NorthBay biz profiles local tourism promoters who are making it easy for visitors to get what they want out of Wine Country travel.
Do-it-yourself travel planning is popular—especially for day-trippers. And since stay-cations are also gaining momentum, finding a comprehensive guide is key to travel success.
A couple of local companies are great for doing just that. Think of them as one-stop Wine Country travel shopping. They’re helping those who want to experience the Wine Country lifestyle: visiting wineries, partaking of local fare at our excellent restaurants and holding special events—especially weddings—in the romantic setting of vineyard and winery.
WineCountry.com is a website dedicated to helping visitors navigate Wine Country, while the Preiser Key to Napa Valley prides itself on being the only publication with a totally comprehensive listing (“every single winery that’s open to the public”) of what’s available and where—the Preisers even went to the trouble of hiring a professional cartographer to ensure their maps were accurate and to scale.
Welcome to Wine Country
“People are still coming to Wine Country,” says Heidi Paul, cofounder (with her life-and-work partner, Frank Forbes) of WineCountry.com. “They come to our website to plan their trips, and our user base—while it has fallen a little—continues to hold fairly steady. Our website chalks up around 3 million visits per year.”
Paul, who grew up in Kansas, exudes a positive passion for what she does and sees a strong need for Wine Country planning services such as her own. “The one thing we’ve learned for sure is that, when people have a good tourist experience in Wine Country, they fall in love with the lifestyle. They find interesting people, wines full of character and food experiences beyond what they’ve had before. Frank and I started with NapaValley.com in 1994, added Sonoma.com the next year, and expanded to WineCountry.com in 1996. Eventually, we hope to cover the entire United States—and even go international at some point.”
She suggests the definition of “Wine Country” is in the process of expanding. All 50 states now have wineries, and nearly all have vineyards (45 at last count). “We firmly believe that expanding the notion of where Wine Country is helps everybody. There are sweet wines, fruit wines, carbonated wines—and those all contribute. A bigger definition of Wine Country grows the whole of the business. When people visit, and they experience the passion grape growers have for their vineyards and winemakers have for their wines, and the care and concern that both have for the land and for culture in the largest sense, well, it’s hard not to be impressed and taken in.
“Our goal is to broaden that experience for people, and to make it comfortable for them to partake of a good experience wherever they might be. When someone wants to take a day trip to Wine Country from, say, Austin, Texas, we want them to know it’s a possibility.”
(Indeed, there are several very fine wineries in the Texas Hill Country, the home territory of President Lyndon Johnson. One of my favorites, Ed and Susan Auler’s Fall Creek Vineyards, sits on the northwest shore of Lake Buchanan. It boasts about 30 acres of vineyards, a house and a winery that look like a spread in House Beautiful, a landing strip for Ed’s Cessna…and 10,000 acres of cattle!)
WineCountry.com lines up its main categories of information starting with travel then moving on to wine and food, “things to do,” an exhaustive events calendar, message boards and blogs, shopping opportunities, wedding planning, real estate opportunities and newsletters. The most recent newsletter offered a shopping feature on where to save and where to splurge, a piece on wineries’ second-label standouts, a personality feature on Kendall-Jackson’s winemaker Randy Ullom, a restaurant profile and events highlights from the site’s sponsors. Looking through the listings, it’s hard to imagine there’s anything you could be looking for that wouldn’t be there.
Born in Germany, Heidi Paul grew up in the middle of Kansas—Great Bend, on the Arkansas River. Her father was a school teacher and superintendent who worked as a civilian for the U.S. military, first at Stuttgart, later at Dachau. A big movie and NetFlix fan, she quotes the line from “Auntie Mame” about life being a banquet, but most folks are starving to death. “If you don’t have some passion in your life—I love my work so much that I rarely have time for hobbies—you’re really missing the boat,” she says, happily recalling a thrilling opportunity she once had to handle the sideline chain yard markers for a football game at Texas Stadium.
She went to college at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then came west to San Francisco in 1991 “for a boy [Frank] and a job.”
“I didn’t want children—Frank already had one—but I did want a friend and a business I could really be engaged with. When we started WineCountry.com in 1994, we expected to find a big sense of competition between Napa Valley and Sonoma County. What we found instead was a great sense of community—people sharing information and ideas on how to grow the best grapes and make the best wines.
