There are some fabled roads in America. You can get your kicks on Route 66. Ten cents won’t even shine your shoes on Broadway. 42nd Street is naughty, haughty, gaudy and sporty. There are no songs about California’s portion of US Route 101. It runs mostly south-north from Los Angeles through San Francisco all the way to the state border and up to Seattle. Interstate 5 runs parallel to it and it’s much faster. The Pacific Coast Highway is much prettier.
Map courtesy of MapQuest.
But if you want to be serious about wine tasting in California, at some point you’re going to deal with Route 101. It is the main stem for almost every wine making area in the state, with the very notable exception of Napa Valley. It will take you to Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, Paso Robles, near to Monterey, and Sonoma County. If America had a route des vins, this would be it.
As you drive north, you have the Pacific Ocean on your left and the mountains on your right. Mostly you can’t see the ocean; take the pacific Coast Highway if that’s your objective, but be prepared to crawl through towns. But you can see the sea for a while as you approach Santa Barbara. Around Pismo Beach, Route 101 skirts the coast along some rather impressive cliffs.
The road heads inland through as you get to Paso Robles where, surprisingly, the mountains appear on your left. Route 101 divides the vineyard areas of Paso Robles. On the west side, in those mountains (well, maybe they’re just foothills at that point) are the artisanal wineries that have raised this region’s reputation. On the left are the mass production vineyards: endless, endless vistas of vines. There are some quality vineyards these days on the east side of Route 101, but if you’re driving through you are overwhelmed by the quantity.
As you get closer to San Francisco, the endless vista is brutally modernistic office buildings in Silicon Valley, followed by the dreary traffic from the airport to the city. Then, suddenly, the highway disappears and you are on city streets. Use your GPS or your roadmap because it will take you to an American legend, the Golden Gate Bridge. If the weather is good, you will offer you a glorious view of the City by the Bay. If that famous fog rolls in, you’ll just have to take it on faith that the city is still there.
Once over the bridge, you’ll soon come to Sonoma County and one wine tasting region after another. Petaluma and the Green Valley. Santa Rosa and the Russian River. Windsor and the Alexander Valley nearby. Healdsburg and Dry Creek. It’s not that you can spend days there; you can spend years visiting Sonoma County and you won’t see it all, because it changes all the time.
You can keep going and find more vineyards, but if you’ve made it from Santa Barbara to Healdsburg, you’ve seen the best of the Route 101, in terms of wine tasting, anyway. Maybe they should write a song about it.