An hour’s drive north of San Francisco, rows of gnarled and twisted vines terrace up the slopes of gently rolling hills in Sonoma County, California – which, alongside its neighbour, Napa, has been one of the world’s premier wine-growing regions for more than a century.
Many of the region’s first commercial vines were planted in the mid-1850s by European settlers who experimented with varietals from Bordeaux and other popular wine regions in France and Germany, curious to see whether they would flourish in the sun-splashed, temperate climate and rocky soil. But California might never have earned such viticultural acclaim if it weren’t for the little-known story of a Japanese immigrant named Kanaye Nagasawa.
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