California’s gold rush towns are booming – 175 years on

A few got rich, but most didn’t. Many travelled from Europe and China, while the journey from the American East Coast was either a gruelling six-month overland slog or an epic voyage, around South America’s Cape Horn and back up to San Francisco. It would be another 20 years before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. 

Now, 175 years later, the region fanning out around California state capital Sacramento is better known for its abundant wineries. In pastoral Fairfield County, I pass by Tuscan-style villas topped by rust-orange tiled roofs with skinny cypress trees lined outside while their vineyards stretch toward the mountains in neat rows. Hawks hang high in the air, as we continue past thick oak trees and breezy palms flanking dusty olive groves and ramshackle farmhouses. In places, the grassy hills and valleys arc so perfectly that their contours resemble a computer game. 

It’s all rather delightful, and I can see why many choose to take sauvignon-soaked vacations here rather than the grotesquely priced Napa Valley a few miles east. 

But my Gold Rush destination is Auburn, in Placer County (pronounced “plasser”) around 35 miles northeast of Sacramento. We make a brief stop at the idyllic Viña Castellano winery (vinacastellano.com) on the way, where the Mendez family specialises in fruit-forward Spanish varietals and the sugar-white snow on the serrated peaks of the Sierras is visible above the trees. 

One reason why there are so many vineyards around here is that when the gold finally ran out (or, at least, the easily retrievable gold), the French, Italians and Spanish who had made the onerous journey returned to what they knew. And for some of them, it was making wine. 

Dragged away from a soporific syrah-infused haze, I spend the afternoon meandering the whimsical streets of Old Town Auburn (oldtownauburnca.com). A Frenchman, Claude Chana, discovered gold in a local ravine in May 1848 and Auburn became a supply and trading centre, as well as somewhere for miners to hunker down during the wet winters. 

It now exists as a vibrant “Old West” tourist town, though my first glimpse of its charming film-set streets is tempered somewhat by the garish sight of a silver Tesla Cybertruck parked in front of a 100-year-old Chinese joss house.