Mike Dunne

The Old Sugar Mill looms from the flatlands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta like one more grim California penal colony to startle unsuspecting motorists as they wind their way through some quiet, remote and sparsely settled stretch of the state.

We're standing in the tasting room of Lone Buffalo Vineyards on the rolling outskirts of Auburn. It's a tasting room more informative than most because the Phil Maddux family, which founded the winery in 2007, is big into educating consumers about the smells and flavors of wine.

A decade has passed since Marco Cappelli startled his winemaking colleagues by letting them know that he saw potential in the trade beyond Napa Valley, specifically in the Sierra foothills.

As you drive up Slug Gulch Road in the Fair Play district of southwestern El Dorado County, you pass a small vineyard easy to overlook for the dense forest of pine and oak that rises up the slope just behind it.

Like small gems on an antique gold necklace, about 20 winery tasting rooms are scattered along and about Main Street of Murphys in Calaveras County.

France's Champagne region sets the standard for sparkling wines. That isn't exactly breaking news.

Despite its proximity to Sacramento, the officially recognized American Viticultural Area called Fiddletown is one of the smaller, more remote and less frequently visited wine appellations in the country.

When you stop by the small family winery Unti Vineyards in the middle of Dry Creek Valley, however, you don't find any cabernet sauvignon or sauvignon blanc, though their portfolio does include a zinfandel. (It may be against the law – of nature, at least – for wineries in Dry Creek Valley not to make a zinfandel.)

Jim Taylor is the father. Ryan Taylor is the son. Together, they form the grape-growing and winemaking team at Mt. Vernon Winery just outside Auburn. t. Vernon is the only winery in the country sanctioned to use the stamp on wine labels. The Taylors continue to donate to breast-cancer research, 12.5 percent from the sale of each of their two Global Journey wines with the stamp.

Sierra foothill historian Eric J. Costa has made my life much easier. Whenever I need to brush up on the history of the wine trade in El Dorado County, I leaf through his newly published book, "Gold and Wine: A History of Winemaking in El Dorado County." (El Dorado Winery Association, $20, 138 pages).

Though harvest was under way, Lou Preston wasn't in the cellar fermenting grape juice. Nor was he in the kitchen kneading dough and baking bread. He certainly wasn't in the tasting room of his winery, Preston of Dry Creek.

Grover Lee relishes a challenge. Tell him something is unlikely if not impossible, and he'll set out to prove that he can do it. In growing grapes and making wine in the Sierra foothills, for example, one of the more enduring shibboleths is that cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, pinot noir and merlot can't thrive in the region's arid soils and searing temperatures.

We strolled through several vineyards in western and northern Sonoma County. Our guides were Mike Officer and David Gates Jr., principals of the Historic Vineyard Society, a nonprofit organization they helped form a year ago to enhance the stature and appreciation of old vineyards.

On paper, tempranillo should be one of California's more popular varietal wines. As the backbone of Spain's glorious Rioja wines, it has reliability, tradition and nobility going for it.

The American wine consumer has been brought up on wines labeled by varietal, such as cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel and merlot.

As a wine appellation, Napa Valley is partitioned into 15 sub- appellations, each claiming to possess such a distinct microclimate and terrain that its wines stand apart esthetically from its neighbors.

When a wine critic talks of a wine being a "fruit bomb," you almost certainly can bet that it's from California. Oh, sure, "fruit bombs" originate elsewhere, most notably Australia, but in sheer numbers and power most of them bear a California appellation.

Jed Steele has been making wine commercially for 43 years. He may be best known as the winemaker who in the early 1980s left some residual sugar in a batch of chardonnay at Kendall-Jackson Vineyards & Winery.

Highway 16 may or may not be the most scenic way to get to Lake County from Sacramento, but it's a route we hadn't taken in years and we wanted to see what's been developing along the road in the interim.

