Sonoma’s Struggle With Authenticity

‘Course you know the standing joke about Healdsburg,” Bruce Campbell is deadpanning. We are rumbling through Sonoma County in a livestock truck. Behind us, his tiny hometown, the new star of wine country destinations, is a study in privileged leisure: bird song, pink sky, dew in the vineyards, executives in line at the artisan bakeries muttering into cell phones.

Campbell is a study in something else entirely: plaid shirt, red beard, thick belly, work boots that reek of--how to put it?--barnyard. He’s a sheep rancher. Actually, he’s more like the sheep rancher, the guy behind CK Lamb, which produces some of the most famously succulent Sonoma lamb in the United States. Spago? That’s his lamb. The Bellagio hotel? That’s his lamb. Campanile? Etc. To an extent, this 4-H judge with the national food media write-ups shares the blame for the popularity that has made over Healdsburg to the point that it now has its own punch line.

“Best bread in the world,” Campbell says merrily, pinching some snuff from a Skoal can. “But no place for a man to buy underwear.”

It was not always thus. “Healdsburg used to be just a sleepy little farm town,” he continues. “Now . . . .”

He spits into a foam cup. Now the old City Hall is a luxury food market. Now smart, well-meaning people trail him into his driveway, sweetly pestering him for designer lamb parts. His town square sports a new hotel with $695 suites and a facade that appears airlifted from Soho; in October, celebrity chef Charlie Palmer opened his new Dry Creek Kitchen on its ground floor. Boutiques selling French antiques, flowers, European clothing and high-end purses are opening next to an international newsstand on the town’s main drag. East Coast wine merchants fly in for grade school fund-raisers on the chance that some local has raided a private cellar for auction items.

Now a low-gear community of 10,700 is hurtling into the fast lane--a bittersweet shift even for those whose livelihoods depend on it.

“I don’t spend a lot of time bemoaning that what used to be ain’t,” Campbell says. “But, oh, yes. This place has changed.”

Sonoma County used to be the spot that tourists visited when they had an extra day to spend in the wine country. Sprawling, lovely and boring, it was the farm annex to Napa Valley, where the real action was.

In truth, Sonoma County is much larger than Napa and its wine industry is far older (the birthplace of premium California winemaking is at the Buena Vista headquarters near the town of Sonoma). But Napa was the place with the chateaux and the “Falcon Crest” ambience and the European connections and the marketing juggernaut of the Mondavi wineries. It was Napa wine, mostly, that put California on the map at the now-historic 1976 Paris wine tasting. Sonoma County had wineries that outsiders thought were in Napa, ocean breakers that outsiders thought were in Mendocino, redwoods that outsiders thought were in Yosemite, and the Russian River and the Bodega Bay school where “The Birds” was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. For many years--unless your turn-on was golden light or utter quiet or rolling acres of emerald farmland--that about covered it.

No longer. Now it’s chic to come to Sonoma County. It is “Napa the way Napa was before it got discovered,” fans say. It is “Provence without the ruins,” “the New Normandy.” It is the cradle of Liberty duck and Laura Chenel goat cheese and Rocky the Range Chicken and some of the best Pinot Noir on the planet. As a socialite told me over organic Sonoma mixed greens one day in San Francisco, it is “where everyone is buying now that Napa is all taken”-- meaning everyone in the market for country houses and status wineries.

It is also, to people who live there, still just Sonoma County--a vast green swath of preposterous beauty shot through with the great California fault lines of class and sprawl. Mention the place to someone who grew up there and you’ll get a dissertation on farm economics or the redneck-on-Mexican high school race wars of the 1980s. Examine its stereotypes and you’ll get hippies who run for public office and cowpokes with college diplomas. Its best known suburb is the town where Polly Klaas was kidnapped. Visitors gush over the “authenticity” of the landscape, but to the folks in the scenery, those fields and barns are legacy and livelihood.

