Article: AMERICAN RIVIERA; SANTA BARBARA SERVES UP SAND, SUN AND WINE

Santa Barbara trumps the commercialized and crowded Napa Valley, hands down.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The first lesson for the naive Midwesterner (that would be me) is this: Counties in California are not the same size as counties in Ohio.

California counties are more like Pennsylvania - the entire state of Pennsylvania.

I had hatched what I was sure was a brilliant plan: I would park my wife and two teenage sons on the beach in the resort town of Santa Barbara - `The American Riviera,' the local tourism folks like to call it - and zip over to visit several wineries in the emerging wine- producing region of Santa Barbara County, which I figured would be only a stone's throw away.

Day One I ...

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