"Good wine is a good familiar creature if well used"
Othello

California's Sonoma Valley plays an understated number two to its close, but more renowned neighbor, Napa. Home to big-buck Cabernet's and even bigger buck real estate, Napa's fast turning into a vinicultural mall of theme wineries, high-ticket restaurants, and country-club croquet parlors. Sonoma, in contrast, while not immune to the above, retains a distinctly agrarian flair, with cowboy boots and pickups the norm, versus BMWs and blazers. Hotter, hillier and more expansive than Napa, you can find wineries tucked away in barns, with vintners still showing up in tasting rooms and the wines named after the owner's dog instead of his growing ego. An atmosphere of fun, rather than fancy pervades.

One of my favorite wineries in Sonoma is Gundlach Bundschu -- or as their ideographic T-shirts sound out, "gun-lock-bun-shoe". Known primarily for Zinfandel, Pinot Noir and Gewürztraminer, it offers a down-home mix of skilled second-generation winemaking and iconoclastic marketing. Their approachable $10 everyday "Bearitage" blend is a perfect example of the self-deprecating humor that distinguishes Sonoma's wineries from Napa's, where a similarly blended, but oh-so-much-more serious, Opus 1 meritage will set you back a $100. Gun-Bun's tasting room features a re-cycled Victorian era hotel-bar, stacks of under-repair bottling equipment and a low-key gift-shop. The tour extends to the hillside cave that includes a small rustic function room (great for dinners for 12-16), mustily redolent of the casks of wine maturing around you.

While we almost always end up with a case or two each visit, the real reason for our frequent returns to Gundlach, is their summer long Shakespeare festival. It's held outdoors on a terraced hillside overlooking ordered fields of grapes. (With drip-fed irrigation the norm in California, the closely ranked and contoured vine trellises always make me flashback to similarly regimented military cemeteries, with crosses ordered "row-on-row".) The rickety and sparsely dressed stage is a far cry from the pomp-and-professionalism of the high-church Shakespeare of Broadway, or London's West End. Yet somehow, with the change in lighting driven by the setting sun, with multiple players playing multiple parts, strolling actors, a munching audience, and the occasional crow competing with a soliloquy, I feel closer to a sixteenth century groundling there, than at many of the more professional in-the-round performances I've attended.

It's strictly a come-as-you-are affair, and for many in the audience, one of their first exposures to a play of this sort. Settings are frequently out-of-time period; this year we saw a California Gold Rush version of Comedy of Errors and a jazz-age Twelfth Night. In general, the low comedy bits fit the audience and actors better than the more intricate and elegant wordplay -- and as for the Histories... despite lots of convincing clashing of swords and bellicose noises off stage, I doubt that many of the audience were moved to charge the breach by cries of "for God, Harry, England and St George".

Picnicking continues through-out the performance, fueled no doubt by selections from the surrounding vineyards -- the intermittent wine bottle's 'pop' an opening for some interesting ad libs from stage. The only real trial is coming to grips with the inevitability that no matter how carefully you stake out your position, no matter how lyrical the poetry is on stage, someone right next to you will engage in an 5-minute no-holds-barred wrestling match with a crinkly bag of party snacks, and innocently crunch their way through the next act.

But to me, that's what makes the whole experience so charming. Despite the distractions of the fraying costumes and inconsistent accents, the kid's questions and the parents shushing, some of the most complex works (and words) of man and the magnificent simplicity of abundant nature fuse together to engage and entrance an audience. On the face of it, a jeans-clad techno-refugee from California's ever-expanding Silicon Valley and their Nintendo-generation kids have little in common with some guy in baggy tights and starched collar from Elizabethan England. But for a brief moment, under the stars, on a sloping hillside in Sonoma, they do.