San Diego North: Temecula and the Wine Country Surprise

Temecula was a valley of cattle ranches until the late nineteen sixties, when a few growers discovered that the combination of altitude, diurnal temperature swing, and marine layer made the valley a reasonable place to grow wine grapes. The coastal influence comes through the Temecula Pass, the same gap in the mountains that lets fog pour in from the Pacific Ocean on summer mornings, cooling what would otherwise be an unbearably hot inland valley. There are now over forty wineries within a few miles of Interstate Fifteen.

This is not Napa. The wines are not Napa wines. But the industry that exists here is real and growing, and it serves a Southern California population that is close enough to drive to wine country without flying to San Francisco.

The Luiseño people, also called the Payómkawichum, the people of the west, lived throughout this valley and the surrounding region before Spanish colonization. The word Temecula itself comes from their language, from a word meaning something like the place of the sun or the place where the sun shines through the mist. The etymology is contested among scholars, but the mist part is accurate, the marine layer that makes wine growing possible is the same phenomenon the name apparently described.

The Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians maintains a reservation immediately south of the town, with a resort and casino that is now one of the largest in the state. Their land base is a small fraction of what the Luiseño held before the mission and rancho period removed it. The wine country and the reservation exist side by side in the same valley, with very different relationships to that valley's history.