Once beautiful but sleepy, the little towns of the Sierra foothills are growing more sophisticated. From charming family-owned wineries to new inns and restaurants, this part of California holds treasures for quiet October weekends.

YOU CAN'T DEPEND ON AUTUMN. Of all seasons, it's the chanciest. What you want are days--weeks--of amber leaves and deep blue skies. What you get is one perfect October day followed by other days that are too hot, too cold, too gray, too weary. And autumn is gone.

Not in California's Gold Country. In the folded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, autumn lingers as if it knows a good thing when it sees one. Here are the blue skies, the tawny hills, the grapevines tinged fierce red.

If Gold Country autumn seems changeless, the Gold Country itself does not. Once beautiful but sleepy, it is now beautiful but sophisticated. Good new restaurants are popping up in unexpected places. Even more strikingly, an influx of creative new winemakers has made the Gold Country one of the most fascinating wine regions in the West.

If your family owned a station wagon when you were a kid, you took a Gold Country vacation, and here is what you did. You drove State 49. At a living-history museum, you saw men in suspenders, women in bonnets, and butter churns. You panned for gold, obtaining a small vial of glitter that an older sibling informed you was not real gold but worthless iron pyrite. You began to cry.

Forget about that. Make the classic Gold Country drive now--along State 49 from Placerville south into El Dorado and Amador and Calaveras Counties--and you will see more BMWs than butter churns.

Drive, for example, into the tiny Amador County town of Plymouth. At first glance it looks unchanged from 1964, or maybe 1864. But on the south side of the street is the restaurant Taste.

"I had never been on Plymouth's Main Street," says chef-owner Mark Berkner. "I saw the For Sale sign."

The sign was on the old Sportsman Club, which Berkner and his wife, Tracey, bought and transformed into a sleekly appealing restaurant. On a Thursday night, Taste is crowded with diners who have driven from as far as Sacramento to sample grilled prawns on gazpacho, or black Mission-fig salad.

The Berkners had worked in hotels and restaurants in Colorado and the Bay Area, and they could have landed anywhere. But they chose Plymouth. "This little Main Street needed us," Mark says. "We're going to give it a shot in the arm."

One measures the changes in the Gold Country in many ways: in the menu at Taste, in the cost of real estate, in the signs advertising yoga classes and family therapists on the 19th-century main streets. ("Tarnation!" you think to yourself. "The forty-niners didn't need no yoga or family therapists! They just whittled!") But maybe the best way is to drive the wine country: El Dorado, Amador, and Calaveras Counties.

Wine has a long history here. Boeger Winery, near Placerville, has roots that go back to the 1850s. Still, it's just in the last few years that Gold Country winemaking has taken off.

The launch is ironically tied to those winemaking roots. Nowhere else in California is a wine region as multifaceted as the Sierra foothills identified with just one wine: Zinfandel. Many of these hills were planted in Zin during the post-Gold Rush years by would-be-rich miners forced to return to more traditional ways of making a living from the earth.

The demand for Zinfandel survived because of an enormous audience who knew very little about true red Zin but who bought copious amounts of the grape in the form of sweet white Zinfandel. Sierra foothills vines supplied this taste and were saved from extinction.

In the last decade or so, though, red Zin has regained a passionate following. And Amador and El Dorado Counties are producing some of the state's most intense versions. Gold Country Zins are not for the timid. Their fruit is almost pruny ripe and earthy, their high alcohol levels often pushing up past 15 percent. But the best are in balance, with acid and tannins to match. They're spectacular wines. And they've been joined by Rhone grapes (Syrah, Mourvedre, Viognier), Italian grapes (Barbera, Sangiovese), and most recently, a Spanish grape (Tempranillo)--all worth watching.

Family vintages

A common denominator of most Gold Country wineries is that they're family-owned, not corporate, operations. Take a twisting road from Placerville, for example, and you come to Holly's Hill Vineyards. Carrie Bendick had lived in Washington and Utah before returning to California, where her father, Tom Cooper, planted vineyards on the family property--and made her winemaker. Now Bendick and her husband, Josh, earn gold medals for their Rhone-style wines.

A few miles away live Chaim Gur-Arieh, a former Bay Area-based food scientist (among other things, he helped create Cap'n Crunch cereal), and his wife, Elisheva, an artist. They had long wanted to make wine and spent years scouring Napa and Sonoma. Then they were invited to the bat mitzvah for the daughter of a Gold Country winemaker. "The moment we drove into the Shenandoah Valley," Chaim says, "my heart started pounding. Elisheva said, 'This is it. We've found it.'"