There’s no denying 2020 was a very difficult year, filled with fear and loneliness, anxiety and stress. But amid the gloom there were bright spots. There were enough of them, in fact, for us to launch a popup newsletter, Best of Times in the Worst of Times, that came out weekly from March to May, highlighting uplifting and good things happening in Berkeley.
The community rallied in a crisis. Residents chalked messages of encouragement on sidewalks, put teddy bears and rainbows in their windows, volunteered at food banks, organized neighborhood support groups and live music and singalongs in the streets to cheer each other up. Individuals and local businesses, as well as restaurants, joined forces to offer mutual aid to those most at risk of contracting COVID-19. Responding to market need and quarantine restrictions, many businesses pivoted and started offering pandemic-friendly goods and services.
Special Report
12 California wines that define 2020
These wines, which make up a case, are not only delicious they tell the story of what happened with wine in this tumultuous year
By Esther Mobley |
Updated: Dec. 16, 2020 9:23 AM
2020 has been an earth-shattering year for the American wine world. And it would have been even without the coronavirus.
Major fires plowed through some of California’s most prestigious terroir, destroying wineries and threatening an unprecedented volume of wine grapes with the insidious malady of smoke taint. The nationwide reckoning with racial injustice forced the wine world to confront its inequities in a new, stark way and then allegations of sexual assault within the country’s most elite sommelier organization forced a similar reexamination of its deeply ingrained sexism.