Asti: California's Italian Swiss Wine Colony
Near Healdsburg, California
The rolling hills of the Alexander Valley around you were the site of one of California's most ambitious agricultural experiments. In eighteen eighty-one, entrepreneur Andrea Sbarboro founded a cooperative colony here, naming it Asti after the wine city in northern Italy, intending to provide steady employment for Italian and Swiss immigrants. When grape prices collapsed in eighteen eighty-seven, Sbarboro pivoted to winemaking, recruiting pharmacist Pietro Rossi as a partner.
The Italian Swiss Colony, as the enterprise became known, grew into the largest wine producer in California. By the early nineteen hundreds its wines had won ten gold medals at international competitions. By the mid nineteen fifties it was reportedly the second most visited destination in California, behind only Disneyland.
That peak passed with changing ownership and industry consolidation, but the valley the colony cultivated remains one of California's prime wine-growing landscapes.
