Small wineries can lead

Can you give me any recommendations for the best wineries to visit in the Willamette Valley? Finger Lakes? North Fork? Santa Barbara? Anderson Valley? New Mexico?

Do you have any recommendations for wineries that we must see in Italy? Can you offer guidance to visitors to Australia with limited time to visit wine regions? What wineries would you visit in Zurich, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden and Malta?

Several times every week, we receive the same question: I am going to a wine region; what wineries should I visit? Each question above came from real letters and we could quote hundreds more from readers asking about regions as varied as North Carolina and Turkey.

We're delighted about this because visiting wineries anywhere in the world is a joy and excites many people into a lifetime love affair with wine.

The advice we give to everyone, no matter where on Earth they're visiting, is the same: Visit the small winery you've never heard of. You will not be disappointed.

That is what we have done all over the world and we pretty much always have a great time, chatting with winemakers (even when we don't speak the same language), tasting wine and enjoying the sights and smells.

When people ask us about visiting wineries, we think they're simply looking for someone to meet with intimate knowledge of the wines, some interesting wines to taste and a welcoming environment in which to taste them. This is all most likely to happen at that little winery with the unfamiliar name.

Most recently, we visited the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco as part of a brief family vacation. It's important to do a little bit of homework on your wine region before you go so you can find a concentration of wineries. Wine regions all over the world, which are eager to welcome tourists, generally have information online.

In our case, we searched online for Santa Cruz Mountain wineries and found the Web site of the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association. There was a handy listing of wineries in the region and a map to download from the site at www.scmwa.com. For an easier-to-use and more-detailed version of the map, we went to the "contact us" page of the Web site and entered our mailing information to receive a printed version.

This map became our best friend on the trip because it not only had easy-to-follow driving directions but a list of every winery and whether each was open to the public and, if so, when.

If you are going overseas, in addition to whatever official information you can find from the region, we'd urge you to buy a wine book that specializes in the wines of that region or country.

There are thousands of wineries all over the world that you've never heard of. They're small, family-run and charming. Those are the ones we target.

While some of the Santa Cruz wineries are well-known, most are more obscure, from Heart o' the Mountain to Clos Tita. Our goal was simply to identify some of these that were open to the public and drop in. (Many wineries are open by appointment only, often because they are small and can't handle many visitors. We prefer to be spontaneous, so we rarely visit those, but they can be quite a bit of fun, too, of course.)

Our first stop was Thomas Fogarty Winery & Vineyards, which is larger and fancier than most (in a gorgeous mountain setting) and a name we know well. It happened to be along our route, so we dropped in. There were two tasting menus: a standard tasting for $6 and a premium tasting for $12.

At most wineries, we find that our enthusiasm inevitably leads to an extra pour of something behind the counter. In this case, the extra pour turned out to be the star of the show: a Barbera that was stunning, with surprising structure and tremendous balance. We loved it so much that we bought a bottle and loved it all over again back at our hotel.

In any wine region, there are wineries all over the place if you look closely for them (or have a good map). The Beauregard Vineyards tasting room is right on the wharf of Santa Cruz. Storrs Winery is located in a little row of shops in the middle of Santa Cruz. The joint tasting room for Fleming Jenkins Vineyards & Winery and Clos LaChance is smack in the middle of Los Gatos.

Our own favorite visits, however, are the ones where we're surrounded by the vineyards and the tanks. At Burrell School Vineyards & Winery, for instance, we tasted a Chardonnay made from vines that were growing, quite literally, outside the window of the tasting room.

Hallcrest Vineyards was difficult to find, but it couldn't have been a more-relaxing, more-pleasant stop, with a knowledgeable young woman behind the counter who was happy to talk about wine all day.

Although Testarossa Vineyards is not an obscure winery (aficionados prize its Pinot Noir and Chardonnay), it's an interesting stop in Los Gatos because it's the site of a very old winery and the tasting room is inside a giant cave.

Most big wineries now charge for tasting, and many small ones do, too, but the smaller wineries are more likely to refund the tasting fee with a purchase or just forget about the fee if you're nice. At Testarossa, where the tasting fee was $10 for five wines (but where the unusually well-trained and friendly pourer also let us taste a 2004 Pinot, which wasn't on the tasting menu, against the 2005 Pinots on the tasting list), we bought a bottle and she waived the tasting fee.

Here's the point: All of the wineries we've mentioned here were chosen randomly, because they happened to be open and along our route. We're sure we would have had an equally good and interesting time at any of the smaller wineries on the map.

There is a story behind every winery in every part of the world. Just stop in. What winery would we recommend during your visit? The one we could never recommend because we've never heard of it.