Placer County is an AVA in the heart of California's Sierra Foothills wine region. Once home to one of the biggest wine industries in the state during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, Placer County now boasts a handful of thriving boutique wineries. As in much of the Sierra Foothills, the terroir of the county is best suited to deeply intense examples of Zinfandel, Syrah and Italian varieties such as Barbera.
The AVA covers the whole of Placer County itself, although the majority of the area's vineyards can be found in the lower-lying western part, although altitudes there are still relatively high. El Dorado County lies to the south of Placer County and Yuba and Nevada counties can be found in the north.
Viticulture arrived in Placer County around the same time as the huge influx of settlers during the Gold Rush. Vineyards were planted to capitalize on the thirst of migrants from Europe, and by the 1860s, Sierra Foothills had the largest concentration of wineries in the whole state. As the gold dried up and the miners left the region in the late 19th Century, the vineyards were abandoned or ripped out in favor of apple orchards. Placer County began to see viticultural activity again only in the 1980s, when small producers started to set up vineyards.
As with much of the Sierra Foothills, the defining feature of Placer County's terroir is its altitude. Vineyards are planted on a variety of different slopes and aspects, at altitudes ranging from 800ft to 2000ft (250–600m) above sea level. This gives them a range of mesoclimates depending on their exposure to the sun and the wind.
Like many high-altitude wine regions, Placer County has a significant diurnal temperature variation that plays a big part in wine quality. Warm sunshine during the days is followed by nights that are cooled by alpine breezes from the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. This daily cooling-off period extends the growing season and lets the grapes develop complex flavors and aromas while retaining acidity.
Placer County's soils are mostly made up of decomposed granite with some smaller pockets of loam. This kind of soil is dry and infertile, and vines are forced to work harder to find water and nutrients. This leads to smaller berries with a greater concentration of flavor, simply because the vines do not have enough resources to produce a lot of vegetation. Wines made from these grapes tend to be complex in flavor and deeply colored, with pronounced tannins.
Few Placer County wines are labeled as such; most are sold under the better-known Sierra Foothills AVA title.
