Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Sonoma

Candor first: Sonoma is a one course town, and this ranking has two entries because the one course has two doors. There is the members' door and the hotel door, and behind both of them is the same ground, a 1928 golf course in the valley north of the plaza that has been the whole of Sonoma golf for nearly a century. Padding this into a five course list with borrowed names from neighboring towns would be easy and wrong. Here is the honest version.

That single course carries real weight. This is wine country golf in the older sense, before the region learned to charge Napa prices for everything: a valley floor layout in the Mayacamas foothills, built when the town was an agricultural outpost, later folded into the resort world without losing its shape. Sonoma the town is a destination for food and wine. Its golf is a reason to stay an extra day, not the reason you came, and the ranking below treats it that way.

It also means Sonoma golfers have no argument to have. Every other town in this series gets a bar debate about order, value, the muni versus the private club. Sonoma gets a single shared reference point, one set of fairways that everyone in town has either played, worked at, married into, or been quoted a price to stay near. A one course town concentrates its golf culture the way it concentrates everything else, into a small place with a long memory.

1Sonoma Golf Club

Sonoma Golf Club dates to 1928 and was designed by Sam Whiting, and its playing history is not decoration: Sam Snead won here, back when the tour stopped in towns like this and the best player alive could be found on a valley course in front of a small gallery. That pedigree is the argument. This is a genuine Golden Age California course, routed for walking, with the bones that modern renovations elsewhere spend millions trying to recover.

The concession is access. It is private now, and the club version of Sonoma is closed to anyone without a member in their life. The golf, judged on its own, is comfortably the best in town, which is another way of saying it is the golf in town. First place by acclamation, because there was never another candidate.

2Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn Golf Club

Second place is the same fairways through the resort door. The Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn arrangement is what puts this course on a public ranking at all: stay at the resort and the private club's tee sheet opens, which makes Sonoma, unusually, a Golden Age course a determined visitor can actually play with enough planning and a hotel bill.

We list it separately because the experience is separate. The resort round comes with the resort frame, spa weekend energy in the group ahead, a different price, a different door into the same clubhouse. The concession writes itself: you are a guest in someone else's club, on their terms, and the round costs what resort access costs. But the alternative in most towns is no access at all. A hotel key that opens a 1928 Whiting course is a better deal than a locked gate, every time.

So the verdict on Sonoma is short because the bench is short. One course, two doors, and the course behind both of them is worth the trouble. Snead came here when he could have been anywhere in California. The valley has filled in with tasting rooms since then, and the fairways are still the oldest honest thing in it.