Cooking on Boonville Time

By Moira Johnston

Published July 20, 2001 • Saveur

It's a springtime Saturday and I'm ''piking to Boont'', as they say in the local lingo, driving over the serpentine twists of mountain road that, for over three decades, have been leading me into a rural Shangri-la called Anderson Valley, and to Boonville, a town caught in a time warp that lets a rare country life-style—and a ''language'' called Boontling—survive. I discovered this place over thirty years ago from a flame-stitched wing chair in my Greenwich Village brownstone—a young banker's wife sick of paying obeisance to France with beef Wellingtons, croquembouches, and pompous clarets. A native of western Canada, I was starved for bare feet, a garden, and good, honest food, and in 1967 I joined the migration back to the land—to California. Too old to be hippies, my then-husband and I became part of the infant boutique winery movement, attempting to grow the finest wine grapes possible in a valley whose name we had spotted in a viticultural textbook, cited as one of the few remaining undiscovered pockets of cool-climate vineyard land.

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