Winery hotels & vineyard stays in Paso Robles

Paso Robles sits halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles and has become California's most experimental serious wine region. The huge diurnal swing — hot days, cold Pacific nights through the Templeton Gap — suits Rhône varieties and Zinfandel, and the hospitality has stayed refreshingly informal: vineyard inns, villa rentals and converted ranch buildings rather than corporate resorts.

The Paso Robles AVA covers more than 600,000 acres and was subdivided into eleven sub-AVAs in 2014 to reflect how differently its east and west sides behave. Westside, closer to the coast and cut by the Templeton Gap, is cooler, higher and limestone-rich — the home of the Rhône Rangers, the producers who made Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre a serious American proposition. Eastside is flatter, warmer and better suited to Cabernet and Zinfandel. Old-vine Zinfandel here goes back to the 1880s, planted by Italian and Swiss immigrants. What visitors notice most is the scale of the tasting-room culture relative to the crowds: over 200 wineries, most taking walk-ins, most run by the people who make the wine. The town square in downtown Paso Robles carries the restaurants; the hot springs the town is named for ('Paso Robles' is short for El Paso de Robles, the pass of the oaks) still feed several spas. Harvest runs September into November.