Besides the relationship between Peter Martin Ray and Paul Masson, there’s another incredibly important story in the rebirth of the Santa Cruz as a major wine growing region; keyed into a famous site overlooking Cupertino on the eastern side of the mountains is Ridge’s Monte Bello Vineyard. While the site has been planted since the 1880s, its modern history begins in 1959, when a group of doctors and amateur winemakers working at the Stanford Research Institute purchased the site.

Founding winemaker David Bennion passed the reins to Paul Draper in the late 1960s, beginning one of the most legendary careers in the entirety of American wine history. The 1971 Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon placed 5th in Steven Spurrier’s famous Judgement of Paris tasting in which top American Cabernet were compared to the great classed growths of Bordeaux; every other American wine was from Napa. 

Ridge’s Monte Bello remains one of the finest wines of the world, and rightfully commands its reputation to this day. More than that, in Paul Draper’s 47 vintages at Ridge, his focus on expressing the powerful individuality of vineyard sites is a key takeaway for us. Paul championed the idea of not so much “making” a wine, as getting out of its way and letting great farming do most of the talking.

Ridge’s hard work over the past half century, humble and grounded, can be clearly tasted today; if you’ve ever been lucky enough to crack a bottle of Ridge from the 70s or 80s or 90s, the wines today are still delectable and often have decades in front of them still. More than anything we’re always struck by the humble transparency of their work, labeling, and craft. Ridge’s work inspires us deeply here at Sandar and Hem.

This year’s harvest started out perfectly, but then Mother Nature made it a fast and furious one! By July it was clear harvest would come early for many sites, due to drought-driven dry soils and warm spells in February advancing bud break. Our first pick once again was Chardonnay from Mountain Winery in the last week of August, with some pristine fruit. With a picture-perfect start we looked forward to picking out our other 11 sites over the next seven or eight weeks as the grapes hit peak ripeness. But then a week-long record-breaking heat wave around Labor Day brought daily highs of 95F+. With fruit ripening incredibly fast and heroic picking crews in short supply, we had intense round-the clock harvesting and brought in fruit from nine vineyards in just two weeks.  We are so thankful for all the incredible growers, vineyard crews, and cellar workers who helped us to get the fruit in and make some great wines. 

Grape crop yields were down 30-50% across many sites, so many of our programs are a bit smaller this year. However, we added several exciting new programs including Pinot Noir from two new sites, a Petite Verdot from Bates Ranch, a Sauvignon Blanc from Hecker Pass, and Nebbiolo from off Summit road in Los Gatos. Those wines will be fun to barrel taste with you all in the near future – we encourage wine club members to reach out for a free winemaker-led winery tour and tasting in San Francisco.   

The harvest is in full swing now.  

We have already picked the Mountain Winery Chardonnay – it has been our first pick in ’20, ’21, and now ’22. The grapes were gorgeous and we expect it to show just as wonderfully as our inaugural release of the 2020 Mountain Winery Vineyard Chardonnay. This legendary site adjacent to Mount Eden in Saratoga towers 1300 feet above Silicon Valley on steep south-facing slopes of gravelly loam and fractured Franciscan shale. It was originally planted to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir around 1900 by the Burgundian Paul Masson, and yielded award-winning wines for 40+ years before ownership changed to a large beverage conglomerate and the vineyards were abandoned. The site is now famous as the site of the Mountain Winery music concert venue. In 2004, the latest owners decided to replant the vineyards with original cuttings sourced by Paul Masson from Burgundy and we have long dreamed of working with this fruit from this storied site. We are thrilled to be the first winery outside of the venue to produce a delicious single-vineyard Chardonnay from the site and are excited to rediscover the origins of the legend with you through this wine.

As a dedicated small family business making artisanal products we greatly depend on and appreciate the continued enthusiasm and support of our wine club members. The club is the best way to get access to exciting new wine programs that will be coming in the next years such as Zinfandel, Nebbiolo and Pinot Gris.  As always, your wine club shipment is 100% customizable.  We have standard allocations, but you can also choose so you get exactly what you want – eg. Only Pinot, or Just my favorite Chardonnays.  Your wine club discount applies to all wine purchases, whether they are part of your allotment, restocking on favorites between shipments or sending as gifts. We will be sending out our fall shipment after harvest, so now is a great time to join.  There is no cost to join the club, and there are three levels offered for our members.

