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The Juice
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Forget Napa and SonomaThe best California wines are coming from the Santa Cruz Mountains |
It’s a common complaint about California wine: overblown, saggy Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays that taste like tiki drinks. I’ve often felt that the wines didn’t have to be that way; that they were just made poorly or grown in the wrong places.
It was all those years of experience with overripe, cloying wines that made my recent visit to the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation, just 40 minutes south of San Francisco, so revelatory. I tasted Pinots with live-wire acidity and bright, perfumelike aromatics, and Chardonnays with citrus bite and underlying minerality. It didn’t seem like California at all.
But then of course it did. As I headed up into the hills, I passed giant mansion after giant mansion, some with stables, tucked into the redwoods. Silicon Valley (which I could see spread out below in all its pixelated glory) and its moneyed venture capitalists are a few miles away.
The fact that these glorious mountains are such primo residential property means that the area will probably never be a dominant wine appellation. That’s a shame, because the potential of the sites—when put in the hands of good winegrowers—is awesome. This is no new development. Mount Eden, originally planted in 1945 by Martin Ray, has produced some of America’s most famous wines. Ridge Vineyards started making a name for itself in the 1960s, and in 2006 made headlines again when the 1971 Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon bested first-growth Bordeaux and top California Cabs in a reenactment of the famous 1976 Paris tasting.
With that kind of success, you would think that ambitious winemakers would have rushed to the Santa Cruz Mountains to get their own little piece of terroir. But it never happened; Silicon Valley moguls stuck to Napa instead.
They should have stayed home, like venture capitalist Kevin Harvey. He started Rhys Vineyards, making some of the most promising Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays that I’ve tasted in a long time. The Pinots have structure, acidity, and balance—words that you don’t always find mentioned in discussions of popular California Pinots. The Chardonnays have enough minerality to tame the warm, sweet flavors of the sun-bathed grapes.
It would be tempting to assign all credit for this success to Harvey’s investment (of time, labor, thought, and money) into his vineyards and completely traditional, noninterventionist winemaking. But even he gives most of the credit to the terroir he’s working with. “We’ve got one of the coolest climates in California,” he says, “but still plenty of sun, and the soils have the right mix of rock and clay, and yields are naturally incredibly low.”
At Windy Oaks, about an hour south of Rhys, the Pinots are again pert and bright, with some earthiness. The Chardonnay is taut with acidity and a fine gravel texture. And Varner, just on the other side of the ridge from Rhys, is making wonderful wines in the same style.
I second what Jim Varner told me: “These wines taste a bit like California wines, but then they don’t.” Indeed, they offer literally the best of both worlds, showing old-world structure, acidity, and earthiness, while capturing plenty of that California sun and fruit.
Like the Napa and Sonoma wines disparaged here,not to mention the rest of California, this short shot does little to convince me to run out to these wineries. For that matter they don't have any wine available anyway.
Is it the lack of space allocated for the writer and the subject or is it there is not enough to write about. This is reverse snobbery-let us write about something that no one knows about or cannot obtain.
Vintage47, sorry
I disagree that it's "reverse snobbery." While it's often great to write about things that are easily obtainable and that everybody knows about, such stories about the everyday would probably fail to interest a reader such as you. Sometimes it seems worthwhile to write about rarer things that are hard to obtain but worth the effort. If a reader is interested, these wines can be located and tried. I've been driven to pursue rare wines many times based on what I've read in an article. Furthermore, the intent above was also to alert people to the quality in the specific region so if they encounter such wines they will recognize them.
there are crops grown in the santa cruz mountains that blow the grapes away...JMHO
While I agree that there are some fantastic wines coming from Santa Cruz, there are also some crappy wines made there too. It is one thing to Point to Ridgem Mount Eden, or Rhys, and let's not forget Kathryn Kennedy or Thomas Fogarty, but to say that the BEST wine comes from there, I disagree. While Ridge Monte Bello is one of my very favorite wines, and has to be considered along with the very best, Napa and Sonoma still make some of the very best Cabs and Pinot Noirs in the country. Not even talking about wines like Bryant, Bond, or Harlan, there are Cabs from Neal, Karl Lawrence, Match, Lewis, etc. that are just as good and less expensive.
Pinot Noirs from Martinelli, DuMOL, Littorai, Marcassin, Rochioli, or Williams Selyem are as good or better than anything ever made in Santa Cruz.
With the exception of Ridge and Mount Eden, I doubt that any Chard from Santa Cruz could be as consistently wonderful as those from such Napa and Sonoma wineries as Aubert, Paul Hobbs, Kistler, or Marcassin
I would never denegrate Santa Cruz, it has its own terroir and there are some fantastic wine makers there. If I was rich, I'd probably invest there too instead of Napa or Sonoma, (although being a major Pinot head, I might take a gander at Santa Lucia highlands/Santa Rita Hills instead) but rich mogels were investing where there was cachet, not because they knew about winemaking and wanted to make great wines.
