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FOPPIANO WINERY SOLD TO GRATON’S MARTIN RAY
Healdsburg, California Healdsburg, California
July 18, 2024 Date, Date, 20202020
126-YEAR-OLD HEALDSBURG LANDMARK WILL REMAIN IN PLACE, BUT OWNERSHIP TRANSFERS By Christian Kallen
➝ Winery, 3
Photo by Roy Doyle
Martin Ray is the resurrection of a venerable name from wine history, and the same thing could happen to Foppiano. Only Foppiano never really went away. The big warehouse by the side of Old Redwood Highway, Foppiano Vineyards, is almost invisibly familiar to locals, though a random stream of tourists is happy to find out about its petite sirah, chardonnay and pinot noir. But dig a little deeper and its story is as entangled with Healdsburg’s history as that of almost any other winery, and that’s saying something. It is almost certainly the oldest winery in this part of Sonoma County still in production (barring Sonoma Valley wineries) and the name has been synonymous with Healdsburg wine for over 100 years. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s history. It was founded in 1896, when Giovanni Foppiano purchased the Riverside Ranch. Even then it was a grape-growing farm, back when reds were “burgundy” and whites were “sauterne,” with very little deeper knowledge of varietals, clones or even vintages. It more than doubled in size 20 years later when Foppiano bought the Sotoyome Vineyards, located just south of the original ranch. CMB Wines, best known for its Martin Ray label—another historic name rescued from oblivion by Courtney Benham—purchased the Foppiano ranch, label and vineyards, now 140 acres of prime Russian River
MUSCLE MAN During the last few years blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite added guitar to his musical arsenal. He will play with guitarist Elvin Bishop on July 20, and they may play some guitar duos.
Musselwhite: ‘And I ain’t lyin’!’ HOW CHARLIE MUSSELWHITE GOT TWO THUMBS UP FROM MARTIN SCORSESE By Christian Kallen
Charlie Musselwhite, who is coming to the Luther Burbank Center this Saturday as part of a blues program with Elvin Bishop and Taj Mahal, used to live in Geyserville. That much is well known locally, though while he wasn’t exactly a hermit he didn’t play the part of a local celebrity, either. He did have an hour-long blues program on KRSH-FM on Sundays, its purported location being the back porch of a house in Clarksdale, Mississippi, overlooking the Sunflower River. It turns out that everything he said was all true— or, in Charlie’s phrase, “And I ain’t lyin’!” Though they had owned the Clarksdale house for some years, only since
2021 have he and his wife Henrietta lived full-time in Clarksdale, giving up their Sonoma County home for their Southern roots. Musselwhite, born in Mississippi in a small town called Kosciusko, grew up in Memphis (when he later moved to Chicago, he became known as Memphis Charlie). He was one of the first generation of white Chicago blues musicians who helped bring Black urban blues to national attention. At the time, though, it was the Black musicians doing the favor to the white kids by giving them a break on stage, not the other way around. Since his first album in 1967, Stand Back! Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite (Vanguard, 1967) to his most recent, 2022’s Mississippi Son (Alligator, 2022), the lanky Southerner with the lazy drawl has probably played to almost as many blues fans in the world as anybody, yet he remains easygoing and as down home as they get. So
naturally we asked him if he missed Sonoma County. Charlie Musselwhite: Oh, sure. We love Sonoma County and it was real good to us, and we have a lot of really good friends there. And the food and just how it looks with the hills and mountains, it’s a beautiful place. One of the most beautiful parts of the world. So yeah, we love it and miss it, and it has a special place in our hearts.
used to be a winery there, but now it’s a little bar and grill and they have sandwiches, and it’s really a good place. Mmm. It’s just down the street from Diavola. But El Taco Grand is kinda like old Healdsburg, and I like it there too. The carne en su jugo was killer. What about in Clarksdale? Have you found any good restaurants there? Sure, the Rest Haven. It’s been there since the ’40s; it’s owned by a Lebanese family. So half the menu is like down-home Lebanese food, the other half is down-home Delta food.
What are you going to do when you come back this week? I’ll see some friends, and I’m gonna go see my acupuncturist up in Cloverdale. You know, just enjoy as much as I can, mostly staying with friends and enjoying some meals, and I think that’s about it.
You’re playing with Elvin Bishop this weekend. You both go way back—when did you first play with Elvin? Neither one of us remember! You know, we used to do these package shows where we’d all be on a bus and it’d be a lot of acts and we would play performing arts centers … There’d be one rhythm section that backed everybody up. And
Did you have any favorite restaurants here? Oh, yeah, sure. There’s a lot of them. There’s Agave and El Taco Grande in Healdsburg, and Diavola and Project 128 [in Geyserville]. It’s a small place. It
‘YOGA ON CENTER’ MOVES BACK TO TOWN HOMECOMING FOR YOGA STUDIO FORCED OFF CENTER STREET By Simone Wilson Photo courtesy of Yoga on Center
YOGA ON WESTSIDE Katina Knapp, left, and Jenn Russo, right, have hosted yoga
and dance classes at the Felta School on Westside Road since losing their downtown space at the end of 2021.
Healdsburg’s only fulltime yoga studio, the nearly 20-year-old Yoga on Center, is moving back to the downtown area this summer—two-and-a-half years after the owners say they got kicked out of their original location at 401 Center St.
we would play solo and together and trios and all. In one of those, a couple of those, I think, it was the first time that I recall that Elvin and I would go out on stage and play a few numbers, just the two of us. And it went over so well, and we enjoyed doing it so well, and it was so easy because we both know all the same tunes and know that style so well. It’s like falling off a log, it’s so easy to play together. So we decided to do more of that, and it just really caught on. At one point we decided, well, we should have an album for sale out there in the lobby when people are going home. So we recorded 100 Years of the Blues (Alligator, 2020) and that got really great reviews and got nominated for a G r a m m y a n d s t u ff like that. It created this whole momentum, and it’s still rolling. ➝ Charlie Musselwhite, 6
It was a light-filled space overlooking one of Healdsburg’s most bustling streets, and owners Jenn Russo and Katina Knapp were devastated when they lost it. “We have been trying to find a space in town ever since,” Russo says. “We are thrilled to be moving to Mill Street.” In early August, they plan to reopen their yoga studio at 44C Mill St. in the Mill Street shopping center—the same space where the Top Cheer Elite gym used to live, right next to the Speed of Sound music shop and across from the Elephant in the Room pub. (TCElite recently moved into a “much bigger space on the back side of the building,” in the 44B unit, according to Russo.) Yoga on Center’s new space is “basically a big, open rectangle, which is ➝ Yoga, 6