It's Spring Break and I have a lot of grading to do, so... I'm reading up on historic California vineyards. Jancis's website has a cool article by Chris Howard from a couple of years ago that gives a terrific picture of the history and social setting of Evangelho, which I knew was in Contra Costa County somewhere, but I didn't know exactly where. It's at the eastern edge of Antioch, tucked between a big power plant on one side and a subdivision on the other. This is familiar to me because I grew up in partly a different but not
much different part of Contra Costa, and I know this landscape well: the high-tension power towers, the long commercial strips dotted with low-rise auto body businesses and self-storage facilities, with the buzz of Highway 4 probably audible in the distance, and Mount Diablo looming to the south. (Some of my earliest memories of the area involved driving out to the northeast side of Diablo with my mother, who was studying archaeology at UC Berkeley and worked on the excavation of an abandoned coal mining town, Somersville -- maybe around 1979.) From the article:
Paradoxically, Evangelho’s saving grace is not its cult following, but the function it serves for the PG&E power plant. Jake [Neustadt, viticulturalist at Bedrock] explains that the vineyard exists, and will continue to exist because PG&E wants it to continue serving as a buffer to housing developments [...] It’s less about heritage than insurance liabilities, but such is heterotopian life.
If you like this sort of thing, or just want to see the pictures:
https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles ... california
