The 9 Wine Regions of California

This California wineries guidebook is part of a series of guidebooks covering the nine wine growing regions in California. In many wine enthusiast circles, there’s a consensus on the boundaries of some of the wine region—but for others, there is no unifying consensus.

Nonetheless, at California Winery Guides we based our regional designations on a number of factors using geographic location, overall size, distinct wine appellations, wine growing associations, and other considerations explained in more detail below.

We also factored in the sheer number of wineries (4,500 plus and more on the way every year), their concentration throughout the state of California, proximity of wineries to major populations centers (like the Bay Area and Los Angeles for example), distance and drive times to get to each wine region, and the wine region’s climate, topography, and geology.

In addition to the above, where a previously defined wine region covered a large area and/or many wineries in a particular area, and to align each wine region more closely to their respective travel, convention, and tourist bureau definitions that help define their regional boundaries, we separated the wine regions into smaller and more distinct areas—thus the nine wine regions.

A perfect example of this regarding the geographic size of a wine region separated into smaller areas is the California Central Coast. The Central Coast covers twelve California counties (that include eight Bay Area, two in the Monterey area, and two more in the redefined Central Coast area of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties), a combined area larger than many of America’s smaller states.

California Winery Guides

Almost as long as Florida’s 360-mile-long eastern coastline, the Central Coast wine region covers a significant area from the NW corner of Marin County, all the way down to the SW corner of Santa Barbara County, a distance of 350 miles and close to six hours of drive time from one end to the other along US Highway 101.

For these reasons, the Central Coast wine region is divided into four smaller and more cohesive regions, with the Bay Area (eight counties and over 300 wineries) taking up the north end, the Monterey area (two counties approaching 100 wineries) holding the middle, and the revised and resized Central Coast region consisting of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties area (two counties and over 400 wineries), taking up the south end.

The North Coast wine region is another example of splitting up a large number and high concentration (1,000 plus) of wineries. These wineries are concentrated into the previously designated and all-encompassing North Coast wine region covering Napa and Sonoma counties, along with the four counties northward consisting of Mendocino, Humboldt, Lake, and Trinity counties (containing more than 100 wineries combined). The Napa and Sonoma counties and wine regions, to no one’s surprise, have always held their own distinct wine regions of California with close to 1,000 wineries combined.

Lastly, in defining which counties to include in the Bay Area wine region, we included all the counties bordering the Bay Area’s coastlines (except Sonoma and Napa counties). To be precise, if you zoom in on a map of the Bay Area, Napa County doesn’t touch the bay, but almost does.

So how many bays, in the Bay Area system, are there besides the San Francisco Bay that these eight Bay Area counties touch? If we head north of San Fracisco Bay into San Pablo Bay and then head east towards Sacramento, we come to Suisun Bay, and the lesser known Grizzly and Honkers bays adjoining Suisun Bay.

However, included in the Bay Area region is one county that doesn’t touch any of the bays, and it’s Santa Cruz County, an outlier. True, it touches Monterey Bay, but it’s history, economy, and inter-county relationships are more strongly developed and aligned with the Bay Area counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara to the north than Monterey County to the south.

Finally, the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley wine regions (with over 300 wineries) are combined because their winery locations, although covering a very large area but sparsely populated with wineries compared to Napa and Sonoma counties) follow a relatively narrow band of California real estate in a north-west to south-east trajectory within the two ends of the Central Valley (Sacramento Valley to the north and San Joaquin Valley to the south).

Along this trajectory, to the east of the Central Valley, sits the Sierra Nevada foothills and their wineries, aptly named the Sierra Foothills winery region.

Below the foothills are the major cities of Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno, and Bakersfield and where we find the Central Valley wineries.

Altogether, these 9 wine regions are listed below from north to south below including their respective counties or county, as follows:

Sierra Foothills & Central Valley (Amador, Butte, Calaveras, El Dorado, Fresno, Kern, Lassen, Madera, Mariposa, Modoc, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Shasta, Siskiyou, Stanislaus, Tehama, Tulare, Tuolumne, Yolo & Yuba counties)
North Coast (Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino & Trinity counties)
Sonoma (Sonoma County)
Napa (Napa County)
Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Mateo & Solano counties)
Monterey (Monterey & San Benito counties)
San Luis Obispo County
Santa Barbara County
South Coast (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego & Ventura counties)

Please note the year used in our guidebook for when a winery was established, is the earliest one recorded and listed on the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) licensing website page, that lists the date a winery’s Class 2 Winegrower license was first issued (activated).

To learn more about when the other California wine region guidebooks are available, please check out the Winery Guides section of the Fratire Publishing website at https://www.fratirepublishing.com/california-winery-guides.

The 9 Wine Regions of California

This website uses cookies.