Contact us for club member tastings, we can take you through some of those new barrels and also taste you on some of our pet project wines made in tiny quantities. These include Riesling from Peter Martin Ray Vineyard, Rosé of Petite Verdot from Bates Ranch, and an Albariño from a site just a stone’s throw from the beach – these are extremely limited, so we can only share these with Club Members during tastings, winery events, and club pickups. And since we did not have a Pinot Noir released this year due to the 2020 fires, we’d love to have you taste two delicious Pinot Noirs (going to bottle in March) with us before their release. 

We wish you and your families a wonderful holiday season and great wishes in the new year.

Cheers!

As part of Rob’s apprenticeship in winemaking, he was lucky enough to spend a harvest at the historic Mount Eden Estate. While it was first planted in the 1940s by Martin Ray, winemaker and local Santa Cruz legend Jeffrey Patterson has been working there since 1981 and has been instrumental in its development. Patterson has developed this property with a careful determination to make delicious, age-worthy, and balanced wines that are farmed in an ecologically sound manner. He believes that vineyards should be planted and managed to last a century, in an era when many producers plan on replanting every 25 years. 

To quote him directly: “Wine, at its essence, is a snapshot of the ecology of the vineyard. By the ecology, I mean the slope, soil, exposure, wind, sun, grape variety, and weather that particular year. At Mount Eden every bottle is a succinct expression of the vineyard’s ecology. Year in and year out we produce wines from the same vines, in the same cellars, by the same people. With that purity of expression comes a true ‘vineyard wine’.”

To put it mildly, this idea inspires us deeply, and is only the smallest tip of the iceberg of wisdom that Jeffrey passed on to Rob during his time at Mt. Eden. We hope to accomplish a vision as substantially rooted in the stewardship of the Santa Cruz Mountains as well as the simple pursuit of fantastically delicious wines.

The 2020 vintage was one of immense challenge. After a beautiful growing season that looked on target for a classic harvest, on August 16th, 2020 an intense lightning storm ignited 27 fires that resulted in the CZU lightning complex fire that burned 86,000 acres in the region. Growers and winemakers across the region all responded differently, with some growers closer to the fires choosing not to harvest their crops and many winemakers choosing to make limited or no wine. Red wine poses the greatest risks in smoke impacted areas as the smoke compounds concentrate in the skins and red wines are fermented with the wine soaking on the skins for weeks. However, our white wines are made by putting grape clusters directly in the press and gently extract juice so even if present, the smoke components remain in the skins and typically have no measurable or perceptible impact on the resulting white wine.

We are particularly excited to share with you our inaugural release of the 2020 Mountain Winery Vineyard Chardonnay. This legendary site adjacent to Mount Eden in Saratoga towers 1300 feet above Silicon Valley on steep south-facing slopes of gravelly loam and fractured Franciscan shale. It was originally planted to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir around 1900 by the Burgundian Paul Masson, and yielded award-winning wines for 40+ years before ownership changed to a large beverage conglomerate and the vineyards were abandoned. The site is now famous as the site of the Mountain Winery music concert venue. In 2004, the latest owners decided to replant the vineyards with original cuttings sourced by Paul Masson from Burgundy and we have been trying for several years to get access to the fruit. We are thrilled to be the first winery outside of the venue to produce a delicious single-vineyard Chardonnay from the site and are excited to rediscover the origins of the legend with you through this wine.

We also are releasing a 2020 Santa Cruz Mountains Chardonnay which is a delicious blend of Chardonnays from several of our vineyard sites including Bruzzone Vineyard, Bozzo Gulch (debuting in fall), and Le Boeuf Vineyard.

