They were having a fall passport weekend, a style of event others in my group had participated in other California regions and enjoyed: wineries poured many wines, there was good food at every stop, live music played, and so on. Here? Not so much.
On Day One of our trip we visited Ridge Winery, some 2300 feet above it all and from where you can see the construction of Apple's new headquarters, among other things. Ridge gives a GREAT tour and tasting (for a $30 fee). We started with a pour of the 2012 Estate Chardonnay (all the past bottlings labeled Santa Cruz Mountain are now called 'Estate'), then went and walked around the vineyards, and returned to a sit-down tasting of several reds including 2012 Pagani Ranch and Geyserville and the 2011 Monte Bello. The Chardonnay showed a bit more alcohol than I would have expected but I loved it's richness (and brought home a few bottles, as well as a Monte Bello chardonnay). The Pagani Ranch was very open and the wine you should drink while the sterner Geyserville sleeps, and the Monte Bello was, owing to the vintage, just a bit lesser than you would want it to be while still being Monte Bello.
On our return to town we stopped at the next winery downhill from Ridge, hoping for some of the Ridge locational magic but it was not to be. The name was something like Pechetti, and since I have nothing nice to say about the wine I'm not even going to take the time to make sure I've got it right. The wines were awkward, inconsistently imbalanced and screamed American oak. And pricing, in the high 30's to 40's, seemed more aimed at the big spenders spilling over from Ridge above than realistically in line with their quality.
The next day we officially began our Passport day, paying our fee and getting a cute little book at Guglielmo Winery in Morgan Hill, a very cool little town with some good restaurants near where we were staying. It's a beautiful facility that dates to around 1908 when the ancestral Guglielmos arrived from Italy. The low mission style buildings and antique winemaking equipment scattered about distract your eye from all the modern wine equipment and tankage on the back 40 that belies the 'small family winery' motif: they pump out 150,000 cases per year. Some under their own label, but more as second and third labels for others. As I stood listening to the spiel, I could remember standing in a BevMo or Total Wine a few weeks ago trying to score some quaffer level zinfandels for a neighborhood tasting and passed on some unfamiliar wines whose back labels, for all that they looked like different producers from the front, all read "Produced and bottled in Morgan Hill, California". The dots connected.
Here we tasted a weird chardonnay that they'd purchased bulk and hated so much that they put it on some pinot grigio lees they had lying around, plus a couple of so-so reds, including a '97 that was obviously corked. When I pointed that out to the pourer, a senior citizen who was not talking about the wines but using this opportunity to hold court by bragging about his long, tedious history of managing tasting rooms, he poured some into a glass, took a big gulp, and then proceeded to swish it around--left, right, up, down, repeat, just like mouthwash. Then he swallowed and said, "I don't find it."
From there we went to a winery by another Italian family where the adult granddaughter was pouring eight 2008 vintage wines made by her grandpapa (grand-puh-PAH). Four were "a sweeter style" and four were "our full-bodied dry reds." I only tasted the second four, and all were maderized and excessively sweet for 'dry' wine. As sweet as the family, I should add, so I hated not liking the wines, but. Then we went to another winery pouring just two wines, both of which tasted like kerosene. Absolutely awful.
Discouragement had set in by the time we reached our fourth stop, Martin Ranch, which I dare mention by name because there were actually some decent wines there. They only poured five from their rather extensive lineup, but that seemed like a lot compared to what we'd been served elsewhere. They have two labels because the owners are husband and wife and each is a winemaker. The Therese wines were hers, the DJ Hurley wines his. It was the Therese wines that showed best, in particular a very peppery syrah and a nice cab franc. A 15.5% pinot noir was a poster child for why you shouldn't grow pinot noir in a hot climate, and it was also the wine that revealed my pourer to be the biggest idiot of the day, as he explained that pinot noir has come out of relative obscurity to triumph in California and Oregon, and--get this!!--"even Washington state is becoming synonymous with the grape." That's a verbatim quote.
"No it's not," I stated flatly, and when he persisted I said "I live in Washington; I know." That's not true, he said, "everyone's making pinot up there." "No," I corrected him, "almost no one is. Just one or three wineries along the Columbia River who mostly get their fruit from Oregon. Everyone else is actually growing cabernet, merlot and syrah." Somewhere during that sentence he just started talking over me, went on with his spiel as if I'd said nothing, so I moved to another pourer. Jerk.
From there we went to a pretty Tuscan Villa style winery that poured just two wines of the 5 or 6 they make, a very good (but not $40 good) chardonnay and a highly extracted petite sirah. All their wines had new-agey inspirational names that sounded like chapters out of a Deepak Chopra book. Drink these wines and find your inner self! Spare me.
To give Santa Clara one more chance, we headed back in the direction of our hotel in Morgan Hill. Where all the other wineries had been highly recommended by the sales manager at our first stop, this was our own wild card pick because it was geographically convenient. The winery was actually a suburban home with some grotesquely amateur artchitectural embellishments in progress to make it look like a castle. The first pour was a godawful 2007 Sauvignon Blanc about the color, and imbibable pleasure, of anti-freeze. A riesling and a sweet champagne made up the rest of the white card, so I skipped those and went to the reds which were as odd as you'd guess with that portentious start. One was a blackberry-merlot blend. We left--and found ourselves a brewery.
Best joke of the day: "Maybe we should have gone to Temecula."
The following day we all went our own ways, and Bob and I headed over to Santa Cruz where we planned a drive up the coast to Pescadero before heading back to San Jose for our early evening flight home. Rather than have a conventional lunch, we decided to take advantage of the myriad casual, inexpensive Mexican options and stage a beef taco contest, stopping at one Tacqueria after another until we'd had our fill and declared a winner.
It was a beautiful sunny day in Santa Cruz, but a mile or three after we turned north onto Highway 1 off of 17 we hit a wall of fog. A bit more driving and it was quite clear that this condition would persist all the way to San Francisco, so when we got to a sign that said Bonny Doon we headed up that road, out of the fog and back into the sun and the old redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains. I expected the Bonny Doon winery to be up there, but lo and behold instead there is a town called Bonny Doon and that is where we found ourselves. There is a winery there, but it's called Beauregard which we had not known of before.
We stopped in for a visit, where they poured us an 07 Pinot Noir, an 06 Syrah and an 03 Cabernet Sauvignon, all of which were relatively excellent and aging well. What a find this place was. The 03 Cab will be a long termer--it's only on the brink of middle age. The winery owns 13 acres of vineyards up there, all of which were planted in 1949 by the grandfather of the two men who now run the winery. Sadly, the vineyards were torched by one of those big California wildfires after harvest 2007 and replanted in 2008--same grapes, same everything, just as it was. Everything but the wines, that is. We tasted several of the new stuff from the young vines, and all were unruly at this point like the children they are. In all, though, a nice way to leave the area with a good taste in my mouth.