For them, the news in Sonoma County is that the pressure to evolve has been ratcheted up, big time. Sonoma County has had its share of tourism for generations--some of its hot springs have been vacation spots since the mid-1800s--but natives say that its profile has risen sharply in the last several years.

Sonoma datelines now riddle San Francisco society pages: Here’s Kirk Douglas partying at the Sonoma home of the Bay Area plastic surgeon Jack Owsley and his wife, Sharon. Here’s San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown arriving by helicopter at the Sonoma retreat of philanthropists Gary and O.J. Shansby. Multimillion-dollar villas now sprout from 160-acre homesteads.

Ernie Carpenter, a former county supervisor from the left-leaning region around Sebastopol, says the acceleration became apparent by the end of the 1990s: “All of a sudden we had a lot more millionaires and dot-commers who were cashing in stock to buy property out here.”

Grapes and more grapes were planted, some for show and more for profit; vineyard acreage in the county increased by 40% between 1996 and 2001. By the time tech crashed and the economy slipped, the wine country had been thoroughly colonized by those who had cashed out early. Land prices were up everywhere.

Travel into the county shot up by 50% a year in the late 1990s, from about 4 million visitors in 1998 to 6 million in 2000, the last year for which figures are available from the state Division of Tourism. Visitor spending rose by nearly the same amount, to more than $850 million in 1999. County officials expect the figure to approach $1 billion for 2000. Although at least two big hotel projects were beaten back, more than 500 hotel rooms were added last year, mostly catering to the business and luxury markets. In spite of a post-Sept. 11 tourism slump, developers are battling to add even more high-end hotel space.

Now, for example, the owners of Napa Valley’s Auberge du Soleil and Mexico’s Las Ventanas al Paraiso are vying to open $500-plus-a-night resorts within a mile and a half of each other in the two-lane hamlet of Kenwood. A third hotel, the Kenwood Inn and Spa, is adding 24 rooms to its Tuscan-style compound, tripling its size. Yet another high-end inn has been proposed in the small town of Glen Ellen. In the town of Sonoma, the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa recently expanded, doubling the size of its spa and adding 30 rooms.

Artisan cheese makers are listed in visitor guides like tourist attractions. Mary Matos, whose St. George cheese is made in a tiny factory down a rutted road outside Santa Rosa, says she has had so many visitors in the past couple of years that she’s had to stop letting them watch the milking--they were making her cows nervous.

Most destinations would cheer such prospects on the heels of recession--after all, many a local windfall has been reaped in the last few years. But Sonoma County has a word for what’s been happening, and not everyone smiles when saying it.

“It’s Napafication,” says Carpenter, who came to the county from Berkeley in the late 1960s. “I mean, so far we’ve maintained a balance, but how much is too much?

“Sure, we have the coast, the wineries, the Russian River. We have bakeries like Seattle has coffee shops. Our bread is fantastic. But people can’t find parking spots in small towns, can’t pull out onto their main roads, and Highway 116 just slows to a crawl on weekends. At any one time, there’s probably a hundred wineries out of compliance with their conditional-use permits, putting on weddings and froufrou events that they aren’t supposed to be doing. So much land has converted to vineyard that you almost can’t find enough apple blossoms in Sebastopol anymore for the Sebastopol Apple Blossom Festival.

“I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve told me in the last year that Sonoma County has just gotten too big for ‘em,” Carpenter sighs. “A lot of people are picking up and moving someplace else.”

Del Rydman would rather not become one of those people, but as a homeowner, he isn’t pleased. Rydman lives in Kenwood, an affluent settlement of about 1,250 on the eastern edge of the county. Recently retired from Agilent Technologies, the Hewlett-Packard spinoff that has become one of the county’s major employers, the financial analyst moved to his three-acre ranchette 25 years ago so his daughter could have horses. His low-slung white house sits at the end of a little dirt road, past some mailboxes and a “Caution: Grandchildren at Play” sign. Five acres of fragrant lavender hug his homestead. Beyond them sprawls the magnificent Chateau St. Jean winery.

