From the Wine Library

Feast for the intellect and  the Senses: The Italian odyssey in Sonoma County
 
Great History Food and Wine.  How about an evening that will stimulate your intellect, titillate and satisfy your senses, and add to your knowledge of the area’s and the nation’s history? On Saturday, September 22, 2012, at the Pedroncelli Winery, 1220 Canyon Road, from 5 to 8 p.m., the Wine Library Associates of Sonoma County will present Paola Sensi-Isolani giving a slide lecture on Italian American wine history in Sonoma County, surrounded by great food and wine. The cost is $50 for the public, and $40 for Wine Library members and Pedroncelli Wine Club members for this lecture titled “From Peasants to Entrepreneurs the Italian American Experience in the North Coast Wine Industry.” Call (707) 857-3531 for reservations.  
Paola, a professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s College, a lively, engaging woman of Italian and English ancestry, is writing a book about the Italians in the area wine industry. She has wonderful slides and will use them as springboard for her talk about how Italian immigrants helped form Sonoma County’s wine history. Ken Rochioli, of KR Catering, will provide the food, and Pedroncelli will pour specially selected wines for this voyage of discovery.  
Mondo Italiano. Italians made the world, America and wine great. They gave us bridges and aqueducts, Roman law, the Renaissance, type fonts like Times New Roman, Opera, and an attitude and philosophy that marries the senses to the intellect and insists on beauty and pleasure, pronto. Cristoforo Colombo, whose fame is in eclipse these days, did in fact lead Europeans to the New World. Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo, Marconi among Italians, and Fermi, Joe DiMaggio and Leon Panetta, among Italian Americans all contributed immensely to the world’s and our country’s heritage. Don’t forget Italian food. If we limit Italian cuisine as pizza and pasta, we are missing much. The diverse cuisines that make up Italian culinary experience encompasses Alpine to African influences and serves it up with breathtaking panache.  
Italo-Sonoma. The area’s wine history would be unimaginable without Italians. Vince Columbano came in the library a week or so ago.  He is only 93. Someone had spotted his older brother Lou out working in the fields earlier in the summer. Vince had brought a history he had written of the Windsor Co-op Winery. I told him about the Pedroncelli event. He remembered that his father had welcomed the Pedroncelli’s here in the 1920’s. At one point his family’s horse had died, and the Pedroncellis had helped the Columbanos with a new horse. To pay them back, Vince, then a strapping young man of 13, went and helped with field work for several weeks. That’s just the brotherly closeness, the fratelli spirit that pervades Italian Americans in Sonoma County.  
Simi and Italian Swiss Colony. Italians came in huge waves to America from the 1880’s to the 1920’s. The Simi Brothers, Guiseppe and Pietro were among the first to start working here. They came to Sonoma County, paid gold coin for a winery on Front Street, and later built the stone winery that bears their name. Italian Swiss Colony started as a utopian experiment. Andreas Sbarbaro, a banker in San Francisco, wanted to help the contradini or peasants on the streets of San Francisco in 1880’s. He conceived the idea of a cooperatively Italian Swiss Agricultural Colony in Northern Sonoma County. He got poor country guys stranded in urban poverty in San Francisco to sign up and setup a large vineyard and wine making operation. Men would live communally and work the land and the winery and eventually get their own piece of land. After a while some of these colonists balked at the pay later provisions and wanted their pay now, not years from now. Sbarbaro was agile enough to reform the colony as a corporation and build it into one of the great 19th Century wine brands, gaining international renown for their Tipo, a Chianti-style wine. Italian Swiss Colony fought and then joined the huge Standard Oil of California wine, the CWA or California Wine Association.  
All the Rest. Among the Italian Swiss Colony colonists was Eduardo Seghesio, and he managed to buy his own piece of land near the Italian Swiss Colony.  He and his descendants built the Seghesio winery.  The Foppianos, the Nervos, the Passalacquas, the Vercellis, the Sebastianis, the Rochiolis, and, oh yes, the Gallos and the Mondavis all came to California and helped build the wine industry. Each has a fascinating and utterly unique story and each has some common elements: hard work, a feel for what grows best and tastes best, and community spirit, the helping hand, as they progressed from contradini to imprenditori. Learn more about these great people and enjoy some great wine and food and help the wine library by attending this event.
Bo Simons is the Branch Manager of the Healdsburg Regional Library and the librarian in charge of the Sonoma County Wine Library, a business and technical and history library serving both the public and the wine industry.