I’m not entirely clear whether I’m doing readers a service, or risking great confusion by writing about Mendocino’s Anderson Valley Pinot Noir the month after I wrote about Sonoma’s Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.
‘I tell people I’m from Anderson Valley, and they often say, “Oh yes!” – and then they start raving about Healdsburg and Cabernet Sauvignon’, says Courtney DeGraff, executive director of the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association. ‘But really, we’re all about the cool-climate Pinot Noir here, not palm trees and desert heat.’
Aside from the accident of two very different wine regions sharing similar names, Anderson Valley has long taken a certain amount of pride in people not exactly knowing where it is. You might even go so far as to say this little community, tucked into the redwood-filled Coast Ranges, trades in obscurity. For decades it has been a haven for those who want to be left alone, or at the very least, for those who value peace and quiet.
Famous for its confounding local language (really an argot) called Boontling, which dates from the 1890s and is named after the local town of Boonville, Anderson Valley possesses a unique and somewhat insular local culture that is part idyllic agrarian, part counter-culture, and part ‘get-off-my-lawn’ eccentric.
The valley offers fewer than 150 hotel rooms and only 10 restaurants spread across its several small towns (villages, really). A combination of local sentiments, the town regulations those sentiments provoke and the extreme limitations of civic infrastructure seem all but designed to keep things that way.
Pinot Noir Paradise
Nestled deep into the hills, and accessible from the east only by narrow, serpentine roads, Anderson Valley might be the very definition of an off-the-beaten track wine region. This small valley, carved by the Navarro River, was settled in the 1850s and was populated primarily by homesteaders and farmers until the hippies started arriving in the 1960s.
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Image by Fabian Jauregui courtesy of Anderson Valley Winegrowers.
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