Full Belly Files | Memories and Wineries in the Santa Cruz Mountains

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The way from my mom’s house in Aptos up to Rhys Vineyard follows Highway 1 through Santa Cruz and then up Highway 17, that notoriously dangerous mountain road where I learned to drive stick-shift pickups, fast convertibles, and even faster minivans while growing up “over the hill” in San Jose. After exiting near the peaks on Summit Road, the directions lead you onto skinnier, more precarious lanes along cliffsides and beneath towering trees. They were full of blind turns and soaked in fog when I drove this route a month ago, as warnings of deer crossings danced in my head.

Thankfully, there were no deer and almost no cars at 8:30 a.m. in the morning, which is about the time I came around another hidden corner and suddenly recognized the Christmas tree farm that we used to frequent when I was a young boy. We’d drive up from East San Jose in the chilly morning hours, and sometimes there’d even be snow on the ground as we wandered through the ranch, searching for the perfect tree to cut down and put up in our living room.

Almost invariably, we’d get home only for my dad to realize that the tree was too big, or crooked, or had some gaping hole on the side. The long drive, cold conditions, and manual labor paired with disappointing results eventually led us to using the nearby Christmas tree lot, probably by the time I was 10, if not younger.

When I stopped my truck and rolled down the window to take a quick picture, the dank smell of redwood forest rushed in, triggering an even more palpable sense of yesteryear. I recalled all the times I’d ridden with my dad over the hill — sunflower seed shells flying out the window, the Giants’ Hank Greenwald announcing balls and strikes on the radio — to check on his candy machines or spend the weekend at our tiny studio in Capitola. My eyes grew a bit misty in the piney air, so I touched the photo of my dad that’s been stuck on my truck’s visor since I inherited the vehicle from him when he died in 2013, at just 63 years old.

The next day, we were preparing to play the 11th, and possibly final, Big D Memorial Golf Tournament, an event I helped start with his best friend, Dave Henningsen, back in 2014, the year after my dad died. With the help of dedicated friends and family — and eventually also honoring my aunt Julie and cousin Kim, when they died — the tournament grew into something way bigger than we ever expected.

We attracted more than 100 golfers in some years and raised tens of thousands of dollars for First Tee Silicon Valley, whose scholarship recipients came each year to speak of what the money meant for them. Whether the Big D stays alive will be up to my generation, although most of the principal folks, including Dave, my mom, and myself, are happy to have it morph into something more casual and less official. We’ll be figuring that out very soon.

This place on Highway 17 near the summit sells great kim chi.

As I proceeded past the Christmas tree farm, Bob Marley’s “Running Away,” came on the radio. With all these memories and thoughts flooding my mind, the line, “You can’t run away from yourself,” took on special meaning.

It made me realize that, while I’ve happily, and proudly, built a home and life for myself in Santa Barbara over the past 30 years, the pull of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Capitola Beach, and all else in between stays strong. I visit a few times each year, but it never quite feels like enough. It might be time to book some longer, more contemplative stays in the years to come.

Rhys Vineyard

Memory-stoking instances aside, my quarry for the day were visits to Rhys Vineyard and Testarossa Winery. I’ve reviewed the wines of both for Wine Enthusiast for years — and both have regularly shown up at the World of Pinot Noir at the Bacara — but I’ve never properly visited either.

Rhys sits atop Skyline Boulevard, looking out toward San Jose and across a canyon — which is actually the San Andreas Fault — from the famed Monte Bello Vineyard of Ridge Vineyards. (Remember my recent Ridge newsletter?) I was greeted by longtime winemaker Jeff Brinkman — who joined the winery soon after it started in 2006 — and assistant winemaker John Fausz, who’s been there since 2018.

The view from Rhys toward Ridge’s Monte Bello. The San Andreas Fault forms the canyon in between.

We got straight into tasting a ton of wines from all across the Rhys portfolio, which is mostly centered on pinot noir and chardonnay in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But there’s also a vineyard in Mendocino, an Italian varietal vineyard in Sonoma, and a smattering of smaller bottlings of sparklers, syrahs, and chenin blancs.

When the brand was founded by tech investor and Burgundy fanatic Kevin Harvey in 2004, the idea was to explore how different each wine could be based solely on where it was grown. He chose this area along the San Andreas Fault because it’s where the Pacific and North American plates collide, thereby pushing some of the oldest geologic layers to the surface.

