The party was on a Sunday in the middle of July, out on the lawn behind the tasting room, the light going long and gold the way it does in Windsor toward evening. Bastille Day. Long tables under the oaks, a band better than it needed to be, rosé and sparkling poured cold enough to sweat the glass. They make a serious Pinot too, the kind that keeps people coming back on the wine alone, and it was moving fast that afternoon. I had been a member for two years. Not long, in the life of a wine club. Long enough to have opinions, maybe not long enough to have earned them.
At the check-in table a young woman found my name on a printed list, ran her finger down a column, and told me, brightly, that I was one of their top members. She said it like a compliment. She meant it as one. What she was reading was a number, two years of spend, the sum of every allocation I had accepted and every case I had carried to the car. She knew what I was worth to them and nothing else about me at all.
I want to be fair about this, because fair is the harder thing to be. The wine is good. The food is good. I have friends who still go, who love the place and the people in it, and they are not wrong to. There are more fine wineries in Sonoma County than any one person can properly know, and two years is a thin sample to judge anyone on. It is possible I never stayed long enough to let them know me back. It is possible I left too soon.
But something was off, and it stayed off. The welcome was warm and rehearsed at the same time, which is a strange thing to feel and a hard thing to unfeel once you have. A member is a person who chose you, with money that could have gone anywhere, and then chose you again. That is a thing to cherish, not a thing to count. Being greeted by a dollar figure attached to your name is the opposite of being cherished.
The pickup parties were where I noticed it most, and in fairness a lot of them run this way. Extra hands brought in for the day, people pouring who do not know the wines and have never met the members, a good crowd coming out of the woodwork for an afternoon on a nice lawn. None of it is bad. All of it is pleasant. But pleasant is not the same as known, and after enough pleasant afternoons the gap between the two starts to matter. I let my membership lapse. Not in anger, and not over the wine, which was genuinely good, the Pinot especially. There was just nothing holding me there except what was in the bottle, and a good bottle by itself is a thing you can find on any road in the county.
Then there is Bacigalupi.
I have been going there for years, longer than I belonged to the club I left, long enough that the visits stopped being events and turned into something closer to stopping by. You come off Westside Road, the gravel does its familiar thing under the tires, and someone is usually out front. The family is in the room, pouring, remembering the last visit, asking about the drive up. Nobody checks a list. Somewhere along the way I stopped being an account and became a person they knew, and I could not name the afternoon it happened, only that at some point it had.
The proof came this past May, on a day they were throwing a party of their own. Bacigalupi was celebrating the anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 tasting where a California Chardonnay beat the French, with their fruit in the bottle that did it. Lori and I had other commitments and could not make the party. I called ahead anyway, half apologizing, and they told us to come by at the end of the day and they would squeeze us in for a quick tasting as things wound down. We turned up as the last of the crowd was thinning out. The quick tasting ran ninety minutes.
At some point Katey reached behind the bar and poured me an older vintage of their Chardonnay from a bottle already open back there. It was a wine I had loved and long since given up on tasting again. I said so. I did not ask for anything. I said it out loud, the way you do when a wine catches you off guard.
That was all it took. Instead of steering me toward what was on the shelf, she went looking. It became a mission. She disappeared into the back and came out with the last four bottles they had of the 2011, off the same block of fruit that had put them in that famous bottle in the first place. Four bottles left in the world that they knew of, and she carried all four out to me. Before we left she went back again and found a couple of bottles of the 2013, the next year off the same block, and those came home too. I had asked for none of it. I had mentioned one wine, once, in passing.
The difference between that afternoon and the Bastille Day lawn was never the wine. Both places pour bottles worth the drive. The winery I left knew me the instant it looked me up. Bacigalupi knew me on a slow afternoon when I was buying nothing in particular, and reached past everything for sale for the one bottle it guessed I would care about.
That is why the rooms I keep coming back to are Bacigalupi and Baldassari. Not because their wine outranks everyone else’s, though it is very good, and not because I hold anything against the place I left. There are too many good rooms in Sonoma to carry a grudge out of one of them. It is that in those two rooms I am a person before I am a number, and once you have been treated as a person somewhere it is hard to go back to being counted.
