People:
Vivienne Sosnowski

Her Interest in Wine Country Runs Red…But She Likes White Too!

About a year ago I was talking with the folks at the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance concerning some content I was working on for this website--concerning AVA’s.  It was mentioned that I should read a book authored by a local Healdsburg lady that gave some great historic perspective to Sonoma and Napa as a wine growing region.  

Wow, what a read… When The Rivers Ran Red, by Vivienne Sosnowski.  I won’t give you a book review here, but sufficed to say it is loaded with facts and colorful descriptions of wine country characters and ultimately how they survived the 14 years of Prohibition.  These were some real survivors of the original ‘man-made disaster’!

I started tracking down Vivienne; I just wanted to talk to a real authority on a historical moment in Wine Country.  It took me about 3 hours to find her in Healdsburg and then sent her an e-mail and told her I wanted to talk about her book.  Figuring she would assume I was a ‘nut case’, I couched my e-mail was somewhat plaintive and implored her to respond.  I was hoping at worst to communicate by e-mail about the interesting history of Wine Country…my favorite subject.

Not prepared to talk to a warm, humble, smart and very enthusiastic person about Wine Country; we talked for 90 minutes about the little known facts of hardships, the drama endured to keep families together, pay mortgages and take care of neighbors that needed help.  Most of these families were immigrant families that knew the vineyard and wine business intimately.  They never took handouts and truly made something for us to enjoy today.

Some of these names from the 1800’s through Prohibition are staples of the industry today in Napa and Sonoma like Passalacqua, Niebaum/Inglenook, Foppiano, Nicolini, Sebastiani, and many more. “This is one of the wonderful things about Napa and Sonoma – the tradition of wine making that is handed down through families for generations,” says Vivienne. “These two premium wine-growing counties of northern California are full of rich, inspiring history.”

Vivienne wrote the book after she had been working with a friend, Gina Riner, on a photo and essay exhibition of some important wine country pioneers in and around Sonoma County’s town of Healdsburg. The exhibition now hangs permanently in Healdsburg City Hall. Vivienne’s component of the project was taking photographs of ten people, nine of them in their 90s -  one of them was 106 - who had lived and worked in wine country. “As they sat for their photographs, they would talk about their lives, their childhoods, their hardworking parents. And some of them told the most intriguing stories of what had happened to their families and to their wine and vineyards during Prohibition. I was astonished,” she recalled, “I had thought Prohibition so long ago that no-one would be left to tell these tales.”  Vivienne thought these stories should not be lost to time and thought they should be written down and one day she thought, “well, I’m a journalist, I should do it.” That’s how the book began. Countless personal interviews later – along with research in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, historical society and museum files, and many libraries, the book came together.

“I see it as a warm and loving homage to the courageous, amazing early winemakers and to their survival. They lost their wines – hundreds and hundreds of thousands of gallons were dumped by Prohibition agents. It was these families’ great assets that they had to watch be poured all over the ground, through orchards and vegetable gardens, down creeks and into rivers. It was horrifying. All that work, all those years of caring in the hot sun for vineyards, all that work pressing and crushing, and all the time nurturing the wine in those wonderful huge redwood tanks people used back then. The environmental damage was terrible – orchards died, gardens were ruined as were whole stretches of trees alongside creeks where the dumped wine flowed.   


“And not one cent of compensation to any of these families for all those losses from any form of government, not from the state, not from Washington,” she says.

But, enough of history this is a section about “People” who work in Wine Country to keep it interesting and fun for the rest of us.  Vivienne is not a diamond in the rough; she is smooth and polished to the proverbial “T”.

When The Rivers Ran Red was published in 2009, Vivienne had spent 3 years doing all original research on Prohibition, a subject that has largely been secret to today’s Wine Country lovers. “I was an editor in newsrooms in Canada and the United States before I wrote about the destructive forces of Prohibition.  The book is 200 pages (a very quick and entertaining read) but, as Vivienne says, “Writing a book was a natural transition from newspapers which we often call ‘the first write of history.' Then to this book, a history that had happened many decades earlier. It was a joy to write.”

Vivienne’s other interests besides writing? She loves to travel by plane or car or bus or train anywhere anytime, “I love to keep moving,” she says. She’s an avid reader of history, loves cooking and hanging out in a kitchen.

Her closing paragraph in When The Rivers Ran Red is what movies are inspired by…maybe Symtrek Partners has a movie idea here.

“Winemakers are men and women of the sun, the wind and the rain.  Like great seafaring adventurers out on the oceans, they can feel change in the air, heat on its way, rain threatening, a frost looming in the dark night, long before they happen.  They are fortune-tellers, every day gambling their knowledge, their intuition, against the risk of elements and climate.  Their sense of taste is erotically acute:  they can pluck one tiny berry off a vine, chew it for a split second, spit it out, and tell you instantly if that berry is ready or how long it might need to hang on the vine absorbing the goodness of the sun before it is ready to be gathered."

"When you walk with winemakers through their vineyards, they wave their hands across the land as if they are introducing you to someone who keeps them virile and energized and pulsating with pleasure.”

Well Ms. Sosnowski, I can only say I wish I had said it exactly like you.

September 14, 2010 is the release date of When The Rivers Ran Red in paperback.  If you missed the hardcover then this is your chance.