Alexander Valley and the Immigrant Wine Tradition

The valley running north from Healdsburg along the Russian River toward Cloverdale carries the name of a man most people driving through have never heard of. Cyrus Alexander was an American trapper who came to manage this stretch of land in eighteen forty-one and received his own share of the grant a few years later, and gave his name to a place that would become one of California's most significant wine-growing regions. He is not the story. He is just the label.

The story is the wave of German, Italian, and Swiss immigrant families who began settling Alexander Valley in the eighteen sixties and seventies, planting grapes on land they found affordable, in a climate they recognized from the wine regions of central Europe. These families established the wine traditions of Dry Creek Valley and Alexander Valley before Napa Valley had achieved its first significant harvest. They planted not for a luxury market, because that market did not exist yet, but because wine was what European farming families made from land that grew grapes.

The apex of that immigrant agricultural tradition was the Italian Swiss Colony at Asti, six miles north of here, where in eighteen eighty-one Italian and Swiss immigrants built a cooperative winery that for a decade was one of the largest wine producers in the state.

That cooperative failed under Prohibition. The corporate consolidation that followed absorbed most of the smaller immigrant family operations as well. Napa Valley, with its proximity to San Francisco and its landscape appeal to wealthy investors, built the luxury market. Alexander Valley remained the working agricultural valley, quieter and less trafficked, carrying an agricultural character that Wine Country's more famous neighbor has largely converted to tourism.

It is still that way. The people who grow up here know it. The people driving through mostly do not stop.