Looking to get your hands on some wine information? It’s a Healdsburg’s Wine Library
The outstanding “personality” at the College World Series last June was the scintillating shortstop from the winning Oregon State Beavers, Darwin Barney. Here was a kid with a permanent smile, willing to strike up a conversation with anyone at the drop of a hat—including an opposing player. The Darwin Barney story that wholly cracked me up was this: He was on first base and had struck up a conversation with the first baseman. So intent was he on the conversation, that the pitcher strolled over and tagged him out!
Librarian Maurice “Bo” Simons is similarly focused when it comes to the benefits of the Sonoma County Wine Library. When he gets to expounding on the depth and breadth of the collection he’s put together in the eastern wing of the Healdsburg Library, a fire could break out and he’d probably be oblivious.
“This is good stuff,” he says, eyes alight with enthusiasm and focus as he explains the virtues of a leather-bound set of seven French ampelographies (which illustrate and describe wine varietals) from a century ago. The books are so valuable that winemakers were referring to them for information—still the best they could find—on the Rhone varieties that were suddenly becoming popular a dozen years ago.
“This was just one small part of the collection we bought from the Vintner’s Club when they moved from San Francisco to San Rafael some years ago. We paid $25,000 for the entire collection of 1,000 books in seven languages back then. A set of these seven ampelographies—not in near as good a condition as ours—went on the market for $17,000 five or six years ago. So I think our set is now probably worth what we paid for the entire collection!”
Putting it together
The idea for a “wine library” initially began to brew in the early 1970s, when the Russian River Wine Road was formed to bring attention to wineries along the Russian River, says Simons. “[Members of Russian River Wine Road] were doing some cooperative advertising, and several of the people from different wineries thought it would be nice to have a business and technical wine library, as well as an archive of the area’s rich wine history. They initially thought of housing it at one of the wineries or perhaps at the Healdsburg chamber of commerce. But Millie Howie [a public relations person then working for Geyser Peak and later a writer and publisher of the magazine Wine West], reasoned with colleagues in the wine industry that, if you’re going to have a library, work with the people who know how to do it; go to the public library.
“Understand, MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] was a potent political force in those days, and many derided the notion of having a collection centered on alcohol in a public library. Millie, the mother of this library, had an answer, though. She told David Sabsay, then director of the Sonoma County Library, that the focus of the collection would be on microbiology, viticulture, history, marketing and economics—and that it would be financed by the wine business. She told him it would be a jewel in the crown of the library and in the rich tradition of cooperative agriculture in Sonoma County. Sabsay was eventually convinced, and he then devised a method—subscriptions or dues paid by wineries, growers and wine-related businesses—for the industry to pay for the proposed library.’”
Before it was even beyond the planning stages, about half of the county’s wineries supported the idea by becoming subscribers and donating money. The next question focused on the collection’s location. The town of Sonoma made a claim based on its historical importance to the industry, but the nod went to Healdsburg on two counts: One, its library was due for rebuilding; two, it’s more centrally located to the county’s wine appellations. In October 1988, the newly constructed Healdsburg Library was opened, containing The Sonoma County Wine Library.
The range of books and information available in the present-day collection is impressive. “We have a bound copy of a law, An Act Limiting and Settling the Price of Wine, which was printed in England in 1657, during the reign of Oliver Cromwell. The oldest book in the collection is titled Libri de Re Rustica, and part of it deals with how they grew grapes and made wine in ancient Rome. It was published by Aldus Manitius, the famed Venetian printer, in 1514. In seven years, it’ll be half a millennium old! It’s in Latin, of course, and there are four authors. One of them writes about how the Romans grew grapes then, and made their wines. This author, a man named Columnella, writes about how a group of people make a bunch of money in Rome then come out into the countryside, buy a villa, plant the wrong varieties in the wrong places, pick their grapes at the wrong time…and then have the temerity to wonder why their wines don’t sell! Is there anything new in the world?
“Some of the items in the Vintners Club Collection weren’t as suited to our collecting areas. There were a number of bartending manuals in Japanese, with the names of drinks in English. One of the better drink names was Symphony of Moist Joy,” Simons says.
It may sound eclectic, but Simons explains the Wine Library covers four areas. The first is the science and technology of viticulture and enology. The second covers the business of selling grapes and wine, which includes marketing and economics. The third area of interest is the history of wine worldwide. The fourth is the history of wine right here in Sonoma County. That includes writing about the wineries and the wine families, including some fascinating oral histories. Plus, we have all the latest information that’s available, mostly in print, but we also have CDs and the like.”
For the moment, the Wine Library receives funding through subscriptions and from its support group, the Wine Library Associates of Sonoma County. “This great group lets individuals support the library and have a ball doing it,” says Simons. “They’ve given us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years; their contributions have made our oral history program possible and have funded our rare book acquisitions.”
Simons’ time is theoretically split 50-50 between the County Library and the Wine Library, but he admits to spending a tad more time working on the latter. “Part of my job is to select books and materials to add to the library, but I also spend time helping local kids with their homework and teaching them how to better use this marvelous facility. A librarian, I think, is, to adapt an Internet phrase, an intelligent filter.
“One of the great tricks of our age has to do with understanding what question lies behind the question being asked and helping our users filter through the mass of information that’s being constantly pushed upon us. A good part of my job ends up being intuitive—a bringing together of learning and experience. I don’t know how you distill all that to zeros and ones.
