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.”

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

Despite broad American traditions, no two households celebrate the winter holidays alike. Yet invariably, the table is the heartbeat of family gatherings, from the recipes passed down from generation to generation, to the comfortable conversation and camaraderie among people bound by their shared history.

Two multigenerational Sonoma County farming families share the touchstones of their gatherings — the boisterous, deep-rooted Benziger winemaking clan of Glen Ellen, and the revitalized Hopkins family, where a new generation helps grow grapes and food crops, and raise heirloom poultry, sheep and goats, off Eastside Road in Healdsburg, on land that has been in the family for 60 years.

The Benzigers

“I want to give a toast to my best helper in the vineyard, Bob Benziger,” says Mike Benziger, general manager of Benziger Family Winery, at a fall meal in the winery cave.

Family gatherings with the Benzigers are epic. It doesn’t matter the occasion: holidays, weddings, graduations, meet-ups at the Tuesday Night Market in Sonoma and the mandatory family dinners they hold every six weeks, with every family taking a turn at hosting. Benzigers celebrate hard, with high energy, affectionate ribbing and unrestrained sentiment.

“We work hard at staying together as a family and a family business,” says Kathy Benziger Threlkeld, at 48 the youngest of seven siblings, the original brood spawned by Bruno and Helen Benziger. “Ninety percent of family businesses fail in the third generation, so we work on it.”

And a major part of the effort is breaking bread together.

“My mother Helen, god bless her, it was all around the table,” says Threlkeld, who is the keeper of all of the matriarch’s pots and pans and Pyrex dishware, as well as the near-sacred recipes with which she was capable of feeding an army, not only of family but also winery workers, five days a week. “She was the heart and soul that kept us together. And it was always through the community of food.”

Helen was known as the CEO, or Chief Emotional Officer. When she died in 2000, 11 years after her husband, the family found itself drifting apart. So they redoubled their efforts to stay close.

Holiday and special-occasion meals among this Swiss-German, Catholic clan invariably include grace and toasts that invoke the spirits of Bruno and Helen and other family members who have died.

“And there are cheers. There’s always three cheers for Bruno,” says Threlkeld. “Three cheers for Bruno! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!”

In-laws are welcomed into the fold. Meals at Mike’s house – he hosts the traditional family Christmas Eve bash every year – are particularly popular since his son-in-law, chef Ari Weiswasser, who runs the Glen Ellen Star restaurant, is apt to contribute to the menu.

Weiswasser married Mike’s daughter, Erinn, and the young couple now have a 2-year-old, Noa, and 7-month-old twins, Hayley and Riley. That makes for lively interaction at the table.

Mike shows granddaughter Noa how to toast. When she nearly knocks over a wine glass, he deftly switches to fist-bumps. Meanwhile, Ari scoops up one of the twins and plants a kiss on her cheek before being called upon to carve the bird.

After toasting, the family members join in with the signature cheer, then Mike exhorts everyone to “dig in.”

There’s always lot of laughter and talking, as the family passes the roasted vegetables, the bread board and the cheeses, making sure everyone’s plate is full.

Although the winery’s extensive organic and Biodynamic gardens speak to the Benzigers’ evolving definition of good food, some traditions are sacred. Like Mom’s potatoes and gravy.

Kathy is the designated gravy maker. “It’s ingrained in me because I helped her at the stove. I can make Mom’s gravy to perfection. You should see my brothers salivate.”

“If there’s anything that is an anchor in the Benzigers’ Thanksgiving diet, it’s mashed potatoes, center stage,” says Mike, who with his wife, Mary, first discovered the Glen Ellen vineyard in the late 1970s and brought his parents and the rest of the Benzigers to California from White Plains, N.Y.

At 63, he is now the new patriarch of a clan that includes his six siblings, their spouses, 16 grandchildren (some with spouses) and four great-grandchildren.

With 26 Benzigers living within 15 miles of each other – 11 of those working full-time at one of the wineries — the Benzigers don’t have to go very far to stay connected.

Clustered around Glen Ellen is not only Benziger Family Winery on Sonoma Mountain, but also Imagery Estate on Sonoma Highway in Glen Ellen, where Mike’s brother, Joe, is the winemaker and general partner. Third-generation Michael is a partner in Envolve Winery in Sonoma. Four others in the third wave also work at the family winery.

“Family gatherings are loads of fun,” says Joe. “We have a lot of personalities, when you include our wives and kids, who are now in their 20s and 30s.”

For those who have married into the family, it often takes perseverance to be heard above the fray.

“You have to be very loud and determined,” Ari says. “It’s like driving a car onto I-95 (in New York). You have to be very persistent.”

Those who want to join the fun-loving Benziger clan are always asked to prove their athletic ability after a dinner and many glasses of wine.

“We had to do a table walk, blindfolded,” says Ari. “I broke a lot of glasses.”

The every-six-weeks clan dinner is mandatory.

“You have to have a family relationship with your siblings, not just business,” Kathy explains. “With Mom, it was always about connecting through eating and being together. We make sure we keep that going.”

The Hopkins

The chickens cluck noisily for attention as Lynda and Emmett Hopkins shop their Foggy River Farm for a family feast.

Eggs nature-dyed in green and brown are gathered from the mobile coop and placed in a basket, along with salad greens, sorrel and late tomatoes.

Emmett scales a ladder and tosses down Golden Delicious apples that Lynda unfailingly catches like an expert fielder. Baby Gillian, who turns 1 just before Thanksgiving, observes from a backpack while happily smearing a cherry tomato into her mouth.

