That Ain’t No Termato...
...That’s My Wine

The Rich Diversity of the Monterey County Appellations

by Clark Smith
September 17, 2008

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erhaps no other California region is so stereotyped and stigmatized as Monterey County. The Salinas Valley’s prolific vegetable farms, supplying everything from artichokes to zucchini, are emblematic of the aspect that defines the Monterey winemaking conversation. Veg. It’s almost impossible to discuss wine with someone from this region without vegetal aromatics entering the conversation. These people are truly pyra-noid – obsessed with eliminating the pyrazines which imparted bell pepper and English pea aromas to the Monterey Cabernets and Sauvignon Blancs of the ‘70’s.

Yet, of the 130 wines assessed in this round of the BEST-OF-APPELLATION Evaluation, not a single wine was overtly veggie. There are herbal elements, distinctive and varied, which we included in the typical flavor profiles we compiled for several of the sub-regions, but the days of the Monterey veg bomb are over. Nevertheless, losing the veg, more than any other single impetus, defines the viticultural and winemaking choices that have shaped the wine styles of the County. The cooler areas have steered away from the Bordeaux varietals in favor of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling and the like. Where Cabernet is grown, we see a preponderance of long hangtime wines (there’s even a winery by that name) and whole berry fermentations as a method to mask the veggies with forward fruit aromas. The strawberry notes of Malbec are similarly employed in blends.

Monterey got off the ground during the table wine boom of early 1970’s, when a grower consortium hired Gallo-trained Beaulieu Vineyards veteran Dick Peterson to conquer this burgeoning source of coastal influenced cheap land, planting 9,600 acres of vineyards in the process.

It sounded easy. Unlike the inland San Joaquin Valley, believed to be too hot for premium table wines to be made, the Salina Valley had natural air conditioning. Each day throughout the summer, unfettered morning sunshine on the Valley’s sand heats the air, creating a chimney effect which sucks in cooling air from the ocean. Peterson was confident that this natural bonanza could produce the crisp acidity and distinctive flavors he’d found lacking in the San Joaquin. In this he was certainly to prove correct.

Peterson’s shrewd and experienced mind saw other advantages to the area. Monterey held a fertile desert with a huge underlying aquifer. Most of it was pancake flat with well-drained, sandy soils – cheap and easy to plant and farm, irrigate precisely and uniformly, and harvest mechanically. UC Davis degree-day formulations based on daily high and low temperatures classified the region as a match for Bordeaux. And viticultural had new secret weapon – advances at USDA in heat treatment techniques had just produced the world’s first virus free rootstocks, which permitted wide scale plantings of healthy super-vines. All seemed aligned to produce vast quantities of affordable, high quality Cabernet Sauvignon on a par with Napa at Bakersfield costs.

Disaster ensued. What followed was a crash course in practical viticulture featuring Mother Nature as a stern professor handing out flunking grades and painful lessons. Winkler’s degree-day system, devised after Prohibition as a first approximation using existing US Weather Bureau data, had never been extensively tested as a tool for evaluating new regions. It turned out that although the high temperatures tracked Yountville, the Salinas Valley was much cooler for most of the day.

Ripening was suppressed by other factors. The high afternoon winds had a strange effect on vines, causing them to protectively close their leaves’ microscopic breathing ports (stomates). This shut down photosynthesis for much of the day, depriving vines of sugar while allowing pH’s to rise, resulting in wines with crisp acid taste (TA) but poor longevity. North Coast buyers like ZD and Buena Vista, who had never seen wines with high pH and high TA together, produced wines of early high quality which quickly circled the bowl.

One more lesson: Grape physiology is geared toward green growth in the spring and reproduction in the autumn. Early in the season, grapes are flavored with vegetal compounds to prevent birds from eating them until the seeds are mature enough to sprout. These veggies get turned off by the same mechanism that signals the production of berry flavors and red color: sunlight on the fruit. Shaded fruit stays veggie. So the first large scale planting of virus-free rootstock, farmed in the traditional California sprawl, led to plenty of acidity and distinctive flavors in the Cabernet alright – paint-stripping acidity and garbage can bell pepper.

But that was then, and this is now. We all need to just get over it - the winemakers, the consumers, and most important, the gatekeeper pundits who have kept the focus on this aspect long past its actuality, simply because they can’t think past its outdated teachings. Who can say what cruel lessons were learned in two millennia of figuring out the vineyards of Europe? Before Bordeaux and Burgundy got it right, did people talk about the “Montrachet veggies?” Thank heaven for the Dark Ages – we don’t need to know.

