Low Price A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma

This is a story about so-called latte towns, slow food, and trophy houses.

It's also about chickens.

The birds used to roam free throughout the Sonoma, Calif. town plaza (don't you dare call it a town square). Then some kid got attacked by a wild chicken.

People got mad.

One headline screamed: "Rustic reminder or taloned terror?''

The townspeople banned the chickens, but a grassroots movement successfully lobbied to bring them back. It's what people do in Napa and Sonoma. They fight.

They fight over everything. From chickens in the square to housing developments to luxury hotels.

Wine snobs take note: you don't know anything about California's wine country. Aside from the haute first impression, it has southern mores deeper than a magnolia tree.

In the 1970s-era Sonoma, if you shot a deer on your property, you ate it, the book notes. (Although, today, you get arrested.)

Napa, the book says, is a "classic Southern redneck town."

If you're black in Sonoma or Napa, you get pulled over by the cops, a woman tells the author.

"People don't want to talk about it," someone tells the author. "One of these days, Oprah will get pulled over. Then things will change."

The book depicts Sonoma as a town in transition. In danger of becoming Napa. Meaning: more neon, transplants, and trophy houses.

It essentially boils down to this passage: "A big percentage of the local people have never left this valley. That's it, they've never gone anywhere else. They haven't flown anywhere. They've lived here their whole lives and they remember the whole history of things that have changed: when the dirt roads were paved, and when the first car dealership came in. They're very resentful about change."


Both of these towns are interesting. But the author falls short of telling the real story. He seems too obsessed with winning affection. (The author writes passionately about being treated as an outsider after he left to live in the city. He was distraught, which makes me wonder what he left out of the book.)

I read the book with interest. (Local political battles are interesting because they are much more personal.) But many town's across the country fight these same battles. With the same passions. (Or, so I've observed.)

The book leaves an empty feeling. It could have told secrets and exposed a more complete reality. Readers are left with a civics lesson about local government, and the feeling that California's wine country really isn't all that different than any small town in Kansas (aside from the wine and the chickens).

About the chickens.

There was another "incident." The taloned terrors are banned for good. Get more detail about A Tale of Two Valleys: Wine, Wealth and the Battle for the Good Life in Napa and Sonoma.