IWP Ep100 A Hidden History of the Chinese in Sonoma Valley Wine - Coral Wang of Maison des Plaisances and Emma Lipp - Valley Bar and Bottle. Coral of Maison De Plaisances and I have been hard at work on this special episode about the Chinese in early California viticulture. We’re going to be focussed in the Sonoma Valley and focussed around Viniculture but Napa, Fresno, LA and orchard and row crops will also make an appearance. Coral was the one who challenged me to get started on this episode and she contributed research, ideas, pronunciations and more. Her energy and enthusiasm for it were infectious. You should really check out her wines if you haven’t Maisondp.com or taste them at Dos Bar. Emma Lipp of Valley Bar and Bottle joins us also. Her and Coral have a great conversation about Chinese contributions in food and wine, cultural appropriation, paying homage and respect to other cultures, what it means to be a Chinese American winemaker and much more. After that, I contribute some deeply researched history and Coral provides some more thoughts and texture to that history. Valley was an intentional choice to record at, Jacob Leese built this building in 1836 and it’s one of the oldest in the town. Chinese homes and businesses used to line the nearby streets.
There are some challenges in an episode like this, because we have much less to go on with any individual Chinese worker than we would like, for various reasons, those accounts just rarely exist. We do our best to piece together the story and what life was like for the average Chinese laborer from about the years around the discovery of gold to Prohibition. Their documented contributions on individual ranches and wineries are often incomplete. You get glimpses and glimmers but rarely the entire story in 1 account. Lucky for us there were lots of curious people documenting what they saw when they visited this new state. There is also no way to complete this work in any reasonable amount of time and so we present what we have but the work continues. It goes without saying that too much of this episode feels like it could be happening in 2026. Our friends at Laughing Gems and Garage Gal provided some great wine for the episode.
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