What’s onAmador has been growing serious wine since 1856. This is its decade.
Twenty-nine rooms on the roads around Plymouth, Drytown and Sutter Creek, in the order you’d drive them.
The oldest documented Zinfandel vineyard in America is on a hillside in the Shenandoah Valley, planted in 1869, and it is still giving fruit. For most of a century this county quietly grew the grapes that made other valleys famous — Sutter Home’s White Zinfandel, the wine that changed how America drinks, was built on Amador fruit. The county kept the vines. Now it is making the wine, too.
What that adds up to: about fifty-five wineries, century-old head-trained Zinfandel at a fraction of what the same thing costs two hours west, Barbera good enough that the Piedmontese order a second bottle, a Rhône house whose founder holds a Rhône Rangers lifetime achievement award, a retired paleontologist, a retired physician, the food scientist who brought Cap’n Crunch to market, and live music somewhere in the valley almost every week of the year.
Start on Shenandoah Road. Give it a whole day.
Off 49 onto Shenandoah Road, up over Steiner and back down. Sixteen rooms with nothing in common but the dirt, and the dirt is the point.
01Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
The valley’s great piece of modern architecture: a steel-and-glass room whose long screen wall is woven from recycled barrel staves. Andy and Janis named it by splicing their own names together, and they farm estate Zinfandel planted in 1978. Wine on tap, a lower-alcohol program that wins over the skeptics, and a bocce court that got real design hours.
02Plymouth · Shenandoah Road · Thu–Sun
Paul Sobon grew up in the valley’s founding family and picked grapes in Bordeaux at nineteen. He built this room himself: a cedar-slab bar with a length of railroad track for a footrest, chandeliers made from wagon wheels, a ceiling milled from beetle-killed pine. Small, outdoors, the winemaker usually pouring. Come with questions and you’ll get the long answers.
03Plymouth · Dickson Road
Bill Easton ran a legendary Berkeley wine shop before he planted Syrah on a hill up here, and the Rhône Rangers gave him their Lifetime Achievement Award for what followed. The tasting is seated and unhurried, in a room with nothing to prove. Easton is the Zinfandel label, Terre Rouge the one sommeliers ask for by name — order both.
04Plymouth · also Sutter Creek Main Street
He learned winemaking as a high-school exchange student in the Rheinland-Pfalz, came to Amador in 1979, and spent a Napa decade in between — where he created Ménage à Trois. Then he came back. Forty-plus vintages here, the Barbera that made the valley take the grape seriously, and a dry Riesling that is the quiet masterpiece. Two rooms, a full calendar, and a man who will happily tell you what 1979 was like.
05Plymouth · Steiner Road · by appointment
Napa wanted this valley badly enough to try twice: Rombauer bid on the old Renwood property in 2009, lost, and bought it a decade later anyway. The lawn is immaculate, the pours are generous, the Zinfandel is the point, and Friday afternoons bring live music and food trucks in season. The locals pretended not to care, then started showing up.
06Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
Larry Long ran a hospital in Truckee and holds master’s degrees in biochemistry and healthcare administration; he retired early to do this instead, and his sons built the barrel-room doors and took the enology degree. A straw-bale building with Tuscan lines, Mediterranean reds, weddings in the barn, and a west-facing patio that does evening better than rooms with three times the budget.
07Plymouth cave · 1860s house in Sutter Creek
The Havills mentioned at a dinner that they wanted to buy a vineyard; Koerner Rombauer told them to go to Amador, and they did. Two rooms, two moods — a wine cave cut into the hillside out in the valley, and a Victorian house in town. Barbera, Zinfandel, and an olive oil people drive up for on its own.
08Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
Marilyn is a fourth-generation farmer who bought these 89 acres with her share of her family’s Idaho grain ranch and never planned to make wine at all — she started in 2000, when the valley’s growers had to. The result is a French-château room run by women, with a winery cat who outranks the staff. Prettier inside than the address lets on. Bring your mother.
09Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
California Historical Landmark No. 762, founded in 1856 by a Swiss immigrant named Adam Uhlinger; the marker notes that the original rock-walled cellar with its hand-hewn beams is still in use. Leon Sobon left a senior scientist’s job at Lockheed in 1977, moved six children up here, and in 2024 collected a State Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. There’s a museum, a picnic lawn, old Mission vines and Uhlinger’s 1855 wagon bell. Start here and everything else makes sense.
10Plymouth · Shenandoah School Road
Framed on the wall is a dollar bill on which Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti wrote the word “Barbera” for a Cooper who had never heard of it. Dick Cooper planted five acres on the strength of that napkin-economics moment and became the godfather of the grape in California; the first Barbera Festival was held right here. A big Spanish-farmhouse room, seventeen varietals, and a lawn built for a long picnic.
11Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
The Gulletts spent three weeks in Chianti Classico before they planted a vine, came home and put in nine Sangiovese plants traced to a great Brunello house, and made 110 cases. Thirty-five years later they are still the Sangiovese specialists in a Zinfandel county — a glorious act of stubbornness. A red barn, bocce, walnut and olive trees, and two hundred lilac bushes.
12Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
Simone Vanophem Shaw staked this claim in 1936, raised chickens and grew mushrooms in the mine caves through the war so she could serve coq au vin, and reportedly wore pearls while dealing with rattlesnakes. Her ranch is now a winery with a misted patio, lawn games and a full basketball court. The setting does a lot of the work; the wine keeps up.
13Plymouth · Steiner Road
Sobon’s first property, started in 1977, with long views down the valley and a serious contemporary art and ceramics gallery upstairs — the only tasting room up here where you might buy a painting. The best value on this list by a clear margin. The trade has known for years; everyone else is catching up fast.
14Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
Twenty-two grape varieties hand-picked across thirty planted acres, an olive grove of 211 trees in twelve varieties, and — the winery says — seven original sections of the Berlin Wall standing on the property. Go and look. A lounge, a patio, and a new name on a vineyard this valley has been drinking from for years.
15Plymouth · Steiner Road
Suzi Raposa came to America as a child refugee from Laos, worked as a physical therapist for thirty years, and credits her grandfather — a rice farmer who plowed behind a water buffalo — with the instinct that brought her to these eighty acres. Four ponds, twenty-four acres of vines, and rooms to sleep in if you’ve done the loop properly.
16Plymouth · Shenandoah Road
Chaim Gur-Arieh is the food scientist who brought Cap’n Crunch to market and later had a hand in Hidden Valley Ranch; he sold his flavour company in 1998 and started making wine on 209 acres between two forks of the Cosumnes. The tasting room is here on Shenandoah Road. There is an amphitheatre. There is a wine in a can designed to go with sushi. The valley’s great original.
Drytown, Amador City, Sutter Creek. Main streets you can walk end to end, rooms open past five, and stages that book touring bands.
17Drytown · Highway 49
Drytown was the first place in the county where gold was found, and at its peak it had as many as twenty-six saloons. This is the last one still standing: a roadside bar with a winery inside it and a stage at the back, pouring small-lot wines and craft beer alongside wood-fired pizza, with live music most weekends.
18Amador City · Main Street
Chris Walsh was an architectural lighting designer in New York, lost the job to the recession, bussed tables, became a sommelier and started making wine in his grandparents’ two-car garage. A friend from Napa gave him the name. Low-intervention bottles, excellent burgers, tattoo-artist labels, and a room in California’s smallest city that would make complete sense in Oakland.
19Sutter Creek · Ridge Road
A former Bay Area tech executive farming twenty certified-organic acres and fourteen varieties on the ridge between Plymouth and Sutter Creek. At the 2025 San Francisco Chronicle competition every wine he entered won something, including Best of Class for the Barbera. Food trucks, music days, and a view that explains the drive.
