{"id":1239,"date":"2019-03-30T18:59:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-30T18:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1239"},"modified":"2019-03-30T19:10:25","modified_gmt":"2019-03-30T19:10:25","slug":"the-town-of-sonoma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1239","title":{"rendered":"Visiting the Town of Sonoma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sonoma County is a big place.\u00a0 It is most famous for the American cartoonist Charles Schultz, the Petaluma Puppy Farm and flooding in the spring.\u00a0 Oh, yes, and wine.\u00a0 Lots of wine, some very good, and the people there have been making it for a long time too.\u00a0 The oldest known commercial winemaking vineyard in California was founded in Sonoma in 1861.\u00a0 It was \u2013 and is \u2013 the Buena Vista Winery, where you can still taste their current<\/em> wines at their winery just outside downtown Sonoma.<\/p>\n

There are three major towns in Sonoma County, the others being Healdsburg and Santa Rosa.\u00a0 They also have restaurants, shops, tasting rooms and hotels.\u00a0 Sonoma town has its own reasons to visit.<\/p>\n

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The Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma.\u00a0 Photo courtesy of Sonomavalley.com.<\/em><\/p>\n

The most important reason, perhaps, is that this is where it all began.\u00a0 As mentioned above, this is where winemaking started in California.\u00a0 It was a Spanish mission town, the last one as a matter of fact.\u00a0 The Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma is still standing and available for visiting.\u00a0 It was in Sonoma that Guadalupe Vallejo, a young lieutenant in the Mexican Army, laid out a street system with a plaza in the middle: today\u2019s town of Sonoma.\u00a0 The Sonoma Plaza is the main reason, besides the history, that you should visit the town today.<\/p>\n

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One side of the Sonoma Plaza, with the historic Sebastiani Theatre.\u00a0 Photo courtesy of joyfimg.pw.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a large plaza, in fact the largest town square in California.\u00a0 It is surrounded by shops, restaurants, tasting rooms and the Sebastiani movie theater that\u2019s an architectural gem in itself.\u00a0 The plaza is full of shady trees and in the middle is the Sonoma Town Hall, also worth seeing for its architectural value.<\/p>\n

Sonoma is the southern-most town in Sonoma County\u2019s Wine Country.\u00a0 If you\u2019re driving up from San Francisco and plan to spend only a day or so, it\u2019s the town in the middle of the Carneros and Sonoma Valley vineyards. There are, in fact, many wineries right around Sonoma to choose from, far more than anyone could visit in a day.\u00a0 While you\u2019re tasting, you\u2019re going to want to eat and Sonoma and its central square are a natural choice.\u00a0 We had quite an authentic Mexican lunch there.<\/p>\n

Moreover, there are many tasting rooms on or around the plaza.\u00a0 If you\u2019d prefer to taste without a lot of driving, especially on weekends, Sonoma offers a good alternative.\u00a0 Some of the wines available there are quite good.<\/p>\n

Many of the wineries in easy proximity to Sonoma have considerable longevity.\u00a0 Besides the aforementioned Buena Vista, nearby wineries include Sebastiani, Chateau St. Jean, Ravenswood, Gundlach-Bundschuh and Hanzell. They\u2019ve been making wine for a long time, in some cases back to the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 \u00a0Of course their wines today are more up-to-date, but you have the chance to sip history in Sonoma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sonoma County is a big place.\u00a0 It is most famous for the American cartoonist Charles Schultz, the Petaluma Puppy Farm and flooding in the spring.\u00a0 Oh, yes, and wine.\u00a0 Lots of wine, some very good, and the people there have been making it for a long time too.\u00a0 The oldest known commercial winemaking vineyard in … Continue reading Visiting the Town of Sonoma<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1239\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}