Santa Lucia Highlands: Cool-Climate Excellence in 2021

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | NOVEMBER 28, 2023

The 2021s from the Santa Lucia Highlands build on a theme of excellence seen throughout California in what has turned out to be a largely impressive vintage in many appellations. Readers will find numerous compelling wines to explore, but many of the best wines are not always the usual suspects.

Picking up coverage of the Santa Lucia Highlands this year is bittersweet, more bitter than sweet if I must be perfectly honest. The loss of Josh Raynolds earlier in 2023 is still very much felt by our entire team and by me personally. Josh was the sort of person who seemed to know everything about everything. He is still sorely missed. As we thought about how to best reassign Josh’s regions for now, I decided to revisit the Santa Lucia Highlands. It’s a region I have spent quite a bit of time in, as I covered the wines during my time at The Wine Advocate and in the early days of Vinous. More recently, Alessandro Masnaghetti and I authored a new map of the AVA that is the most accurate visual representation of the region and its vineyards. So, I approached these tastings with a mixture of loss and excitement of rediscovery. What I found in the 2021s is a set of rich, deeply layered wines that showcases the region to its maximum potential.

Vineyards in Santa Lucia Highlands’s North Bench.

The Santa Lucia Highlands: A Brief Overview

The Santa Lucia Highlands (SLH) is a small AVA that is just 18 miles from north to south and one mile wide, with only a few local wineries. Perhaps for that reason, the SLH gets lumped together with other larger regions in what is often referred to as California’s “Central Coast.” I have never understood this broad ‘denomination’ as it includes all of Santa Barbara County (which is itself very diverse), Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo, along with the smaller micro-appellations around these areas. The differences among these areas were evident as soon as I started spending time in this part of California, which is why Vinous has always published separate articles for each region, something I am happy to see has increasingly become the norm at other publications as well.