The Unseen Vintage

Every time you raise a glass of Sonoma wine, pause before the first sip. Think of the generations who made this beautiful country, and of those who suffered in the making of this cultivated paradise.

Behind the wine's color and fragrance lies a history far older than the vineyard itself. There were Indigenous people whose land was taken, immigrants whose labor built an industry, families whose ambitions turned a quiet agricultural valley into a world-famous destination, and people whose lives were sacrificed to the American faith in conquest and progress.

Today, the visitor sees rolling hills, elegant tasting rooms, and vineyards stretching toward the California sun. The wine tells a story of soil, climate, craftsmanship, and heritage. It is a beautiful story. But it is not the whole story.

The vintage is printed on the label. The history that made it possible is not.

On September 23, 2026, Vineburg LLC, the company behind Gundlach Bundschu Winery, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The family had been making wine in Sonoma since 1858. Six generations had survived vineyard disease, the great San Francisco earthquake, Prohibition and devastating wildfires. Now the family was seeking a new owner, hoping to preserve its connection with the winery while the business reorganized its finances. The vines were still in the ground. The tasting room was still open. But the financial arrangements that had sustained the family enterprise could no longer hold.

There is something peculiarly American about this scene: a business whose most valuable cultural asset is its history enters a federal court seeking a new beginning. Yet Rhinefarm, the Gundlach Bundschu estate, offers more than a story about an old winery's financial troubles. Its 168-year history opens a window onto something much older—the making of an American cultural icon from the land, labor, ingenuity and ambition of generations of people.

To understand what is happening to this vineyard, we must first travel backward, to a time before there was a vineyard at all.

Before the first vine

The familiar story of California begins with pioneers. They arrive in a vast and beautiful country, work hard, plant crops, establish businesses and turn the wilderness into prosperity. Their descendants preserve the family photographs, the old buildings and the stories of how it all began. But the land was not empty.

For generations before European colonization, Indigenous communities lived across what is now Sonoma County. Coast Miwok, Patwin, Pomo and Wappo peoples sustained communities with their own languages, knowledge of the landscape and ways of living. Their descendants remain in the region today. In 1823, Father José Altimira established Mission San Francisco Solano at Sonoma. It was the last of California's 21 missions and the only one founded after Mexico had gained independence from Spain. The missionaries were Spanish Franciscans, but their project operated under Mexican authority.

The mission did not simply introduce a new religion. It reorganized people's lives. Indigenous people were subjected to coercive religious and labor practices. Mission agriculture transformed the landscape through vineyards, fields and livestock, while confinement, disease and the disruption of Indigenous communities imposed a terrible human cost.

Today, near the mission chapel, a stone memorial bears the names of 896 Indigenous men, women and children who died and were buried there. It was dedicated in 1999, more than a century and a half after the mission's closure. Their deaths had different causes, including disease and the conditions of mission life. They should not all be described as victims of direct killing. But the memorial is a reminder of how much suffering can fit inside a period that later generations remember through a handful of picturesque adobe buildings.

The violence did not end with the mission system. Under Mexican rule, military authority extended colonial control beyond the mission walls. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, who became military commander at Sonoma, oversaw the secularization of the mission and the development of a new settlement. His ranching enterprise relied on Indigenous labor, while military expeditions sought to subdue communities resisting Mexican domination. California State Parks records that more than 100 such expeditions set out from Sonoma after 1835. Some were led by Vallejo and others by his brother Salvador or Indigenous allies. Contemporary accounts of the wider military campaigns also document killings and the taking of captives, although the details and numbers reported for particular encounters are sometimes disputed.

Then the flag changed. In June 1846, American settlers seized Sonoma during the Bear Flag Revolt. California subsequently passed to the United States following the war with Mexico and entered the Union in 1850. A new political order brought a new system for recognizing and transferring property.

Under the California Land Act of 1851, holders of Spanish and Mexican land grants had to establish their claims through an American legal process. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had promised to respect existing property rights, the expense and uncertainty of litigation contributed to the loss of land by many Californio families. What had been Indigenous territory became mission property, Mexican ranchos and eventually land that could be bought and sold under American law. Each transition produced documents, boundaries and new owners. Each also changed which claims the governing institutions were prepared to recognize.

