In Vino Veritas

Surrounded by coastal redwoods, 40 acres of grape vines, chardonnay and a little pinot noir, firmly stretch across the fine gray sand at Bald Mountain. It’s my first time to the vineyard. At an elevation of 920 to 1,050 feet, roughly three miles off of Smith Grade in the mountains of Bonny Doon, Bald Mountain Vineyard looks out over the Monterey Bay. Just beyond the trees I can see the ocean, the thick fog already making its way across the edge of the bay, sucked inland by the day’s heat. The grapes are eager for the cool evening when they’ll continue to ripen, though the absence of the sun at night means no photosynthesis will take place. The wines produced here are known for their low residual sugars and high acidity, largely a result of the cool microclimate—deep canyons that fill most summer evenings with coastal fog.

Ryan Beauregard, the vintner and proprietor of Beauregard Vineyards, makes one of my favorite Chardonnays from Bald Mountain fruit. He discovered fossils of ancient crustaceans in the vineyard when he planted some of the first vines here almost 20 years ago, a reminder that all this land was once under water. Ryan jokes that people shouldn’t be surprised about rising sea levels—there’s evidence all around that it’s happened before. Here along the Pacific coast, where the continent is slowly deteriorating, cliffs crumbling back into the ocean, the continental shelf slowly subsumed beneath the ocean’s crust, it’s difficult to imagine a more beautiful place. “This is terroir,” Ryan says, reaching down and bringing a fistful of soil to his nose.

Due in part to the cultivation of the land, as well as the many quarries in the area that have fractured the soil (sand, limestone and asphalt quarries all operate within a few miles of the vineyard), there is a strong mineral component to the wines in this region. The most prominent characteristic of wine from the Ben Lomond AVA, located on the western edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is an intense minerality. Ryan and I decide the effect of the soil on wine from this area is similar to a combination of flat water, San Pellegrino, an earthy terrain, chalk, granite, and sandstone. I suspect the minerality is also a consequence of the logging of the redwood forests that began in Bonny Doon in the mid 1800s, which upturned much of the soil on the mountain, as well as the limestone-rich earth—an ancient ocean floor, once covered by thick layers of redwood duff and other forest detritus, which is now prime real estate for grape growers.

However, there is much more to making wine than finding the right place to plant a certain varietal of grape. If a sense of terroir is to be achieved, if a wine is to convey the flavor of the land, it is important to stay true to the land in every aspect of the winemaking process. This includes using local yeast and unobtrusive oak barrels. An American winemaker might plant a Pinot clone from Burgundy, ferment the fruit with a famous French yeast, and age the wine in new French oak casks, hoping to recreate a wine from that region, but he will be disappointed. It will express little of the land from which it was produced. If you want French wine, go to France.

Here in California, farmers recognize that the climate is everything, and that food is best when it’s picked at its peak and consumed locally. This is especially true of wine grapes, and this recognition is a driving force behind the concept of terroir. Originally a French word used to describe the flavor of the land, and to distinguish wine produced from different vineyards, American wine makers, especially small, artisanal producers, are now heralding California’s unique microclimates as perfect for wine rich in terroir. Only a minority of California winemakers, however, are on-board the terroir bandwagon. While an aesthetic pursuit has provided solid ground for many vintners who champion terroir as a focal point of good winemaking, some winemakers are now using the concept as a marketing gimmick, selling the image without truly embracing the philosophy.

The central tenet behind terroir is that beautiful land produces beautiful wine, and that every individual wine can be a reflection of the land in which the grapes were grown and the wine is produced. To work with the land, to cultivate and nurture the terroir of a wine, is to reveal the components of place. What a shame it would be if all wine tasted the same. What pleasure would there be in drinking something so bland, so uninterestingly universal? Combating the entrepreneurial, neo-Californian technological approach to wine making is the Old World, French naturalist perspective that focuses on the wine and not the profit. This view recognizes that wine tastes like the land, is in fact a gift from the earth, one that should be respected, shared and enjoyed.

As Ryan and I pull up to The Lost Weekend Tasting Room after our tour of the vineyard, he stresses that I should develop my own opinions about wine. As I learn more about this region where I grew up, and where I’m living again after six years on the east coast, I’m starting to understand that this is what an appreciation for terroir is: an invitation to find my own taste, to discover what vineyards and what vintages appeal to my palate without letting critics or advertisers chose my wines for me. It’s a challenge to reconnect with the land.