The Jimtown Store had permanently closed at the end of 2019, so this is not late breaking news. But its passing, as well as the 28 years in which it served travelers in the Alexander Valley, tells a tale about what Sonoma County was and what it is now.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Valley Winegrowers.
The best that can be said about the Jimtown Store is that it served really good food in a beautiful general store setting, along a country road with views of the mountains. We always looked forward to lunch there when we went wine tasting in the area. They had a few tables in the store aisles among shelves packed with goodies, gifts and old fashioned toys. They also had a charming outside seating area. It was a relic of another age, with its somewhat dilapidated exterior and the old red Ford pickup parked outside. The sign outside touted “Good Food” and the store delivered on its promise.
But it was a fake.
Yes, there had been a general store there back in the late 1800’s but it had been closed for years when John Werner and Carrie Brown bought it in 1989. They refurbished the place, but not too much, to retain the feel of what it had been. They were not starry-eyed beginners but experienced entrepreneurs in the gourmet food trade. They opened the store not to serve the local population but rather wine-loving tourists who needed to put some food in their bellies as they hopped from winery to winery.
That told the story of what Sonoma County was becoming in the 1990s and into this century. Wine grapes were long grown there. The area was focused on farming and winemaking, but there were few tasting rooms, much like Napa Valley 25 years before. Werner and Brown could see what was coming and filled their store with fancy foodstuffs and gourmet sandwiches. Now we like fancy foodstuffs and we always enjoyed the gourmet sandwiches but we knew quite well that this wasn’t what the farmhands were eating.
Jimtown Store wasn’t an ol’ time general store any more than Jordan Winery is an English manor or Ledson Winery is a haunted castle. But all of them were built on the proposition that pretense plus wine equals tourist dollars.
As indicative of Sonoma County as was the Jimtown Store, so was the cause of the store’s closure: wildfire and its effect on tourism. The recent Kincaid fire came awfully close and it frightened away many wine tasters during the high tourism season. That, combined with Covid-19, is also a part of what Sonoma County and many other areas of Wine Country have become: a tourist destination starved of visitors.
Again, we want to emphasize that we are among the tourists who in the past have added to Sonoma county’s economy. We won’t be going this year because of the pandemic and many wineries have only limited openings anyway for the same reason.
The Jimtown Store wasn’t just good food; it was fun. And Sonoma County isn’t just good wine, either. The pleasures of going wine tasting are being forced to change, but we who love to do it must always preserve the fun.
Farewell, Jimtown Store. We eagerly await the next chapter of visiting Wine Country, Sonoma County very much included.