Gonzales, CA

Gonzales is the Salinas Valley farm town you pass on U.S. 101 southeast of Salinas, with the Santa Lucia Highlands rising along the valley's western side. Chualar is the next town north and Soledad the next south, so Gonzales works as the middle stop on a long valley drive. Pinnacles National Park is reached through Soledad on Highway 146. The town began in 1874, when brothers Mariano and Alfredo Gonzalez planned a fifty-block grid on land their father had been granted decades earlier. Dairies and a condensed-milk plant came first, then vegetables took over in the 1920s, and farming has set the pace here ever since. Voters made it a city in January 1947. Wine is the newer chapter. Constellation operates a winery on the south end of Alta Street, and the vineyards of the Santa Lucia Highlands, first planted commercially in the 1970s, cover the hills across the valley. River Road, southwest of town, is the signed wine trail, and it passes Pessagno Winery and Escolle Vineyard for a loop of country driving. Pisoni Vineyards pours by appointment only, so plan ahead. Lettuce and other leafy crops fill the fields almost to the edge of town. Taylor Farms runs a vegetable processing operation in the agricultural business park, and trucks and field crews are part of the morning scene through the seasons. Salinas has the hospitals, larger stores and county events, and the trip is a straight run up 101 with no turns to think about, a drive most people make without a second thought. Most of the region's wine and food life sits just outside the grid. Tasting rooms and vineyards are out on country roads, not on the main street, so enjoying them means a drive and a plan. The town itself is plain and workmanlike, with a distinctive tower and a sky that opens up as soon as the houses stop.