Wine fans, next time you find yourself day-tripping in Guerneville, but yoked to a boutique-hopping death march with family or companions, here’s the strategy: curios and ice cream for them, wine for you.

Until recently, picturesque Korbel was the only wine stop on the way into town; now Equality Vines anchors the town’s former Mercantile five-and-dime building with pride. The Bank Club Wine Collective takes a little more footwork to find—not that the sturdy artifact of the Beaux-Arts style it’s located in doesn’t make a statement on Main Street. Designed in 1921 by architect Carl Ingomar Warnecke, according to the historical plaque, the Bank of Guerneville building somehow survived 30 years of neglect until it was restored by Robert Anderson Pullum in 2015.

The tasting room is secreted away behind a Russian River Historical Society exhibit about the glory days of the river vacation wonderland, which in turn is tucked behind an ice cream shop, pie company and boutique gift shop. It’s got a small bar, tables for two, a lounge area and a nice little “library” of wine books to kill some time with.

The deeply fruited, chocolate and plum cordial–inflected Baldassari 2015 Russian River Pinot Noir ($42) comes from one of two family wineries in this collective. Both of them are bona fide winemakers’ wineries—that is, most of the principals have day jobs in the industry, and are not simply ordering up consultant-made juice like high-priced takeout (not that, you know, there’s anything wrong with that). Father-and-son team Dom Michael and Matt Michael run this outfit—the name’s a tribute to ancestor Vincenzo Baldassari. The rich and chocolatey 2015 Nolan Vineyard Bennett Valley Syrah ($35) is a tribute to this underappreciated varietal.

INIZI Wines, cofounded by A. J. and Jen Filipelli and John and Kirsti Harley, brings more of the unexpected to the table, rare Italian varietals like nutty, broadly acidic 2016 Tocai Friulano ($24), a Sangiovese blend, and 2014 Calistoga Charbono ($32), which brings old wine casks and leather to mind. The chewy palate is poised between acidic tang and puckery tannin, but this rare varietal is famously food-friendly. An old school California red with obscure origins, Charbono is grown on just 80 or so acres today. OK, so a curio for you, too.

Bank Club Wine Collective,
16290 Main St., Guerneville. Open Friday–Sunday, noon–5pm. Tasting fee, $15. 707.604.6938.

Nestled in the foothills of Sonoma Mountain since 1979, Coturri Winery might, by contemporary California standards, be said to be a winery of a certain age. The scene on the cellar floor, however, is positively antediluvian.

“It’s astounding to me,” winemaker Tony Coturri says approvingly of his new collection of amphorae, buried in the dirt floor of his cellar in between stacks of tarnished oak barrels that are looking fairly ancient too. “For 8,000 years they’ve been using these things.”

These clay vessels are actually quite younger than that—brand-new, shipped from the nation of Georgia, where wine made in the beeswax-lined fermentation vessels is enjoying a renaissance among new fans of old traditions.

Coturri says he’s been getting interesting results from the odd-looking ovoids—a cloudy fermentation cleared up after the full moon, for instance. But how to clean these things, when they’re buried deep in the earth? Luckily, he’s got a lanky assistant in the person of Caleb Leisure, a globetrotting young winemaker who, after stints in France, has been helping Coturri to reboot the winery in the last two years to meet increasing demand for the “natural” wine category.

Coturri grants that that he’s been called the godfather of natural wine, a loosely defined term that generally means wine made without added yeast or sulfites. When you’ve got good grapes, says Coturri, there’s no need to add sulfites.

Yet after Leisure lifts a heavy glass cover off the clay seal of an amphora to extract a sample of a firm, flavorful 2017 white wine that was fermented on its skins, he tops it with inert gas with the greatest of care. Even in this rustic setting, hygiene, not sulfur, is the key, says Coturri, relating what a Southern California wine distributor told him: “Tony, your wines are a bridge between conventional and natural wines—because they’re so clean, you can’t tell they’re natural.”

Strangely enough, there isn’t much of a market for such wines in the North Bay, Coturri says, even if he was the poster boy—or poster graybeard—for organic winemaking pictured on the wall of the local Whole Foods‚ until he pointed out that they no longer carried his wines.

An everyday red blend from Mendocino and Sonoma County fruit, the non-vintage Sandocino North Coast Lot No. 2 ($25) smells like mixed berries in a bed of hay, and brings me right back to the first Coturri Zins I sampled from a folding table they’d set up in the Sonoma Plaza for some wine event or other, about 10 years ago. Or is there something about this aroma more ancient than that?

Find Coturri wines at Crocodile Restaurant in Petaluma, and at coturriwinery.com.