I will admit to some vanity in this. I like being known. I like walking into a place and having someone look up before they look me up. There are seasons the cellar is full and I take only what I am assigned, or pause a shipment and let it catch up, and at those two wineries it has never once changed the welcome. They could turn in a soft vintage and I would buy it anyway, and probably tell them it drank better than it did, because that is what you do for people who walk into the back and find your bottle instead of looking up your total.
The 2011s are gone now. We opened them with friends across the summer, which is the only proper end for four bottles somebody went to that much trouble to find. The 2013 is still in the cellar. It has a stand of its own, a carved bear holding it up like something won. I look at it more than I drink from it.
Everybody should know your name. Not your credit card number.
Subscribe to Vianarra. Firsthand stories from wine country, restaurants, and hotels worth remembering, and the operational insight underneath the welcome. Every Wednesday, in your inbox. newsletter.vianarra.comame as known, and after enough pleasant afternoons the gap between the two starts to matter. I let my membership lapse. Not in anger, and not over the wine, which was genuinely good, the Pinot especially. There was just nothing holding me there except what was in the bottle, and a good bottle by itself is a thing you can find on any road in the county.
Then there is Bacigalupi.
I have been going there for years, longer than I belonged to the club I left, long enough that the visits stopped being events and turned into something closer to stopping by. You come off Westside Road, the gravel does its familiar thing under the tires, and someone is usually out front. The family is in the room, pouring, remembering the last visit, asking about the drive up. Nobody checks a list. Somewhere along the way I stopped being an account and became a person they knew, and I could not name the afternoon it happened, only that at some point it had.
The proof came this past May, on a day they were throwing a party of their own. Bacigalupi was celebrating the anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 tasting where a California Chardonnay beat the French, with their fruit in the bottle that did it. Lori and I had other commitments and could not make the party. I called ahead anyway, half apologizing, and they told us to come by at the end of the day and they would squeeze us in for a quick tasting as things wound down. We turned up as the last of the crowd was thinning out. The quick tasting ran ninety minutes.
At some point Katey reached behind the bar and poured me an older vintage of their Chardonnay from a bottle already open back there. It was a wine I had loved and long since given up on tasting again. I said so. I did not ask for anything. I said it out loud, the way you do when a wine catches you off guard.
That was all it took. Instead of steering me toward what was on the shelf, she went looking. It became a mission. She disappeared into the back and came out with the last four bottles they had of the 2011, off the same block of fruit that had put them in that famous bottle in the first place. Four bottles left in the world that they knew of, and she carried all four out to me. Before we left she went back again and found a couple of bottles of the 2013, the next year off the same block, and those came home too. I had asked for none of it. I had mentioned one wine, once, in passing.
The difference between that afternoon and the Bastille Day lawn was never the wine. Both places pour bottles worth the drive. The winery I left knew me the instant it looked me up. Bacigalupi knew me on a slow afternoon when I was buying nothing in particular, and reached past everything for sale for the one bottle it guessed I would care about.
That is why the rooms I keep coming back to are Bacigalupi and Baldassari. Not because their wine outranks everyone else’s, though it is very good, and not because I hold anything against the place I left. There are too many good rooms in Sonoma to carry a grudge out of one of them. It is that in those two rooms I am a person before I am a number, and once you have been treated as a person somewhere it is hard to go back to being counted.
I will admit to some vanity in this. I like being known. I like walking into a place and having someone look up before they look me up. There are seasons the cellar is full and I take only what I am assigned, or pause a shipment and let it catch up, and at those two wineries it has never once changed the welcome. They could turn in a soft vintage and I would buy it anyway, and probably tell them it drank better than it did, because that is what you do for people who walk into the back and find your bottle instead of looking up your total.
The 2011s are gone now. We opened them with friends across the summer, which is the only proper end for four bottles somebody went to that much trouble to find. The 2013 is still in the cellar. It has a stand of its own, a carved bear holding it up like something won. I look at it more than I drink from it.
Everybody should know your name. Not your credit card number.
Subscribe to Vianarra — firsthand stories from wine country, restaurants, and hotels worth remembering, and the operational insight underneath the welcome. Every Wednesday, in your inbox. newsletter.vianarra.com