Sonoma Valley Vintners Alliance prunes away from Wine Country Weekend

Big changes afoot for Sonoma Wine Country Weekend and the big-ticket Harvest Wine Auction.|

Sonoma Valley Vintners & Growers Alliance at a Glance:

Five appellations represented

Bennett Valley, Los Carneros, Moon Mountain District, Sonoma Mountain and Sonoma Valley

140 vintner members

140 grower members

250 associate members (hotels, restaurants, etc.)

sonomavalleywine.com

While it is being billed as an amicable, beneficial parting of the ways, eyebrows raised in the wine industry yesterday when the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance announced at its annual members meeting that the trade organization will no longer co-own and co-operate the wildly successful Wine Country Weekend.

Last year, Wine Country Weekend brought in $5.7 million – $4.7 million of that from its signature charitable event, the Harvest Wine Auction, which the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance founded in 1993. The Harvest fundraiser has been named among the top three wine-auction events in the country.

Under the heading of 'be careful what you wish for,' the event's tremendous success in recent years was cited as the cause for the change.

Over the past decade, the Sonoma Wine Country Weekend partnership between local industry groups the Sonoma County Vintners and Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance has brought in more than $26 million, the bulk of which goes to local charitable organizations.

Vintners and Growers Alliance executive director Maureen Cottingham announced the break with Wine Country Weekend at the Jan. 18 meeting.

'This is an important year in our organization's history,' she said in understatement.

Going forward, Sonoma Wine Country Weekend will be its own entity under the umbrella of the Sonoma County Vintners organization, which is led by its executive director Jean Arnold Sessions.

Cottingham effused optimism, however, as she laid out what lies ahead for the Vintners and Growers Alliance.

'We're excited to shift our focus back to our core mission,' she told meeting attendees. Part of the decision was based on a broad membership survey, she said.

Cottingham noted that the events surrounding the Wine Auction were chewing up more than 75 percent of the Alliance staff's time.

'We can go back to our day jobs now,' said Cottingham.

The event's emphasis on Sonoma Valley has been diminishing for a while. In 2014, the Sonoma Valley Harvest Wine Auction was renamed, simply, the Harvest Wine Auction, and in 2016 it was announced that the auction would no longer be held each year at Chateau St. Jean in Kenwood, but instead be rotated around the county.

'It was time for other AVAs in the county (wine growing areas) to be recognized,' said Sessions.

Negotiations over handing off Wine Country Weekend have been quietly in the works for the past 18 months — but became public with the Jan. 16 hiring of Kelin Backman, who will serve as managing director of the event going forward.

Backman was hired by a transition committee comprised of members of both Vintners groups' boards, as well as Cottingham and Sessions. She will report to Sessions, and occupy an office two doors from Sessions in the Sonoma County Vintners office in Santa Rosa. She will have at least two full-time employees under her, dedicated solely to the event.

Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance staff will play a limited role in organizing Wine Country Weekend events this year and next, primarily to assist with the transition.

After 2019, the Vintners and Growers Alliance will have no financial or management stake in Wine Country Weekend, although Valley nonprofits will continue to be eligible to be recipients of its needs-based philanthropy.

In the past, about 70 percent of the proceeds from the Labor Day weekend event were distributed to county nonprofits, and the remaining 30 percent covered the operating expenses of the event, plus a management fee to both trade organizations.

To fill that gap, Cottingham said the Alliance is staging a new event, Signature Sonoma Valley, which will be held April 7 and 8.

She said Signature Sonoma Valley will evolve over the next three years – but the plan is to begin small, with perhaps 200 hand-selected wine enthusiasts in attendance. The scope of the event will expand each year and Cottingham expects that it will be begin to turn a profit in 2019, bringing in funds to replace Wine Country Weekend proceeds.

A 'Prelude' event the first night will focus on a welcome dinner and an industry speaker.

An 'Immersion' event will follow on Saturday — bringing wine collectors out to select Sonoma Valley vineyards and featuring lunch at Beltane Ranch.

The culminating 'Echelon' dinner will feature a Sonoma Valley winemaker host at each table. A website with complete details of the April 2017 event is expected to go live next week.

The name of the new event is also not without controversy. For the past several years, Visa's Signature card has been the lead sponsor of Sonoma Wine County Weekend, and Sessions hopes that Visa will continue as its lead sponsor going forward.

Vintners and Growers Alliance board president Kenneth Juhasz is enthusiastic about the change.

'The goal for the new Signature event is to bring a serious group of wine consumers to the Valley, not just bodies,' he said at the Jan. 18 meeting. 'We want to offer quality experiences that get our highest quality wine in front of influential consumers.'

Cottingham said that the membership has made it very clear about their desired mission for the Vintners and Growers Alliance.

'Our members wants to get a premium price for their grapes and the wine they produce and to cement the Valley's reputation as the premier wine region in America,' she said in her presentation. And she believes they have created a new event that will help accomplish those goals.

Meanwhile, a new era dawns for the Harvest Wine Auction and the surrounding weekend events.

Sessions says she's particularly excited by the skills and experience Kelin Backman brings to the new position as the captain of the SWCW ship.

Backman, 48, has a decade of fundraising and event planning experience, including developing and executing Petaluma's Rivertown Revival event and Levi's Santa Rosa GranFondo events. Until recently, she served as the fundraising director and events producer for Rep. Jared Huffman.

'Kelin's well-suited to all the different aspects of this role,' said Sessions.

'Not only is she a good fit in terms of her personality and our culture, she even has a background as an English teacher, which is terrific considering our Fund the Future focus. She understands the challenges of moving the needle on literacy and can help us understand the academic world.'

Backman's salary was not disclosed.

In other news from the Vintners and Growers Alliance meeting, outgoing board member Danny Fay was thanked for his service and new board member Erich Bradley was introduced.

Cottingham discussed the Sonoma Valley group's five-year goal of being the first 100 percent sustainable wine growing region in the country, and she announced an honor roll of more than three dozen wineries who have already met the goal.

Contact Lorna st lorna.sheridan@sonomanews.com.

Sonoma Valley Vintners & Growers Alliance at a Glance:

Five appellations represented

Bennett Valley, Los Carneros, Moon Mountain District, Sonoma Mountain and Sonoma Valley

140 vintner members

140 grower members

250 associate members (hotels, restaurants, etc.)

sonomavalleywine.com

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