About an hour from Sacramento or South Lake Tahoe and a little over two hours from Reno or the San Francisco area, El Dorado’s wineries beckon visitors with a wide diversity of award winning wines, friendly tasting room staffs and idyllic views of snow-capped mountains and oak-studded foothills.

There wineries are renowned for making vibrantly flavorful, distinctly delicious wines, grown in the dramatic elevations of the Sierra Nevada.

These Sierra foothills range from 1,200 to 3,500 feet and hundreds of microclimates perfect for nearly 50 grape varieties. And all our artisan winemakers have a passion for experimenting and for this place. That’s what sets El Dorado apart.

Want to know what gives El Dorado wines their intense flavors and deep colors? Our mountain vineyards are on steep hillsides with warm summer days and cool night air. It’s an environment that gives wines luscious fruit, an alluring balance, gentle tannins, and body and depth that valley floors just can’t match.

Today, the county has more than 2,000 acres of vines, is home to approximately 50 wineries, and produces some of California’s most sophisticated wines. El Dorado was designated an American Viticultural Area (AVA) in 1983.

In El Dorado County, the vintner’s strength is the land’s terrain: hundreds of microclimates provide a broad range of temperatures, exposures, and soils. When well matched, this topography provides an ideal location for the world’s finest wine grapes, hailing from Bordeaux, the Rhône, Germany, Italy, and Spain. And that’s what we call “Right Grape, Right Place.”