The last day of the annual Plein Air Painters Convention in
San Francisco was actually a paint-out at the glorious Viansa Winery in Sonoma,
just 35 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. On a sun-swept 70-degree day it
was a quintessential California wine country retreat and a welcome
counterpoint to the bustle and blight that plague the city where I left my
heart. Paint brush in one hand and a precocious little Pinot Noir in the other I
painted my way through a charcuterie plate, a panini and a cucumber-lemon grass
gelato before decamping for our hotel at the airport. Wait a minute. It was
Peggy doing the painting and that was with a sprightly Chardonnay. I tend to
conflate.
Anyway, I recommend a sojourn to Viansa on such a day. It’s
best enjoyed with a three hundred of your best painting buddies as was the case
on this stunning and memorable April 28.
Sitting at a table, Pinot at the ready, I inhaled a tiny measure
of the life that I love. The gestalt of wine culture, the farm to table lifestyle and pura vida from the land has me hooked as it has for more than fifty years. Above
the vineyards with San Pablo Bay and the Mayacamas Mountains in the distance
the sweep of the vistas and the depth of its pleasures was magical.
My mission was to photograph the start to finish sequence of Peggy painting the farm across the highway from Viansa. Since the painting took a scant 1-1/2
hours she called it a field study which I gather is something less than a
painting. Couldn’t prove it by me. At the time she thought it was her best of
the week and later thought it was not. Eyes of the beholder.
From my vantage point at a sunlit terrace table these happened.
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Topiary |
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Don or consiglieri? |
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Painter Albert Handel |
And in the window of the tasting room sat this prize.
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Floral in window |
Despite half a century of wine lust I had never heard of
Viansa. It is not in the pantheon of Sonoma legends. But it’s blood line is not
to be trifled with as it was founded in 1989 by the grandson of Samuele
Sebastiani, you know the name, an Italian immigrant who purchased his first vineyard in 1904 after making cobblestones in San Francisco when he arrived from Tuscany in 1896. Lawrence Ferlinghetti would be proud.