Comstock's magazine 0919 - September 2019 | Page 89

special supplement
Customers sit at the bar of D’Artagnan
Vineyards’ tasting room in Historic Folsom,
which opened in 2014. Three other tasting
rooms have opened there since, and a fifth is
coming soon.
F
olsom is taking wine seriously. In Au-
gust 2018, the city released its gen-
eral plan for 2035, which includes
the imperative: “Brand Folsom as the ‘Gate-
way to the Foothills Wine Region.’” Drive
through town and the surrounding area, and
the aspired designation makes sense.
Past historic downtown, a half-mile strip
of gold-rush relics, the rolling foothills of the
Sierra Nevada open up like the pages of a
book. Nearly every valley for miles seems to
house a winery. In El Dorado County, there’s
D’Artagnan Vineyards and Due Ragazze
Vineyards, both frequent honorees in the
San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.
Amador County has more than 40, and the
grape vines continue to climb up the rugged
terrain surrounding Tahoe National Forest.
A handful of those hill-hidden vineyards
have chosen to open tasting rooms on Fol-
som’s Sutter Street, where a wine scene has
been fomenting for years. There will soon
be a new addition when Oregon-based
Willamette Valley Vineyards moves into a
spot in the Roundhouse building in October.
With securing the big-name tenant and the
city’s marketing push, Folsom is positioning
itself to become a regional wine destination.
“There’s a certain synergy as you get
more and more tasting rooms in,” says Bob
Reitz, who owns the 12-year-old winery
D’Artagnan Vineyards with wife Bonnie.
When the couple opened shop in a barn-
red storefront on Sutter Street in 2014,
there were no other tasting rooms in His-
toric Folsom. Today, there are four packed
into two storefronts on Sutter Street, with
D’Artagnan Vineyards, Due Ragazze Vine-
yards, Rempfer Cellars and Merlo Family
Vineyards. Tastings start at around $10-
$15.
The Reitzes have embraced their status
as tasting-room pioneers. They encourage
other foothill winemakers to open spaces in
Folsom, like the Western settler promoters
of the city’s gold-rush glory days. “I don’t
see it as competition at all,” Reitz says.
“People just love to walk from one tasting
room to another to sample new wines, so
the more (that) come in, the better.”
One of Reitz’s successful converts is Jeff
Bauman of Due Ragazze Vineyards, D’Art-
agnan’s neighbor in both El Dorado County
and its Folsom store. Bauman agrees that
Folsom’s tasting rooms help all of the wine-
makers involved, and he adds that Historic
Folsom’s other businesses benefit from the
extra traffic. When tasters get hungry, they
visit one of the district’s restaurants, some-
times for takeout they bring for an indoor
picnic at the cedar tables D’Artagnan and
Due Ragazze share. “We’re interested in
selling wine, not food,” Bauman says.
Folsom’s tasting rooms, restaurants
and other businesses regularly team up
to stage events that benefit everyone in-
volved, like the annual Sutter Street Sip
and Stroll, a wine-focused block party that
involves more than 20 venues. Earlier this
year, business owners helped organize a
months-long calendar of parties and pro-
motions leading up to the centennial of
Rainbow Bridge on Feb. 10. For the finale on
May 4, the bridge became a 500-foot-long
tasting room, where guests sampled wine
and small plates from local businesses as
the sun set.
It’s this collaborative spirit that helped
win over Folsom’s newest tasting-room
tenant, says Christine Clair, Willamette Val-
ley Vineyards winery director. “We became
attracted to Folsom because it’s a very
tight-knit community,” she says. “There’s
an amazing amount of public service and
citizen leaders that are trying to create a
family-friendly great place to be.” The win-
ery’s founder, Jim Bernau, has close connec-
tions to that community; his brother, Jerry
Bernau, is the developer of the Roundhouse
building in the Historic Folsom Station.
Clair says Willamette Valley Vineyards’
space will be the most elaborate tasting
room in Folsom, with multiple daily flight
options, food pairings and a “barrel blend-
ing experience” that lets customers create
their own customized bottles. Clair de-
scribes the mood of the space as a whimsi-
cal “steampunk-wine-country casual,” with
enough gears and levers to build a Victorian
automaton.
Despite the novel aesthetic, Willamette
Valley’s goal is to be “a local feature, a local
company and a big part of the community,”
Clair says. To that end, it’s making wines
from local grapes for the Folsom location
under the name Natoma — a callout to
Natoma Vineyard, which was the largest in
the world when it was planted near Folsom
in the 1880s.
Far from fearing the out-of-state com-
petition, Folsom’s small family of winery
tasting rooms is looking forward to wel-
coming its newest member. “We’re going to
join in with them and see what we can do
to promote the area more,” says Reitz. He
envisions an explosion of tasting rooms in
Folsom — up to 15 along Sutter Street alone
— with a winery association to bring them
all together.
“They say we’re what Napa used to be
20 years ago,” he says. “People are realiz-
ing there’s high-quality wines here in Fol-
som.” n
Jennifer Fergesen is a freelance writer who
covers food and the stories behind it. Born
in New Jersey, she has written for publica-
tions around the world, including in Iceland
and the United Kingdom. Read more at
jcfrgsn.journoportfolio.com.
September 2019 | comstocksmag.com
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