A stroll through downtown Sebastopol—a town formerly known more for Gravenstein apples than for grapes but these days a burgeoning wine hub—reveals glimpses of the distant and recent past and perhaps the future, too. Many hippies settled here in the 1960s and 70s and, as the old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song goes, they taught their children well: the town remains steadfastly, if not entirely, countercultural.
Sebastopol has long had good, if somewhat low-profile, wineries, among them Iron Horse, Lynmar Estate, and Merry Edwards. With the replacement in 2016 of the town's beloved Fosters Freeze location with a vaguely industrial-chic venue for California coastal cuisine and the evolving cluster of artisanal producers at The Barlow, the site of a former apple cannery, the town always seems poised for a Healdsburg-style transformation. Then again, maybe not—stay tuned (in, not out).
