SHENANDOAH VALLEY – The tasting room of Cooper Vineyards on Shenandoah School Road was a little chilly on a recent Saturday morning, which isn't a bad thing since it's also the barrel room for the Amador County winery.

Chill or not, the tasting bar in one corner was a bastion of warmth and cheer, as much for the energy being shared by the tasters and pourers as for the quality wine list.

Scott Newton, an independent database developer from San Francisco, was feeling it. He was intrigued by the lushness of the pinot grigio, a sometimes leaner white, and asked where that feel came from.

"Good question," said one of the servers, a tall, mid-30s guy. "Be right back." He disappeared through a side door.

Maybe a minute later, Mike Roser, the winemaker at Cooper, came bouncing back through that door in work clothes, which meant a T-shirt, shorts and a generous application of grape stains. Roser is a sturdy, lively, very friendly guy. I say this as a dog person: He's like a Labrador retriever in human form, if Labs could make good wine.

Roser told us the silkiness came just from the grapes and the yeast. There wasn't much manipulation of the wine. "Wait," he said, "you gotta try something."

He half jogged out the same door, then came back with a wine thief – that's the long, plastic turkey-baster-looking tool without the bulb that "steals" wine from barrels. Roser went over to a barrel of not-ready-yet pinot grigio, pulled the plug, dipped in the thief and poured a couple tastes of the infant wine into glasses for Scott and for me.

"Wow," Scott said.

"Wow," I said.

"I know," Roser said.

Its taste was full of bananas and pineapple. Huge on the banana, but still fresh and clean like a pinot grigio.

"I hope that stays in there," Roser said. "It'll be months before we bottle it."

Where did all that come from? we asked.

"It's the grapes," Roser said. "Isn't it great?"

We talked more, then Scott bought a bottle of wine. Roser scouted around for the right pen, ducked out, came back with a gold one and signed the bottle. As we were walking back to the car, looking at the vineyards and rolling hills around us, we were both amped and a little giggly from Roser's energy.

"OK," Scott said, "that never happens in Napa."

I give you the joys of foothill wine country. Lots of good wine, loads of great scenery, and, very often, a personal connection to some very cool people involved with the wine. You'd almost have to hide on some weekends if you wanted to avoid meeting a winemaker or owner.

This is not any kind of Napa bashing. Scott loves Napa and Napa wine. So do I. Napa is the beating heart of America's wine industry and one of the great regions on the planet. But it's also very different, and far more grown up, than the foothills. Amador's Shenandoah Valley gets compared a lot to the way Napa was decades ago.

This recent expedition to Amador was an experiment. Scott is my buddy and a wine guy of the best sort. He's an amateur with a good palate and an affection for the whole world of wine, from the vineyards and the tasting rooms to the glass on a dinner table. He gets excited about new wines and places, and is a dedicated anti-snob.

But Scott had never been to Amador County. He knew some of the wines but not the places, so off we went, through Shenandoah Valley, following his wine nose and expectations. I just held the map.

What was he expecting, I asked when we were driving up Highway 16 before we got there.

"I'm thinking it's very rural," he said. "I'm visualizing dusty back roads and patches of gnarly old zin vines, the free-standing ones that look like a little, grizzled army standing in formation. And I'm hoping for a couple really eccentric places."

He wasn't entirely off the mark. The foundation of Amador wine may be grizzled old zinfandel vines, and there is certainly a healthy share of eccentricity. But a lot of the winery buildings have an almost shiny newness, which is a testament to the growing popularity of the region. Plus the roads are paved.

What he was struck by – me, too – was the beauty of the soft hills, the varied and lush sense of wine country, the mix of vineyards and pasture, the places where Shenandoah Road hugs white fences while folds of vineyards run off every which way.

Sometimes we were up high, and there were classic green vistas of vineyards lining hillsides, accenting the curves of the landscape. And sometimes we were in cozy nooks, rolling down a road between an ancient oak and a weathered, heavy wooden fence with a couple horses behind it.

