Both Scribe’s popular pét-nat and Nouveau of Pinot Noir are ebullient, youthful, and spontaneous celebration-making. What’s more desired by the food-and-wine-culture scene than Peak California, and who has done a more complete job of bottling it? Photo courtesy of Leo Patrone.Īdam and Andrew are making expressive wines that, literally, ferment the spirit of West Coast bon vivant minimalism, and attract a coterie of food (and design, and tech, and literary, and music) world creative counterparts in kind to their fan club. It felt almost equalizing when I caught it. An irresistible, casually aspirational reflection of place gives everyone visiting today, no matter their existing credentials as a somebody (and there are many somebodies here), a festive gleam of belonging in their eye. In fact, they’ve whipped everything on site into an aggregate state of Peak California-the patina-forward Hacienda renovation, earthenware ceramics and indigo linen napkins, twinkling patio string lights, an abundance of both indoor potted plants and effortlessly attractive people. It’s the humbler affectation of the agricultural image that they sow through the Scribe identity, threading the slow food, farm-to-table spirit long fomenting in the Bay Area into their winemaking ethos.
The Marianis identify as farmers as much as they do winemakers. The brothers bought a decrepit turkey farm for $3.8 million a few miles south of downtown Sonoma and nurtured acres of soil compacted for decades by a dozen industrial turkey buildings into land that could, once again, grow its best grapes. After a few years’ experience working with winemakers across the world (including La Tour Melas in Greece and Guigal in the Northern Rhone), and partnering with an uncle with industry connections (vineyard consultant Andrew Avellar), the unlikely endeavor of starting a winery in their late twenties became a reality. Understanding the structure of a massive agricultural operation was absorbed through familial osmosis, according to Adam, and through his brother Andrew’s undergrad work in Cal Poly’s ag program. The brothers, along with their younger sister Kelly, a Chez Panisse alum who oversees Scribe’s kitchen, are the fourth generation of a California farmer lineage that includes one of the largest nut companies in the world ( Mariani walnuts were served on my visit, crack-your-own, along with clementines). Vintner-brothers Andrew and Adam Mariani have been making low-intervention wine-along with cultivating an edible garden, raising bees and chickens, and throwing parties for an international community of hip food people who whirlpool around the Bay Area-from this southern plot of Sonoma Valley since 2007. And it’s been that way for a long time.” Photo courtesy of Leo Patrone. Lingerers are gathering to watch from the Hacienda’s front steps. “California is a beautiful place,” says winemaker Andrew Mariani, as we rise from our lounge seats on the south patio, next to their edible garden. The vines, natural firebreaks that surround the winery on three sides, are dormant for the year, at peace. Baby green sprouts shoot up on the hill behind us. The Scribe team of two dozenish still have jobs. On this winter weekend, we’re luxuriating in their successes. They had completed their harvest the night before it all began, and thanks to Cal Fire, who helped conduct an equipped Scribe crew in rescue mode by digging fire lines and irrigating roofs, the winery remained unscathed.
Disaster seemed imminent, but the magnitude, indeterminable. When news of the fires broke, a harrowing photo circulated online of the Hacienda at Scribe Winery surrounded by these colors, as flames pummeled towards Sonoma Valley. Smoke’s tragic haze has the same paint job.
But after the wine country wildfires in 2017, this blazing sky is a reminder of incineration. This one, periwinkle and hot orange, foreshadowed tomorrow’s heavy rain, the begged-for kind that humbles Californians of any stratum. There’s a neon sunset, a showstopper, the kind that signals extreme weather to come. It’s dusk in early January-three months from the night in October when the deadliest California wildfires in history began, when flames churned by Diablo Winds spread through the Mayacamas and burned across Anderson Mountain in Sonoma, on whose Western slope we’re currently lounging while peeling clementines and drinking Scribe Sylvaner-and everyone at the Hacienda is suddenly gazing west.
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