temeculawinetasting.com — an independent visitor's guide to Southern California's wine country, an hour inland from San Diego.
Fifty-some wineries sit in the hills of the Temecula Valley, and most of what is written about them is either winery marketing or a listicle. This is the independent version: the wineries by trail, how a tasting actually works, the dawn balloon flights, and how to plan a day that does not collapse into three tasting rooms and a long drive home.
The valley sits at about 1,500 feet in southwest Riverside County, roughly 22 miles from the Pacific. Every afternoon marine air slides through a low notch in the coastal range — the Rainbow Gap — and cools vines that spent the day in inland heat. Warm mornings, cool nights, and fast-draining decomposed-granite soils are what convinced the first growers to plant here in the late 1960s, and what won the region its own federal AVA in 1984.
The valley pours everything from méthode-champenoise sparkling to big estate Cabernet, but its reputation rests on Mediterranean varieties — Rhône reds and whites, Italian Sangiovese, Montepulciano and Vermentino, Spanish Tempranillo. Grapes that like the same weather the visitors do.
AVA established 1984 · around 50 wineries pouring · 33,000 acres in the appellation · 1,500 ft valley elevation · 22 miles to the Pacific. 111 pages.