The scenic route: laid-back wines without the crowds
It was a pretty good offer. I would remain sober enough to drive my friend Rose around a chunk of Yolo County, while she was allowed to drink as much wine as she wanted (provided she could still operate the iPhone map). She said yes. Then, she had an afterthought.
“Yolo County? Is that a real place?”
Yolo County is not only real, it is surprisingly attractive (once you get off Interstate 80), and most of its best features are within a twohour drive of much of the Bay Area. It turns out the Capay Valley/Dunnigan Hills and Winters areas offer wine drinkers a quality, but very un-Napa like, experience.
“It’s a little more mom and pop up here,” said Tom Frederick of Capay Valley Vineyards in Brooks. “But we’re just the next valley over from Napa, and we’ve had good success with a number of varietals — Syrah, Tempranillo, Viognier. People get their money’s worth here.”
We started in Sacramento and headed up to Matchbook Wine Co. in Zamora. After 25 minutes on charmless Interstate 5, we made a left onto County Road 92B and into Eden. Fat, fluffy sheep and tiny lambs frolicked in grass that looked like it had been drawn with a crayon. A giant hawk sailed past the windshield, alighted on a fence, and stared at us.
“If that hawk starts talking, we’ll know we’ve stumbled into a children’s book,” Rose said.
Matchbook Wine Co. opened in 2005, but its owners, John and Lane Giguiere and John’s brother Karl, have been making wine in the Dunnigan Hills for over 30 years. Matchbook’s sunlight-saturated industrial-chic tasting room opened in 2014.
“We wanted to build something that matched the farm buildings but had an urban feeling,” Lane said. “Also, we wanted a place to showcase the area, where people could drink wine right in the middle of the vineyard.”
You can taste wine from several brands here — Mossback, Chasing Venus, Sawbuck — but since this was a Yolo County trip, Rose and I stuck with Matchbook, grown in the Dunnigan Hills. We began with a glass of the 2015 Rosé of Tempranillo, which smelled like strawberries to me and peaches to Rose.
Despite the mild, lighter-wine-friendly weather that day, it was the 2012 Syrah that Rose and I took to the back patio. It was earthy and had deep, dark fruit, with delicate violet in the finish — it’s an affordable, big, juicy crowdpleaser. We sat in wicker chairs and looked west over the Chardonnay vines to watch spring come to the hills beyond. On weekends there are food trucks and bigger crowds, and while that sounds fun, Rose and I agreed this midweek experience was more “us.”
We headed east on Route 16 to the Séka Hills tasting room in Brooks. The green hills seemed to grow shades brighter as the day progressed, and they were decorated with swaths of cheerful yellow flowers.
Séka Hills features the products made of the 16 crops grown on the adjoining 1,400acre ranch owned by the Yocha Dehe Indian tribe, which also owns Cache Creek Casino across the street. But there’s no gambling in the tasting room. Just delicious olive oil, honey and beef sold by the tribe, as well as local and regionally sourced gifts. There is a great fire pit, surrounded by olive groves stirred by mountain breezes.
There is also wine, from grapes grown on the ranch and made down in Clarksburg. We had the 2012 Rosé of Syrah, dry, crisp, refreshing, and the 2011 Viognier, fruity but admirably restrained — at $16, both are a good value. Séka Hills’ olive oil is amazing. We tried all four varieties of olive oil; the Frantoio and Taggiasca were lighter and more elegant, the Picual and Arbequina stronger and more peppery.
We both coughed after trying them, and Jim Etters, head of olive oil operations here, said, “A good olive oil is supposed to make you cough.” Good to know. You can get the oil on Séka Hills’ website, so consider your lifelong search for an affordable, California-themed, sustainable, always-welcome gift over.
It was late afternoon and we headed down Route 16 to Winters. This drive is less green than the drive to between Matchbook and Séka, all flatness and farmhouses. Explosions of purple flowers and palm trees were exotic reminders we were in California, not Kansas.
Winters is a farming town — walnuts, peaches, apricots. Grapes are a growing crop here and wine a growing industry, and the town’s largest wineries, Turkovich and Berryessa Gap Vineyards, both have large and lively tasting rooms in the walkable, pleasantly-frozen-in-1958 downtown.
Turkovich feels, not unpleasantly, like Central Perk in “Friends,” with comfy chairs and gleaming floors. Sensing our mid-afternoon