Halfway Between Los Angeles And San Francisco, The Wine Country Surrounding Paso Robles Is Rich With Good Food, Scenery And Things To Do. And It’s Never Crowded.
For decades, Napa has gobbled up plenty of viticulture’s oxygen, as the amount of money it costs to travel there can attest. Tasting fees in Northern California wine country routinely exceed $100. The high cost of entry has much to do with the millennial and Gen Z rebuke of the wine business, and much of the industry is desperate to figure out how to draw travelers back to the vineyards. What’s increasingly clear, winemakers say, is that even the best “juice” isn’t enough.
Enter the Central California Coast, long a sleeper hit that never feels too crowded nor too exclusive, anchored by the impossibly cute Paso Robles and the lively college town San Luis Obispo and home not just to some of the state’s best wine but also outdoor recreation, quiet coastal landscapes and farm-to-table fare. Thanks in part to its three-hour driving distance both from Los Angeles and San Francisco, the central coast rarely feels overrun. Not the trails, restaurants or hotels.
“It’s kind of a forgotten part of California,” Matt Trevisan, owner and winemaker at Paso Robles’ Linne Calodo, told me. “There’s still a bit of the wild west down here, a lot of growth in the last 30 years but still retaining some of that entrepreneurial spirit.”
Where Historical Charm Abounds
There are a few small towns in central California that stand out for different reasons. In San Luis Obispo, the 104-year-old Granada Hotel and Bistro’s 17 guest rooms bask in historical charm and with a restaurant, a speakeasy-style cocktail lounge and ample indoor and outdoor space to relax. The hotel is a good home base for strolling the city’s walkable downtown, where lively restaurants like Lure Fish House and Bear & The Wren serve up fresh California fare.
Thirty miles away lies Paso Robles, a more classic “wine country” town that offers plenty of good food, coffee and shopping, all an easy walk from the 151-room Ava Hotel, which opened in summer 2005. Standouts include Les Petite Canailles, a French restaurant that does a decadent tasting menu filled with oysters from nearby Morro Bay and succulent Wagyu steak; Etto, which dishes up handmade pasta alongside classic Italian dishes from beef bolognese to a 2-pound bistecca ala Florentina; BL Brasserie, another French restaurant often highlighting fresh seafood; and In Bloom, working with several local farms and purveyors to craft dishes from salumi toast to a whole branzino.
Coastal Towns With Big Personalities
Closer to the coast lie Cambria and Morro Bay, each with its own distinct personality. Cambria, an artsy town close to the Hearst Castle, has a boardwalk along Moonstone Beach, an elephant seal rookery just north of town and good hiking along the coastline at the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve. Robin’s Restaurant manages to pull off a blend of Mexican, Thai and Indian food in a restored adobe home in the town’s historic East Village. Morro Bay is a quiet seaside town just off of Highway 1 on a calm body of water full of sea otters, seals, sea lions and dolphins, and the volcanic monolith Morro Rock is a protected habitat for peregrine falcons.
For oenophiles, there are 20 wineries on 40,000 in the surrounding area, many of them defiantly hanging onto independent ownership in an industry rife with consolidation and of corporate buyouts. Among the holdouts are Trevisan’s winery, which since 1998 has focused on Rhône-style blends from the Willow Creek district. “You can still meet winemakers in the winery here,” Trevisan says. “They’ll take you on tours, show you barrels, taste from the vats, show you where the babies are. That’s always really magical.”
The “French Mafia” Make Wine
French winemakers Guillaume and Solène Fabre have been making wine in Paso since 2003, when Guillaume landed an internship at L’Aventure. “It reminded me of where I grew up, in the south of France,” Fabre said. “The ambience, the terroir, all of it.” Four years later, he and Solene started their own label, Clos Solene. Reared in Bordeaux, Guillaume Fabre’s father found the French government too restrictive, and the U.S. more permissive of his ambition to experiment. Clos Solene is now among a trio of wineries locals sometimes call the “French Mafia,” because they include L’Aventure and also BENOM Wines, which Guillaume owns with his brother Arnaud Fabre, who came to California after his wife, Chloe, who is the daughter of L’Aventure’s owners and the winery’s general manager. “It’s those beautiful rolling hills,” Fabre told me. “There’s a feeling when you come to Paso and go to restaurants and how nice everyone is.
Beyond viticulture, the central coast also has a robust outdoor scene, from the gentle surf breaks at Morro Bay to myriad hiking trails all over San Luis Obispo county. The Black Hill Trail in Morro Bay State Park winds its way up to panoramic views of the coast and back down again, and the Cerro Alto Trail in Los Padres National Forest sends hikers up a 2,624-foot summit. The county is also one of the top-producing in the state for olives, with about 1,300 acres in production.
El Paso de Robles, as the town was once known, originated as a region of healing hot springs frequented by the native Salina’s Indians before cattle ranchers turned it into a “cow town” in the 1880s, long before the first American Viticultural Area was designated here in 1983. There are natural thermal waters run by Franklin Hot Springs with a surrounding wildlife reserve and River Oaks, where guests soak in tubs overlooking nearby vineyards.
Publication: Forbes
Author: Winston Ross