“When we first moved here,” he says, reaching down to pet a cat that has leaped onto the hood of his 1995 Saturn, “you could go outside and work on your property and you’d hear nothing--nothing!--but birds. This was raw land with a spec house when we bought it. A house and a few prune trees and land that went straight through. There were walnut orchards and egg farms and cattle. We used to feed my son cow’s milk fresh from the Jersey--brought it home in big mayonnaise jars. The kids would ride horses to Chateau St. Jean and through the grapes because there were no fences--they could wander all around.

“Then the walnut trees were pulled up and grapes went in. And pretty soon everywhere you looked, more vines were popping up. The cattle land went to grapes, and so did the ag land. There were three wineries here when we moved in. Now we have 10 or 12.”

The vineyards are breathtaking. Highway 12--a two-lane blacktop that runs like a ribbon through Kenwood--is flanked in either direction by wildflower-strewn pastures, ancient oaks and long rows of gnarled vines. The Mayacamas range overlooks them. The tasting rooms look like haciendas, chateaux, plantations, Gothic castles. They’re magical and romantic--and irritating as hell, Rydman says.

“On weekends, when the wineries have events, you can hear the music thumping,” he says.

“During the harvest, the grape trucks come banging down the road, night and day, clang-clangin’ when they’re empty. Every Saturday and Sunday, 200 or 300 people come in here. Just trying to pull out onto the main road is getting ticklish.”

This brings him to the topic that, of late, has consumed Kenwood. Call it The Attack of the Four-Handed Massages and the Five-Star Meals. The first volley came in under the radar. The Kenwood Inn and Spa--an Italianate garden compound that opened in 1990 as a four-room villa and expanded to 12 rooms six years later--had quietly gotten permission to expand again, this time to 36 rose-strewn units. Lush, romantic and extremely private, the $325-a-night units quickly developed a following among Hollywood types and honeymooners. “It had gotten to the point where we had a six- to nine-month waiting list,” says Len Beatie, the resort manager.

Then came the second wave. Auberge Resorts, the development company behind the San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara and Auberge du Soleil in the Napa Valley, bought a 183-acre chunk of pasture and woodland along Highway 12, just north of town. The land, once part of a ranch, had been zoned for a hotel and winery, but various problems had kept it tied up. Mark Harmon, owner of Auberge Resorts, says he’d been scouring Sonoma County for years, looking for a place to build a sister to Auberge du Soleil, when he heard that the property was on the market.

“It’s one of the prettiest sites I’ve ever seen, beautiful and pristine and just stunning,” he says. Perfect, in his opinion, for Campagna, a 50-room hotel, a 75-seat restaurant, a dozen or so hilltop home sites, a spa, a market and a boutique winery. Rooms will go for $300 to $600 a night.

“We’re going to grow vines, plant orchards, grow organic produce,” Harmon says. “Then we’ll feature those things in our restaurant and country store. We’ll bring in producers from all over the county. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. We’ll bring in a flagship chef--you know, when we did that at Auberge du Soleil there was no French Laundry, no Culinary Institute of America. And look at what has happened there.”

Fifty rooms is a modest size by hotel standards, and Harmon’s project might have progressed without objection if Paradise Resorts hadn’t come in on its heels with a plan to tuck 98 rooms into 24 vine-covered, $500-to-$700-a-night country French villas in the wooded hills behind Chateau St. Jean.

The developers of Las Ventanas, as it has been named, run one of the most luxurious and pricey resorts in Los Cabos--a beachfront hotel with in-room telescopes for stargazing and rooms that go from $575 to upward of $2,000 nightly. But Las Ventanas came with bad karma--the developers had made a run at a larger project on city-owned land in the nearby town of Sonoma and had been overwhelmingly voted down in 1999. Though the project was trimmed by the time its backers found a potential site in Kenwood, the community rose up when word leaked out that their neighbor’s bete noire was now sniffing around their backyard.

