About San Marcos Creek Vineyard
San Marcos Creek Vineyard is named for the San Marcos Creek — the waterway named for Saint Mark (San Marcos in Spanish) that flows through the Templeton Gap District property. The creek is both geographic and historical: Spanish missionaries and ranchers named California's waterways for saints, and San Marcos Creek carries this colonial-era naming tradition across a landscape that predated European settlement by thousands of years.
The North El Pomar estate has been farming Templeton Gap terrain since 1996, producing Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel from west-side Paso Robles vineyards cooled by the daily Pacific marine air that moves through the Templeton Gap. The creek's name on the winery label connects the estate to its specific watershed geography — this is the creek's vineyard, and the creek defines the terroir.
The daily walk-in tasting room is dog-friendly, picnic-welcoming, and family-hospitable — over two and a half decades of Templeton Gap family farming expressed as accessible Central Coast welcome.