Think of wine regions within an easy drive of San Francisco or Oakland and either Napa or Sonoma will jump to mind. Pity then the poor, forgotten Santa Cruz Mountains and Livermore Valley to the south, two regions steeped in just as much wine-making history that turn out wines as well respected as those from more famous appellations to the north.

The Santa Cruz Mountains region is actually doing pretty well and has carved out a successful tourism and wine niche. It has plenty of Silicon Valley money to the east, some of Northern California’s best redwood forests to satisfy outdoor junkies, and fabulous beaches to the west, resulting in a curious cultural blend of capitalists, hippies, mountain folk, and surfer dudes. Within Northern California’s Wine Country only the Russian River Valley can boast a similar degree of scenic and cultural diversity.

Thanks to a few particularly famous wines the region is also well and truly on the wine map, even if not sharing the same sort of tourist traffic as other parts of wine country. Clinging to the eastern and western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains are a few hundred acres of vineyards. Some face east and others west, some at high elevations and others at lower altitude, some warm and others exposed to chilling ocean winds. It all creates a patchwork of growing conditions ideal for a wide variety of grapes. The notoriously finicky pinot noir grape thinks much of the land is heaven, but there are fine growing areas for chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, and other grapes, too.

Small mountain wineries happily craft limited-production wines with a greater sense of place than many in other appellations. A limited supply of local mountain grapes often means making wine from regions farther south along the Central Coast, giving visitors the chance to compare great wines like pinot noir and chardonnay from prime coastal growing regions in both Northern and Southern California.

The Livermore Valley might be a little more desperate for attention than the mellow mountains of Santa Cruz. Subdivisions of bedroom communities blanket large swaths of the valley and development very nearly pushed out grape growing altogether in the 1990s. Only some of the biggest wineries managed to stem the loss of vineyards, convincing the city of Livermore that the wine industry is worth having around in the long term.

Now those wineries would really like visitors to prove them right and discover that there’s far more to see in this sun-baked valley than housing developments and freeway traffic. Unlike the Santa Cruz Mountains that has made a name for itself with a handful of world-beating pinots and cabernets, the Livermore Valley still struggles to find a wine identity.

Small producers make worthy wines with little fanfare but also with very little profit-generating publicity. Other Livermore wineries seem to be psychologically trapped in the shadow of Napa and Sonoma, trying to emulate those better-known regions despite the fact that the vast housing tracts in the valley mean there will never be quite the same sense of rural charm. As more new wineries open their doors in the Livermore Valley there is no doubt the region will eventually find its mojo and carve out a wine and cultural niche of its own.

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