“That’s why I believe most people think of Napa and Sonoma first when it comes to what ‘Wine Country’ is. The newest thing is that people really want to experience the vineyard and the winery first-hand. They want to stay in a bed and breakfast that’s in a vineyard or on winery grounds. The ordinances make those less common in the Napa Valley than they are in Sonoma County, but the romance of it is undeniable.
“Most of the people who log on to our site are doing so to plan a trip. What our consumers want is a connection. The lure of the smaller wineries is that visitors get to talk with the proprietor or the family who runs the winery—the people who are in the middle of the process of growing grapes and making wine. The only difficulty is when they’ve had a long day and might not have the time or the energy to fully connect with their fans. The advantage of the larger wineries is they have the well-trained staff to answer any and all questions, and they have the facilities to handle the executive meeting or the wedding. Again, Sonoma has an advantage in that they don’t have quite the zoning restrictions that some Napa Valley wineries have to face.”
The challenge for such a business, as always, is to convince sponsors that their funding gets returned to them in the form of increased business and sales. “We’ve added the wineries of Virginia to our website,” says Paul, “on the notion that, if we build it, they will come. Well, they’ve been a little slow to show up, but we’re still optimistic. We’re increasing our focus on the wine, recipe and lifestyle content on our website, and we’re preparing to create a new website called Pinot.com. Pinot Noir is the hottest thing going these days, as people are easily drawn to a wine that’s so sensual, so romantic.” Well, who wouldn’t be?
Key holders
Monty and Sara Preiser are a couple out of the business and legal world who developed a love of wine and wine travel and—when they couldn’t find the sort of published guide they wanted—went out and developed their own.
“We’ve published the Preiser Key to Napa Valley for just two years now, and it’s the most comprehensive guide to Napa Valley wineries and restaurants ever published,” says the irrepressible Preiser from his home in Boynton Beach, Florida (he and Sara relocate to Napa each year when the weather warms). “It’s simple: We have a database that lists every winery in the valley—more than 700—and every restaurant, complete with tasting, contact and other useful information for each one.
“We also have five maps—completely drawn to scale and with precision—that show where all of those facilities are. Exactly. If they’re open to the public or take appointments, we have them. It’s a concierge publication that’s exhaustive and accurate, and you can get a subscription for the cost of mailing.”
The guide has been so successful that the Preisers are planning to go national with it—have it available in wine shops from coast to coast—and are preparing to launch a similar guide to Sonoma County. “We were hoping to be able to launch this summer,” he says wistfully, “but the reality of the current economic climate means it’ll more likely be next spring. The contracts are out and we’ve hired the cartographer to make sure our maps are equally accurate for Sonoma County.”
Monty suggests the lure of Wine Country goes far beyond the romance that most people suggest. He agrees with my comment that most people in the wine industry are multitalented and have a wide range of interests. “Oh, yes. These are some of the most interesting people in the world to talk to. They’re well-educated, fun to be with and quite charitable with their time, money and wines.”
A big fan of the Napa Valley Barrel Auction, Preiser is fond of reminding attendees that there are values to be found there. “Most folks follow the path of least resistance and bid on the big names, the known producers. But if you trust your own palate, you can find excellent wines at decent prices. I’m particularly fond of the Barrel Day Auction. It’s a great time for those who think most wines taste alike. They don’t, and at the barrel tasting you can really taste the differences. It’s the best $200 you can spend. There are probably more than 100 wines inside on which people can bid, and perhaps another 100 or more outside just for tasting. Sommeliers are on hand and great for guidance. There’s a tremendous variety of wines and great foods available. It may take you two days to recover, but all in all, it’s a terrific learning experience.”
A native of West Virginia who was once a ranked tennis player (“bad shoulder now, have to serve underhanded”), Monty decided that he wanted to go to college at a small school, but one located in a city. “When my father took me to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, I knew Tulane was the school for me.” Later, he attended law school at Hastings (San Francisco) and West Virginia. “My father was a lawyer, and I took over his practice.” For 20 years, he handled high-visibility pharmaceutical liability cases, cases so widespread that he opened offices across the country, from West Virginia to Florida, from Pennsylvania to California. “A lot of it was vaccine work, cutting-edge cases that popped up everywhere.”
