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Business & Tech

A New Generation at Alexander Valley Store

Medlock Ames, a small winery built on sustainability and organics, takes over the historic country store and turns it into a destination.

Last week, at the invitation of , I dropped by their new tasting room at the intersection of Alexander Valley Road and Highway 128, the site of the old Alexander Valley Store.

When I say “new,” it’s not a casual choice of words  – the AV store had been there at least since the 1920s, and closed down only a couple years ago. It had been a staple of valley life for generations, supplying sundries and groceries to the rural locals, with a dark but roomy bar where ranch hands and bikers played pool in the gloom.

It’s a different place now, suitable to a different time in history. Medlock Ames is one of those wineries committed to sustainability and organic wines, all of which is estate grown at their property off Chalk Hill Road. Their year-old tasting room reflects these company policies of “sustainable business, gentle winemaking, organic farming and communal social spaces.”

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It’s the same building, but gutted and remodeled from cellar to sky. Painted a trendy gray, styled with repurposed wood and salvaged materials, set amid a reshaped contemporary landscape of galvanized raised beds, herb gardens, native and drought tolerant plants, the grumble of Harleys and whiff of motor oil seems but a distant memory.

The Alexander Valley Store was one of three traditional “country stores” in the immediate Healdsburg area, the others being the and the , this last just a couple hundred yards down the road. Few people realize, however, that one family owned or ran all three stores at one time or another. And therein lies a tale.

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Lloyd S. Goodyear was running the Dry Creek store in 1918 when he met his bride-to-be, Lydia Dorothy Stack, a Nebraska-bred country girl herself. They partnered up and supplied to prune and grape farmers of Dry Creek with the daily supplies they needed, fulfilling an important role in the rural economy in a time when trucks were still a rarity.

“My dad carried the average farmer out there for a year,” remembered Bob Goodyear in a 1997 oral history. “He got paid once a year – not just every Tom, Dick and Harry, but the most prominent landowners, maybe half a dozen ranchers.” Prunes were the big crop, and it was in the late summer when the harvests were sold and the ranchers’ work paid off.

Around 1930, Lloyd sold the Goodyear Dry Creek Store, as it was then known, for about $7,000, then turned around and lost it all in the stock market. He and Lydia had a house on Lytton Station Road in Alexander Valley, and about the same time the Alexander Valley Store itself came up for lease when the man who ran it died suddenly. So the Goodyears moved their experience  and Standard Oil concession to Alexander Valley, and built up the business there for almost 20 years.

In 1947, however, the owner of the property upped the lease (sound familiar?) and when the Goodyears balked, gave them 45 days to move out. They had two things on their side: their son Bob had just gotten engaged to a hardworking woman named Caroline Teldeschi, and the old Jimtown Post Office was standing empty just down the road.

Working day and night, the Goodyear clan cleared out the Alexander Valley Store and moved the supplies due east a hop, opening on Jan. 1, 1948.

The younger Goodyears eventually purchased the from their parents, in 1967, and continued making it an essential part of valley life. Bob’s youthful ambition, however, was to be a musician – he learned the drums at ut in his own words “The instructor at that time was dead set against what they called jazz. It was just ordinary dance music is all it was.”

Perhaps, but soon 12-year-old Bob and 14-year old Eugene Dominicelli, who played accordion, started playing barn dances, church socials and weddings. Soon “the grown-ups took over,” said Bob, and with a banjo and saxophone they grew into a well-known dance band in four counties, the Agelis Orchestra.

After the Goodyears moved down the road, several other shopkeepers ran the Alexander Valley Store, and the attached bar known as Barbie’s. Over the years it became more and more anachronistic, especially once John Werner and Carrie Brown turned the nearby Jimtown Store into a regional destination. It was ripe for a remodel, and when Chris Medlock James and Ames Morison went looking for a tasting room to showcase their Bell Mountain wines, the match was made.

The Medlock Ames Tasting Room opened in May 2010, after calling in landscape designers (Thomas Wolz) and interior designers (Will Wick), architects from Santa Rosa and San Francisco, and a “green” contractor from Sebastopol (Earthtone Construction). You can’t get sandwiches and six packs anymore, but you can get local olive oil, cheeses from Bellwether Farms, pickled beans and peppers, and an artisan cocktail in the “speakeasy” out back that opens when the tasting room closes (5 pm daily).

The occasion for my first visit there was a “Meet the Brewers” beer tasting and pork barbecue, with Richard Norgrove and the other hard-working brewers of the . Barbecue pork sliders were served, the Racer 5 and Ryevalry flowed, and a new generation Alexander Valley regulars shared the pleasures of a sunset over the pétanque court and herb gardens.

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