This is a familiar routine for the young couple who, fresh from Stanford University, returned to Emmett’s family land in the fertile Russian River Valley five years ago and taught themselves to farm from the ground up.

Up on the hilltop overlooking the land he shares with his son, grapegrower Bob Hopkins is also gathering for the feast – a pinch of tarragon, the last of the basil – from a kitchen garden where the sunflowers are just starting to drop their heads. The site of the tomato vines reminds him of an old poem, which he wistfully recites before heading inside to put finishing touches on a meal made from scratch.

“We really do eat and drink what we grow. It’s really fun because we’ll have some meals where everything but the pasta is from the property,” says Lynda, a suburban girl turned self-described “milkmaid” and “henpecked vegetable farmer,” who a week before giving birth to Gillian helped harvest 22 heirloom turkeys for Foggy River’s CSA holders.

On Thanksgiving, which draws to Foggy River a gaggle of up to 25 aunts, uncles, cousins and strays from all branches of the family, even the table will be decked with the farm’s bounty. One annual tradition is to go down to the vineyard to gather gold and orange leaves for the table.

Bob Hopkins and his wife, Toni, took over the land from his widowed mother after he finished college in the early 1970s. They slowly replaced prune and pear orchards with premium grapes. Invariably, family meals are accompanied by wine made from his grapes, which are sold to La Crema, J Vineyards & Winery and Hartford Family Winery.

On this night the family — Bob and Toni’s daughter, Whitney, works for the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C. — gathers on the deck outside the modest home Bob’s mother built in 1970. On the rare warm Thanksgiving, they might even dine here at the redwood picnic table, looking out at the blazing vineyards and a farm road lined with Lombardy poplars turned bright as bullion by late autumn.

Everyone contributes to meals, whether small get-togethers or holiday feasts. Bob, who got interested in cooking in college, has his specialties: succotash, corn pudding, roasted beets, and kale salad with cranberries and slivered almonds. Toni makes a killer apple cake. His sister, Susan Coolidge, of Petaluma, brings her signature Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, plus cranberry pie.

Most of the Hopkins’ family heirlooms perished in a house fire more than 40 years ago. But among the surviving touchstones are a set of silver napkin rings, each with a different design. Every guest selects his or her own.

“Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday,” says Emmett, “because it’s focused around family and food rather than a bunch of manufactured traditions.”

One immutable custom on feast day is a midday walk after the turkey.

“Either we’ll walk downhill or around in the hills and then come back and have dessert,” says Toni. “So everybody brings their walking shoes.”

Lynda loves the ritual of feasting from the fruits of their land and own labor, right down to the bird, which the Hopkins have been doing for 60 years, starting with Emmett’s grandparents in the 1950s.

“When you grow everything you eat, almost every meal is a bit like Thanksgiving because of all the work that goes into it,” she says over a plate of heirloom Bodega Red potatoes, carrot salad, beets and chicken, all from Foggy River Farm. “There’s something very special about sitting down and saying thank you for this food and thank you for everybody around the table. In a way, I wish we did it at every meal.”

If we get it right, the winter holidays can be filled with expressions of gratitude.

Why do we celebrate? Just what are we celebrating? Whether it’s the mundane, the momentous or the mystical, the reason seems always to lie rooted in this truth: It’s a time to acknowledge that for which we are grateful.

Environmentalist Bill Kortum says he’s especially grateful for the coast because of its sheer beauty.

“We’re so fortunate to have a coastline,” Kortum says, with his wry sense of humor. “If you were in a county in Iowa, you would go to the county line and just find another cornfield.”

Kortum, 86, is founder of the group called COAAST – Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelands – and has spent years fighting to ensure the coast be open to all. As thanks for his tireless efforts, he has a trail named after him, a three-mile path that begins in Jenner at the mouth of the Russian River and ends at Wright’s Beach in Bodega Bay.

“When I meet people they often say, ‘Oh, I thought you were dead. You have a trail named after you,’” Kortum jokes.

The retired veterinarian, who lives on a 22-acre cattle ranch near Petaluma, hopes people appreciate the wildness of the coast and all it offers, particularly during the holidays.

“You can go out to the coast and dive for abalone,” he says. “You can go whale watching or go to Salt Point to pick mushrooms. Or you can go for a hike, a great pastime for a gathering of people.”

David Goodman calls himself a “food banker.”

The executive director of the Redwood Empire Food Bank works hard to make sure needy people have ample food for their holiday feasts.

“What is incredibly gratifying for me during the holidays is that everyone can share in the joy of the season,” he says.

“The holidays are centered around food to celebrate and connect, and our ability to help people experience that makes it very poignant this time of year. If they don’t have sufficient food reserves, they can’t celebrate.”

Kathleen Weber, co-owner of Petaluma’s Della Fattoria bakery and cafe, says she’s most grateful for the welcoming aspect of the holidays.

“I think what the holidays really mean is that you take your core family and invite others to be a part of it,” she says. “It’s the essence of life. The Italians really have it right when it comes down to food and family. That’s just part of their culture. You’re always welcome in an Italian home.”

Kindness, Weber says, has a synergistic magic of its own.

“The more graciousness and the more generosity you extend, it seems to come back in the form of relationships and connections,” she adds. “The holidays are a perfect time to restore all of those.”

While the holidays can be busy with special orders and stressful for the bakery, Weber says it’s still a very uplifting time.

“We see families come in with their kids from college, and their grandchildren,” she says. “There’s a huge family component and it brings a lot of joy.”