“The [Campagna] project was out of town and out of sight, and nobody had known that Kenwood Inn was expanding,” Rydman says. “But Las Ventanas is right in the middle of town.” If all three projects were approved, homeowners reasoned, Kenwood’s hotel sector would jump from 12 rooms to more than 180. Most homes in the area rely on well water and use septic tanks for sanitation. What would become of their ground water? What would the hotels do with all that sewage? And where would the employees live? The cheapest home in the area, as of early March, was a two-bedroom fixer in a cow pasture for nearly $400,000, and apartments are all but nonexistent.

“This place is pristine,” Rydman says. “The reasons those hotels want to be here are the reasons we don’t want ‘em. We organized a meeting in December at the Kenwood fire station and almost 100 people showed up. Everybody was against it. But we had them come in to make a presentation. And they came in with their slide show and their statistics. Nine hundred more cars on the road on weekdays. Fifteen hundred more cars on weekends. A spa that would pull 46,000 gallons a day up out of our water table. Three hundred employees to be bused in from Santa Rosa. Well, we all listened very nicely. And then we said, ‘Forget you.’ ”

In fact, not everyone opposed Las Ventanas--or Campagna or the Kenwood Inn expansion. Some, like John Moran, who owns a roadside antique shop, doubted that the hotels would really intrude. Some, like Micheal Hudson, were undecided, but questioned the opponents’ motives. “Out here, there’s a lot of I-got-mine-and-I-don’t-want-you-to-have-yours,” says Hudson, a contractor and captain of the volunteer fire department.

In any case, Rydman and his neighbors organized into committees, and within four months had launched themselves as the nonprofit Valley of the Moon Alliance, complete with a Web site. Since then, they have protested the expansions, but the fight is uphill.

Kenwood is unincorporated. Its planning decisions are made by five county supervisors who govern an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Their most pressing problem is not, as alliance member Bill Hafner puts it, “$700-a-night bubble baths jeopardizing the ground water,” but a severe countywide shortage of low-income housing, which in Sonoma County is funded with a tax on hotel rooms.

The Kenwood projects, if all were approved, would increase the number of hotel rooms by a factor of 15. The Campagna people estimate an extra $730,000 would flow into the public kitty just in its first year; Las Ventanas figures it would pump out $68 million in bed taxes over the next two decades, and has offered to front the county $2 million. Any housing that would be subsidized would almost certainly be somewhere other than Kenwood. To those not directly affected, the package sounds like a good deal.

“Those particular resort hotels come into the communities with a great deal of class and sophistication and do such a good job,” says Sharon Owsley, who bought a weekend home four years ago in the town of Sonoma after summering for 25 years in the Napa Valley. “I know there’s always the concern that it’ll get too developed, but you have to have a balance--”

She catches herself and chuckles.

“Watch,” she says. “Now I’ll probably be picketed.”

A lot of people might wonder how a place would be anything but tickled at an influx of back rubs, room service, nice upper-class people and chilled Chardonnay.

But no season begins without another one ending. Carla Howell spent eight years as a mayor and city councilwoman in Healdsburg, and several years before that was a member of the Planning Commission. During the 1980s and 1990s, she was in on the groundwork for many of the changes now coming to fruition: the sale of the old City Hall building to a developer who installed the gourmet Oakville Grocery, the marketing of the town as a Hollywood location for movies such as “Scream” and “Mumford,” the redevelopment of a vacant lot on the town plaza into the hip new Hotel Healdsburg, the growth policies that preserved the city’s turn-of-the-century charm.

Now 53 and retired from public office, Howell runs a children’s clothing boutique on Healdsburg’s quaint central plaza. The downtown that has developed is sophisticated and welcoming, filled with treats and surprises. On weekends, delighted visitors from around the world peruse the bookstores or stock up for wine country picnics. There’s a chocolatier and a bakery run by former Chez Panisse pastry chefs and a deli with 39 varieties of olive oil just in the “extra-virgin” section.