I have been a champion of wines coming from the Santa Cruz Mountains for nearly 40 years! Here are just a handful of examples . . .
Some no longer with us* include: Martin Ray Estate Pinot Noirs of the 1950s and Chaffe Hall's Estate Cabernets from the 19402 through the mid-1960s; Nicasio (Wines by Wheeler) from the 1950s and 1960s; Felton-Empire's Rieslings (some estate; some not) from the 1970s; Vine Hill Estate Sylvaner and Riesling; Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Estate Pinot Noirs; Congress Springs Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sémillon; Sunrise, Gemello, Woodside (LaQuesta), and other producers of Cabernet Sauvignon . . . the list goes on.
Those still with us include Ridge Vineyards Jimsomare Zinfandel and Monte Bello Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnays from the mid-1960s to the present day; Mount Eden Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay (1972-present); David Bruce Estate Pinot Noir, and various other wines (1964-present); McHenry Vineyards Estate Pinot Noir (1977 to present); Ahlgren Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon from Bates Ranch (1976 to present); Kathryn Kennedy Estate Cabernet, and later Syrah (from 1979 to present); Storrs Winery Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Petite Sirah -- all from the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA (1988 to present); Equinox méthode champenoise Sparkling Wines from the SCM AVA (the best produced in the US, IMHO); Soquel Vineyards, Trout Gulch, P and M Staiger, Cinnabar, Zayante, Ryhs, Clos Tita, Burrell School, even the estate wines from Bargetto -- the list goes on and on!
That said, Jordan -- shut up! Don't let these wines become any more difficult to find than they already are! ;^) After all, no one here makes a lot of anything . . .
Seriously, this is -- hands down! -- my FAVORITE area of the state for wines. Bar none.
Cheers,
Jason
"Remember, 'Napa' is just a four-letter word the rest of the wine trade has to learn to live with."
* In their original form.
>>> While I agree that there are some fantastic wines coming from Santa Cruz, there are also some crappy wines made there too. <<<
Yes -- just like there are in Napa, Sonoma, Santa Maria, and everywhere else in California and the world -- let's not forget the poor quality wines coming out of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Italy, Spain, Australia . . . .
>>> . . . to say that the BEST wine comes from [the Santa Cruz Mountains], I disagree. <<<
And you're entitled to your opinion, certainly, but -- in the FWIW Dept. -- I would take Ridge Monte Bello, Ahlgren Bates Ranch Cabernet, and Kathryn Kennedy Estate Cabernet any day of the week over Neal, Karl Lawrence, Match, Lewis, etc. And while I'll give you Rochioli, I'll take Mount Eden Estate Pinot, David Bruce, Rhys, Clos Tita, and Storrs any day of the week over Martinelli, DuMOL, Littorai, Marcassin, and Williams Selyem . . . just my palate; YMMV. ;^)
>>> With the exception of Ridge and Mount Eden, I doubt that any Chard from Santa Cruz could be as consistently wonderful as those from such Napa and Sonoma wineries as Aubert, Paul Hobbs, Kistler, or Marcassin. <<<
Again, I'll pass on the Hobbs and Marcassin; and add to the Ridge and Monte Bello some of the single-vineyard bottlings from Storrs (especially Meyley, Beauregard Ranch, and Christie).
The point here is NOT that one of us is right and the other wrong, NOR that one of us is "more right" than the other. Rather, it's that there are some truly excellent wines made in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but they tend to "fly under the radar" and are far less known than their Napa and Sonoma cousins. The fact is Napa and Sonoma make some GREAT wines, but they also benefit from having a "name" and are over-hyped to the Nth degree. The Santa Cruz Mountains also yields some magnificent wines, but many are scarcely heard of by the public, and rarely reviewed by those responsible for generating the "buzz".
And to be perfectly honest about it, I am both pleased and saddened by that.
Cheers,
Jason
Vintage47:
Varner Pinot and chardonnay are widely available and certainly worth trying. Look how Varner Amphitheater Chardonnay did in this tasting:
http://dat.erobertparker.com/bboard/s...
The only problem with the Santa Cruz Mountains is that because the vineyards tend to be so small there's a lot of amateur wine makers who aren't very good.
Duane Cronin died, but his Santa Cruz Mountains pinot from 1994 was excellent when I had it last year. His pinots tend to be very Burgundian.
Yeah, I miss Duane -- and I forgot to mention Varner. My bad . . .