Brambles

Set on 600 acres of open meadow in Lake County wine country, Brambles is a Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw design that plays across treeless terrain dappled with specimen oak trees and ringed by foothills extending to the Mayacamas range. The course is surfaced entirely in Zoysia grass from tee to green, achieving firm and fast conditions with minimal irrigation, and intentionally omits par from its scorecard to emphasize match play.

The origin of Brambles traces to James Duncan, a longtime associate of Coore and Crenshaw who served as the onsite design lead for the project. Duncan first shared his vision for the club with a select group during the 2013 Walker Cup at the National Golf Links of America, with a subsequent meeting at San Francisco Golf Club later that year where Bill Coore confirmed his and Crenshaw's commitment to the project. Duncan discovered the site in 2014 while searching for suitable land within a two-hour radius of the Golden Gate Bridge. The property, located in Middletown approximately an hour north of Napa in Lake County, was acquired in 2017. Duncan envisioned a modern club that would embody historic traditions, drawing inspiration from Scottish links clubs like North Berwick and St Andrews.

His emphasis was on match play, walking, and conditions that allowed the ball to run along the ground. Two strains of Zoysia were selected for the playing surfaces and greens, a warm-season species Duncan had familiarity with from his work at Trinity Forest Golf Club and Austin Golf Club. The heavier soil's moisture retention was expected to yield long-term advantages requiring significantly less irrigation while still achieving the firm and fast conditions central to the design philosophy. The course sprawls across a meadow floor ringed by foothills, with natural barrancas — dry creek beds — featuring prominently on several holes including the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th, 11th, and 17th. Bunker work ranges from small excisions to large sandy walls.

A working sheep herd grazes the rough areas, and native prairie perimeter zones are being established as transition areas between the course and surrounding landscape. Brambles quietly opened in 2024 alongside several high-profile new course openings. The club also serves an environmental purpose: the irrigated course acts as a firebreak protecting the town of Middletown from wildfire danger, a factor that contributed to its unanimous approval by Lake County planning officials. The Brambles course's simultaneous service as a golf facility and as a wildfire firebreak for the town of Middletown reflects the dual-function approach to land use that California's increasingly severe wildfire threat has made a practical consideration for development in fire-prone foothill and mountain communities. Lake County's approval of the course based in part on this fire management function demonstrates the potential for golf infrastructure to address community safety concerns in ways that justify land use decisions that might otherwise face opposition in the current California regulatory environment.

The course's 2024 opening placed it among a cohort of new California layouts that reflect renewed investment in destination golf in Northern California's interior wine regions — a market whose combination of viticulture tourism and outdoor recreation creates demand for course experiences that complement the winery visits that are the primary driver of tourism in the Lake County corridor. The Middletown location, in the Clear Lake wine region north of the Napa Valley, positions Brambles within a developing wine tourism circuit that has been actively building golf infrastructure to extend the appeal of the region to visitors whose primary interest is the combination of wine, landscape, and outdoor activity. The environmental rationale for the course's development — the wildfire buffer function that informed its unanimous planning approval — gives Brambles a community integration story that conventional golf development rarely achieves, connecting the course's existence explicitly to the safety of the town it surrounds.