Wandering East, Sip by Dip

And who could blame them? The mission is beautiful, and it's possible the lecture would have been intriguing, but who wouldn't prefer browsing the boutique clothing stores and cool art galleries, to say nothing of the stores with New Age gadgets and leftover hippie stuff? I happily spent an afternoon just strolling the town, which offers much more than you'd expect of a place its size. Then again, it's a college town, home of California Polytechnic State University, and tourists no doubt also help keep the town vibrant.

On the way back to my hotel, I stopped for a look at the Madonna Inn, easily the oddest little resort in all of the Americas. Each of the 109 rooms is uniquely decorated. The caveman room, for example, features solid rock floors and walls; the tack room walls are covered in red leather and pony pictures. A spa, slated to open this winter, will have a waterfall cascading into a lagoon, a 90-foot-long pool and bridges and walkways leading to a gazebo. Meanwhile, you can dine in the steakhouse, where the plush red seating and gold tinsel make it seem like an odd cross between a bordello and a Venetian castle.

I rather wished I could have stayed and eaten at the Madonna Inn, but I had mentally reserved dinner at the farmers market. Neither the food nor the ambiance disappointed.

You can find a farmers market any day of the week within the county. Paso Robles hosts them on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The San Luis Obispo market on Thursday evenings is a major party that shuts down numerous blocks to traffic.

Several bands were playing when I arrived. Farmers were selling gorgeous piles of every fruit and vegetable known to North America, including hybrids I've never seen before, such as a cross between a plum and a peach, and a cherry and a grape.

There were fortunetellers and New Age evangelists and booths where Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians looked for voters. Best of all were the food booths, with ethnic fare and barbecue, pies made by farmers who also grew the fruit inside them, handmade gourmet chocolates and platters served up by local restaurants, high-end and low.

Only warning: No matter how beautiful the fruit appears, if you fail to resist temptation and buy more than you and an army could possibly eat in several days, it will rot.

Flights and Fancy

Paso Robles, founded by an uncle of Jesse James, was once a major destination for travelers seeking natural hot springs. By the 1990s it had fallen on hard times, but it has since experienced a renaissance.

A good place to start a winery tour, Paso Robles is also home to a growing culinary scene. Historic buildings surround a large, wooded town square with a gazebo-style bandstand that features live music on Friday nights in summer. The square is also a staging area for three major wine festivals each year, including the Harvest Wine Tour the third weekend of October. The fest offers cooking classes, lessons in pairing wine and food, and events such as grape stomping and jeep rides through vineyards.

I settled in at Villa Creek Restaurant and Cellars, an elegant establishment where lunch begins with a flight of wines. Most of the finer restaurants in Paso Robles are committed to sustainable agriculture and the slow-food movement, meaning fresh ingredients from local farmers. Villa Creek follows this trend, with a special focus on early California, or Rancho Mission, cuisine. The ever-changing menu features such items as blackened buffalo rib-eye with grilled corn spoonbread, butternut squash enchiladas and fish with heirloom tomatoes and avocado salsa.

Having soaked up the flight with food, I strolled a couple of doors down to Vivant Fine Cheese Tasting, where 200 kinds of artisan cheeses were paired with wines. Across the street in a historic bathhouse, another wine-tasting room with a terrace beneath a vine-covered pergola was preparing for a September opening. Next door sat the newly opened Hotel Cheval, a 16-room European-style luxury inn that provides a horse-drawn carriage to carry guests to nearby restaurants.

A few more tipples at Vinotech, a wine bar that on Friday nights features various local winemakers pouring barrel samples, and I was in no condition to drive myself to the estate wineries.

There are several ways to get there without driving yourself: balloon tours from overhead, tours by van, tours by an open trolley car or a new tour that combines a hike with a gourmet picnic and winery stops. In my case, I'd arranged to meet with Christopher Taranto of the Paso Robles Wine Alliance, who does the driving.

The wine industry in Paso Robles is expanding quickly. In 1983, a count showed 20 wineries; today, 170. Quality also continues to rise, says Taranto, with Paso Robles wines winning prizes at world shows and showing up as top picks by publications such as Wine Spectator.

Everything Olives

It's worth driving the countryside just for the scenery. Oak forests provided Paso Robles with its name, which means "oak pass." The Midlife Crisis Winery is shaded with lines of Italian cypress. Adelada Winery is surrounded by walnut and almond groves.

I put off more tastings until arriving at Justin Winery, a beautiful property with a rare feature: a winery restaurant, one of only a handful in California. Lunch is served on a patio overlooking a rose garden. Dinner is a formal affair, a five-course dinner in a six-table restaurant that oozes romance.

The winery also has four luxurious suites with fireplaces, flat-screen TVs and glorious views of farm and field for overnight guests.

Then it was on to Pasolivo's olive grove, where the Guth/Yaguda family and its seasonal workers each year pick 72 tons of olives by hand from their 9,000 trees during a two-week period. The olives are rushed to the grinder, pulverized into mush, then put into a centrifuge before being bottled on site.

Joeli Yaguda says her family is one of 200 olive oil producers in California. The tasting room is rarer still and was opened as an afterthought: Olive oil enthusiasts were constantly stopping by wanting to see the operation and taste the various mixtures. The family ended up moving their home to make room for the tasting room, where samples from the grove are offered, along with tangerine olive oil chocolates, olive oil soaps and other skin products, and cooking gear.

Who knew olive oil could carry such a strong and distinctive taste? Unless you own a grove and press, you probably don't want to use it for ordinary cooking, seeing as how a half-liter bottle of the really good stuff costs $28, Yaguda says. But dribbled on a salad or over pasta, you want the best.

Olive oil should be used within about 18 months of the time it is pressed, and the most vibrant taste is from the olio nuovo, Yaguda said. Most supermarket varieties are old and tired, she added. First thing back home, I rushed to the cupboard to inspect the two bottles of extra-virgin Italian I had on hand and could not find a date on either of them. A few weeks later I read a New Yorker magazine expos¿ of a major scandal in Italy, in which tanker loads of soy oil from Turkey are received and bottled with extra-virgin Italian olive oil labels.

Frankly, I found Pasolivo rather strong when taken with just a small chunk of bread, but it turns out, as I discovered after returning home, that it makes a huge difference in the quality of my homemade salad dressing. I even decided to upgrade my balsamic vinegar to make it worthy of being mixed with Pasolivo, which, by the way, just won two best-of-show awards at an international olive oil competition.

Less than 30 minutes after leaving the inland olive grove, I was in an oceanfront room at Avila Beach, also in San Luis Obispo County, watching the waves roll in. By morning, within a few minutes, I was back on Route 1 at the beginning of my beloved Big Sur.

That particular California pleasure is still the be-all, in my mind, but it's not the end-all. Behind those rocky cliffs pounded by the ocean lies a destination treasure.