If you wander into a restaurant and see a soft and gentle red wine with a label branding it Torres, you can be forgiven for thinking you are about to enjoy a delightful vintage from Spain. You could be wrong.
The Marimar Torres estate grows its pinot noir grapes at Don Miguel Vineyard, all right, but that is in the ocean-front cool climate area of Sonoma.
Named after Marimar Torres, who began planting a 22-hectare plot in that chilly micro-climate, Sonoma's Green Valley, in 1986, the wine has a definite Spanish ancestry, and an aristocratic one, at that. But it is a Californian child.
The proprietor-winemaker is Ms Torres, born in Barcelona into the great Catalan wine family. She grew up in Spain, working in the family business, before going to California to study business at Stanford and, more meaningfully, wine and grape-growing at the leading wine school in the US at nearby Davis.
That knowledge of wine and commerce helped her boost sales of her Spanish family's wine over a decade from 15,000 cases to 150,000 in America. But then, Ms Torres decided to put down roots in the wine country north of California and grow her own grapes, making wine with a mixture of centuries of Spanish tradition and the latest local technologies.
That idea has proved a spectacular success. The chardonnay and pinot noir planted a decade ago are now producing excellent fruit at a 15,000-bottle estate winery.