A property deed is an extraordinary instrument. It can establish who has the legal right to possess a piece of land without telling its owner very much about the people who possessed it before. The document can be entirely legitimate under the law of its time and still leave most of the land's history outside its pages.

This is where Jacob Gundlach enters our story. On March 12, 1858, the Bavarian immigrant purchased 400 acres in Sonoma and named the estate Rhinefarm. He returned to Europe, married his childhood sweetheart, Eva, and acquired grapevines for his new vineyard. The following year, Gundlach and his three partners planted 60,000 vines.

It is a wonderful immigrant success story: a young man crosses an ocean, sees possibilities in a new country and creates something that will outlive him. It is also a story made possible by a landscape already transformed by conquest, disease, coerced labor, changing sovereignty and the consolidation of property. Gundlach did not create that history. He inherited the circumstances it produced.

For his family, 1858 was a beginning. For Sonoma, it was another chapter.

The hands that built paradise

Wine had been part of Western civilization for thousands of years before Jacob Gundlach arrived in California. The Spanish missionaries brought European grapevines to the region, and Indigenous workers planted, tended and harvested them. Later, Mexican Californio landowners expanded commercial wine production, followed by European and American immigrants who brought new varieties, techniques and capital. But no one makes wine alone.

A vineyard requires people who understand the soil, select the vines, plant them, prune them, harvest the grapes, construct the buildings and perform the countless tasks that stand between a patch of earth and a glass on someone's dinner table. The entrepreneur may supply the vision and the capital. Other people turn that vision into something tangible. In nineteenth-century Sonoma, Chinese immigrants were among those people.

At Buena Vista Winery, founded by the Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy, Chinese workers helped excavate the wine caves that became part of the region's celebrated winemaking infrastructure. Their work transformed the rocky hillsides into spaces where wine could be stored and aged. Imagine the labor involved in cutting those passages through the rock, then imagine visitors generations later admiring the historic cellars. The visitor sees ingenuity, endurance and craftsmanship. The guide may tell the story of the visionary founder. The workers who made the vision possible can become a footnote in the enterprise's heritage.

These were people helping to create one of California's most important agricultural industries. Their contribution was not limited to the physical strength they supplied. Chinese immigrants established businesses, organized work crews, leased agricultural land and participated in the wider economic life of the region. Yet their indispensability did not protect them from hostility. Sonoma County experienced organized efforts to boycott Chinese labor and businesses. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely restricted further immigration, while discrimination and economic pressures continued to undermine established communities. The county's Chinese population reached 1,145 in 1890 but had fallen to fewer than 200 by 1930. Exclusion, hostility, competition and migration all contributed to that decline.

The caves remained. The vines continued growing. The wine industry expanded. New generations inherited an increasingly valuable agricultural landscape. Not every employer participated in the hostility. Haraszthy defended his employment of Chinese workers, and other growers publicly acknowledged their dependence on Chinese labor. But the contradiction was larger than the behavior of any one employer. California's prosperity depended on people whose place in California society remained precarious.

That contradiction has not disappeared from American agriculture. In a 2021 PBS NewsHour report, Sonoma vineyard worker Anabel Garcia described being called to harvest grapes during the 2017 wildfires. She and her co-workers went into the fields despite smoke that left their eyes red and their throats irritated. Garcia had worked in Sonoma agriculture for two decades. She explained that harvest wages paid her rent and bills. When the call came to work, she could not easily refuse.

For a consumer, a vintage is a year printed on a bottle. For Garcia, that year's harvest was also a record of the conditions under which she had to earn a living. Garcia and other workers subsequently organized to demand better protection during wildfire emergencies. Their proposals included clearer multilingual warnings, financial protection when work became unsafe and additional compensation for hazardous conditions. Their story is not merely one of hardship. It is also one of knowledge, organization and people seeking a greater say in the conditions under which an admired American product is made.

The immigrant may be celebrated as a pioneer when he becomes an owner. The immigrant who makes the owner's prosperity possible may remain invisible.

