Where Three Valleys Meet: The Healdsburg Plaza
Near Healdsburg, California
You have arrived at one of the most improbable crossroads in American wine. Stand in the Healdsburg Plaza and three great valleys pour together almost exactly beneath your feet. To the west opens Dry Creek Valley, narrow and warm, famous for old vine Zinfandel.
To the northeast stretches the Alexander Valley, broad and sunny along the river bottom. And running through the middle of it all is the Russian River Valley, cool and fog touched, threading down from the hills. Very few towns in the country sit at the seam of three distinct growing regions at once, and that geography is the whole story of Healdsburg.
Long before the vines, the Southern Pomo people lived in villages in these open valleys along the river, which they are said to have called the long snake. Then in the eighteen forties the sea captain Henry Delano Fitch received a Mexican land grant of roughly forty nine thousand acres called Rancho Sotoyome, covering the ground you are on now. The town itself was the idea of one stubborn Ohioan.
Harmon Heald had come west chasing gold, given up on the mines, and built a cabin beside the busy road between San Francisco and the diggings. He opened a store, then a post office, and in eighteen fifty seven he hired a surveyor to lay out a proper town around a central square. Eighty five lots, straight streets, and at the heart of it this plaza, drawn in the Spanish style as a place for the community to gather.
That was no accident. On the very first map the open space was already labeled a plaza. Today it is shaded by towering redwoods and palms, ringed by tasting rooms and restaurants, and it has been called one of the most beautiful town squares in the United States.
But listen past the wine glasses for a moment. This green rectangle was a cattle rancho, a squatter's gamble, a farm town, and a prune capital before it ever became a luxury destination. Every one of those lives is still layered right here, under the same trees, at the exact spot where three valleys agree to become one town.
