{"id":1644,"date":"2020-09-28T14:18:35","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T14:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1644"},"modified":"2023-07-27T16:00:36","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T16:00:36","slug":"jimtown-store-farewell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/?p=1644","title":{"rendered":"Jimtown Store, Farewell"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Jimtown Store had permanently closed at the end of 2019, so this is not late breaking news.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Alexander Valley Winegrowers.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 We always looked forward to lunch there when we went wine tasting in the area.\u00a0 They had a few tables in the store aisles among shelves packed with goodies, gifts and old fashioned toys.\u00a0 They also had a charming outside\u00a0 seating area.\u00a0 It was a relic of another age, with its somewhat dilapidated exterior and the old red Ford pickup parked outside.\u00a0 The sign outside touted \u201cGood Food\u201d and the store delivered on its promise.<\/p>\n

But it was a fake.<\/p>\n

Yes, there had been a general store there back in the late 1800\u2019s but it had been closed for years when John Werner and Carrie Brown bought it in 1989.\u00a0 They refurbished the place, but not too much, to retain the feel of what it had been.\u00a0 They were not starry-eyed beginners but experienced entrepreneurs in the gourmet food trade.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

That told the story of what Sonoma County was becoming in the 1990s and into this century.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Werner and Brown could see what was coming and filled their store with fancy foodstuffs and gourmet sandwiches.\u00a0 Now we like fancy foodstuffs and we always enjoyed the gourmet sandwiches but we knew quite well that this wasn\u2019t what the farmhands were eating.<\/p>\n

Jimtown Store wasn\u2019t an ol\u2019 time general store any more than Jordan Winery<\/a>\u00a0is an English manor or Ledson Winery\u00a0is a haunted castle.\u00a0 But all of them were built on the proposition that pretense plus wine equals tourist dollars.<\/p>\n

As indicative of Sonoma County as was the Jimtown Store, so was the cause of the store\u2019s closure: wildfire and its effect on tourism.\u00a0 The recent Kincaid fire came awfully close and it frightened away many wine tasters during the high tourism season.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Again, we want to emphasize that we are among the tourists who in the past have added to Sonoma county\u2019s economy.\u00a0 We won\u2019t be going this year because of the pandemic and many wineries have only limited openings anyway for the same reason.<\/p>\n

The Jimtown Store wasn\u2019t just good food; it was fun<\/em>.\u00a0 And Sonoma County isn\u2019t just good wine, either.\u00a0 The pleasures of going wine tasting are being forced to change, but we who love to do it must always preserve the fun.<\/p>\n

Farewell, Jimtown Store.\u00a0 We eagerly await the next chapter of visiting Wine Country, Sonoma County very much included.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Jimtown Store had permanently closed at the end of 2019, so this is not late breaking news.\u00a0 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. … Continue reading Jimtown Store, Farewell<\/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\/1644"}],"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=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2435,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions\/2435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}