San Luis Obispo CountyCountry: United States of AmericaArea: 33.49 km²Time zone: GMT -8

Junípero Serra founded the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772, and San Luis Obispo grew up around it in satellite communities along on the coast and in the mountains. It is California’s third largest wine-producing county and its largest agricultural export is strawberries.

San Luis Obispo County, one of the six counties that lie on California’s central coast, is popularly defined by what it isn’t and what it lacks. It isn’t the terminus of a highway or a train line. It isn’t flat. Although a centre of winemaking, it isn’t Napa or Sonoma. It has no port and contains no big cities, though its location, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, has been central to its fate. In 1979, local geographer Calvin Wilvert noted that San Luis Obispo – SLO CAL – had been “discovered.” But even then, Wilvert pointed to a degree of controversy over the “merits of growth.”

Many people are familiar with SLO CAL, or have associations with the county, without realising. They may have passed it while driving down the coast along Highway 1, or know Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother, which was taken in 1935 in the unincorporated community of Nipomo, or seen the episode of The Simpsons where Homer and Marge visit a hotel based on the Madonna Inn, chalet-style on the outside, kitsch and garish on the inside. (In 1971, its proprietor, Alex Madonna, was acknowledged for “augmenting the county’s acclaim.”) The most likely possibility is that they have heard of the enormous estate, heaving with art, statuary and exotic animals, which the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst commissioned the architect Julia Morgan to build on land above San Simeon Bay that his father had purchased as a horse and cattle ranch in 1865. The Hearst Castle is one of the best-known former private residences in American history. It served as the set for the house of Crassus in the 1960 film Spartacus and the basis for Xanadu, the Florida compound (its exteriors filmed in New York) where Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, the once-greatest film of all time, stores many rooms worth of “junk,” including – spoiler alert, I guess – his boyhood sleigh Rosebud. (Welles made it to SLO CAL later in the decade to shoot The Lady from Shanghai.) The chaletier Madonna was drawing on his Swiss heritage and a Grand Tour he had taken with his mother as a child, as the story of SLO CAL is one of nostalgia for an idea of Europe, a sort of Old World fetishism, which overlays the more direct European influence evident in the Spanish colonial architecture and place names. (The contraction SLO CAL recognises the area’s status as a distinct subregion, derived from the “so cal” region anchored by the Los Angeles megalopolis.)

In late September, as the weather started to cool, I spent almost a week driving around SLO CAL. There was much to do, to see, to eat. My itinerary, supplied by Visit SLO CAL, the county’s tourism bureau, had been designed to exhibit the area’s extraordinary mixture across its three-thousand-plus square miles of natural splendour, traditions new and old, and brunch spots. On one day, I visited Linn’s restaurant in Cambria – “I love that substance,” the manager, Aaron Linn, announced, as he laid down a plate of smoked salmon – then went for a tour of Hearst Castle. After making swift decisions in the gift shop (water bottle, snow globe), I headed for a late lunch up the hill – way up, it turned out – at Ragged Point, where I enjoyed beautiful fog-bound views of the Pacific while digesting a salad. Doing SLO CAL properly required not just appetite and energy but – in my case at least – humility. It was crucial, for instance, that my deficient e-biking around Pismo Beach, a small coastal city, did not put me off the next day’s kayaking around the volcanic plug at Morro Bay. If I survived that, I would be rewarded with Peruvian-style raw fish at Mistura, one of the best restaurants in the City of San Luis Obispo, the county seat. By my side was Tanc, a photographer who I have known since university. He looked like Dennis Hopper, in the Colonel Kurtz sequence at the end of Apocalypse Now, not only festooned with cameras but often – for reasons that will become clear, and which were not entirely his fault – wearing a similar vacant glaze.

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Down the coast from Ragged Point, formerly a pitstop for gold prospectors changing horses, the Hearst Ranch Winery is now home to a tasting room with dog-friendly outdoor seating a perfect rest stop for weary walkers heading home from the nearby Montana de Oro Bluff Trail. A short 13 minutes down the coast, the Brydge Restaurant is an eatery serving retro and micro-seasonal plates in Williams/Thorndyke/Bright House built by prominent local carpenter Henry Williams in 1877 and formerly home to Captain Lorin Thorndyk, the first lighthouse keeper at Piedras Blancas.

Rex Pickett’s 2004 novel Sideways concerns a wine tour around the Santa Ynez Valley, in Santa Barbara County, taken by Miles, the narrator, and his university friend, Jack, described as “incorrigibly late” and “outsized in every way.” Jack is due to get married in SLO CAL, in the town of Paso Robles, in a Mission-style church, at the end of the trip. At one point, eager to conceal this fact, he tells someone they’re heading there to encounter “the wines of the Central Coast.” In 1979, Calvin Wilvert’s exercise in defining the county made no reference to vineyards or viticulture. A quarter of a century later, Jack’s fib served as a solid excuse, an obvious reason why someone would check out Paso Robles. (In Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, starring Paul Giamatti as Miles, Paso Robles is mentioned as the site of a wine competition.)

