THE ANDERSON VALLEY: BEHIND THE REDWOODS, A CALIFORNIA DREAM

BOONVILLE, Calif.

WHEN you turn off busy Route 101 at Cloverdale and head up into the hills,
you leave one world behind and enter another. The lumberyard, gas stations
and fast-food joints quickly disappear as Route 128 twists its way
northwest through scrawny, moss-covered trees. Only a scattering of houses
can be seen.

Forests of evergreens begin to appear as you drop down the western slope of
the coastal ridge into the Anderson Valley, California's own Shangri-La.
After passing through downtown Boonville, all seven blocks and 974 souls of
it, you start to see grapevines growing in orderly ranks. But this is a
vineyard region with a difference, still largely untouched by developers
and weekenders. In Napa and Sonoma, the landed gentry drive Range Rovers
and wear loafers; here they drive pickups and wear muddy boots. It is, as
Bruce C. Cass observes mildly in "The Oxford Companion to the Wines of
North America," "an isolated and somewhat eccentric district."

Early in the last century, the locals developed a lingo that they call
"boontling," in which Boonville is called "Boont" and Philo, the only other
town of significance, is called "Poleeko." A few people still speak it.

The main purpose appears to have been to confuse outsiders, including the
police. The valley and the slopes above it have long sheltered a motley
crew of tax-evaders, back-to-the-earthers and other unconventional
citizens, including, at various times, Charles Manson and Jim Jones.
Marijuana is a major cash crop; last summer the police uprooted 24,500
plants in two days, but the district attorney, a man of sturdy libertarian
principles, refused to prosecute.

No one asks at local dinner parties whether it's O.K. to light up a joint.
It's standard practice.

"A lot of people still come here to get lost," said Don Schmitt, himself a
refugee from the Napa Valley, where he and his wife, Sally, operated the
French Laundry before selling it to the superchef Thomas Keller. They now
run a 32-acre organic spread called the Apple Farm with their daughter,
Karen, and her husband, Tim Bates, where they grow 85 varieties of apples,
including heirloom beauties like Gravensteins, Spitzenbergs and Arkansas
blacks.

But the wines are the big noise in the valley, and the big money-spinner.
Roederer Estate, owned by the French Champagne house of the same name,
produces what many experts (and many enthusiasts, like me) consider the
best American sparkling wine, and Navarro bottles a range of outstanding
still wines, including a luscious late-harvest gewurztraminer with hints of
litchi.

It is geography that makes the vineyards here special. Unlike the Napa and
Sonoma Valleys, the Anderson Valley opens onto the Pacific Ocean at its far
end, and its floor slopes from 1,300 feet above sea level in the southeast
to 800 feet in the northwest. Fog slides up the valley in the mornings,
slowing the ripening process, to the benefit of cool-weather northern
European grape varieties like riesling, pinot noir and chardonnay.

Driving along the ridge above the valley one day early last November, my
wife, Betsey, and I felt as if we were on an island surrounded by vast,
fleecy seas of cloud. But that same afternoon, as we tasted wine at a
vineyard below, we luxuriated in bright sunshine that had burned through
the fog.

Inevitably, the valley is attracting more and larger growers, such as
Kendall-Jackson and Duckhorn Vineyards, which now produces an intense,
weighty pinot noir on its Goldeneye property here. Mr. Schmitt told me he
frets about absentee ownership, about limited water resources and
especially about the possibility that the valley will become monocultural,
with orchards and sheep pastures being converted to vastly more profitable
use as vineyards.

The cultural impact has been substantial. In 1971, there were virtually no
Spanish-speakers in the region. Now, following the importation of skilled
Hispanic vineyard workers, more than half of the elementary and high school
students speak Spanish. The valley is becoming a bit less insular.

"We feel a little like Oregonians," said Milla Handley of Handley Cellars,
one of the pioneering Anderson Valley operations, which she and her
husband, Rex McClellan, started 21 years ago in their basement. "We love
where we live. There is something comforting about the isolation of the
Anderson Valley. It's small and finite, defined by the mountains. We can
live by ourselves.

"There's a strong community spirit - the true hippies, the old loggers, the
winos like us, the commune people, we all play softball together, we all
take part in the variety show every year. We don't hate visitors, not at
all, but we don't want to see the valley overrun by tourists or grapes.

"I don't want to wait to make a left turn. That worries me."

But it seems unlikely that the valley will be Napa-ized anytime soon, for
all its attractions and all the Silicon Valley millions waiting to be
invested. "We're too far from the Bay Area," said a young woman pouring
zinfandel at the octagonal Greenwood Ridge tasting room. There's nothing to
get people here - no freeways - and nothing to anchor them here - no
shopping, and not very many hotels or restaurants."