The American faith in improvement

If land and labor provided the foundations of Sonoma wine, nature supplied both the opportunity and the resistance. Sonoma's varied soils, hillsides and climate offered possibilities that European winemakers recognized from their own landscapes. Immigrant growers brought their knowledge across the Atlantic, experimented with grape varieties and developed new approaches to cultivation. But nature did not always cooperate.

Phylloxera, a tiny insect that attacks grapevine roots, devastated vineyards in Europe and California during the nineteenth century. The eventual solution was an ingenious union of different biological inheritances: susceptible European grape varieties could be grafted onto rootstocks derived from resistant American vines. It was a triumph of scientific adaptation. Knowledge crossed borders, experimentation responded to failure, and an industry survived by learning to work with nature rather than simply imposing its original plans upon it.

Yet a short journey from Sonoma's celebrated vineyards takes us to another institution where the ambition to improve living things acquired a far darker meaning. At Eldridge, the Sonoma State Home, later known as Sonoma State Hospital, became one of the centers of California's eugenics program. During the twentieth century, the institution sterilized more than 5,400 people, many against their wishes. Its superintendent, Fred O. Butler, supported the belief that preventing people classified as unfit from reproducing would improve society.

The vocabulary of the institution was reassuring. Its administrators described their work in terms of care, prevention and social welfare. But behind that vocabulary were people whose lives were being controlled by others.

In April 1938, Butler wrote to California's director of institutions about a 22-year-old Indigenous woman named Dorothy. She had a child, and the state wanted her sterilized before permitting her to return to care for that child. Her mother had not provided consent. Butler requested authorization to proceed without it. Approval was granted, and Dorothy was subsequently sterilized.

The administrative record is chilling in its economy. A young woman's reproductive future and her relationship with her child were reduced to a few pages of official correspondence. She was a person. The institution had turned her into a case.

Another father, José Silva, pleaded with Butler in 1931 to spare his son Benito from sterilization. Benito had escaped from the institution once before. His father's objections did not save him from the operation, which took place the following year. These were not simply the excesses of a few misguided doctors. They were actions undertaken through recognized institutions, supported by laws and justified through the language of scientific progress.

In the vineyard, scientific ingenuity helped fragile vines survive. A short distance away, another institution invoked the authority of science to deny people control over their own reproduction. Both histories belong to Sonoma. Only one became part of its celebrated heritage. A beautiful landscape can accommodate both the triumph of human ingenuity and the terrible misuse of human confidence.

When agriculture became a dream

For all these contradictions, Sonoma wine became a remarkable achievement. Its transformation from an agricultural product into a cultural icon required far more than favorable soil and inherited European knowledge. It required business. Gundlach's original venture grew through partnerships, investment and commercial expansion. Charles Bundschu joined the enterprise in 1868 and later married Gundlach's daughter Francisca. Under his leadership, the company developed a distribution network that carried its wines beyond California. The family was building something larger than a vineyard. It was creating a commercial enterprise whose name could travel farther than the grapes themselves.

Then, in 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed the company's urban facilities, three family homes and approximately one million gallons of wine. Charles Bundschu escaped the burning city and subsequently wrote a letter describing the catastrophe. That letter became part of the family's archive, a record of an enterprise that had survived what might have seemed an ending.

Prohibition brought another rupture. The winery business was liquidated in 1919, although the family retained 130 acres of Rhinefarm and continued agricultural production. Walter Bundschu grew grapes for the juice market and converted part of the vineyard to pear orchards and pasture. For decades, commercial winemaking under the family name was largely silent. Then, in the 1970s, Jim Bundschu helped revive the winery. He crushed 20 tons of Zinfandel from the 1973 harvest, and the family began releasing its wines to the public again in 1976. It was a rebirth within a larger transformation of California wine.

The modern industry increasingly sold more than an agricultural commodity. It sold taste, discernment, place and an experience of the good life. Vineyards became destinations. Tasting rooms invited visitors to participate, if only for an afternoon, in the romance of a cultivated landscape. Sonoma's success was not simply manufactured by advertising. Generations of growers and winemakers developed genuine expertise, and the wines could stand on their own merits. The industry's rise created livelihoods, attracted investment and offered consumers a pleasure once associated more closely with Europe's established wine regions. It also gave Americans a distinctly Californian version of refinement.