Monterey wines are not like this any more. In my view, the stigma they carry over-defines the current activities of winegrowers in the region, and residual “pyra-noia” may be holding them back from appearing powerfully on the world stage. Characteristics that persist here are freshness of fruit and ample acidity, together with a range of herbal aromatic constituents, which are more signatures of specific terroirs than signs of viticultural mismanagement. They need to be embraced as part of the region. The common practice of planting fast growing gum trees as windbreaks also frequently appears as part of the regional signature in a minty eucalyptol note. Beyond these generalities, whether the wine is a friendly quaffer or a thought provoking artistic statement depends a great deal on the scale on which it is made.

David and Goliath make wine

In Monterey County, perhaps more than any other place, the drama of big versus tiny, industrial vs artisanal, is played out in each vintage. Here, the small guys wield John Henry’s hammer against the machine of factory farming. While it is easy to side with the personal attention of the boutique craftsman, recent and ongoing advances in precision viticulture are constantly being integrated by giant vineyard management companies, seeking to deal with the challenges of being big.

Of the 40,000 acres planted in the County, most are managed by large farming operations. ‘Twas ever thus. In 1973, Prudential Insurance planted the entire 7600 acre San Bernabe, perhaps the world’s largest single vineyard. In 1977, Coca-Cola of Atlanta scooped up The Monterey Vineyard’s 9,600 acres in an unsuccessful bid to take on Gallo.

Now they are gone. Out-of-industry corporate giants have been replaced by local expertise, but still on a grand scale. San Bernabe was sold in 1988 to Manteca-based mega-boutique Delicato Vineyards, who still manages it. Monterey Pacific today manages over 7,000 acres and Scheid Vineyards another 6,000. Much of the wines produced do not carry a local appellation, but instead comprise the backbone of such vast California Coastal programs as BV and Robert Mondavi.

This is not to say that quality is not a priority. To be sure, with their ability to pick and choose, labels like Scheid and McIntyre may be relied upon to put their best foot forward for their showcase wines. But make no mistake - across the board, the County’s viticultural powerhouses are light years ahead of their predecessors. What felled Coca-Cola was its outsider’s ignorance of the built-in challenges of Salinas. The message digested long ago is that, at all price levels, quality matters. Monterey’s combination of cheap land and coastal influence looked like a slam dunk profit play, and big mistakes were made in the ‘70’s rush for the quick buck. But thought is born of failure, and a third of a century later, with regional challenges now well understood, fine tuning is taking place at both extremes of scale.

Technologies unheard of in the 1970’s - probes for soil moisture, leaf temperature, and vascular tissue flow, sophisticated pest assessment programs, satellite infrared pictures of water use and photosynthesis mapping, webcams permitting direct vineyard viewing online - permit large firms to more efficiently manage vine health and vigor and to monitor soil, water and fertility issues. GPS technologies tied to sophisticated new software permit microclimate data mapping and selective harvesting techniques. The big guys are getting better all the time.

The glass ceiling for precision viticulture is vine uniformity. Precision viticulture breaks down when point readings don’t reflect the status of every vine. What works on the valley floor fails in the highlands, because vines cannot be as uniform in the rocky, elevated soils which in Monterey produce the most distinctive wines. Thus the valley floor is a perfect place for the efficiencies of factory farming, and seems to have been all but abandoned by small fry.

When micro-grower Dan Lee of Morgan Winery chose the site for his Double L Ranch, a primary consideration was the proximity of hand labor. He might have picked a warmer, more shielded site further south, but he felt that ready access to the large labor pool in Salinas was a crucial advantage for the manual techniques he intended to employ, from cane pruning to fruit sorting. No one disputes that individual attention at every stage is the ace in the hole which permits challenging vineyard sites to show their best.

While they may lack access to high technology, small producers have another edge concerning dynamic quality improvement. Experimentation is simply difficult to accomplish for an organization geared to mass practices. Randomized block designs involving treatment variables, offset harvest dates and keeping lots separate impede the efficiencies built into the factory farm, while the tending of experimental plots is a natural extension of the small winery process.

An important and unusual feature of the struggle for small wineries in Monterey County is the near absence of tourism. Tasting rooms (and the resulting lucrative wine club Internet sales) are an important focus for small producers. Tasting rooms also can influence style – more residual sugar in the Chardonnays, softer tannins in the Cabs.

No such luck here. As a result, Monterey County’s small producers need to make it on the competitive world stage. They tend to make wines which will appeal to a more Eurocentric collector’s palate: austere and sophisticated, age-worthy and without cheap tricks like excessive oak, ML, and RS. Lacking a front door revenue source, popular pricing is not usually on the agenda.

