Exploring California’s Central Coast

by Antonio Galloni

I tasted an amazing range of wines during my trip to California’s Central Coast earlier this summer. The Central Coast is the broad name given to a number of AVAs starting roughly north of Los Angeles and finishing just south of San Francisco. In reality these vastly diverse microclimates deserve to be acknowledged on their own rather than being lumped into one generic category (more on that below). From south to north, Central Coast starts with Santa Barbara County, home to cool weather AVAs such as Santa Maria Valley and Santa Rita Hills, where Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Syrah flourish, and the Santa Ynez Valley, a broad area, itself composed of several distinct regions. Further north Paso Robles is the epicenter of the Rhône Rangers movement, and increasingly home to an even wider range of exciting wines. Santa Lucia Highlands, an hour to the north, is another cool-climate site best known for Pinot, but also capable of interesting Chardonnay and Syrah. The Santa Cruz Mountains is not technically considered part of the Central Coast, but from a practical and logistical view of visiting wineries and organizing tastings, it makes most sense for the wines to be included in this report. In cases where estates make wines from more than one appellation (which is quite common) I have listed them according to the region where they are based, with the full understanding that no attempt at regional classification can be perfect.

The quality of the best wines in the Central Coast is truly stellar. I tasted over 1,100 finished wines for this article of which 63% scored 85 points or above. The Central Coast offers readers an incredible selection of wines made from Burgundy, Rhône and, to a lesser extent, Bordeaux varieties, in an equally diverse range of styles. The breadth is truly remarkable. Even better, readers will find a number of wines that deliver incredible value, something that is always welcome at a time when imported wines have become more difficult to afford because of the weak US dollar.

All that is not to say the Central Coast doesn’t have its challenges, as it most certainly does. The most obvious is the extent to which so many wineries depend on purchased fruit. Even under the best of circumstances wineries might be able to give some direction to growers who actually farm the fruit, but they aren’t doing the work themselves. While that in and of itself is not an insurmountable challenge, properly supervising vineyards in a number of sites is a big job made all the more daunting when those vineyards are far away from the wineries themselves. In vintages that proceed uneventfully – a rarity these days – relying on someone else to work the vineyards might not be a big deal, but when a decision needs to be made quickly, there is little question that having direct access and control of vineyards sites is highly preferable.

Then there is an issue of logistics. If a vintner has to drive more than one hour each way to visit a site and sources from several sites, the reality is that she won’t be visiting each vineyard with any frequency. The culture of buying fruit is of course quite prevalent in the wine world. In Burgundy the large-scale négociants have been complemented by micro-négociants who focus on much smaller lots in sizes similar to those found in artisan wineries in the Central Coast, so it can be done, but in general, throughout the wine world the trend for most elite wineries is to focus on estate fruit.

The ease with which winemakers can buy fruit leads to a secondary challenge, making many single-vineyard wines that are of consistently high quality. There is little question some winemakers covered in this article have succumbed to the temptation of producing a large number of single-vineyard bottlings. These winemakers excel with some, but not all, of their single-vineyard wines, perhaps because they are stretched too thin.