Cultural Landscapes: A Journey through the Vineyards and Olive Groves of Northern California

An enduring tension, and often a contradiction, regarding cultural landscapes is whether we should conserve the form of a cultural landscape or the processes that allow cultural landscapes to emerge and adapt. I thought about this a lot as I travelled through northern California from Fort Bragg through the Anderson Valley, past San Francisco and into the area around Paso Robles.

 

The Anderson Valley is in Mendocino County north of Sonoma County. Mendocino County is largely noted for the raw beauty of its rugged coastline and quite a fantastic collection of rhodedendrons at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens. Although vinyards are starting to sprout up on the coast it is in crossing into the Anderson Valley that the landscape itself begins to reflect our interest in wine. The Anderson Valley still reflects a cultural landscape of mixed production with the odd pasture and orchard sprinkled in among the emerging vinyards. Hill tops still retain tree cover as the vines slowly take over the bottom and shallow sloped lands of the valley. Driving south and east the valley opens up and the vinyard becomes the dominant structure of the cultural landscape. As one crosses from the Anderson Valley into the Sonoma Valley wine becomes the product that has shaped the land.

Contrast this with the vinyards and olive groves that have emerged around Paso Robles to the south. Whereas the Anderson Valley may be in a transitional stage from one cultural landscape to another the transformation around Paso Robles is complete. No longer are trees found at the skyline but rather as oddities that have lingered, for some unknown reason, within a vinyard. Not only are vines planted on bottom lands and shallow slopes but the hillsides themselves are now terraformed into terraces so that the vines literally climb up the hills and become the skyline themselves. Vineyards, in this part of North America, have become the corn fields of mid America. As far as the eye can see the landscape has been transformed to grow grapes and produce wine.

What took centuries in Europe has occurred in less than a hundred years in California. The World Heritage Centre has recently approved vinyards in recent nominations to the World Heritage list. Vineyards, in Europe, are seen as heritage, a product that no longer is attached to the processes by which a landscape is transformed. In California, two plants, the grape and the olive, have led to a transformation that in less than one hundred years has transformed a landscape. The cultural landscape in California is still an emerging process and as can be seen in the Anderson valley one that is not yet complete.

This leads to the interesting contradiction that once a place becomes a heritage cultural landscape the products that led to its transformation become detached from economic processes. The cultural landscape is now produced, not through work as expressed through the intersection of cultural values and economic processes in producing goods like wine and olive oil, but rather in its sale as a heritage product reflecting a different set of cultural values and economic processes.

My journey through this cultural landscape of vineyards and olive groves made me wonder whether we need to reconsider cultural landscapes as in constant transformation; each transformation reflecting how cultural values and economic processes guide us to undertake work in transforming landscapes. How can we conserve not just heritage forms of landscapes but the cultural values and economic processes that can lead to a diversity of cultural landscapes both in the present and transforming into the future?