TASTEMAKERS
The Paso Wineries That Turn Visitors Into Regulars
From Spill
18 wineries
We asked a different question than usual. Not which Paso winery is good, but which one turned you into a regular. Those are not the same list and the answers proved it.
01
What people said
Calcareous for the hilltop and the view down the Adelaida. Penman Springs out in the Geneseo District. Whalebone, named for the fossils that turn up in the soil. Tablas Creek, which brought Rhone cuttings over from Chateauneuf and effectively wrote the template for the region. Austin Hope, and Lone Madrone from somebody who came back a second time to add it.
Somebody also named DAOU for the hospitality. DAOU is not in our data, which is a genuine hole given the size of the name, and we are fixing it.
02
What makes a regular
Almost nothing people mentioned was about the wine in isolation. It was hospitality, the same faces, a club that felt like membership rather than a subscription, somewhere that remembered the last visit.
Paso is well suited to this. It is a two-hour drive from a lot of California and a long way from everywhere else, so the people who come tend to come deliberately, and the wineries respond in kind.
03
Building a day
The west side around Adelaida and Willow Creek is hills, oaks and switchbacks. The east side is flatter, faster and easier to string together. Mixing both in one afternoon costs you more driving than you expect.
Hours and tasting details are on every Spill page here.
04
What the answers had in common
Nobody described a wine. They described being recognised.
That is the mechanism behind a regular, and it is not really about quality, because plenty of excellent wineries never convert a visitor into one. It is about whether the second visit felt different from the first.
05
Why Paso converts well
Distance helps. Paso is far enough from San Francisco and Los Angeles that nobody arrives by accident, so the people who show up have chosen to, and the wineries respond to that.
Scale helps too. Most of these are small enough that the same handful of people work the room, which is the precondition for being remembered.
06
Planning around the split
The west side around Adelaida and Willow Creek is hills, oaks and slow switchbacks, beautiful and time-expensive. The east side around Geneseo and Estrella is flat, quick and easy to string together.
Pick one side per day. Crossing the 101 twice in an afternoon costs more driving than the map suggests and it is the single most common way a Paso day runs out of time.
07