Unlike the aristocratic estates of old Europe, the California winery could present itself as the creation of an immigrant entrepreneur, an adventurous family and a willingness to challenge inherited traditions. Wine became another expression of the American promise: excellence could be created in a new place by people prepared to work, experiment and take risks. Yet heritage also became an increasingly valuable commercial asset.

A nineteenth-century building was no longer merely an old building. It became a connection to an authentic past. A family photograph became part of the brand's identity. The age of a vineyard supplied a sense of continuity that distinguished its wine from the bottles competing for attention on a store shelf. History was no longer simply something the enterprise possessed. It was something the enterprise could sell. This is where selective memory becomes capital.

The most marketable parts of the past are easy to recognize: the visionary founder, the pioneering family, the beautiful estate, the extraordinary vintage, the recovery from disaster. They provide a narrative that consumers can admire and feel good about joining. The rest of the history is less convenient. Indigenous dispossession does not fit comfortably onto a back label. The exclusion of Chinese workers complicates the romance of hand-built stone cellars. The sterilizations at Eldridge are hardly material for a tourism brochure.

These histories do not all belong to the Gundlach family's own business, and the family should not be made responsible for everything that occurred in Sonoma. But they belong to the region whose beauty, antiquity and cultural identity help give Sonoma wine its extraordinary appeal. A visitor can spend an afternoon enjoying a beautiful estate without learning much about the people who worked the region's land before the winery existed, or the workers who helped create the wider industry. The pleasure is genuine. The historical experience is incomplete.

When nature sends the bill

There is, however, one participant in Sonoma's story that has never agreed to respect the distinctions between the beautiful landscape, the commercial enterprise and the costs of making wine. Nature.

In October 2017, wildfire swept toward Rhinefarm. The Gundlach Bundschu staff had been working to protect the property, clearing vegetation and preparing fire lines. Jeff Bundschu's parents, Jim and Nancy, lived in an old adobe house near the vineyard. As the flames approached, Jim initially wanted to stay and defend the home. Jeff called his sister Katie, who came to help get their parents out. The vineyard workers who had arrived for a late-season harvest were sent home. The family escaped with little more than their clothes and a few keepsakes, including some of the old family archives. Most of the family's historical treasures had already been moved off-site for protection.

By the following day, the house was gone. The winery buildings survived, but the family home, outbuildings and vines on the hillside had burned.

In the days that followed, Jeff helped defend the remaining property. A New Yorker reporter found him studying a map of the estate, with smoke rising from the ridge and ash falling around the winery. Jeff had been digging fire lines since early morning. He also told the reporter about the letter Charles Bundschu had written after the 1906 earthquake. More than a century separated the two disasters, but the family could still hear an ancestor's voice describing the earlier catastrophe. There is something profoundly moving about a family trying to save the records of its history while the place that carried that history is burning.

And the family's predicament was part of a much larger disaster. Across wine country, farmworkers faced lost wages, dangerous air and uncertain housing. For some, the harvest represented income they depended on for the rest of the year. For vineyard owners, it represented the crop on which an entire year's business might depend. Neither could control the approaching fire.

Sonoma endured further major wildfires in 2019 and 2020. Smoke threatened harvests beyond the areas directly burned, leaving growers with grapes that might be unsuitable for winemaking. The economic damage extended through the wider industry. Then came the pandemic. In February 2020, Gundlach Bundschu acquired another 60-acre estate as its business expanded. A month later, COVID-19 disrupted hospitality and wine tourism. Weakening demand and an increasingly burdensome debt structure subsequently placed the business under severe pressure.

The winery's financial troubles were not caused by a single fire or a single failed decision. Expansion, financing, changing markets and environmental shocks accumulated. By September 2026, Vineburg LLC reported approximately $39.1 million in liabilities. There is no reason to turn this into a morality play in which a family is punished for its ambition. Businesses invest with imperfect knowledge. Markets change. Disasters strike. Plans that once seemed sensible become impossible to sustain.

But the collision of debt, weakening wine demand and environmental pressure reveals something important about an industry that sells permanence. A winery can promise a taste of a particular place. It cannot promise that the place will remain unchanged. A distinguished brand cannot negotiate with a wildfire. A beautiful tasting room cannot guarantee the next harvest—or the next generation of customers. The cultivated paradise remains dependent on forces that no amount of marketing can fully control.

