Long Board Vineyards
It’s finally summer. Sell your textbooks, pack your bags, put the boards on the roof and hit the road. To experience a unique surfing culture where waves meet wine, visit Sonoma County in Northern California. Roughly 45 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge on the West Coast, the region is defined by rolling hills lined with vineyards.
Welcome to the wine country. After a surf session at Doran Beach or Salmon Creek in Sonoma County, head to Healdsburg where you will find some of the most delicious and internationally acclaimed wines in the world.
Walking into the Longboard tasting room, you’d swear you were walking into a surfer’s garage in the 1970’s, but with a modern twist. A variety of bright surfboards decorate the wooden ceiling; classic longboards, a stand-up-paddle board from the 1930’s, even a 1960’s board bought from Sears is suspended from the ceiling by rope.
The wine tasting bar is constructed from a hand-crafted redwood longboard from Waikiki while a flat screen continuously running surfing films is mounted on the wall at the end of the bar. Oded Shakked stands behind the counter in his Longboard hoodie and jeans. He’ll greet the visitors, pull out the wine list and pour one of five different wines Longboard Vineyards offer for tastings. As you relax with your first glass of Sauvignon Blanc you will quickly sense that the surf culture is as authentic as the wine in Sonoma County.
Sonoma County is internationally renown for harvesting some of the world’s best wines, the moderate temperatures and diverse region of northern California offer ideal growing conditions for winemakers. The vineyards attract wine lovers from around the world to taste wine for $0-$15 depending on the winery. Barrel tasting and wine tours invite guests twenty-one and over to buy a wristband (about $30 cost) to taste at nearly twenty wineries in Sonoma County. Many also provide food and live entertainment.
The winemakers of Longboard Vineyards value balance and authenticity above all. “We’re about making good wine that ages well, at decent prices,” said winemaker Oded. While some wineries exude sophistication with the act of tasting wine, Oded and the staff at Longboard Vineyards take a more relaxed approach, his mantra being, “You should spend more time in life having fun and less time reading the backs of your wine labels.”
The laid back winemaker grew up in Israel where he surfed and built boards for one of the two companies surf companies in the country. “It’s not great, but there’s decent surf in the Mediterranean,” Oded said. “Whenever we heard there was an earthquake in Greece we would wax our boards because we knew we would get some waves.”
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