Scott pretty much alternated two sentences: "This is what I was hoping for" and "I'm really surprised." He didn't expect the wineries to be so close together, or the variety of wines or the quality to be so consistently good.

"I'm really surprised (see, there he goes again) by the diversity here," he said early into the afternoon. "We've had fruity wines, a few peppery ones, some that seemed thicker and full-bodied, and some that were lighter and more elegant. There are people up here that know what they're doing."

Also in his "surprise" category were the wine prices. "I'm amazed at how many really good wines are in the $20 category," he said. "That's like the starting point in Napa."

Scott did expect the tastings to be free. That's something everyone expects there, though the concept is a little mind boggling when you actually think about it. You drive up, walk in, they give you free wine. You can leave.

We decided we hope tasting stays free in Amador, though sometimes the popularity of places can eventually mean they'd pour so much wine they'd have to charge something.

What fit under Scott's heading of "hoped for" were places like C. G. di Arie on Shenandoah School Road. The wine is varied and good, the winery is owned by Chaim Gur-Arieh, the man who developed Cap'n Crunch cereal – reason enough to love the guy – and the tasting room is in a house by a brook.

What you see when you walk up is a brightly painted garage door. "Look," Scott said, "a real garage winery." (Actually, this is just the tasting room. The winery is a state-of-the-art facility a few miles away just across the El Dorado County line.)

Even more down the eccentric trail is Dobra Zemlja on Steiner Road, where they taste in a cave and the atmosphere at the tasting bar feels like a party, possibly because they have Kikas zinfandel, a port-style fortified wine with 20 percent alcohol.

But the styles of tasting rooms are as assorted as the styles of wine. For instance, Jeff Runquist Wines on Shenandoah Road has a bright, airy, modern building – the wood still smells new – but the same country friendliness inside. The highlight of the room, despite a strong lineup of polished, elegant wines, is a sweet golden retriever named Pearl.

Plus, we kept meeting owners and winemakers. At Terre Rouge and Easton Wines, Scott found his most impressive portfolio of wines. He particularly loved the syrahs. Me, too, though we split on favorites. I voted the concentrated, smoky Sentinel Oak syrah my top pick there; Scott went with the spicier High Slopes.

While we were tasting, Doug Bellamy, the tasting room manager, dragged us into one of the regular food-wine pairing exhibitions he runs with Jane O'Riordan, a chef, cookbook author and one of the owners. I need to tell you, go to their Web site – www.terrerougewines.com – click on Jane's Kitchen and get the recipe for shrimp in romesco sauce. Seriously, do it. You will become happy.

Or at Dillian Wines on Steiner Road, the cheery guy pouring behind the bar was Tom Dillian – the young Tom, winemaker and tasting room manager, not to be confused with his father, Tom, the head winemaker. "We're just a family making wine," Tom-the-younger told us.

"That's how it is up here," Tom said. "Most of us are family places, and we all do a lot of things at the winery. We're all rooting for each other, too. I love that my neighbors make good wine."

At nearly the end of the day, and nearly the end of the valley, we were a bit unneighborly, getting to Sobon maybe five minutes before they were closing. We felt bad. You hate to be the people who stumble in, oblivious that folks are trying to go home, so we asked tentatively if we could quickly sample a couple of their renowned zins.

A man and a woman had started to straighten the rustic, wooden tasting room. No problem, they said. No hurry. They were casual and amiable. It could have been noon. They showed Scott some memorabilia from the winery's long history and offered stories with the tastes.

At one point, I looked at Scott.

"Old-school hospitality," I said.

"That's what it is," he said. "It makes the wine taste better."

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Call The Bee's Rick Kushman, (916) 321-1187. Listen to him Thursdays at 8:40 a.m. on NewsTalk 1530 (KFBK) and 8:50 a.m. on Armstrong & Getty, Talk 650 KSTE.

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