Though they both hailed from West Virginia, Monty met Sara in New York, where she was a spokesperson for DuPont. “She did everything!” he says with gleeful respect. “She gave talks teaching professional women how to dress and how to apply for top notch jobs. She worked as a consultant.”
The love of wine infiltrated their lives, and when they moved to Boca Raton, they offered to write a wine column for the local paper. “They turned us down,” he says with a wry laugh. “So we started our own private newsletter, which became so popular that the paper came back to us asking to publish our column! There was nothing there, so we just did it ourselves. I’ve always liked the arts and sports—trial lawyers need them to relax—and wine is all about the arts and about culture…and it sure helps me relax.”
(In rare moments of spare time, Monty dreams up deliciously radical notions for baseball, including that of composing a pitching staff solely with relief pitchers, each of whom throws one inning per game, and that of always squeezing home a runner on third “because it will almost always work, unless the third baseman charges, at which point your odds of getting a hit swinging away increase threefold!”)
When asked about his favorite wines, he says it all depends on the time of day and the situation. “I like a mineral-based Chardonnay in the mornings, but in the afternoon or evening I’m looking for more oak and full body. The atmosphere and the food selection always have a lot to do with which wine I’m likely to choose. I like all wines, essentially. I’m looking for character, depth and flavor, the more distinctive the better. These days, that means Petit Verdot, Carmenère, Malbec—big wines, good flavors, lots of layers, and different from the ordinary. Why settle for ordinary?” Why, indeed?
One should never “settle” for anything, be it the wine you drink or the experience you sign on for in Wine Country. Paul, the Preisers and others are dedicated to showing you the best of our little corner of Eden. Give them the slightest chance to show off their knowledge, and they’ll bend over backward to let you in on our most closely held secrets. Trust me, they have some good ones to share.
A Minute of Your Time
By Alexandra Russell
If you’re a typical wine enthusiast, your thirst for knowledge about wine runs a close second to your thirst for the wine itself. The problem is, unless you’re a wine professional, you probably have limited time to spend learning about your favorite varietals. But now there’s a fast and easy way to incorporate wine education into your hectic daily life.
Wine Country Minute 00:60 (www.winecountryminute.com) is the brainchild of Marin resident Michael DeNunzio, himself an oenophile with a very busy schedule. His solution? Short-but-complete profiles that take about one minute to read, emailed three times per week to a select group of subscribers. “Each minute paints a clear and complete picture of that day’s subject,” he says. “If it piques your interest and you want to learn more, you can click through to the subject or our website, where we’ll have related details and, often times, photos.” But, he emphasizes, “the story is complete on its own. They can be read between meetings or during phone calls. All it takes is about a minute of your time.”
DeNunzio developed Wine Country Minute after a previous online wine publication, VarietalsWineCountry.com, didn’t pan out as expected. “The economic model of that web-based publication wasn’t viable,” he says. “But what was viable was the email/newsletter piece of it. The subscription-based model is what we built the Wine Country Minute idea on.”
Currently, the emails cover the enjoyment of wine and the Wine Country lifestyle primarily in California, though expansion into Oregon and Washington is possible (but only “when we can have editorial leadership in those areas”). Content is divided into four main sections—Discover, Travel, Taste and Shop—each with a contributing editor whose personal experiences and knowledge makes them a match for the subject. Content is decided by consensus, with each editor contributing ideas for discussion before DeNunzio develops an editorial calendar. Recent Minutes include spotlights on Anderson Valley, Cade Winery, The Philo Apple Farm and Acme Fine Wines.
So what makes an experience “Minute worthy”? “Our content areas are diverse, but we’re guided by a few simple concepts,” he says. “First, is it something we’d recommend to a friend—and do we think that friend would recommend it as well? Second, is there a ‘call to thought’? We recently did a Minute on ReCork, a company that’s started a cork recycling program. We received so much enthusiastic feedback from readers who had never considered such a thing—and neither had I, to be honest. That’s a ‘call to thought.’ Third, we want to tell a story. We don’t rate wines or anything like that. We want to find a great story about a place or a person and convey that to our readers.”
For more information about Wine Country Minute or to subscribe, visit www.winecountryminute.com
