Buena Vista and the Count of Wine
Near Sonoma Sebastopol, California
Just east of the town of Sonoma, tucked against a wooded hillside, sits Buena Vista Winery, widely called California's oldest premium winery. It was founded in eighteen fifty seven by one of the most colorful figures in American wine history, a Hungarian immigrant named Agoston Haraszthy. Haraszthy was a nobleman, a promoter, a schemer, and a genuine visionary, often called the father of California viticulture.
He believed the hills around Sonoma could rival the great wine regions of Europe, and he set out to prove it, planting cuttings of European grape varieties and digging deep stone aging tunnels into the hillside by hand. He championed the idea that fine wine grapes did not need constant irrigation and could thrive on California's dry slopes. Under the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society, founded in the eighteen sixties, the operation grew astonishingly fast, and within a couple of years it was reportedly producing around two million gallons of wine a year.
Haraszthy's own story ended strangely. He left California and vanished in Nicaragua, where legend says he was eaten by an alligator while crossing a stream. The winery he founded still stands on its original grounds, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and honored as a California Historical Landmark.
