The California Shenandoah Valley AVA is an American Viticultural Area that includes portions of Amador County and El Dorado County, California, USA. The region was first settled during the California Gold Rush in the nineteenth century, and settlers in the region began planting the first grapevines and producing the first wine soon thereafter. In the 1970s, Sutter Home Winery began bottling varietal Zinfandel wines made from Shenandoah Valley grapes, and in 1983 the region became a designated AVA. The most important grape varietal in the region is Zinfandel.
Famous quotes containing the words california and/or valley:
“We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser Oregon and California unexplored behind us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)