In the most unexpected example of sustainability, a hotel is recycling wishes in the heart of Sonoma County’s wine country. Sonoma, the equally attractive stepsister to the better-known neighbor Napa, is making efforts to reclaim some of that wine tourism. It’s a less congested city with beautiful wineries, a great array of tasting rooms around a cute downtown, and yes: the capacity to sustainably process our dreams.
At The Lodge at Sonoma Resort, Autograph Collection, you can visit the Dream Wall where rows of empty wine bottles rest in a specially designed stand. You write down your personal dreams and wishes on a piece of paper, roll it into a scroll and push it into one of the bottles. The ritual of choosing the wish is aided by the fact that you’re near the Heritage Oak, a 400-year-old tree that is one of the oldest (some say the oldest) in Sonoma.
Once a month, staff collect the papers (with a tool that is like extended tweezers) and mulch them. Then the dream paste is spread at a local vineyard where it fertilizes the soil from which grapes grow. In other words, in the future, someone will be drinking the manifestation of your hopes and dreams. What a vintage: this is some powerful compost, right here!
The bottles at the Dream Wall are varied since the hotel hosts a complimentary nightly tasting with a rotation of local wineries. And if you miss the happy hour, there’s a wine vending machine in the lobby that holds eight bottles of locally-sourced wine, so you can get a tasting, a small glass or a large glass. Perhaps you will unwittingly already be drinking someone else’s wish—and hopefully, it will be a delicious way to make their dream come true, too.