One person’s name may appear as the author of a book, but many other people help, from providing inspiration to contributing talent. At the top of my list of people to acknowledge and thank for helping me write “The Signature Wines of Superior California: 50 Wines that Define the Sierra Foothills, the Delta, Yolo and Lodi” is my wife Martha, ever willing, eager even, to taste and evaluate wine, tour wine regions, and, so my hands would be free to jot notes and take photos, happily fulfill the unenviable task of carrying spit cup around the grounds of a wine festival.
Three other people who contributed significantly to the packaging, content and tone of the book were Elk Grove graphics designer Chuck Donald of Donald Design, our son Dylan Dunne of Pine Grove, who executed the illustrations, and Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti, who prefers “grocer” to all the other sobriquets with which he has been anointed over the years, “wine authority” being the foremost, who contributed the foreword.
Here is Darrell’s forward to “Signature Wines,” and the art here is Dylan’s illustration of the late Dick Cooper’s landmark truck at his Shenandoah Valley vineyard and winery. The drawing is used to highlight the first of the 50 signature wines to form the heart of the book, the Cooper Vineyards Amador County Shenandoah Valley Estate Barbera.
Incidentally, “The Signature Wines of Superior California” is available at Corti Brothers and through Amazon.com.
From Darrell Corti:
Mike Dunne’s new work on the history of wine in the Sierra Nevada foothills and other areas about Sacramento is one that needed to be done. And Mike has all the qualifications to do it. He is a professional journalist. Journalists write about things that happen “in our days.” Here he is writing about not only the almost forgotten history that happened “before our days” but what has happened since. He has lived and worked in the area he writes about. Mike has been involved in wine writing – food also for that matter – for 50 years. This has given him a viewpoint that very few wine writers in California have. He has lived most of the modern history of wine from the Sierra foothills and neighboring areas – the Delta, Lodi, Yolo County.
What has pretty much been left unwritten up to now has been the history of the rambling Sierra Nevada foothills – some 170 miles long and 30 miles wide planted to vineyards. Prohibition and its misguided proponents did the wine industry no good and harmed it tremendously. In fact, Prohibition can be called the death knell of the wine industry in the entire area.
Agriculture in the Sierra foothill regions – and regions they are – began as subsistence farming after the experience which we call the “Gold Rush.” The history of some of the fortunate prospectors in this adventure is well known. What is really not so well known is the history of those less successful in gold mining, but sometimes very successful in the production of goods for everyday living, which in some instances was more important than finding gold. However, a lot of this history, like much of history, has been lost. Mike Dunne has revitalized a lot of pre-Prohibition history and put it into an eminently readable text with information that even the casual reader will find fascinating. As a professional, I know I did.
Mike has dug deeply into stories of the almost 175 years that grapes have been grown in this California region and makes that history come alive. To some of the people living in this region this history might be just “stories.” To others it will be a point of departure to learn about what went on in the past and how possibly it could affect the future.
Modern wine history in this region begins in the late 1960s to early 1970s. In what was to become Amador County’s “Shenandoah Valley” there was only one winery dating from the 1860s. Mike’s history will tell you that this lone survivor was not the only winery in the area. The others have become history. Now there is an almost staggering wine production in the region. It is this history which Mike has lived. Some of these wineries from the early 1970s have now become themselves history and are no longer. But of the ones which have remained and thrived, Mike’s history is a delightful delve into their specific story and the almost forgotten history of what went before. We do not have this history anywhere else. Most has been forgotten. Mike’s work has brought to light a lot of this history which we should know just to be aware of it.
“The Signature Wines of Superior California” is also a highly personal view of the contemporary wine scene about Sacramento. Based on years of touring, tasting and noting, Mike chose 50 wines that not only tell the story of the region’s modern wine trade but offer wine enthusiasts exceptional character, quality and value.
A lot of readers consider history to be only “dry bones.” But Mike’s unique perspective has taken these old bones and fleshed them out so that the Sierra foothills and its agricultural history becomes an interesting and informative read. If nothing else, today’s “information age” makes this history all the more compelling. How do we know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been?