Sonoma Valley Vineyards

Unwilling to pull one more platter of macerated turkey, one more ziplock container of mashed potatoes or broccoli salad out of the fridge, I convinced OilMan that we should take a field trip to Cornerstone...a rather odd conglomeration of shops, tasting rooms, restaurants and the Sunset (The Magazine of Western Living) gardens. We didn't count on the ice skating rink or the circus, so it was heaving with people and excited kids, but we had a nice lunch...duck confit and unoaked chardonnay for me, grilled cheese sandwich and a beer for OilMan.

Even I am not terribly enamored of French Shabby Chic,  appearing to my uneducated eye to be  tables which have been sitting outdoors in the rain for decades and sport a patina of combined rust and peeling paint, or of Nomad fashion, mostly scarves and shoes with cunningly woven soles of seagrass. Expecting OilMan to enter any of these shops would be asking for trouble, so I left him to watch the skaters while I took a quick turn through the hand made soaps, sculptures made from old spoons, and astronomically pricey table linens.

One shop intrigues me. Much of the merchandise...furniture, vases, garden pots dried branches and unidentifiable yet interesting seed pods, is made from salvaged materials. I was quite taken with a pot/vase/urn made of recycled bicycle tires, or was it inner tubes? I spoke with a woman who lost her home in Fountaingrove and explained this to OilMan who , not known for his patience had decamped and wanted to know what had taken me so long. "She's living in the Hyatt Hotel", I said. "Then what on earth was she buying in there", he wanted to know. I couldn't answer that....

The drive through the Sonoma valley is always beautiful. Even now with its fire scarred hills and charred trees, the vineyards are mostly unscathed and at the peak of their fall color, and I risked yet another picture of vineyard covered hills.