Heard of the “Holiday in the Vines” celebration?  It’s a celebration of sights, sounds and flavors of the holiday that Sonoma Valley wineries are offering visitors during this festive season.  The signature event that the tasting room staff gets giddy over is the Gingerbread Winery Contest!

This is the fourth year that professional and amateur chefs alike produced extravagant gingerbread likenesses of Sonoma’s most acclaimed wineries. Throughout the month of December, visitors can pick up a map and a ballot at any of the participating wineries and cast their votes for their favorite edible-masterpiece. As an added bonus, each time participants cast a ballot they’ll be entered into a raffle to win a prize.

Cline Cellars owner, Nancy Cline, and tasting room employee, Maggie Cox (and a few of their elves), tried their hand at replicating the 1850s style farmhouse tasting room.  It was a new venture for each.

“The coolest thing we learned about making the gingerbread house is that you can make ponds out of melted Jolly Ranchers; blueberry in the case of Cline. We truly had a blast for never having done this sort of project,” explained Nancy.  And she described the creative marathon as “…one whole hectic day and four or five trips to Safeway, Sonoma Dollar Store, Tidily Winks, and others in search of just the right adornments, such as lollipops. It was a wonderful undertaking which I approached with duress and now am confident that next year we will mow down the competition.  This was our getting up to speed year.  Next year we envision a project that we can’t even talk about it is so exciting!”

One term the team had to come to realize during the construction was “authentic” looking.  “Maggie and I had to remove the idea we were making something look authentic.  We planned on creating the rock walls with croutons, but they are boring.  Instead we decided on brightly colored gum drops!  Syrah hill was to be planted with grapevines using pretzels and green and orange frosting, but instead we decided lollipops would be more whimsical …I mean how authentic is a gingerbread house to begin with?”
 
The final product is a sight to see.  Unique creativity crowds the display with examples such as Gummy sharks representing carp in the pond, and Peeps style ducks sit on another.  Come behold the masterpiece from 11-6
daily throughout the month of December…. and don’t forget to vote.