Raise a glass to the changing times
Editor: I’m sipping Sonoma wine, on a warm, sunny day while my 1/4-acre backyard vineyard exhibits budbreak.
A young couple visiting from Austin, Texas, tastes wine at Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat), 2025
I’m also pondering the bleak fate of Sonoma’s wine industry.
What metaphor best describes the situation? This wasn’t a Black Swan event. No unexpected, stop-winebibbers asteroid hitting Sonoma.
Generation Z was consuming less wine; there was an oversupply of grapes with bottled wine and viticulture land prices in Sonoma were rising for the last several years.
More probable is a butterfly effect or chain reaction. For example, Trump’s election, then his crippling export tariffs, with debilitating immigration policy affecting farm labor, and a public sense of an inflationary economy all promoting a wine industry collapse.
If we put several butterfly effects together, we get a perfect storm.
The perfect storm hitting Sonoma vintners is an admixture: High Prices for wine and tasting room sampling, Generation Z drinking less and preferring cannabis and beer as competition to wine, climate stress (fire and drought), oversupply of grapes and wine production, Trump’s enervating tariffs and immigration policies and now an undeclared Iranian war with its debilitating inflationary consequences.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. (The times change, and we change with them.)
Thus, drink Sonoma wine and “vote the bums out!”
— Michael Heiman, Sonoma
Sonoma County shouldn’t buy railroad property
Editor: If readers are upset by the self-serving behavior of the Trump administration, ICE raids and unauthorized wars, they should realize that Donald Trump only understands money. That is why the residents of Sonoma County have a unique opportunity to put our money where our collective mouth is.
The Board of Supervisors should terminate the $2.7 million 20-acre purchase of abandoned railroad property in Sonoma from Union Pacific Railroad for a future bike path. Union Pacific is a major donor to the White House ballroom project, perhaps because Union Pacific needs federal approval for a merger with Norfolk and Southern Railroad.
Sonoma County’s railroad purchase, which has been delayed in escrow for three years, is unnecessary because there is a more cost-effective alternative bike route supported by businesses, cyclists and residents alike.
Contact your county supervisor and encourage them that their actions will speak louder than words.
— Philip Sales, Sonoma