20Sutter Creek Main Street · also Plymouth
It began with one barrel of Primitivo made from leftover grapes; two years later their Barbera took Best of Show at San Mateo. The estate is an old D’Agostini walnut farm with seventy-five-year-old trees still standing and barn owl boxes in the rows. In town: a genuinely modern room with a bistro, dogs on the patio, and a summer music schedule that fills the sidewalk.
21Sutter Creek · Hanford Street
Ann Kraemer managed vineyards for Domaine Chandon and Swanson and consulted for Cain, Calera, Hobbs and Shafer before planting Shake Ridge Ranch — the vineyard every serious winemaker in three counties wants a row of. The name goes back to a man who walked into California with the Portolá expedition in 1769. A garden patio, an art gallery, cheese boards, and sometimes a musician under the trees.
Two of California’s best Rhône producers are twenty minutes apart on the same road. Start early.
Eight that earn the extra hour.
22Camino · El Dorado County
Edio Delfino started this Apple Hill farm in 1964 and helped found the growers’ association; his four grandchildren run it now, three of them Cal Poly-trained, and they sold their fruit to other winemakers for decades before opening their own room in 2020. Rhône wines, a cider program, and Folk on the Farm on Saturdays. The best-looking room on the hill.
23Somerset · El Dorado County
In 2006 the Skinners spotted “Skinners, CA” on an old map near Rescue and traced it to a Scottish gold miner — their own ancestor — who ran one of California’s largest wineries here in 1861, on the Pony Express Trail. They bought the historic cellar back, and the ranch with it. Today: a mountaintop pavilion, Rhône blends that get written about, and twenty-two surviving Mission vines from the 1800s that go into the Angelica.
24Pleasant Valley · El Dorado County
Victor Alvarez was a practising physician, bought 254 acres in 1998 and designed the room himself out of salvaged European material: beams from the old Oakland Ferry Building, Mediterranean stone floors around two centuries old, and a thirteenth-century fireplace from Crete. Grand, and entirely unembarrassed about it.
25Somerset · El Dorado County
Robert Jones made his money in eighties tech and still owns the basket press he used as a young man — his grandfather planted grapes near Lodi in 1940. The winery is a hillside cavern with a bocce court on the roof: tastings underground, the view up top, and a Pinot program that has no business being this good at this elevation.
26Camino · El Dorado County
David Jones was a Berkeley paleontologist who helped work out the structure of California’s Coast Ranges and won a National Academy of Sciences medal for it; both his sons took geology degrees and now run the vineyard and the cellar. The name is miners’ slang for the volcanic rock that caps the gold gravels, which is also what the vines are growing on. A big deck, a happy crowd, and a wine list with a thesis.
27Placerville · Main Street
Marco Cappelli spent seventeen years as winemaker at Swanson in Napa, then came up here and put his wine on tap: bring the bottle back, they refill it from the keg, and roughly ten tons of glass a year stay out of the landfill. Alicante Bouschet, Zinfandel, and a Mission Angelica he fortifies young and ages six to eight years in barrel. The smartest wine on this list per dollar.
28Murphys · Calaveras County
Home to a 44-pound specimen of crystalline gold — the largest known, more than three times the next — and to a fifteen-rank Robert Morton theatre pipe organ built in 1927 for a Sacramento movie palace. Add gardens, a museum and an amphitheatre that fills with thousands on summer nights. Big, generous, and completely unapologetic about it.
29Murphys · Main Street · Calaveras County
An 1859 stone building on Main Street that smells of lavender, pouring Rhône wines from a forty-two-acre lavender-and-vine property, with artisan cheese served alongside half the list and a seated library flight on Saturdays in the Rhône Room. If you make one stop in Murphys, make it this one.
Dated shows, the standing weekly series at nine wineries and bars, and the four festivals worth building a weekend around — all on one page.
The calendarThis list is short because the pleasure is in the edit. Every room on it has been walked into and every bottle paid for; nothing here was arranged, traded or comped, and no winery was asked whether it wanted to be included.
Twenty-nine out of roughly a hundred within an hour’s drive. Go and argue with it over a glass of Barbera — that is what a list is for.
Ask around.