Via - May/June 2014 - California - (Page 32)

Fine wines, delicious eats, friendly people, great outdoors. Find all that and more in California's charmed Anderson Valley. Vintage ROAD TRIP F O R T R AV E L E R S D R I V I N G California's sinuous Highway 128, Anderson Valley was once just countryside out the car window-a flickering film of rolling farmland and stately redwoods linking the Sonoma wine country to the Mendocino coast 60 miles away. Folks pulled over for gas in Boonville or a bag of apples from the local orchards, but their sights were always set farther down the road. Today there still isn't a single traffic light along this pastoral corridor, but visitors from wine lovers to locavores to urban escapees are finally stopping, drawn by a recent bloom of restaurants and tasting rooms that combine serious connoisseurship with low-key charm, a pairing largely vanished from California's more famous wine regions. "It's Napa 30 years ago, Sonoma 20 years ago," says Kristy Charles of Boonville's Foursight Wines. "We still have sheep roaming the hills, there's still open space, and a lot of the wineries are family run." Another delightful anachronism: one-on-one tastings with the winemaker or owner-folks like Mary Elke of Elke Vineyards, who I 32 VIA MAY+JUNE 2014

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Via - May/June 2014 - California