THIRTY years ago, Louis Roederer of Reims, which produces the luxurious
Cristal Champagne, went looking for a place to make sparkling wine in the
New World. Its chairman, Jean-Claude Rouzaud, sought growing conditions as
close as possible to those in France. After scouring New Zealand and
Tasmania, he chose California, but not the Napa Valley, as most of his
competitors did.

"Here in the backwoods he found a good balance between heat in the daytime
and cool temperatures at night and in the early morning," said Arnaud
Weyrich, the 33-year-old Alsatian who is scheduled later this year to take
over as winemaker from Michel Salgues, who is retiring.

Another advantage was the temperature gradient in the valley, which is
cooler at the ocean end, hotter at the inland end. Planting began in 1982,
and the first wine was released in 1988. Roederer now has 125 acres of
pinot noir and chardonnay vines near the ocean, 160 in the center, around
Philo, and 117 at the warmer end, which gives it a variety of lots from
which to blend.

The whole Roederer operation was conceived in lavish but understated terms,
with handsome stone walls and iron gates surrounding the main property, and
the winery tucked carefully behind the brow of a hill to avoid overwhelming
the landscape. The public tasting room is furnished with tapestries,
antiques and Oriental rugs.

Although the soil here differs from that in Champagne, and lime must be
added to lower its acidity every two or three years, Roederer's basic
California fizz, known as Roederer Estate brut, can be hard to distinguish
from the old-country product. Pale, complex and truly dry, it contains a
generous proportion of reserve wines, aged up to five years, as well as
wines of the current harvest. The brut bottled in magnum is markedly richer
and creamier.

Roederer also makes a rose here, which has more body than most, and a
magnificent vintage brut called L'Ermitage, which is comparable to Cristal
in its finesse. Made only in the best years, it has tiny bubbles and
deliciously yeasty and nutlike flavors.

Navarro is an entirely different bunch of grapes, planted in 1975 by Ted
Bennett, who had made a fortune in the retail stereo business. Experts like
Darryl Corti, the Sacramento wine and food maven, told him he'd never sell
his gewurztraminer (and other aromatic varieties in which he wanted to
specialize) through conventional channels. So he developed innovative
techniques.

The Mendocino coast, north of here, was just becoming a destination resort
at the time, and Mr. Bennett persuaded people headed there from San
Francisco to stop and buy at his tasting room. His wife, Deborah Cahn, an
advertising copywriter, began turning out a stylish, witty quarterly
newsletter. The Internet beckoned. And restaurants like Ducasse in New York
and Peristyle in New Orleans came shopping.

Jim Klein, the winemaker, who was wearing blue wraparound sunglasses when
we spoke at an outdoor table next to the Navarro tasting room, told me that
Mr. Bennett had bought land cheap and had therefore been able to keep
prices low. He sold his 2001 chardonnay for $9.75.

"He's very cost-oriented," said Mr. Klein, who was named winemaker of the
year in 2002 by The San Francisco Chronicle. "That obviously helps. When
most people were hit by the post-Sept. 11 slump, we didn't see a beep, and
95 percent of our sales are direct. Only 5 percent goes to distributors."

In addition to bargain-basement chardonnays, crisp pinot gris, ethereal
gewurztraminers and zingy rieslings, Navarro makes excellent pinot noirs,
light-bodied but subtle and age worthy, from grapes grown high on the
slopes above the winery, where they are exposed to the cool maritime breezes.

Milla Handley, a great-granddaughter of the founder of Blitz-Weinhard, a
regionally renowned brewery in Portland, Ore., graduated from the nation's
premier oenological school, at the University of California at Davis.
Politically aware and socially active, she operates according to firm
principles. She said she is absolutely determined, for example, "never to
buy grapes for $3,500 a ton from some yuppie grower, which would put my
wines beyond reach of the average consumer."

The Handley Cellars press kit says: "Milla encourages balance between work
and family by promoting a family-friendly atmosphere that leads to the
gathering of employees' children after school, and flexible scheduling to
accommodate family priorities." Now there's the authentic Anderson Valley
ethos speaking.

My own favorites among Ms. Handley's wines are the lean, slightly mineral
Anderson Valley chardonnay, which tastes more European than Californian,
with none of the overripe butterscotch flavor produced in hot climates, and
a pinot noir with overtones of ripe cherries, which she terms "the
challenging child."

