More Than Mourvèdre

A New Speaker Series Launches in Los Alamos

WORDS Ninette Paloma

It is 5:00pm on Bell Street, in the dusty town of Los Alamos where honey-hued trees frame corrugated rooftops, and the casa that winemaker Sonja Magdevski built is swelling with guests.

From Laguna Beach to Los Olivos, folks have gathered together on a Friday afternoon to swill glasses of Magdevski’s bespoke and low intervention wine out of her charming Casa Dumetz tasting room – and her wizardry with Grenache is not the only draw today.

For over a decade, Magdevski has been curating a Words to Live By speaker series shaped around the diverse stories and ideas of people that spark her varying interests. Farmers and fine artists and professionals spanning all walks of life pull up a chair on her cozy patio, and, for one hour, give themselves over fully to the “Sonja third degree.”
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In the hot seat today is UCSB alum and author Natasha Sizlo, whose discussion over her new book All Signs Point to Paris is kicking off Magdevski’s fall series. Gal pals and couples and waiters fresh off the early shift have come to listen in on Sizlo describing her quest for destiny and healing from Los Angeles to the City of Light. With refreshing candor and wicked humor, Sizlo maps out a journey fraught with debilitating loss and unexpected hope, topics all too familiar in our current environment.
True to form, Magdevski injects compassion and honesty into questions that flow seamlessly between playfulness and pragmatism, all the while casually drawing her audience into the conversation. At hour’s end we are left with a new book to cradle, and the nagging sensation that Sizlo’s story is really our story, too: wildly unpredictable and hurtling forward ready or not.