Full Belly Files : Walking Through Wine History

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on May 6, 2022. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

One of the biggest attractions to wine for me is how it can provide a direct and visceral tie to the history of a landscape, whether you’re exploring the vineyard rows of a particular property or trying to understand the past of a wider region. These lessons can go way back in time — thousands of years in places like Armenia and Greece — although California’s viticultural ties go back a mere 200 or so years, when the Spanish imported wine grapes in the late 1700s.

More common are vineyards that span back 50 years to a century or so, and these — or at least their remnants and memories — are relatively widespread in the Golden State, from way down in San Diego and Riverside counties north to Lodi and Napa and Mendocino. But I think that there’s even plenty to learn about much more recent historical periods as well when looking at vines and wines, such as what happened during the financial tumult of the late 2000s or how business strategies shift to adapt to emerging trends and climate realities right now.

Over the last week, I took two trips that tugged on these history strings.

SANTA CRUZ ISLAND MASS