Others have other specialties. Husch, whose gewurz was the first Anderson
Valley wine I ever tasted, 25 years ago, still does a fine job with that
grape. Greenwood Ridge excels at merlot and zinfandel. Lazy Creek's young
owners make highly concentrated pinot noir from the fruit of old vines.THE
local weekly, The Anderson Valley Advertiser, is as unconventional as the
valley itself. Its editorial philosophy may be deduced from its front-page
mottos, "Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!" and "All happy, none
rich, none poor." Not surprisingly, the local establishment, such as it is,
doesn't agree very often with the paper's feisty self-description: "The
country weekly that tells it like it is!"

Its editor is Bruce Anderson, 63, a tall, bearded, surprisingly courtly man
who sports a beat-up fedora much like the one Averell Harriman used to
wear. He prints 4,000 copies of each issue, some of which go to subscribers
who live as far away as New England. In addition to printing the kinds of
local tidbits that once filled many American newspapers, plus two or three
pages full of readers' letters, he runs a column for the marijuana crowd
called "CannibiNotes" and a weekly essay by Alexander Cockburn, the
left-wing British journalist, who lives up the coast in Humboldt County.

But the paper's staple is long articles excoriating officialdom, local,
national and international, contributed by freelancers who relish seeing
their stuff run uncut. (Mr. Anderson pays $25 a piece). One week in early
November, targets included American imperialism, the California Fish and
Game Commission and President Bush's decision to withhold all federal funds
from the United Nations Agency charged with population control and maternal
care.

Mr. Anderson is a relentless campaigner. He has hammered away on the case
of a friend named Judi Bari, an environmental activist who was killed by a
bomb. The bomber, he told me, "is still unpunished, and no serious effort
has ever been made to find the truth, 12 years down the road." He suspects
her former husband.

Sometimes The Advertiser goes off the deep end, but always entertainingly.
For months, Mr. Anderson promoted the idea that a certain Wanda Tinasky,
who wrote regular letters to the paper, was in reality the reclusive
novelist Thomas Pynchon, and that Mr. Pynchon was living in hiding
somewhere in the region.

"In fact," the editor said, "Tinasky was nothing but an erudite old hippie
who later murdered his wife and killed himself. I was wrong - at book length."

The general air of zaniness in the valley is enhanced by boontling. Despite
the efforts of Heidi Haughy Cusick of the Mendocino County Alliance, we
never managed to find a boontling speaker. But the lingo is all around you.
A cafe in Boonville is called "Horn of Zeese" (cup of coffee), a booth on
the main drag is labeled "Buckey Walter" (pay phone) and fanciers of the
grape refer to good wine as "bahl seep." Handley makes a gewurz-riesling
blend called Brightlighter, which means city folk in boontling.

There is plenty of "bahl gorms" (good food) in the valley. On the more
casual side, Boonville's Redwood Drive In produces a knockout Ortega
burger, made with an Ortega chili and pepper Jack cheese, and Libby's
Restaurant in Philo, a funky Tex-Mex place with a hand-lettered "Mendocino
County Mobilization for Peace" sign in the window, makes everything from
scratch - mole sauce, guacamole and vibrant salsa fresca. It also stocks 25
local wines.

Johnny Schmitt, son of the French Laundry's old proprietors, runs the
10-bedroom Boonville Hotel, which from the outside looks like something on
the Paramount back lot, with a broad, two-tiered cowtown veranda. Inside,
it's Sante Fe - all autumnal colors, sisal rugs and updated Shaker-style
furniture - plus a good dining room.

Mr. Schmitt doesn't mess around at the range. He coaxes real flavors from
real ingredients: a rich tomato and white bean soup with spicy sausage, a
Caesar salad with superlative romaine (after all, this is California,
folks), a thin-crust pizza with cherry tomatoes and killer applewood-smoked
bacon, and a rare rib-eye steak and mushrooms on a bed of spinach with
proper horseradish cream.

After that feed, there was nothing to do but drive back to the coast, where
we were staying, along the glassy Navarro River and through a canyon of
second-growth redwoods. Stumps the size of Volkswagens stood among the
trees that towered above our heads. The ground was carpeted in fallen red
needles, and the air smelled spicy.

The Pacific was foaming and churning when we approached the Elk Cove Inn,
our local headquarters, in the waterside hamlet of Elk. As the sky spun
through its kaleidoscopic changes, from gold to pink to lavender, fearsome
waves crashed into offshore rocks that looked to us like Monet haystacks
that had drifted out to sea.

"Perfection," said Mrs. A, who can never resist a good sunset.