Touring wine country sober is like hitting the beach in a tuxedo. It feels like you came to the wrong place. I should know. I’m on an epic road trip through Sonoma and Napa Counties, which collectively boast more than 800 wineries. At every turn of this charming region that spans more than 2,500 square miles, I spot a sign for a tasting room. Rolling lush vineyards embrace winding roads. Boutiques peddle shirts and tea towels that read, “I make pour decisions” and “No wine left behind.” My lions and tigers and bears are pinots and merlots and cabs. I haven’t had a drink in almost two years.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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Why would a former problem drinker with a penchant for red wine spend three days cruising a countryside designed to get you buzzed? For starters, I want to return to the scene of my boozed-up bad behavior and make amends. During past visits to wine country, I have puked in a hot-air balloon high above Napa, grabbed a glass of zin out of a newlywed’s hand at a winery in St. Helena, thrown a mushroom pizza at my husband, and passed out in an Uber or two. Call it a road trip of shame. Incidentally, we ate that pile of pizza after I apologized. If only I could say “I’m so sorry” to the couple from New Jersey who went up, up, and away with me.
Beyond the colossal mea culpa, I’m also here to (metaphorically) drink in this majestic region without a hangover. I didn’t even pack Advil last night as I prepped from my home in Los Angeles. Rather than drive the seven hours to Sonoma on my own and arrive haggard, I hopped on a quick flight to the unbelievably compact and cute Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa. TSA agents whistle while they work here. The rental car agent handed me a key fob with a smile and asked, “I’m wondering how soon until you have a glass of wine in your hand?” I didn’t kill the mood by saying “If I’m lucky, never” before I set out for my hotel in downtown Sonoma, about 30 miles away.
One of the worst reckonings of quitting drinking is the fear that you won’t have fun anymore—socializing sober should be an Olympic sport. Our culture orbits around alcohol. We do business over cocktails, meet our friends at local bars, and celebrate life wins with champagne. Wine country revolves around this mindset and banks on it. (California is the fourth-largest wine producer in the world and makes over 80 percent of all domestic wines.) When I check into my room at the historic and hip El Dorado Hotel, built on the town plaza in 1843, a split of Gloria Ferrer brut awaits me. Three years ago, I would have popped that cork before I unpacked. This time, I stare the bottle down like a bad ex-boyfriend.
Things have changed since my last visit here, just before COVID. Wineries are up against damning statistics and downward sales: In 2023, the World Health Organization warned that any alcohol consumption was bad for you. This past January, before the new administration took over the White House, the U.S. surgeon general linked alcohol to cancer as its third leading cause, in fact. And it’s not just middle-aged folks like me who are facing down their mortality and reconsidering their relationship with drinking. In a 2024 Nielsen survey, 45 percent of Gen Zers older than 21 said they did not consume any alcohol in 2023. Maybe meditation (and/or weed consumption) has replaced inebriation for younger demos. In any case, stats like that present a looming existential threat to this region: Wine sales dipped 8 percent in 2024.
My road trip itinerary over the next 72 hours won’t help the flagging industry. I plan to fully explore the dry side of wine country. That may sound like a mighty challenge, but it’s liberating. Why? Most of the better tasting rooms call for reservations. In my experience, you sip, savor, spend money, and then speed off to the next winery appointment. It can be a mileage marathon, too. Some vineyards are dotted along main roads, while others are perched atop remote hills avoided by Uber drivers. Luckily, I won’t need one this time around. Let’s go.
DAY ONE: ZIG, ZAG
The Call of the Wild author, sailor, and socialist Jack London settled in Glen Ellen—a hamlet about 10 miles from downtown Sonoma—in 1905 and named his lush estate Beauty Ranch. It’s now the Jack London State Historic Park, replete with redwoods, meadows, and vineyards. Like me, London wrestled with responsible drinking. He wrote John Barleycorn, a semiautobiographical account of his alcoholic exploits, in 1913. On my first morning, I take the paperback with me as I head to the park to hike trails and explore his former cottage and the ruins of his manor, Wolf House. Along the leafy drive, I pop into Les Pascals patisserie for provisions: a bracing French roast coffee, an almond croissant studded with nuts, and a fresh baguette. The café owners, a married French couple named Pascal and Pascale, are always on hand and attract a line of locals who unabashedly shout “Bonjour!” and “Merci!”
“Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries,” I read aloud from John Barleycorn when I stop at an overlook two hours into my hike. I look out on acres of orchard trees, growing in neat rows like soldiers. To reach the vista of Sonoma Mountain that London writes about, I would need to hike another two hours. No way. I’ve got a measly inch of baguette left. Besides, this is a road trip.
So I hop into my Nissan sedan and head to the late culinary luminary M.F.K. Fisher’s modest ranch house, which sits on a hill about 10 minutes from London’s cottage. She entertained the likes of Julia Child and Maya Angelou here. She also once wrote, “Wine is life.” I wonder what Fisher would think of zero-proof wine as I move along to drive 20 miles southeast on picturesque Highway 12 to the only winery I plan to visit. And for the record, I don’t map out my itinerary on solo road trips. I zig. I zag. The same could be said for my nonlinear approach to life: I have pivoted countless times in my career and had my only daughter, Tess, at the ripe and reproductively challenged age of 42.
Bouchaine Vineyards is one of the oldest wineries around, dating to the 1880s—it bottled its first-ever nonalcoholic wine, a dry rosé from pinot noir grapes, late last year. The drive to the ultramodern tasting room, on a high peak in the Carneros Valley, is breathtakingly beautiful. I count 17 red-tailed hawks en route. When I settle down with a sip of the sunset-pink pour, the friendly bartender explains the process of distilling to extract alcohol from the wine after it’s been blended. “A lot of nonalcoholic wines are made from unfermented grapes, so they just taste like juice. This is real wine,” she tells me. It took me 40 years to definitively extract alcohol from my own life. I toast my sobriety with two delicious glasses.
DAY TWO: ZERO PROOF
Laid-back Sonoma and luxe Napa are like sisters separated at birth: One grew up on a working farm and has the rough hands to prove it; the other never misses a manicure. I like both vibes, so I toggled between the valleys yesterday and continue to do so throughout my road trip. My day begins with a decision to forgo highways for the Silverado Trail, a serpentine route carved in 1852 to transport cinnabar and, later, mined silver to trade posts. It will lengthen my trip to St. Helena by 30 minutes, but it’s worth it: I whiz by stately oaks, rustling pine trees, and cheeky gold smatterings of wild mustard that vintners plant to fortify the soil with nutrients during spring.
You could easily miss the Napa Valley Olive Oil Manufacturing Company, tucked away in a whitewashed barn on a dead end. Don’t. This cluttered Italian market stocks every delicacy that ends in a vowel, from prosciutto to pesto to pecorino to a family-blend EVOO that it started cold-pressing in the back in 1931. (The market also sells plummy nonalcoholic Missing Thorn red wine.) Matriarch Narcisa Lucchesi rips hunks off a fresh loaf of bread so I can sop up oils infused with Persian lime, harissa, and orange. She’s more gruff than grandmotherly. I leave with olive oils to pack for L.A. and snacks—including a half-pound slice of imported Sicilian nougat candy known as torrone—for a midnight binge. “You’re going to eat that candy first,” Lucchesi accurately predicts with a half smile as I walk out.
After a leisurely walk down St. Helena’s Hallmark movie–worthy main street, I zip over to farm-to-picnic-table eatery Gott’s Roadside for a California Burger, dressed with a locally sourced fried egg, Cowgirl Creamery cheese, bacon, balsamic onions, and arugula. Then it’s back on the Silverado Trail for 20 miles to check out the beer garden Napa Yard. Located in downtown Napa, it’s the first stop on wine exec Devin Joshua’s knowledgeable and witty three-hour Zero Proof Tour, for folks like me who are eager to bypass wineries for spots that offer nonalcoholic beers and cocktails. “It’s like a pub crawl without the regrets or the hangover,” he tells me with a laugh. (Airbnb, seeing the uptick in abstainers, just partnered with Joshua to offer travelers a sober experience in Napa.)
