied food menu, but all the dishes are paired with Kendall-Jackson wines.
Head left to the Tasting Lounge and choose two or three small bites paired with a 2-ounce or 5-ounce glass of wine. Or go right and check in at the Flight Club, where the culinary team carefully curates specific flights of wine paired with specific seasonal dishes.
“It’s one of the best wine-and-food experiences in Sonoma County,” says Justin Wangler, Kendall-Jackson’s executive chef. “We really put a lot of thought into the pairings.”
The Flight Club menu includes pairings with three artisan cheeses; a five-course pairing showcasing fresh vegetables and herbs; and a five-course chef’s tasting menu highlighting seafood and meat along with vegetables from Kendall-Jackson’s culinary garden.
Partake is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays in the winter, and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays. 241 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg, 707-433-6000, partakebykj.com.
Tip: During the winter, look for monthly gluten-free nights and a lineup of wine seminars.
Beverage director Jordan Nova selects a bottle from the many featured wines at 1313 Main in Napa. (photo by Conner Jay)
1313 Main, a premium wine-tasting lounge in downtown Napa, added Lulu’s Kitchen at 1313 Main to its premises in August.
The ambiance exudes international jet-setter charm, with the large space divided into six different venues, from the hip Speakeasy room to the lush Fireside Lounge.
Lulu’s menu features small bites and small plates to complement the 1,300 wines served by the bottle and 70 by the glass.
“The wine is the core of the conversation,” says owner Al Jabarin, who opened 1313 Main two years ago. “But I felt that the wine-centric experience was lacking in food.”
The pairings here are strictly do-it-yourself. And some dishes may provide more ballast than balance for serious quaffers.
“Take a dive bar and put in an incredible wine cellar with a beautiful facade,” says wine director Jordan Nova. “That’s what you have.”
1313 Main is open 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays. 1313 Main St., Napa, 707-258-1313, 1313main.com.
Tip: There’s live music Thursday through Saturday, and plans call for the addition of a spirits bar.
The Green Music Center’s “Messiah” is only in its second year, but is sure to become a Sonoma tradition.
Remember the first time you heard George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah?”
Maybe you were young, holding Grandpa’s hand and looking up at the stage in wonder, stunned by the spiritual power of the human voice. What could match an array of singers building to the powerful, joyous “Hallelujah” chorus?
That first “Messiah” encounter might have been around Christmas time. Composed in 1741, the choral masterpiece was intended for performance during Lent and at Easter, celebrating Christ’s resurrection after his crucifixion.
Instead, it has become more of a Christmas tradition, used to mark the birth of the savior.
The $145 million, state-of-the-art Green Music Center opened only last year, but its presentation of Handel’s “Messiah” is already well on its way to becoming a Sonoma County winter tradition.
The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, plus the Philharmonia Chorale and four soloists, directed by Bruce Lamott, return Dec. 15 to perform Handel’s masterwork for the second time in the center’s Weill Hall, on the Sonoma State University campus in Rohnert Park.
People are still talking about last year’s elegant performance. In the towering, acoustically sophisticated Weill Hall, the ensemble, nationally known for its expert handling of Baroque music, captured the awe and reverence inherent in Handel’s “Messiah.”
Tickets for the performance, which begins at 3 p.m., are priced from $40 to $85. 866-955-6040, gmc.sonoma.edu.
