Location: Portions of Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Sonoma and Solano Counties
Climate: Although days in most areas of the North Coast AVA are warm or even hot during the growing season, the region is close enough to the Pacific Ocean that it experiences cool evenings creating an ideal environment to grow Bordeaux style grapes, the first varieties to gain serious credibility in the global wine industry.
Comments: The North Coast AVA reads like a who's who of California wine regions and contains arguably, the most well known wine region in the New World, Napa Valley. In California, most estimates put Napa Valley second only to Disneyland as a tourist destination. It also contains the two wineries that won the 1976 Paris wine tasting, Chateau Montelena and Stags Leap Wine Cellars, which accidentally became the single most significant single event to influence the global wine industry in the last 50 years.