Also in this release is a returning wine club favorite, the 2021 Bates Ranch Grenache Rosé, which is crisp, refreshing, and delicious. This rosé has a bit more pink color in this vintage, which will liven up your get togethers, perfect for picnics, warm evening meals on the deck, or as a versatile wine to pop with friends. 

As a small winery just coming into stride, we made the decision to forgo making Pinot Noir in 2020 as our two sites were close to the fires and their smoke paths so there will be no single vineyard Pinot Noir released in 2022. Most our Chardonnay sites were many miles from the fires, and with diligent winemaking and multiple rounds of analytical testing and blind tasting, we are certain that we have crafted Chardonnays that meet our highest standards and that you will be delighted to cellar and drink them. And we are thankful to come off a great 2021 vintage where we added several new vineyards, produced more wines than ever including several new red wines, and they are already showing to be delicious in barrel. And for the fast-approaching 2022 vintage we will have three single-vineyard Pinot Noir programs including an exciting new site in Ben Lomond called the Coast Grade Vineyard. 

This time of year, the work of the winemaker is mostly in the cellars or writing emails. In advance of our spring bottling, as well as planting cover crop, pruning, and preparatory work in the vineyards, there’s a lot to consider in terms of logistics and planning. Bottle glass, labels, and corks have to be ordered, barrels racked to tank, and a commercial mobile bottling line and bottling crew secured. While this isn’t a glamorous part of winemaking, it’s absolutely essential to ensuring we can make the best wines possible.

The most rewarding aspect of the winery this time of year is tasting through the cellar to see how the wines have developed since harvest. Tasting teaches us about the effects of a set of vintage conditions and also helps us to improve both our vineyard practices and winemaking every year. For example, for many vineyards we vinify and barrel different vineyard parcels separately so we can understand how vine canopy management, clonal selection, maceration time, or levels of whole cluster vinification will affect the finished wines. Great wine is the sum of many, many small details and we strive to improve those details iteratively vintage after vintage.

I can’t wait to share our continued exploration of these vineyards with the exciting 2020 reds and 2021 whites and rosé sometime later this spring.

Besides wrapping up the exciting 2021 harvest, we’re very happy to announce that Wine Enthusiast has awarded a number of our 2019 wines extremely favorable scores. While we make wine for ourselves and for you, our incredible customers, it’s always nice to receive some external validation for our hard work. 

Our Bruzzone and Bald Mountain Chardonnays, as well as our Mindego Ridge Pinot Noir all received 95 points, with most of our other 2019s receiving between 92 and 94 points.

A thank you to Edible Monterey for their story on Sandar & Hem!

“Recognizing the fabulous sources of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the couple currently make more than half a dozen Chardonnays—most of them vineyard designates, including from Bald Mountain, Bruzzone, Frances J, Le Boeuf and Mindego Ridge—as well as a Pinot Noir and Cabernet.”

Click here to read the full article.

One of the reasons we chose the Santa Cruz Mountains as the center of Sandar & Hem’s work is the long, rich history attached to the region. While Napa and Sonoma may be foremost in many people’s minds as California’s leading winegrowing regions, the Santa Cruz Mountains’ winegrowing history is every bit as old and integral to the story of California Wine.

The first vines planted here were put into the ground by Catholic missionaries in the first decade of the 19th century. In the later part of the 1800s, loggers cleared huge amounts of land in the mountains, providing for the plantation of significant acreage to commercial vineyards and the boom of various European immigrant populations fueled an interest in the first plantings of major European varieties.

One of the first major operations, Ben Lomond Wine Co., managed by William Cooper won a swath of medals for his wines at World Fairs throughout the 1890s and early 1900s. Paul Masson established his sparkling wine operations as well. As with much of the wine industry in the early 20th century, the Santa Cruz Mountains suffered from overproduction, followed by Prohibition and both World Wars on either side, until a rebirth in the 1950s…

We’re so thrilled to be working in a wine region with such a rich tapestry of history and exploration. We like to think we’re contributing to the next chapter of this development, through our careful management of our vineyard sites. We work to make wines as expressive as possible of their special corner of the Santa Cruz Mountains.