Craving some culture and a chance to stretch my legs, I drive to the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art to saunter through its outdoor sculpture meadow and galleries. There are more than 1,600 offbeat pieces by Northern California artists, ranging from a wacky vintage Oldsmobile decorated with toy guns, doll parts, billiard balls, and a giant rhino head to a 30-foot-tall red sculpture called For Veronica, by Mark di Suvero. Flanked by serious vineyards, this droll museum seemingly winks at the pretensions of both the art world and viniculture.
DAY THREE: BARS WITHOUT BOOZE
Most people associate wine country wellness with the gurgling hot springs and mud baths of Calistoga. But April Gargiulo, a Napa winemaker turned founder of the skin-care line Vintner’s Daughter, insists otherwise: “Oh my God, you have to try a cedar enzyme bath. People gatekeep this place.” So, on my final day of the trip, I drive toward the coast for an hour to try a Japanese treatment offered in only two places in North America, one of which is the rustic Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary, in Freestone, a town of 32 people. On my way, I pass just a single vehicle—a red pickup truck—along the remote roads and the scenic Bohemian Highway. Cows curiously watch me go by.
Nothing prepares me for being buried naked in a tub filled with 600 steaming gallons of finely ground cedar, Douglas fir, and rice bran. It’s primal. I even howl like one of London’s sled dogs. Twenty minutes later, I am dug out feeling mentally soothed and nimbler in my middle-aged joints. I shower and stroll the spa’s meditation garden before crossing the street to Wild Flour Bread. This ramshackle bakery specializes in wood-fired sweet and savory loaves that sell out by noon. I nab an aged gouda, onion, and herb flatbread and a pear, walnut, and chocolate chip scone. Time to sample a few elixirs at the nonalcoholic bottle shop and sober social club Better Sunday, at the Barlow in Sebastopol. The crowd here is much younger than the affluent boomers I see walking into winery tasting rooms and swank Michelin-star restaurants. “It’s a bar without booze, which means you won’t go home with anyone,” I overhear a millennial say to her friends. I buy a chilled St. Agrestis Phony Negroni for the road.
When it’s time to check out of the El Dorado in the afternoon, I’m faced with the challenge of swaddling three bottles of olive oil and one bottle of nonalcoholic rosé into a carry-on I will have to check as baggage. Before returning my boring Nissan, I make one final stop in upscale Healdsburg to traverse the “mocktail trail,” the tourism board’s nod to nondrinkers in partnership with local restaurants. I flit from bohemian plant-based Little Saint, where I sample a concoction of pomegranate tonic and fresh lemon balm, to the bar at Goodnight’s Prime Steak and Spirits to taste an elixir made with Gravenstein apple juice and ginger scrub. Both impress me enough to say “Cheers!” A few blocks away, at a new honey-and-mead tasting room called La Ruche (or “the hive” in French), I vow to spend just a sec but stay for 20 minutes. The chatty founder, Nicole White, opened this chic jewel box of a boutique to turn people on to varietals infused with ginger, lemon, and even rich, complex chestnut. “People who want a break from drinking wine all day come in to do a tasting,” she tells me. “You’re never going to wake up and think, ‘I ate too much honey last night.’ ”
She’s right. I woke up this morning feeling alive and grateful—even giddy. But as I drive to the airport, I reflect on regret. Specifically, the regret I still carry for not quitting drinking sooner. How did hundreds of hangovers hold me back in life? It’s time to drive away from decades of accumulated guilt. Screw shame. I can leave it in the distance. This has been a road trip to redemption.•
Monica Corcoran Harel is a screenwriter with a media platform for women over 40 called Pretty Ripe and loves being middle-aged.