The American art of starting over

We have now returned to Rhinefarm's bankruptcy, but the vineyard should look different to us. The court sees a company, its assets, its liabilities, its creditors and the legal possibilities for its future. Chapter 11 offers a process through which a business may continue operating while its financial affairs are reorganized. It is, in many respects, an admirable American invention. The ability to reorganize a struggling business rather than simply destroy it can preserve jobs, productive assets and valuable relationships. It recognizes that a failed financial arrangement does not necessarily mean the underlying enterprise has lost its usefulness. America has often turned this capacity to begin again into an economic strength.

But the bankruptcy of a winery whose greatest cultural asset is its history presents a remarkable irony. The enterprise's past contributes to the value of its name, its reputation and its appeal to customers. Yet its financial obligations are now subject to a legal process that may permit some to be renegotiated or discharged. The history helps make the business worth saving. The financial burdens threaten its survival. And the longer history of the land sits outside the proceeding altogether.

There is no creditor's claim for the Indigenous communities displaced before Rhinefarm was founded. There is no entry in the winery's accounts for the Chinese workers who helped build Sonoma's wine industry. There is no financial mechanism that can restore what was taken from the people sterilized at Eldridge. These are not necessarily obligations that the Gundlach family owes in a legal sense. They belong to the larger inheritance carried by the region, its institutions and the society that has benefited from its development.

And they raise a question much more enduring than who will own the winery after bankruptcy. What does it mean to inherit the benefits of a history without inheriting any responsibility to remember it?

Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of America's celebrated ability to reinvent itself. The country has repeatedly found ways to convert upheaval into new opportunity. Conquest becomes settlement. Settlement becomes property. Labor becomes capital. Agricultural production becomes a cultural icon. A failed commercial arrangement becomes an opportunity for restructuring. Each transformation can create genuine value. Each can also produce a new story that places the achievement at the center and moves its human costs toward the margins.

The country celebrates the frontier without always remembering the people who lived beyond the frontier's advancing line. It celebrates immigrant ingenuity while repeatedly arguing over which immigrants should be allowed to participate. It celebrates national progress while struggling to acknowledge those who did not share equally in its benefits. This is not an argument against ambition, business, science or national achievement. Sonoma wine would not exist in its present form without the extraordinary work of people who sought opportunities beyond the world they inherited.

It is an argument against confusing achievement with innocence.

A civilization capable of extraordinary reinvention ought also to be capable of remembering what it has done. The ability to begin a new chapter need not require tearing out the pages that came before. And remembering need not be an empty ceremonial gesture. At the Sonoma mission, the names of the dead are now inscribed in stone. At Buena Vista, the Chinese workers who helped build the winery's caves can be recognized as creators of its heritage, not merely anonymous laborers. In the modern vineyard, the people who prune and harvest the grapes can be recognized through their names, their expertise and the conditions under which they work.

These acts cannot undo the past. They can change what the next generation inherits. Perhaps that is the difference between possessing a history and understanding it.

The future of Gundlach Bundschu remains uncertain. The family hopes to preserve its connection with the winery, even as ownership may change. The vineyards continue to grow, and the enterprise continues operating while its financial future is worked out. Perhaps new ownership will bring another successful chapter. Perhaps future generations will look back on 2026 as one more difficult year in the long life of Rhinefarm. But the land will still carry a history much older than the winery.

And there is one final limit to the American art of starting over. A court may reorganize financial obligations, but it cannot discharge a drought, reverse a warming climate or restore a burned landscape by legal decree. A lender can accept a loss. Nature does not negotiate a reorganization plan.

So the next time you raise a glass of Sonoma wine, enjoy it. Look at its color, breathe in its fragrance and appreciate the remarkable human achievement that made it possible. But remember that a vintage is more than a year of sunshine and rain. It is also a harvest of history: the land, the labor, the ingenuity, the ambition, the violence, and the fortunes made and lost.

Some of that history is celebrated. Some is buried. Much of it never found its way onto the label.

The wine is beautiful. Its history deserves to be seen. Perhaps the next glass will change not only how you remember yesterday, but how you see today and imagine tomorrow.