Windwalker Vineyard and Winery at Fair Play in southwestern El Dorado County generated a bunch of buzz this summer when its primitivo from the 2008 vintage was named Best of Show Red Wine at the California State Fair.

When people talk about wine regions they'd like to visit, Oregon House just never seems to get mentioned. This is understandable. For one, it's about 20 miles northeast of Marysville, itself so remote and isolated it doesn't draw many visitors, despite its Gold Rush history and relics.

With Labor Day past, the fashion-conscious have mothballed their white accessories, but the wine-conscious recognize that much warm weather remains before they turn from the whites and pinks of summer to the reds of fall.

The black Italian grape sangiovese, the backbone of the remarkably agile wines of Chianti Classico, is having a difficult time getting a firm grip in California's soils.

I admit it, my image of the winemaker who likes to craft a single wine from three or four or more grape varieties is romantic.

"Welcome to a new tradition" is the tagline the George Mettler family uses on promotional material for its Lodi winery, Harney Lane.

Quirky things happen occasionally at the California State Fair commercial wine competition. Consider the Greenwood Ridge Vineyards 2006 Mendocino Ridge Estate Bottled Late Harvest White Riesling. Judges this year declared it the competition's best white wine.

Two surprises emerged from the Amador County Fair commercial wine competition this year, and just one of them was a wine.

At commercial wine competitions, entries customarily are arranged into classes by varietal or style, and occasionally by residual sugar, alcohol level, price niche and region of origin.

I usually don't shop for wine at Walgreens. But I'd heard of one being sold exclusively through the drugstore chain and wanted to try it.

You can almost miss seeing the vines at Helwig Vineyards & Winery in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley.

Difficult as it may be to imagine today, chenin blanc not so long ago was one of California's more popular wine grapes.

I should have seen this coming, but nonetheless was surprised. It wasn't like I was in a blind curve.

Two years ago, the principals of the Lodi winery Van Ruiten Family Vineyards reveled in the news that the Wall Street Journal wine club had chosen their 2007 Old Vine Zinfandel as the best interpretation of the varietal in the nation.

California's wine trade hasn't been immune from the nation's lingering recession – witness the deep discounts on high-end wines – but sales nevertheless have remained surprisingly strong.

I'm getting pretty excited about the first Barbera Festival coming up June 11 in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley. Fittingly, it will be on Dick Cooper's ranch, the source of so much highly acclaimed barbera.

When the modern California wine trade began to gain momentum about four decades ago, one of the more instrumental players to establish Amador County as a fine-wine region was Montevina Winery.

Who in the world would buy a wine called "Train Wreck"? That was my first thought as I stepped up to the tasting counter of Newsome-Harlow Wines in Murphys and scanned the sheet listing the winery's current pours.

Think "port" and visions of squat, black bottles encrusted with decades of cellar dust are apt to materialize.

Mark Twain had an opinion about everything, and his views were so cogent and provocative they still resonate, as seen by the popular and critical success of the first volume of his autobiography, published last year.

There's lots of chatter these days about how the draft horses of the wine trade - big, heavy, lumbering zinfandels, cabernets, syrahs and the like - are going the way of the, well, draft horse.

From intimate workshops to large general assemblies, the thousands of grape growers and winemakers who gather in Sacramento each January for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium are inundated with a flood of statistics concerning plantings and sales.

Neither Hank Cooper nor his son Dick Cooper was the first to cultivate barbera in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley.

No winery in the Mother Lode embraces blended wines with more energy, optimism and good humor than Twisted Oak of Murphys in Calaveras County.

During the past five years, production at David Girard Vineyards just south of Coloma has more than quintupled, from 1,200 cases annually to 6,500.

Rich Gilpin celebrated 25 years as a California winemaker last year with a new brand, Coppermine.

A brash prediction: By the end of the decade, harvesting wine grapes by machine will be far more widespread in California than it is today.

Bray Vineyards in Amador County's Shenandoah Valley gives the impression that it doesn't take itself too seriously, or maybe not seriously at all.