It was somewhat hard to overlook the parallels with Pickett’s novel as Tanc and I, a Jancis Robinson book in tow (The Oxford Companion to Wine in their case, The 24-Hour Wine Expert in ours), set about exploring the local wine country in a Japanese car – Toyota for them, a Nissan for us. (They also make a stop at Hearst Castle.) In Sideways, Miles devises a scheme of driving north before starting a southerly grape tour, so that their drinking would follow a route back down to the motel. My own solution was less ambitious and less hedonistic. I would drive, Tanc would drink.

El Paso de Robles, which means the Pass of Oaks – after the state’s protected tree – is conventionally shortened to Paso Robles and colloquially known as Paso. Grapes have been grown there since the late 18th century. But it has only been recognised as a significant wine-producing region for about 40 years, due in part to the efforts of Gary Eberle, one of the “Rhône Rangers” named by Wine Spectator magazine, who was the first winemaker to plant Syrah in California.

Tanc and I spent a few hours at the Eberle vineyard. At first we wandered around the cave under the car park where wine is fermented and stored. Then while Tanc sampled the products, I talked to the winery’s extroverted 80-year-old founder – a one-time college football star – at an outdoor table with his large poodles, each named for a varietal. It was when he was studying for a doctoral dissertation in cellular genetics at Louisiana State University that he first tasted cabernet. “In a very short time,” he said, “I went from being not a teetotaller, but I drank very little, to someone who was just… intrigued… with fine red wine.” The good stuff available in New Orleans was mostly French. But Eberle started investigating the few cabernets being made in California. He realised, “I don’t want to be a geneticist. I want to be an alcoholic.” He transferred to the University of California, Davis, where he was the only doctoral student in oenology, and discovered Syrah. On graduating, he chose Paso because the land was affordable. “This area was undiscovered and the land was very cheap. Now it’s quite expensive.”

In 1976, as Eberle was getting started, an English oenophile, Steven Spurrier, organised the so-called Judgment of Paris, a blind tasting in which a chardonnay and a cabernet sauvignon from winemakers in the Napa Valley were awarded first prize – by a largely French panel – in the white and red categories ahead of Bordeaux and Burgundy grand crus. (Spurrier’s own grades skewed slightly French.) Subsequent tastings, to assess how the wines tasted after two years, ten years, thirty years, all found in favour of California. Eberle had set up further to the south, but as his career progressed, he became a protégé of the greatest Napa entrepreneur, Robert Mondavi. (Miles, in Sideways, makes reference to “the tentacular Mondavi empire.”)

The pasta served at Etto is made from premium organic durum semolina flour, produced by the artisan milling operation Central Milling Company, who have been making flour in Utah for 150 years. Elsewhere in SLO CAL, local restaurateurs Robin and Shanny Covey serve internationally inspired food at Novo and Latin-inspired fare in keeping with San Luis Obsipo’s former “Spanish feel” at its sister restaurant Luna Red. Similarly globally inspired but with coastal views, Blue Moon Over Avila is located nearby in Avila Beach.

For visitors to SLO CAL looking for refuge the San Luis Creek Lodge (above), located in downtown San Luis Obispo, boasts interior design by Nina Freudenberger, author of Surf Shack and Bibliostyle. Top, the Gold Rush Steak House dining room at the Madonna Inn is a short drive away.

The question of what is and isn’t authentic or desirable for SLO CAL was a recurrent theme of our visit. The area is understandably eager to define itself in relation to present-day ways of living. The tourist board urges you to “Take. Your Time.”  The local magazine bears the tagline, “Life’s Too Beautiful to Rush.” But as Calvin Wilvert acknowledged, some occupants were always likely to compare it to what it used to be – whether that was last year, or 15 years ago, or 50. SLO CAL might still the most sparsely populated county on the Central Coast, but it’s still more costly and frenetic than once was – whenever that might be. (In 2003, an earthquake in Paso destroyed the clock tower building that proudly claimed, “Darned Near Paradise”; the sign that replaced it read, more prosaically, “Experience Paso Robles.”)

On our last afternoon, we had lunch at a superb restaurant by the airport – the Spirit of San Luis. Tanc opened a bottle of 2022 white Barbera which Brian Terrizzi had given us.

As we were leaving, we got into conversation with an elderly couple on a nearby table. They weren’t very keen on the county in its era post-discovery, let alone post-explosion. They occupied what Wilvert called the “no-growth position.” They would disagree with Travel Paso that the town has retained its “authentic, small-town charm.” They reminisced about dinners at the Motel Inn, back when the local buildings still had their “Spanish feel,” when there weren’t polo matches and rock concerts in the rural areas, when young people were willing to run cattle, when everybody knew each other and nobody talked about wine. (Wine is for drinking, the man said, not tasting.)

I asked if there were any positive changes.“Ah, what do you think?” the woman said, turning to her husband. “We’re more on the not positive side.”I argued that it’s still a very beautiful part of the world.“That’s what they tell me!”Then the woman got talking to another diner – a Paso Robles native. It turned out their daughters had gone to school together.Tanc pointed out that it seems people do still know each other. I added that you can’t even go out for lunch without bumping into an old neighbour. What they needed was more people, more strangers. She sighed, then resolved to double-down, in the face of this contrary evidence.“I guess we just liked it the way it was.”Her husband looked at her. “That’s because we’re old!” .