Ray Isle explores the distinctive character of some of California’s best wines at stops along a destructive fault line.

There’s not much better in life, as far as I’ve discovered, than sitting outside on a deck over the water at one of the renovated fishermen’s shacks at Nick’s Cove, an inn and restaurant on Northern California’s Tomales Bay, particularly right as the sun is setting, with a glass of rosé and a dozen raw oysters. The view over the bay turns golden, with darkness just beginning to touch the hills across the water, and all you hear is the light slapping of waves against the piers below you.

The place is so peaceful that you’d hardly guess that the San Andreas Fault, that tumultuous collision of two vast tectonic plates, runs directly under the water in front of you. It bisects Tomales Bay, miles below the surface. Have another oyster, another sip of rosé. Then head to the restaurant, as I did, and order some of Nick’s Cove’s excellent cioppino — the signature seafood stew of San Francisco, as popular now as it was back in 1906, when the San Andreas more or less flattened the entire city.

The San Andreas has been responsible for earthquakes (a little too often) and strings of erupting volcanoes (in the very distant past), but also in many ways it has formed the distinctive character of some of California’s best wine regions (not to mention the entire California coast). That influence is why I’d decided to take a road trip down a good portion of its length. We tend to think of wine travel as heading to a region — the Napa Valley, Tuscany, Bordeaux — and staying put there. But I’d started to wonder if it might be even more interesting to follow a different kind of itinerary. Why not dive into history and geology and build a trip visiting wineries along the San Andreas?

The Sonoma coast
I started off my journey at the Harbor House Inn, in Elk, where 2019 F&W Best New Chef Matthew Kammerer works magic with hyperlocal ingredients in a redwood home originally built in 1916 for a timber company. Harbor House is directly on the coast, and from the inn’s deck, you can look out to where the San Andreas runs under the water. (It comes onto land a few miles south, near Point Arena.) Kammerer harvests seaweed offshore for some of his dishes, but most of his produce comes from a small farm that he bought right on the fault line.
“It’s all basalt up at Harbor House,” he told me when I took a visit there, “but here, it’s sandy loam, with this rich black soil on top — for farming, that’s ideal. I call it carrot soil. The carrots grow nice and straight all the way down.”
After waking up the next morning to a breakfast of Kammerer’s shirred eggs and foraged mushrooms, I headed south, cutting inland off Highway 1 near The Sea Ranch toward Peay Vineyards. I followed the twists and turns of Annapolis Road through evergreen forests for several miles, and at one point I crossed a small bridge over the dry and not-very-mighty Gualala River: At that point, Andy Peay had told me, I would be directly above the San Andreas.

I got out and walked over to the middle of the bridge, looked up and down the scruffy, tree-bordered riverbed, and thought, basically, that for such a mind-blowing geological feature, this view was pretty unimpressive. I was standing in the middle of the road on a bridge, thinking about rocks.

In my defense, if you care about wine, you really should think now and then about rocks (just not while standing in the middle of a road). Climate occurs aboveground; it’s easy to envision its effects. The precise cut of the Pinot Noirs from brothers Andy and Nick Peay and winemaker Vanessa Wong — “density but not heaviness,” Andy said — owes plenty to the cooling effect of the Pacific Ocean, four miles west. But vines have roots, and roots grow down, into the soil and the stone.

Andy said about his and Nick’s impetus to found their vineyard back in 1996, “We wanted more of that florality and tea and earth that you weren’t finding in California Pinot in the 1990s.” Those characteristics come from the Sonoma Coast’s ocean-driven weather, but also from the effects of the rock-tumbler, fault-derived jumble of geology that lies under vineyards here. “The big factors for all of us out here are the climate, and then geology and geography. And the geology and geography are driven by the fault.”