Beyond the valley
Temecula is the subject of this guide and always will be. But a handful of doors outside it have earned pages of their own — the coast, the city, the elders, and the long road north.
Every guide has a home turf, and ours is fifty-some wineries on three Temecula roads. Still, California is long, and sometimes the road leaves the valley — west to the coast, north into the city’s history and beyond it to Sonoma, south into San Diego County, or up the 15 past a vanished vineyard empire. When it does, this is the shortlist we vouch for: famous doors, old doors, and a couple that are both.
The shortlist
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Rosenthal — The Malibu Estate
Malibu · the coast day
Malibu’s first vineyard, planted in 1987 in a canyon with its own one-winery appellation — and a tasting room down on the Pacific Coast Highway, just off the beach. The estate grows the wine in the hills; you drink it with the ocean across the road.
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San Antonio Winery
Los Angeles · the city cellar
Los Angeles’s last historic winery — on Lamar Street since 1917, four generations of the Riboli family, Prohibition survived on sacramental wine, and the unlikely modern home of Stella Rosa.
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Bernardo Winery
San Diego · the elder, since 1889
The oldest continuously operating winery in Southern California — a village of weathered buildings under the pepper trees, the Rizzo family’s since 1927, walk-ins the standing tradition.
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Galleano Winery
Cucamonga Valley · the old vines
The living memory of one of California’s great vanished vineyard districts — est. 1927, still family-run at the original National Register ranch, pouring old-vine Zinfandel planted the year it opened.
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Orfila Vineyards & Winery
Escondido · the San Diego day
San Diego’s flagship — seventy hillside acres of Rhône-leaning wines in the San Pasqual Valley, forty-five minutes south, with more than 1,300 medals on the shelf.
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Optima Winery
Healdsburg · the pilgrimage north
A small Dry Creek Valley house in Sonoma County where winemaker Mike Duffy has been at the craft for more than forty years — limited-production and single-vineyard lots, picnic grounds, a bocce court, and no hurry at all.