Great Valued California Wines Recommendations $10$20 & $20$30 Price Ranges

Scale down your expectations. California is a big state and wine is grown in a lot of areas of the state. You won't experience "all of the great wines California has to offer" in two weeks, months or years.

If you are "from the east coast" you should be able to find plenty of wine stores that can help you explore beyond the Napa-Sonoma axis. Now, if you were living in "fly-over country" I'd be more sympathetic.

Buying and schlepping $10-20 wines across the country is a futile exercise.

All that being said, I'd suggest that you set some reasonable brackets for this excursion. Maybe pick one smaller region to explore like Paso Robles for example. Then do some web research on wineries in the region that you can visit. Alternatively, look for some wine-focussed restaurants in cities that you will be visiting. They will have wine lists with strong focus on local wines and often provide by-the-glbutt options to taste more than a few of them. Recognize that markups might be 2x retail but you'll still be money ahead in terms of travel time and breadth of experience as well as benefiting from some pre-filtering by professionals to narrow the field.

When you find something you like, note the winery and the odds are they will have a web site and for most states you'll be able to order when you get back home.

Ed Rasimus Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret) "When Thunder Rolled" www.thunderchief.org www.thundertales.blogspot.com