news story / By Heidi Walters and Helen Sanderson

Trinity Terroir

(May 24, 2007)  At the Winnett family’s winery, east of the Trinity River, tiny green beads of fruit clustered on the young plants in the vineyard. Halfway down one of the grassy aisles between rows of tethered leafy vines, you could stand and stare out across the plunging landscape toward Friday Ridge and imagine the past. Timber country, every inch covered in trees — at some point in time, bigger, older trees. In the foreground, rolling smooth pastureland.

A cricket creaked somewhere nearby, a robin chortled farther off. Back up the hill by the large shed where the wine is stored in pink-stained wood barrels, you could hear the muted voices of the crowd. Twenty-somethings laughed and caught up on the week’s news. Retired buddies filled their glasses, suspended from their necks by homemade wineglass holders. And though One Foot In The Grave, a trio of gray-haired musicians, was playing country standards like “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” the scene buzzed “future.” Or so you might imagine: The Winnetts were pouring tastes from barrels whose contents were still months off from bottling. If you liked the hint of what was yet to come, you could “invest in the future” and reserve some bottles now.

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Last Saturday and Sunday marked the first-ever Willow Creek Barrel Tasting Weekend, something the organizers hope will become an annual thing. Seven Eastern Humboldt and Trinity County vintners were pouring — Dogwood Estates, Sentinel, Winnett, Meredith, Coates, Cabot and Vinatura. Warm and breezy, it was the ideal weekend to toast the start of the summer season — those lucrative months businesses rely on. For the winemakers, who recently formed a Klamath-Trinity Winemakers’ Association, it was the perfect moment to celebrate their efforts to put Willow Creek on the wine country map.

To some, the event seemed like a harbinger of a final transition — from empty-storefront podunk to an appealing country town with boutique wineries, organic produce and some community theater. An escape, in other words, for city people with refined tastes.

“Willow Creek’s really changing,” said Ron Davison, president of the Willow Creek China Flat Museum. “It’s not just Bigfoot and pot growers anymore.”

Marc Rowley, owner of Bigfoot Rafting Company and a former general manager of the Willow Creek Community Services district, outlined the changes coming to the town. “You’ve got two breeds of cats moving in,” he said. “Retirees who want to do some farming and have wineries, and a new generation of young back-to-the-landers.”

Since 2000, 64 percent of Willow Creek’s individual homes are under new ownership, he said. Many are “equity refugees,” snapping up cheap east Humboldt land with cash from the sale of their pricier SoCal homes. Interestingly, Rowley said, the population has maintained a steady growth rate of 1.5 to 3 percent. Only now there are fewer kids at the local elementary school. In the 1960s, Rowley and his wife attended Trinity Elementary with about 420 other kids. Today, the school’s enrollment has dropped to less than 200. And the academically failing Hoopa Valley High has lost many local students, whose parents have applied for permission to send them to Arcata High.

You saw all breeds on the barrel-tasting tour, which went from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and cost $15 for the works — copious wine, heavy duty hors d’oeuvres of grilled meats, cheeses, salmon, breads and fruit, lessons in wine tasting and even a commemorative glass. The three wineries located closest to the center of Willow Creek — Dogwood, Sentinel and Winnett — hosted the other four, some of which are out in Orleans and Hyampom. Only six miles or so separated the three host wineries but for those who still didn’t feel up to driving there were Jeep tours to shuttle the drinkers around.

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