Michael McCarthy

Jordan Winery, Sonoma County, Calif.

The Good Earth: Sonoma Wine Tours

Grape grower Cam Mauritson looks at my handiwork and grins. “Keep at it. You’re doing fine,” he says with a laugh. He’s being nice and definitely stretching the truth. It’s 8 a.m. on a chilly morning in the Dry Creek Valley of Sonoma County, Calif., and I squat beside vines pregnant with dime-sized Chardonnay grapes, bunched together like rush-hour passengers on Metro’s Red line. I hold sharp clippers on my gloved hand, snipping far too slowly.

It’s harvest time, the high season of grape holiness, when growers and winemakers become obsessed with daytime and nighttime temperatures, the sugar content of grapes and the best hours to bring in the harvest. Laborers work the next row over from me. Some have already been at this since dark. They glide in a blur from one vine to the next, cutting clumps of grapes and dropping them in large bins.

I pick Chardonnay grapes as part of Grape Camp (sonomawinegrape.org; $1,850 per person, including all meals and upscale accommodations—during my camp experience, we stayed at the Kenwood Inn & Spa), a three-day immersion in all things wine and food in Sonoma County. It’s a brilliant concept that’s entering its sixth year in 2012 (hint: register early).

The county is much larger than Napa, with more than a million acres, 350 wineries and 13 growing regions stretching from the Pacific to Knights Valley.

My time snatching grapes is limited to an hour, as we’re hustled to Mauritson’s processing facility to watch the grapes we just picked get squeezed by drums the size of a compact car. The juice is drawn through a hose to settle for 24 hours before it’s transferred to another tank, inoculated and popped with yeast for cold fermentation.

For reds like Pinot noir, the process is more traditional. The grapes ride the long arm of a sorter as workers search for MOG (material other than grapes), yank the rotten detritus and move the contents to a tank for crushing with skins intact to provide those rich red hues.

For 30 minutes, campers work alongside the winery’s staff. We pull MOG, taste two-day-old Pinto (the sweetest fruit juice you’ll ever gulp), and punch and stir red grapes in fragrant vats.

But Grape Camp isn’t hard labor for the sake of making a fine Sauvignon Blanc to accompany your scallops. In fact, while field education is an adored element of the event, cornerstone learning comes from talking to vineyard owners during intimate dinners, walking through tasting rooms with winemakers and even going to cooking school to learn how best to pair food with the 50-buck bottle of Merlot you landed for your birthday.

“Wine is an experience, not a drink,” says Donna Urlaub, who, along with her friend Kathleen Grove, attends Grape Camp for the first time. “We’ve been out here before to experience wineries and tasting rooms, but we wanted to learn even more. The Camp is a blast. Sonoma is so down to earth. They are real farmers, real people. Sonoma feels like the Midwest of wine country,” Urlaub continues.

The women talk about their affection for wine as we ride a tour bus to the Russian River Valley and our first wine dinner hosted by Williams Selyem Winery. “Now that I’ve come out here, I’m more discriminating about wine, and I appreciate it more,” says Grove. “I’ll remember a conversation I had in a tasting room and want to drink those wines again and again.”

Donna del Rey is so passionate about food-and-wine pairing that she drives an old truck to vineyards, opens the back and conducts impromptu cooking classes. Del Rey ditched the corporate world a few years ago and opened her culinary education business, Relish (relishculinary.com). In addition to her wheels, she launched an instructional kitchen in Healdsburg, a village rich with bistros, galleries and wine-tasting rooms. It’s a culinary pit stop on the Grape Camp express.

Five competing teams of campers are given a different dish to prepare and match with wine. Flatbread pizzas, gazpacho and tuna tartare are on the menu, and we’re coached by local chefs for two hours.

We end the day at MacMurray Ranch, home of Sonoma Wine Country Weekend (sonomawinecountryweekend.com). Recognize the name? The ranch was owned by the avuncular actor Fred MacMurray, who wanted a place far from Hollywood in the Russian River Valley to fish with pals Clark Gable and Bob Hope. His getaway hasn’t changed a lick, except for the acres of Pinot grapes planted in the late 1990s for a boutique wine. MacMurray’s daughter, Kate, who works for the new owners, the Gallo family, greets us at the ranch gate.

We are schooled in the intricacies of wine blending and actually sit, beakers in hand, to mix and taste varieties. After 30 minutes, I wander outside and walk the ranch. Barrel-chested redwoods frame a barn. A whitewashed chicken house holds cackling birds. Sunflowers perform a slow tango as the late-afternoon sun fades.

MacMurray knew what he was doing by finding sanctuary in this valley. In fact, a soul’s refuge in Sonoma isn’t hard to find. Glass of wine in hand, I wander into the pre-harvest fields, kneel and grab a handful of the warm, good earth.