Brilliance in the Santa Cruz Mountains

If I had to name the greatest estates in California, at least two, possibly three, would come from the Santa Cruz Mountains. These rugged hillsides above Silicon Valley are home to some of the most distinctive, pedigreed Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines readers will come across. For more background information on the Santa Cruz Mountains, readers might want to revisit my past articles Santa Cruz Mountains: Scaling the Heights and Santa Cruz Mountains – A Study in Terroir.

A landscape view from Rhys

Once again I was deeply impressed with the wines I tasted during my annual summer trip. At the same time, though, the Santa Cruz Mountains faces some challenges. Perhaps the most important of these is that the number of top-tier estates in the Santa Cruz Mountains proper is small. Once past the best estates, quality becomes much more variable and less exciting overall. Yet as winemakers discover the latent potential of these sites, many producers from other regions, most notably Sonoma, are starting to make compelling, world-class wines from Santa Cruz Mountains fruit. That is both a blessing and a curse because while the best wines can be fabulous, the producers themselves have no physical presence in the region. Given how entrenched the culture is of buying fruit from faraway sites is in California, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.