Writer Patrick Dillon's new book traces the rise and fall of Alquimista Cellars
Many people dream of opening a winery—Patrick Dillon did it and lived to tell the tale
According to his bio, “Patrick Dillon is the only person to have won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and double golds in winemaking”—and, naturally, he lives in West County, just a stone’s throw southwest of Sebastopol.
Before Dillon came home to this most beautiful corner of the world and became a winemaker, he was an award-winning journalist—a former editor and columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, who has also written for Forbes, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. (That Pulitzer? He won a share of the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990 as part of the San Jose Mercury News staff for its coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.)
Dillon’s books include the nonfiction book, Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy, and the Silicon Valley novel, The Last Best Thing. He co-authored Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees and a cookbook, Open Range: Steaks, Chops and More from Big Sky Country.
His new memoir, Grounded: Down to Earth in California Wine Country, was published independently in April 2026. Dillon’s story perfectly captures the feel of the last 20 years in West County and in the winemaking world in particular. It’s filled with fascinating historical and agricultural tangents—the history of the Gravenstein apple, the Japanese internment, viticulture in Sonoma County, and bite-sized bios of well-known local winemakers—mixed with personal stories of Dillon’s growing involvement in the wine world.
The beauty of western Sonoma County has long been a draw for Bay Area creatives. The back-to-the-land movement that started in the late 1960s and early 1970s created a pipeline that has been funneling urbanites like Dillon (and, okay, me) into Sebastopol and its environs for more than 50 years now—often to the dismay of the town’s original inhabitants.
Dillon and his wife, artist and photographer Annie Dowie, bought a run-down sheep farm outside of Sebastopol in 2000. They lived in San Francisco but came up frequently thanks to Dillon’s growing interest and involvement in making wine.
By the time they moved up here fulltime in 2014, Dillon had worked more than 10 years of harvests—including at Radio-Coteau and White Cottage Ranch—and learned how to operate a forklift (one of the many funny sections of the book).
In 2015, he opened a winery called Alquimista Cellars in partnership with renowned local winemaker Greg La Follette. (Alquimista is Spanish for alchemy.) Like so many small wineries in west county, Alquimista Cellars specialized in high-end Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Of its founding, Dillon writes, “In 2015, Alquimista Cellars joined 6,010 wineries operating in California, the majority of them producing 5,000 cases or less. Our odds for emerging from that heap were long.”
The rest of the book details their efforts to make great wine and break out of the pack, all the while trying to survive the disasters that befell Sonoma County over the last ten years—fire, flood, pandemic—and, for Dillon, life-threatening heart problems.
In the end, Alquimista Cellars didn’t make it. The winery closed its doors in 2022, and it wasn’t the only winery to do so. Toward the end of the book, Dillon writes, “By 2025, owing to Covid, declining demand and increasing costs, some due to tariffs, the number had dropped to 4,800, a 26 percent drop from when Alquimista Cellars entered the fray a decade earlier.”
That decline in the wine industry continues to this day.
Yet, somehow, this book isn’t at all depressing. It’s funny, blithe, rich in detail, and tells the story of a dream pursued and a life lived to the fullest. So what if the winery didn’t work out; it was years of good hard work, delicious food, fantastic wine and a growing circle of friends in a gorgeous place that feels like home.
Knowing what he knows now, would he do it all again? You betcha.
You can find Grounded: Down to Earth in California Wine Country at Copperfield’s Books or on Amazon. Dillon recently signed a contract with Brandeis University Press for his next book, a history of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which at 294 years old, is the longest-running, continuous publication in the history of the United States.
This: "The beauty of western Sonoma County has long been a draw for Bay Area creatives. The back-to-the-land movement that started in the late 1960s and early 1970s created a pipeline that has been funneling urbanites like Dillon (and, okay, me) into Sebastopol and its environs for more than 50 years now—often to the dismay of the town’s original inhabitants."