I was on vacation last week and managed to not check email, Slack or my work-related social media channels — not even once. I left my cell phone off for long stretches of time. It felt amazing, until I forced myself back into reality and realized I’d missed what felt like 10 news cycles’ worth of changes in California’s reopening plans.
Who can keep track of this stuff? (The Chronicle’s handy-dandy Reopening Tracker, that’s who.) Within the last week, Napa County rolled back the reopening of indoor tasting rooms and restaurants, and closed bars altogether. Sonoma County followed with similar plans.
Then, just when I was starting to parse apart the different regulations in various Bay Area counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom made things simpler to understand: He announced on Monday that all wineries and restaurants (plus movie theaters, museums and other businesses) throughout the state would have to close for indoor visitation. Bars would have to cease all operations.
The reversals have left many vintners frustrated, and I wrote about some of their reactions in this story that ran in Wednesday’s paper. Stephanie Honig of Honig Winery maintained that wineries don’t deserve to be punished for the rise in Napa County’s COVID-19 cases. Other vintners worried about the effect of visitors tasting wine — and employees working long hours — in the summer heat, now that wineries will have to hold all their tastings outdoors.
“Outside tasting is NOT a viable option for tasting fine wine,” winemaker Bill Easton wrote to me in an email from Amador County, where temperatures had neared 100 degrees in the past few days. Meanwhile, Comstock Wines general manager Kelly Comstock Ferris said that she’d moved her tastings to a shaded area of the Healdsburg property and had installed misters, to keep people refreshed.
And what did Newsom’s decree mean for Bay Area bars? That was a little harder to pin down, and even the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control didn’t immediately know how to interpret Newsom’s order. By Tuesday afternoon, we had clarity: Bars that can serve food outdoors can remain open, which essentially means they fall under the same rules as restaurants. For most bars in the Bay Area, this new order doesn’t actually represent much of a change, since bars that don’t serve food hadn’t been allowed to reopen anyway.
I checked in with Laura Sanfilippo, one of the owners of Duke’s Spirited Cocktails, an excellent cocktail bar in Sonoma County. Since Duke’s serves food, it has been open for takeout, including takeout cocktails, since March. Then it reopened for dine-in service on June 8 — after rearranging all the furniture to keep everyone nice and distant.
But as of Monday, Duke’s can no longer seat people inside, which means it’s back to takeout only, since the bar doesn’t have any outdoor space. Luckily, the takeout prospects look promising: Healdsburg has eased restrictions to allow the consumption of alcohol in the downtown plaza, right where Duke’s is located. It’s hard to imagine a better product to offer in that setting than a canned cucumber cooler or a peach-yuzu spritz.
Are you exhausted yet? The reversals in our reopening plans, though certainly not unique to California, can feel crushing. Business owners have to reimagine their operations with very little advance notice — and employees of those businesses have it harder still, unable to count on remaining employed from one week to the next.
But worst of all is confronting the dreadful reality that we’re moving backwards. That we’ve been premature in declaring some of our incremental victories against the coronavirus. It’s easy to feel like the last several months of mask wearing and quarantining were all for naught, even if deep down we know they weren’t.
Where do we go from here? Who knows. Your move, California.
What I’m drinking
Speaking of employees who don’t know whether they’ll have a job next week: I spoke with a few Bay Area bartenders to see how they’ve been coping with quarantine. Their answers were surprising — some of them have found unexpected pleasures in staying home (and all reported that they’re drinking less than usual). Of course, I couldn’t resist the chance to ask them for some cocktail recipes, too. I hope you’ll read the story.
What I’m reading
• In Wine Country, farmworkers have experienced an alarming rise in coronavirus cases. My colleague Danielle Echeverria looks into the issue and how grapegrowers are responding to it as harvest approaches.
• Victoria James chats with San Francisco’s own Tonya Pitts, wine director of One Market restaurant, about her career and how she’s fared during the coronavirus shutdown. (I’m envious of all the Champagne she has been drinking!)
• The Chronicle’s Justin Phillips shares a disturbing experience: During a recent trip to Sonoma County for dinner, he was called the n-word. He writes about what that incident exposes about the Bay Area’s relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement.
• Matt Kettmann — one of our fabulous Chronicle wine contributors — has a new book on the way, “Vines and Vision,” that promises to be the definitive work on Santa Barbara County wine. I’m excited to read it!
Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob
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July 17, 2020 at 12:13AM
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A game of red light, green light for California wineries - San Francisco Chronicle
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