From Prune Town to Luxury Wine Destination
Near Healdsburg, California
The Healdsburg you see today, with its Michelin starred restaurants, boutique hotels, and dozens of tasting rooms, is a surprisingly recent invention. Grapes had grown here since the eighteen hundreds, but Prohibition and the prune boom pushed wine to the margins for most of the twentieth century. The turn began in the nineteen seventies and gathered pace in the nineteen eighties.
As American appetite for fine wine surged, growers realized that the same three valleys meeting at Healdsburg, Dry Creek, Alexander, and the Russian River, offered an extraordinary range of soils and climates in a single small radius. Old orchards were cleared and vineyards planted once more, this time for premium wine rather than bulk. Wineries multiplied, then came the restaurants and inns to serve the visitors, and gradually the sleepy farm town on the plaza reinvented itself as one of the most sought after food and wine destinations in the country.
The plaza that Harmon Heald sketched out in eighteen fifty seven became the polished center of it all. It is worth holding both pictures in your mind at once. The luxury is genuine, but so is the memory of the same streets lined with prune dryers and packing sheds.
Healdsburg did not inherit its fame. It earned it twice, first as a farm town, and then as a wine town built on the farm town's bones.
