This is as close as you get to the vines. At the base of the Santa Lucia Mountains on the western side of the Salinas Valley close to nearby towns Gonzales and Soledad, River Road is home to a handful wineries and tasting rooms offering direct access to estate-grown fruit from the Santa Lucia Highlands above. Look up from your glass and you're looking at the vineyard it came from. Beyond River Road, you’ll find a few more low-key wineries near Greenfield and further south in Arroyo Seco.

No traffic lights. No street addresses. Carmel-by-the-Sea has been doing things its own way since 1916, and the result is one of the most charming walkable towns on the California coast. It’s a village of art galleries, historic cottages, and cypress-lined streets that ends at one of the state's most beautiful beaches. Several SLH producers have intimate tasting rooms right in the heart of it, which means you can move from the sand to a pour of estate-grown Pinot Noir or world-class sparkling wine in under ten minutes. Most rooms are walk-in friendly, the scale is human, and the whole village is your afternoon.

The grapes grown on these mountain terraces have a following. Top producers from Napa and Sonoma to Santa Barbara — and points in between — drive hours to source Santa Lucia Highlands fruit, then pour the finished wines in their own tasting rooms across the state. Which means wherever your California wine country travels take you, there's a good chance a Santa Lucia Highlands bottle is waiting nearby. From Russian River Valley to the Sierra Mountains, these are the wineries that prove a great vineyard's reach extends well beyond its appellation lines.