This compact valley is perhaps one of the easiest parts of the Wine Country to visit in a day, and certainly one of the easiest to get around by car or bike.

At its southern end is the Victorian town of Healdsburg, with plenty of Wine Country frills but still relatively crowd-free even on summer weekends. It also has a staggering number of downtown tasting rooms, so many in fact that you can’t help but wonder whether they’ll all survive. You could tour Northern Sonoma wines never venturing more than a few blocks from the plaza, but that would mean missing out on the rustic charms of places like the Dry Creek Valley.

Although Healdsburg is the only place to shop, stay, or eat, getting out of the town is essential if you plan to experience some real wine country. At its hot northern end, the Dry Creek Valley is dominated by the huge Lake Sonoma Recreation Area, which offers some of the best outdoor recreation opportunities in Sonoma County. Between Healdsburg and the lake there are just vineyards, barns, and small wineries full of character, many run by eccentric characters.

Although the wine industry got an early start here when French and later Italian immigrants planted grapes in the late 1800s, Prohibition killed everything off and for much of the 20th century the valley was full of plum, pear and prune orchards. It was not until the early 1970s that grape growing started to pick up again, and the 7,000 acres of prune orchards that once filled the valley with their bounty shriveling in the hot sun are now long gone.

During that agricultural transition, little else apparently changed in the valley and the only development seems to have been winery related. Just two main roads run up the valley on either side of Dry Creek itself: West Dry Creek Road and the original Dry Creek Road, which eventually becomes Skaggs Springs Road and heads off over the coastal hills to the ocean. Apart from a couple of roads traversing the valley and cutting through the eastern hills to the freeway and Alexander Valley beyond, that’s about it.

Development did significantly change one thing: the valley’s eponymous creek. Dry Creek used to dry up to nothing more than a few puddles by the end of the summer, like the many smaller creeks running down the valley sides still do today. Since the dam that created Lake Sonoma was completed in the 1980s, however, Dry Creek has become wet year-round.

The Wines

Dry Creek is perhaps best known for its zinfandels, which can sometimes take on an overbearing, jammy style in the hotter parts of the valley. But zinfandel vines do not dominate the valley as much the wine’s prevalence might suggest and account for only about a quarter of the almost 10,000 acres of vineyards in the Dry Creek AVA. That’s a lot of vineyard acreage for such a small and narrow valley, especially when you consider the sprawling Russian River Valley appellation to the south only contains a few thousand acres more.

About 4,000 acres in the Dry Creek Valley are planted with cabernet sauvignon and merlot, particularly on the cooler western hillsides around places like the renowned Bradford Mountain. The hotter valley floor with its richer, alluvial soils grows excellent sauvignon blanc and, increasingly, semillon. Other varietals hint at the valley’s French and Italian heritage, with syrah and petite sirah coexisting with small amounts of sangiovese and carignane.

The ideal mix of growing conditions for so many grape varietals results from the two ranges of low mountains that flank the valley--the 1,500-foot coastal hills on the valley’s western side and the lower hills on the eastern side that separate it from the Alexander Valley. These hillsides have thousands of acres of benchlands and canyons where growers can usually find just the right degree of heat needed for ideal ripening of most grape varietals. The hills also shield the valley from direct influence of the cold coastal air, yet just enough cool air and fog is funneled up from the Russian River Valley to prevent things from getting too hot and sticky, particularly at night.

At the far northern end of the valley, on the hot, rocky ridges overlooking Lake Sonoma, is the aptly named Rockpile AVA, established in 2002. Don’t expect to be visiting wineries here, though, because there are none. In fact, there are few paved roads. The 200 acres of vineyards are planted predominantly with zinfandel and cabernet, producing intensely flavored wines for the few wineries lucky enough to own land here.

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