The life of Enid Sales, a preservationist and all-around polymath, sounds almost too delightful to be true. The first woman in California to earn her general contractor’s license, Sales was best known for campaigning to save 350 of San Francisco’s old Victorians in the 1960s and ‘70s — and saving their residents from eviction. And quietly, in the background of all her flashier accomplishments, Sales, who died in 2008, also planted a Healdsburg vineyard that has proven to be a special and distinctive site for Pinot Noir.
That vineyard, known as the Cohn Vineyard, turns 50 this year, and its old grapevines have come to embody a similar sort of historic significance as the buildings that Sales worked her entire life to preserve.
