Coming in from the cold

Nicasio — UNLESS you've been living under an air-conditioned rock for the last couple of decades, you may have noticed signs that the world seems to be getting warmer. It's been widely reported that the trend is likely to wreak some interesting havoc upon California's wine regions in the not-too-distant future, leaving Napa and parts of Sonoma with conditions that resemble the Central Valley. And wine-growing regions once thought to be extreme, like Marin County, the sprawling coastal county north of San Francisco whose cliffs form the northern edge of the Golden Gate, are finding their way to the center.

Marin has long been considered too cool, too foggy and too marginal for anything but sparkling wine grapes. But all that's changing. In the last decade, a small but ardent group of viticulturalists has been farming vineyards there and attracting winemaking talent. Not long ago, the Chalone Group (now owned by wine-industry giant Diageo) planted a spectacular vineyard in the Nicasio Valley for its new Pinot Noir project, Orogeny. And filmmaker George Lucas recently planted 20 acres of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at Skywalker Ranch to augment his tiny vanity label, Viandante del Cielo.

Whether or not global warming is a factor, the county's reputation for grapes has gone from marginal to viable in a very short period of time.

Of course, Marin County is more famous for its counterculture than its viticulture, but wine grapes have been here for nearly two centuries, beginning with plantings by Spanish settlers at Mission San Rafael in 1817. As the century progressed, immigrants planted so many vines that a souvenir booklet from 1893 boasts "every dweller from Fairfax to Sausalito has his little vineyard." Earthquakes, Prohibition and phylloxera brought an end to this cottage industry, but interest was rekindled in the early 1980s as Napa and Sonoma became wine tourism destinations.

Marin vineyards tend to be set fairly close to the Pacific, and they're subject to dramatic daily fluctuations of temperature, along with moisture and fog. Most of them at one time or another have been farmed by grower Mark Pasternak.