“Yesterday I had an interlibrary request from the University of Houston regarding an article about terroir by Bill Jekel from Decanter in 1983. Our present collection doesn’t go back quite that far, but I remembered that article was part of an ongoing debate between Jekel [the then Monterey winemaker] and Bruno Prats [Cos d’Estournel, France] on the influence of land and climate on grape growing, so I was able to get a much fuller account of the debate on terroir and send a reply that was more and better than what had been specifically asked for.”
A while back, one of Kendall-Jackson’s winemakers, David Hastings, was trying to track down a treatise on the absorption of chloroanisoles from wine by corks. At wit’s end, he turned to Simons. “I’d heard that a paper had been written on the subject in Australia, but no one could track it down for me,” Hastings remembers. “Bo did.”
With a deft sense of timing, Simons points to the wide array of periodicals housed in the library’s north bay, including old Robert Lawrence Balzer and Robert Finigan newsletters, and Redwood Rancher magazine (one of the first I ever wrote for). There are copies of Wine & Food from the 1930s, penned by the great British writer Andre Simon and his crowd. The south bay displays the Wine Library book collection, about three-quarters of which is available for circulation. The center bay is primarily reference materials, including the older books and collections.
“One of the first things I did when the library opened in 1988 was start what librarians call a ‘vertical file,’ which is really just a clipping file of articles and ephemera. The industry magazines— the ones with good practical and technical information, like Wines and Vines, Vineyard and Winery Management and Practical Winery and Vineyard—weren’t, at that time, indexed at all. Now, when someone comes in and wants to know which trellis system is likely to work best for their circumstances, we can point them in the right direction.”
Cultivating his calling
Bo’s father was in the Air Force. As a result, Simons was born in Tokyo and the family did stints in Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania before settling in La Jolla near San Diego. After high school—“I thought I wanted to be a writer”—Simons went off to UCLA, then tried UC Berkeley before scratching an itch to travel. “I felt I had to see something of the world before settling down to a career, so I went off to Europe and the Philippines. When I came back to La Jolla three years later, I went to work at The Bottle Shop. That’s where I began to cultivate my love of wine.”
Because his father had died when Bo was 12, Simons was eligible to receive surviving dependents benefits that included money to go to college. So once he returned to California, he applied for a governmental scholarship to complete his formal education. “They required an aptitude test, and the results of my test pointed insistently toward ‘librarian.’ Now, I had this stereotype in my head of what that word meant, and it didn’t seem very exciting to me at the time—the whole thing was sort of like the classic Greek tragedy, where the hero fights vainly to avoid his fate. And for years, I resisted the call of librarianship. Then I started investigating the profession seriously, and the more I looked into it, the more there seemed to be. I liked books. I felt the need to do something that served the public. What’s greater than hooking up a person with just the right book? And I found out a lot of librarianship is about teaching, about expanding people’s minds. That’s kind of exciting.”
Indeed, a fair amount of Simons’ time is spent teaching. “Oh, yes. We do workshops in Spanish for grower employees, working with the Nick Frey and the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission,” he says. “It’s important to get to the guys in the field—those who are the very blood, sweat and tears of the wine business. Daniel Robledo, who succeeded Rich Thomas as director of viticulture at Santa Rosa Junior College and has since moved on, has also been very involved in our educational programs. We also have a grant from the Kellogg Foundation that helps with these programs. We’ll get 50 or 60 guys and do workshops on viticultural topics as well as pesticides, safety and tractor driving. Then I get to show off our library to them and show them how many of our resources are available in Spanish. I can show them we have free Internet access and ESL [English as a Second Language] programs. And then—this is the best part—they come back and get a library card! That’s the payoff. That’s when you know you’ve contributed something to the community.”
Once an active Rotarian, Simons is now an active member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and says he’d like to increase his involvement with the Latino community. He’s active in the Sonoma County Library’s Latino Outreach Committee, which sponsors bilingual reading groups, writers’ workshops and gang awareness programs. His wife, Annette, is a real estate agent. Their daughter, Amanda, is studying linguistics at UC San Diego, and their son, Blake, is presently attending Santa Rosa Junior College. In his spare time, Bo likes to play blues and other music on “a nice old Gibson guitar.”
Simons says he’s fascinated by watching and keeping up with the “information industry.” Countering the popular notion that libraries are threatened by things like the Internet and Google books, he says, “Libraries are the corporate memory of mankind. Even with the Internet and the wonderful web resources we now have, I think we still need places like a library: a building filled with books. You can browse books on shelves in a library in a way that’s different from Googling or any other kind of Internet of database searching.
“The thing that happens when you go through the stacks looking for a book is that you find things you never would have expected! Because you’re there and because you’re searching. There is no computer program—there’s no simulator—that can give you that sensation, that feeling, that sense of wonder that comes when you hook into something wondrous and unexpected.
“That’s the great thing about a physical library: It lets you wander and wonder, it lets you browse creatively in a well-organized roomful of books. That’s how you become connected to the unexpected; that’s how you reach that ‘Eureka!’ moment, where all the parts fall into place and you come to something like an epiphany. And that, I think, is how you learn that the journey, not the destination, is the most important part of life.”
Like any good English major, Simons has a quote to back that up, from the fourth of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
“For me,” concludes Simons, “when people love books, it’s not an escape from the world. Rather, it’s an encounter with the world. There’s a Raymond Chandler line about the bad stereotype of librarians, ‘the acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.’ That’s the negative image of librarians, but a library should be where you learn about life.” And, perhaps, bring that life into a little better focus. n
If you wish to become a subscriber/supporter of the Wine Library, phone (707) 433-3772, extension 5.
