Modern Times
The world changed rapidly during the Sixties, and so did our valley. The back-to-the-land movement introduced revolutionary notions of consciousness and culture.
Joe Miami
It is believed that the great wines of Sonoma Valley can be traced back to his tutelage in the late Forties and early Fifties.
Robert Sylvester de Ropp
Robert de Ropp was a well-known English biochemist who studied with P. D. Ouspensky who eventually found himself in the center of the burgeoning human potential movement.
Hunter S. Thompson
The notorious gonzo writer stayed in Glen Ellen early in his career, drawn here by his fascination with the total immersion journalism that had been developed by his hero Jack London.
MFK Fisher
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-1992), better known to her devoted readers as MFK Fisher, was a preeminent American food writer. She wrote some 27 books, including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin, and believed that eating well was just one of the “arts of life”.
Joe Miami
Robert Sylvester de Ropp
Robert Sylvester de Ropp was at first a well-known English biochemist and academic in that field, who published several studies in cancer research. Early in his career he met P. D. Ouspensky— a student of G. I. Gurdjieff, whom he also met— with whom he studied for many years. Eventually he found himself in the center of the burgeoning human potential movement.
After retiring to a ranch on Sonoma Mountain in 1961 he began writing several seminal books on consciousness, including the very influential Master Game. De Ropp established a learning community on his land in 1967, with a focus upon learning at the levels of body, mind and spirit. He died in a kayaking accident in the Pacific Ocean in 1987, at the age of 74. Many residents of the valley studied with him, or with teachers who studied with him; many of his ideas still resonate in our community.
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, the notorious gonzo writer, stayed in Glen Ellen early in his career, drawn here by his fascination with the total immersion journalism that had been developed by his hero Jack London. Hunter S. Thompson wrote to Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, saying “I’m leaving the country in about ten days… for a variety of reasons: foremost among them being Lyndon’s bloodlust and a $5,500,000 lawsuit filed against me and Cavalier Magazine by the greedy lunatic Chester Womack, who runs the Rustic Inn in Glen Ellen… Never trust a bartender.”
The lawsuit was over an article originally written some three years earlier for The Reporter, in which he described a typical evening in the last of our saloons “which they may refuse to buy, even though they’ve okayed it,” he wrote to his friend Eugene McGarr, adding “I have discovered the secret of writing fiction, calling it impressionistic journalism.”
A month later he wrote “I have honed my skills to the point of unbelievable sharpness. The thing I just sent The Reporter is razored from beginning to end— 18 pages of perfect calumny.” And perfect calumny it was, it turned out, which may be why The Reporter turned it down. In time, however, it was published by Cavalier.
MFK Fisher
MFK’s informal education undoubtedly had a far greater impact on her writing career than her formal education. She loved reading as a child, and began writing poetry at the age of five. Her family had a vast home library, and her mother provided her access to many other books. Later, she wrote for her father’s newspaper, and she would draft as many as fifteen stories a day.
Food and good relationships became early passions in her life. She once said “I decided at the age of nine that one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people.”
In 1928 she married Alfred Fisher and they relocated to France, where MFK studied painting and sculpture while they visited all the restaurants they could. In 1932 they returned to California, where she began publishing short essays on gastronomy, which were later collected in her first book, Serve it Forth. For the next twenty years, during which she remarried twice, MFK continued to write, alternating homes between California and Europe.
MFK came to Glen Ellen in 1971, when her friend David Bouverie built a home on his ranch to her specifications, which she called “Last House”. She continued to visit France, but Glen Ellen remained her home until her death in 1992.
Before the arrival of the winemaking trendsetters of the industry in the early 1970s, and certainly before the sudden international popularization of fine wine varietals from California at the Judgement of Paris in 1976, there were outlaw vintners in the hills— young, restless hipsters who had become curious about what was possible beyond the generic reds, whites and rosés being sold by the gallon at grocery stores and drug stores in those days.
In the hills above Sonoma Valley an old world farmer by the name of Joe Miami was teaching what was happening in the vineyard throughout the year to those who would listen, and helping them learn how to nourish the character of the harvest in dark cellars throughout the winter. It is believed that the great wines of Sonoma Valley can be traced back to his tutelage in the late Forties and early Fifties.
A local vineyard manager remembers how he first met Joe in a characteristic story of the legendary man. He was clearing a large field by himself, in preparation for installing a vineyard, when he noticed a pickup had pulled over to the side of the road and a man get out to lean against it with his arms folded, quietly watching him. Curious, he went over to meet the stranger, who immediately took his arm in a firm vise-like grip, looked him in the eye, and said “you look like a man who’s not afraid of hard work,” and he hired the young man to work with him on the spot.
“Joe suffered no fools,” it was easily said. Friendships with him deepened over the decades, and were based upon deep mutual respect— “We worked hard, and did what we were told.” A great Joe Miami story involve the removal of a giant boulder while preparing a field for a vineyard. Several people were trying, unsuccessfully, to pry an enormous stone from the ground. Joe took the pry bar from them and walked around the boulder, tapping it gently at various points; he then brought the pry bar down hard on the center, and it immediately shattered into a pile of gravel, which he told them to shovel up.
There is a characteristic snapshot of Joe as a young man with his pet deer— a buck fully antlered standing with its front feet up on his shoulders— calmly feeding it some of his chewing tobacco. His strength was apparently phenomenal; once, when he asked two men to bring fencing wire up to where they were working, he was amused to watch them run a pipe through a spool of wire and lift each end. He allowed as he could carry one under each arm, and they believed it.
