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The Sonoma Valley is a beautiful place but the main reason for our visit to the area was to spend time with our good friends Kelly and Elaine. Since they are both working and taking classes and we are busy during the work week our time together was relegated to evenings and weekends. It is amazing how much you can squeeze into an evening, especially since it stays light until well after 8 p.m.

For one of our visits we drove down to Santa Rosa, the once small farming town that is now a big city. In 1943 Alfred Hitchcock based his film Shadow of a Doubt in the quaint town and filmed it there. Many of the historic buildings were destroyed over the years, first in the catastrophic earthquake of 1906 and again in 1969. The city sits squarely on top of the Haywood-Rodgers Creek Fault System, which seismologists expect to heave again before 2030. Won’t that be fun?!

Our destination was the “Day Under the Oaks” festival held at the Santa Rosa Junior College. Kelly was staffing one of the exhibits as part of the botany class he was taking. The festival offered a little bit of everything from a petting zoo, to food booths, to free jazz concert to Lance’s personal favorite: a Laughing Yoga demonstration. As with most of these public events some of the best entertainment was in the people watching.

After the festival we wandered over to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens near downtown. The land for the small park was donated to the city by Luther Burbank’s widow as a memorial to Burbank and his work. If you’ve never planted a garden you may not have heard of him, although you are intimately familiar with his work, I guarantee.

Luther Burbank was the 13th of 15 children when he was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1849. Burbank had little more than an elementary school education but his innate curiosity took him far. Plants fascinated him and by the early 1870s Burbank had a small plot where he experimented with hybridizing. By selecting plants for their desirable qualities and breeding them with hardy plant stock Burbank created new plant varieties with higher yields. His first success came in 1875 when he sold the rights to his firm, high yield, blight-resistant potato plant. Now known as the Burbank Russet potato, it is the most planted potato in the United States with companies such as McDonald’s exclusively using it for their fries. See, I told you that you knew Burbank’s work!

Buoyed by his success Burbank moved to Santa Rosa in 1875 and redoubled his plant breeding efforts. Soon Burbank had outgrown his greenhouse in town and purchased more land near Sebastopol. Between the two facilities Burbank and his employees worked at a feverish pace, testing over 3,000 hybrids at once. Scientists decry Burbank’s methods since he admittedly kept lousy records; but Burbank wasn’t interested in research, he wanted results. Though some may call his philosophy socialist, Burbank’s main goal was to improve the quality of plants and increase the world’s food supply. Burbank was influenced early on by the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, the horror of which he hoped the world would never see again.

During his 50 plus years working with plants Burbank developed over 800 new varieties, 200 of which were fruits, vegetables, nuts, or grains. “The Plant Wizard”, as friends (including Jack London) called him, was awarded 16 U.S. plant patents in 1930, four years after his death. Some of Burbank’s most famous varieties (other than the potato, of course) are the brilliant white Shasta Daisy and the easy eating Freestone Peach.

The park which includes the cottage where Burbank and his wife Elizabeth lived, a carriage house and greenhouse are open to the public for tours. We arrived late in the day so the buildings were closed though the gardens were still open. As seems fitting, Burbank is buried near the greenhouse where he spent so much of his life.

It wouldn’t have been right to leave Sonoma Valley without sampling some of the area’s famous wine. Wine tasting is a limited event for us, since there is only so much wine we can sip before our taste buds lose their edge. Of the hundreds of wineries in the area we selected three, one new to us, one Lance hadn’t been to, and one that we both enjoyed on our previous visit several years before.

First up was Rodney Strong. The winery was an impressive building laid out in a hexagon shape. Each side offered a different view down into the winemaking process which was explained by panels on the walls. After viewing the large vats and humongous oak barrels, we entered the tasting room. Like other tasting rooms, this one had a large gift shop full of wine-related gizmos but we headed straight for the tasting bar. Similar to other wineries, Rodney Strong offers a few tastes for free and charges for sips of its reserve or higher end wines.

Savvy people that we are, we had stopped at the Visitor Center in Healdsburg earlier in the week and picked up wine brochures and coupons. (I always make the Visitor Center my first stop and pick up brochures since coupons come in handy.) There was a quote in the wine country brochure that I just have to share with you, “Compared to beer or liquor drinkers, and even non-drinkers, wine drinkers have healthier lifestyles. Wine drinkers also tend to be better adjusted, less neurotic and depressed, and have higher IQ’s.”

I’m not sure where they got their information but it certainly made us smile! Our wine brochure wasn’t only funny but it entitled us to a free reserve tasting at Rodney Strong which we decided to split. (We split all our tastings that day to reduce the impact on our bodies and our brains. See, we are smart!)

Though the building looked imposing, it was a great first stop for us. Next up was the tasting room at Ridge Lytton Springs. The open and airy building at Ridge was topped with row upon row of solar panels; they have won awards for their eco-friendly, sustainable design. Ridge was quiet that afternoon and we were able to discuss the wines in depth with the staff, which greatly enhanced our experience. Just outside the massive windows were row upon row of grape vines, bright green with their first flush of spring. Oddly enough, even though Ridge makes stellar wines from grapes grown in the Sonoma Valley, our favorite Zinfandel of theirs was from Dusi Ranch near Paso Robles, California. For our anniversary just a few weeks prior we shared a bottle of Zin also from the Dusi Ranch, and it was delicious. Dusi Ranch is now on our radar screen!

For our last stop of the afternoon we rode our bikes over to Dry Creek Vineyard. Dry Creek stands out from the crowd by not only having some of the oldest vines in Sonoma Valley but by focusing on Fumé Blanc. True, it is not the only varietal they have planted, but it is their most popular wine. During our visit they were celebrating Fumé days with live music and hors d’oeuvres. It certainly made our visit more festive. True to form, we liked their Fumé best out of the wines we tasted. After purchasing a bottle we hopped back on our bikes to continue our ride. Conveniently, the wine bottle fit in the water bottle holder on Lance’s bike.

Though biking through the acres and acres of vines is probably the best way to enjoy the scenery, most of the narrow and winding roads do not have bike lanes. Thankfully, we were riding small back roads late in the day, after most of the tourists had gone home, so there wasn’t much traffic. After frequent stops for pictures, we finished our loop. It really is beautiful country; it reminds us of the Tuscany region of Italy.

Our last evening was spent lingering on the back porch at Kelly and Elaine’s house. Over a delicious dinner we swapped stories, shared adventures, and finally said goodbye. It had been almost three full weeks since we first pulled our RV into Sonoma Valley, though it certainly didn’t feel like it. We covered some miles that night on our way towards Sacramento. We had a date for a whitewater rafting trip with Josiah and Heidi the next morning, and we didn’t want to miss it.

Photos: View our photographs from Windsor, California in Winding Down in Windsor and Back in Sonoma Valley.

Notes: We stayed in Windsor, California from 04/20/08 to 05/09/08.