Perhaps you’ve heard of (or tasted) Santa Barbara’s seven AVAs (American Viticultural Areas, the official designation of wine growing areas or appellations): Alisos Canyon, Santa Maria Valley and Santa Ynez Valley — a big-daddy region containing four sub-AVAs: Ballard Canyon, Happy Canyon, Los Olivos and Santa Rita Hills.

The county sprawls around 3,800 square miles and many of its wineries are farflung. To make wine tasting that much easier, some vintners have established tasting rooms in the county’s main towns, near hotels. These “urban” tasting rooms allow visitors to enjoy flights of local wine without getting in the car and navigating highways and winding back roads. If you’ve been itching to experience some Santa Barbara wineries, consider visiting these tasting rooms where you can sip and swirl the day away. 

The more than 270 wineries in Santa Barbara County take good advantage of the area’s unique geography and climate. Thanks to ancient seismic events, the Santa Ynez Mountains and the valleys in between shifted to run east-west instead of parallel to the coastline. As a result, the cool, damp breezes off the Pacific reach the vines, even in the sunny eastern parts of the county. The resulting wines — the majority are pinot noir, chardonnay and syrah, made from the 70 types of grapes grown here — win awards and contribute to the wealthy county’s major economic drivers: tourism and wine. 

The region’s wines and picturesque wineries even played a starring role in the 2004 movie “Sideways.” The estates of Alma Rosa, Fess Parker, Firestone, Fiddlehead and Foxen all took a star turn on camera.

The Santa Barbara Urban Wine Trail is primarily made up of two clusters of tasting rooms, both just a 10-minute walk apart. In these compact groups, established wineries sit alongside tasting rooms for up-and-coming labels as well as shared quarters for trying smaller growers’ bottles. 

Au Bon Climat, located along an arcaded stretch of shops, has a lovely setting in a wine library where you can sample its well-regarded wines. Nearby, at Riverbench, sip your flights of wine in an industrial setting with poured concrete floors and beamed ceilings. (Riverbench began planting grapes in the Santa Maria Valley in 1973, making it one of the oldest estates in the county.)

In Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone neighborhood, the grand Margerum tasting room has a more formal vibe — cathedral ceiling, adobe walls, terra cotta tile floors with oriental rugs — and a full kitchen menu. While you can order curated flights of wines, you can also choose drink by the glass, which in this busier downtown area seems to be the norm. The Fess Parker Funk Zone follows that model in a chill corner spot with food and ample seating indoors and out.  

If you choose to stay in Lompoc, a Santa Barbara farm town, you’ll find lots of great wines to accompany your visit. The Lompoc Wine Ghetto, an off-the-highway warehouse building that has been converted to a tasting room, provides a concentrated experience. Little has been done to disguise the industrial nature of the low-rise, steel-sided building, but that straight-forward approachability works. People arrive to try wines by several makers, not to be charmed by decorative trappings. Along with new upstart labels, you’ll find more familiar brands like Melville and Foley Estates.

Babcock Winery has taken a different tack and has juiced up its allotted warehouse space into something like a rollicking bar. The neon signage, bins of vintage vinyl records, old concert posters and funky flea market lamps and sofas have proven popular with locals as well as travelers looking to taste the wine.

On one lot in this tiny village, you can find two different ways to enjoy bottles produced by the Fess Parker Winery: The Epiphany Tasting Room pours flights of the winery’s Rhone varietals in a shady garden. Out in Epiphany’s courtyard, The Bubble Shack, a diminutive tasting room with indoor and outdoor patio seating, conducts 90-minute tastings dedicated to Fesstivity, the sparkling wines Fess Parker Winery produces. 

Even though the town of Solvang is known to some for its pancakes and kitschy Danish architecture, others arrive to get a taste of Santa Ynez Valley wines in the town’s 20 tasting rooms. Again, the in-town venues are clustered, so that walking from one to the other rarely takes more than three or four minutes. The outpost for Royal Oaks Winery, in a corner building with indoor and outdoor patio seating, features a tasting that pairs artisanal chocolate with their popular dessert wines and some of their drier wines. Pairing wine with food in a focused way can serve as a palate change-up during a weekend of tasting after tasting.  

Also in Solvang, Alma Rosa‘s sunny, chic tasting room has 1,000 square feet of patio space with a firepit which makes all-weather taste-testing possible. The changing menu of the winery’s bottles on offer, including some chardonnays and pinots, provides a great lesson in how the cool nights in the Santa Rita Hills benefit certain vines.

About four miles west of Solvang, the small city of Buellton also has a little clutch of in-town opportunities to try the local bounty. Of them, be sure not to miss a stop at Ken Brown Wines, the tasting room of a favorite maker built inside a prefab warehouse building on a stretch of farm equipment retailers. It sounds like an odd set up, but don’t be scared off: The perfectly acceptable tasting room may be the site of a personal wine epiphany after you try Brown’s esteemed syrahs and pinots, made from grapes cherrypicked from some of the county’s best vineyards.

This story was edited by Hearst Newspapers Managing Editor Kristina Moy; you can contact her at [email protected].