Since then, the vines have all been planted with the same clones on the same rootstock and vinified more or less exactly the same. “The only thing that changes is the geology,” said Brinkman. “It’s a New World terroir experiment writ large.” Referring to their measured use of oak and whole cluster, Fausz added, “We try not to introduce noise.” Instead, they said in unison, “Enhance signal.”

The differences between wines grown very near each other, but on different soils, can be striking. Perhaps most evident is the comparison between the Home Vineyard — the backyard site originally planted by Harvey in 1995 — and the Family Farm Vineyard, a former Christmas tree ranch that was planted in 2002. “They’re kind of fraternal twins,” said Brinkman.

Just east of the fault, the Home Vineyard is on the North American Plate, where the bedrock is decomposed sandstone. Its pinot noir was full of cherry fruit dusted in very powdery tannins that apparently show up every vintage. To the west of the fault, the Family Farm sits on the Pacific Plate, growing in alluvial sand and clay soils. That gives a plummier flavor, enhanced by forest-like, “sous bois” spice.

In addition to tasting all of the recent pinots and chards, they showed me their excellent chenin and syrah as well as their Centennial Mountain bottlings of Italian grapes, specifically the carricante, which mixed fresh hits of lemongrass with more resinous herb flavors, and the nerello mascalese, which was wrapped in heavy tannins. We finished with their new bubbles, a refreshing way to end our morning meeting.

See rhysvineyards.com.

Testarossa Winery

I was vaguely aware of Testarossa Winery as early as my college years in the 1990s, largely because it is located inside the old Jesuit Novitiate in Los Gatos and was founded by Santa Clara University grads Rob and Diana Jensen. Both the university (the alma mater of many of my uncles and cousins) and novitiate, which was built in 1888 and had connections to my Jesuit high school, are prominent institutions for San Jose’s Catholic families like my own.

Testarossa’s historic photos of the Jesuit Novitiate in Los Gatos.

But it wasn’t until I started reviewing wines in 2014 that I learned how deeply the Testarossa wines explored the entire Central Coast. Their pinots and chards hail from more than a dozen vineyards, covering the Santa Cruz Mountains, Santa Lucia Highlands, Chalone, Arroyo Grande Valley, Santa Maria Valley, and the Sta. Rita Hills. (They even do a little Russian River Valley, but that’s outside my beat.)

It only took a decade for me to schedule a proper visit, and the Jensens and longtime winemaker Bill Brosseau — who I have hung out with multiple times before — made my time there unique. They invited me to an actual blending session, in which a large team from various departments gather to determine the final blends for the vintage-to-be.

Led that day by production assistant Holly Kimura-Carlin — who, incidentally, watched my kids for a couple years here when she was at UCSB — we were presented with a control sample from the previous vintage and then various choices for each bottling, including both single-vineyard lots and blended wines like the Diana’s. The goal is to achieve a level of consistency while, as Brosseau said, “to make each vintage better.”

He, Rob, and Diana are each considered “super delegates,” but the voting played out pretty democratically. It’s a smart way to steadily expand and improve the house palate while simultaneously engaging employees in a meaningful exercise.

Matt and Holly Kimura-Carlin, who used to babysit his kids and now works at Testarossa Winery.

Rob and I then headed to the cellar to snag some back vintage wines for lunch, picking the 2016 La Rinconada chardonnay from the Sta. Rita Hills; the 2012 Pisoni pinot noir from the Santa Lucia Highlands; and the 2014 Rosemary’s pinot noir from Arroyo Grande.

Chef Nadiv Geiger (also part of the blending panel) started catering special events for Testarossa in 2014, but the 107 Bistro & Wine Bar didn’t open until last year. So lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch — many of them also accompanied by live music — are relatively new offerings here.

From left: 107 Bistro’s lamb chops; 107 Bistro’s Belfiore burrata

As we talked about the wineries’ ups and downs over the years, Geiger sent out a number of appetizers (black garlic shrimp, Belfiore burrata on grilled sourdough, fancy Fourth of July corndog bites) followed by the lamb loin chops with mint salsa verde and crown of duck with berry reduction as entrees. The chocolate mousse cake in a jar, topped with caramel and white chocolate whip, may have been an unnecessary finale.

See testarossa.com.