A week in Sonoma

Over the Golden Gate and up 101 — the city falls away and the vineyards begin in about ninety minutes.

A town of eleven thousand with roughly thirty tasting rooms around one square — and a three-Michelin-star restaurant two blocks off the plaza.

Harmon Heald laid out this plaza in 1857 and sold the lots around it for $15 apiece. It’s one of the last surviving examples of early-California plaza-town planning.

A husband-and-wife Burgundy obsession: four Chardonnays and four Pinots poured side by side. None of the Chardonnay ever touches malolactic — all nerve, no butter.

The Colonel Armstrong Tree has stood here over 1,400 years; Parson Jones is taller than a football field is long. A lumberman saved this grove in the 1870s — the last old growth in Sonoma County.

Born a logging town literally nicknamed “Stumptown,” adopted by the hippies in the ’70s — now the Russian River’s quirkiest lunch stop.

Rhonda Carano spent sixteen months planting the five acres of gardens at Villa Fiore — over 2,000 labeled species, with a French underground barrel cellar beneath it all.

The Russian River runs warm and slow in August — a lazy paddle with a swimming beach around every bend.

A dozen tasting rooms within two blocks of the plaza — no car, no reservations, no plan required.

Hitchcock shot “The Birds” here in 1963 after watching crows gather outside a waterfront restaurant. The bay itself sits right on the San Andreas Fault.

The Tides Wharf got into “The Birds” because its owner demanded three things: the town be called Bodega Bay onscreen, the lead be named Mitch — his name — and a speaking part. Hitchcock agreed to all three.

Forty-nine square miles, one last night. End it somewhere with a view of the bridge.