Lodi — Old-Vine Zinfandel, a Downtown Mission Revival & Micke Grove Gardens

Forty minutes south of Sacramento, Lodi is one of California's most rewarding and least pretentious wine towns — the self-proclaimed Zinfandel Capital of the World, where gnarled, head-trained vines planted before Prohibition still produce some of the state's most characterful reds. This unhurried single day wanders the sandy-soil vineyards of the Mokelumne River appellation, tasting at family wineries whose century-old vines are worked by the fourth and fifth generations. In between, it slows down in Lodi's handsome Mission Revival downtown — the 1907 Mission Arch, antique shops, and a tasting-room lunch — before an afternoon among the Japanese gardens, oaks, and rose beds of Micke Grove. It's a gentle, glass-in-hand introduction to the flat, fertile country that supplies a fifth of California's wine grapes.