“What? They don’t open until noon?” one New Yorker was overheard fretting on a recent weekday outside Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen. It is heaven, if heaven were designed by Wine Spectator subscribers and National Public Radio listeners.

And Carla Howell has “very mixed feelings” about the way her town has turned out.

“A lot of the things I did were to maintain the character of our small town,” she says.

“But in preserving the town, we made it this wonderful place that is now extremely expensive. All the things I was trying to preserve for my children might as well have gone by the wayside because my children can’t afford to live here anymore. I know the decisions were the right thing to do at the time--what are you going to do? Have Kmarts and Wal-Marts? That was our choice. Be Mart-ed up or get tarted up. We chose the tarts.”

But housing hasn’t been the only aspect of life to be altered in the New Healdsburg. Another practical effect, she says, has been a shortage of stores that cater to locals as commercial rents have been bid up. There has been, for example, no mainstream department store in Healdsburg since JCPenney moved out some years ago. This is the source of the no-underwear-in-town joke, which is actually false--you can, in fact, find men’s underwear in Healdsburg. You just have to know where. (Halfway to the back of a store called Everywear that features sweaters in the window. It has one very small rack.)

But the biggest difference in town is the most subtle--the commodification, for lack of a better word, of its authenticity. It is perhaps the signature unintended consequence of the era, familiar to any small place that has ever hit the big time--the Hamptons, the Berkshires, the New England coastline, the--yes--Napa Valley.

“On weekends, the whole town turns from cowboys and soccer moms into something straight out of L.L.Bean or Eddie Bauer,” Howell says in amazement. “Just wall-to-wall khaki bermudas and guys with loafers and no socks. The inside joke is that it’s like we should all show up in dirndl skirts and lederhosen, like ‘Li’l Old Winemaker Me.’ It’s actually sort of a hoot.”

Zinfandel virtuoso Dave Rafanelli, owner of A. Rafanelli Winery, stopped letting people drop in for wine tastings three years ago for that very reason. “There were 30, 40 people in here on weekends,” he says as his daughter Shelly stands in the cellar, pouring a glass of the 1999 vintage. “And they all wanted private conversation and personal attention. They were lined up out the door. I felt like some kind of attraction at Fisherman’s Wharf.”

So he put up a locked gate and told tourists that they had to call first for appointments. Did they listen? Rafanelli and his daughter exchange mirthful glances.

“Some woman just pulled in today,” he says, “and when I asked if she’d called first, she said, ‘Oh, well, we were here last year and I memorized your gate combination. Gee, you don’t mind, do you?’ ”

It is this--the understanding that Sonoma County’s very heart is what is yearned for--that residents seem to find most unsettling. There is the suspicion that the tourists’ hunger isn’t just for good bread and fine wine but for entree to a home they are altering, just by being there. Every new face is another vote for a cleaner, classier, more self-conscious Sonoma County, a citified Eden where the country doesn’t have bumpkins and the Sonoma lambs are invisibly slaughtered and the li’l old winemakers welcome (upscale) trespassers. Yes, it’s progress, locals say, but at what price?

“Is it worth it,” Howell asks, “if you become a curiosity in your own town?”

Campbell, the sheep rancher, offers a more pragmatic, and perhaps larger, viewpoint.

“There’s a flow here,” he says. “The good side of it, at the moment, is that these people who want to come in are the people who can afford my neighbors’ $100 bottles of wine and my lamb.”

He clambers down from his pickup. We have come to his destination, a farm with sweet, green volunteer wheat rippling around us in every direction. It is another county, not Sonoma, and I will not name it because it is Sonoma before Sonoma got discovered, paradise before the appetites of man.

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Shawn Hubler is a Times staff writer based in San Francisco.