A sip of Santa Ynez: North of Santa Barbara, find superb food, charming small towns-and some grand wines - Santa Ynez Valley, California

Sunset, April, 2002 by Matthew Jaffe

The sight of cattle dotting distant hillsides is one of this region's trademarks, however. So too are its oak trees: evergreen forests of coast live oaks set against grasslands and the gnarled silhouettes of valley and blue oaks, which are beginning to leaf out this time of year.

The growth of the wine industry has raised concerns about the county's oak woodlands. Vineyard acreage in the area has surged from about 9,500 acres in 1990 to almost 20,000 acres today. This increased vineyard planting has contributed to the loss of both oaks and the trees' habitat.

"We're losing oak woodlands at a horrific rate in California," says Sanford. "Santa Barbara County is at a corner of the state where the flora officially changes from Northern to Southern California. There's a wonderful environmental interaction that takes place here. Can you imagine this land with all the oak trees gone?"

Even as change comes to the local environment, one of the Santa Ynez Valley's important parcels is reverting to a more natural state. The onetime Rancho La Laguna de San Francisco was donated by rancher Francis (Duke) Sedgwick to the University of California and is now administered as 5,880-acre Sedgwick Reserve. The ranch gained a measure of fame with the publication of Edie: American Girl, a 1982 biography of Andy Warhol model and actress Edie Sedgwick, who grew up here. But its real value is as an environmental laboratory.

Reserve director Michael Williams says that after the 1870s, the ranch was not grazed as heavily as many other parcels, and remnant native grasslands offer a unique opportunity for understanding the area's ecology. The work here could help both cattle ranches and wine operations to work with the natural environment. Williams says one oak genetic study revealed that the pollen that produces acorns almost always comes from other oaks within 60 meters. That theory could alter current planning approaches, which focus on the number of oaks per 100 acres rather than tree proximity.

Williams believes that most people in the wine industry are aware of the need to protect these trees. "They know how important oaks are to the California landscape," he says. "You see oak artwork on wine labels and restaurant menus. The problem has been that some people cultivate right up to the base of the oaks' trunks. But the habitat extends beyond where the oak is actually standing."

Sedgwick Reserve is a remarkably intact slice of old California. Yellow-billed magpies, their wings flashing black and white, swoop over meadows of purple needle grass. Centuries-old valley oaks are pockmarked with holes made by acorn woodpeckers, who stash acorns by the thousands in the bark. A white-tailed kite hovers above a slope marked by outcroppings of 150-million-year-old serpentine. And in the damp soil near the old ranch buildings that stand beneath a grove of California pepper trees, a puma has left fresh tracks.

A valley oak casts a long shadow across a low rolling hill as a hint of the ocean rides in on a western breeze, And not far from the reserve, the young leaves of the grape vines have broken from their buds, marking the beginning of a new wine year and the arrival of spring in the Santa Barbara wine country It's a landscape worth toasting even when words can only say so much.