What is emerging is a win/win – large operations providing affordable wines which offer excellent value for the everyday table, along with small producers who turn out appellation-defining jewels to appeal to the connoisseur’s appetite for distinctive, world class collectibles – a connoisseur already impervious to sticker shock, thanks to much higher price tags in Napa and France.

Monterey’s 9 Sub-Appellations

Though mostly distant from its namesake township, the 50 mile wind tunnel of Salinas Valley, which terminates in King City, is simply called Monterey, thus it is easily confused with Monterey County, which can hail from anywhere in this quite diverse county. The Monterey appellation also extends another 30 miles south of King City into warm climes not much influenced by the maritime winds, overlapping down the valley with the more sheltered AVA’s of San Bernabe, San Lucas and Hames Valley, as well as areas such as the Indian River Valley which are probably in need of their own AVA.

Paralleling Monterey Valley on the west side for 16 miles is the Santa Lucia Highlands appellation, separated from the valley floor by nothing but an escarpment in places only six feet in height, yet possessing utterly different flavor characteristics. Since it is still windy and cold on the bench, growers have steered away from Bordeaux varietals in favor of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Syrah and other low-veg, cold-loving varietals. Unlike the valley below, the uneven terrain of the terrace has rewarded a smaller scale, more labor intensive approach here, and two decades of distinctive, high ticket successes (the APPELLATION AMERICA database currently lists 82 wineries employing the SLH appellation) have established the Highlands as the crown jewel of Monterey AVA’s.

Wrapping around the south end of SLH, Arroyo Seco is defined by the gulch and alluvial fan laid down by the Arroyo Seco River, extending down from 500 foot elevation canyons to the Valley floor to create a sunken section shielded from the winds which race overhead each afternoon. Bordeaux varieties and Zinfandel thrive here. Most of the planted land is further down stream in the exposed alluvial fan around Greenfield, underlain with gravel or river rock and quite flat and vulnerable to the cooling afternoon winds, which favor Chardonnays and Rieslings of intense fruit and moderate to high acidity. This portion owes most of its terroir distinction to its good drainage and to temperatures moderated by its distance from the mouth of the Valley.

The other three sub-Apps are not part of the Valley and are immune to its influences. The tiny Chalone AVA, which straddles Monterey and San Benito Counties high above the Salinas Valley’s east side, has one of the most distinct terroirs in California. Its elevations range from 1400 to 1800 feet, well above the influence of fog and maritime winds. Its scant 300 acres are planted on decomposed granite as well as some of the state’s only true limestone. Arid and high in incident light, its nighttime cool temperatures have nevertheless made it a proven home since 1919 to some of California’s most highly prized Burgundian varietals.

Despite its proximity to the Pacific, the box canyon of Carmel Valley lacks the open sun-baked anvil of the Salinas Valley and thus does not undergo its daily shellacking of maritime air. Nevertheless, precise vineyard location is critical to proper varietal selection here, with consideration to altitude, aspect, soil type and proximity to fog influences: Hot days and cold nights and 200 – 2700 ft elevations, mostly above the fog line. Here is the Bordelais region at last, where Cabernet, and Merlot produce distinctive, Eurocentric wines with recognizable Old World class. 300 acres are planted mostly on mountainous terrain on fine sandy loam, with a few cooler microclimates planted to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Our most surprising find was the county’s latest AVA, San Antonio Valley. Nestled into the Santa Lucia Mountains at over 1000 feet elevation, this fertile mountain valley, located halfway between Monterey’s southern end and the Pacific, possesses a unique climate well suited to Bordeaux varieties. Although grapes were planted here in 1971, this alpine bowl is only now achieving well-deserved recognition as a premier spot for serious reds. Moderated by fog influence from Lake San Antonio and nightly breezes from the Pacific some 15 miles west, the region basks daily in incident sunlight, and its well drained gravelly loams contribute to intensely colored, firmly structured Cabernets and big, plush Syrahs.

Tasting the Cabernets of San Antonio, I felt just like the Stephen Spurrier character in Bottle Shock, stumbling upon this remote and obscure enclave of some of the world’s most underrated wines. The APPELLATION AMERICA panel was literally in shock. Like an enclave out of a Steinbeck novel, this remote but verdant country reminds us of the lost valley in Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown, with its wild country, pioneer spirit and epic struggles against both nature and convention. These traits seem to show up in the wines. Bordeaux varieties are fashioned here into seriously respectable wines, but unlike the debonair styles of Carmel Valley, these tougher, more masculine wines speak of cowboy country on the edge of civilization.

Alas, their new AVA designation may allow them to distance themselves, only to be confused as a Texas provenance. Still the name seems in tune with the serious but rustic style of these wines. As Jim Barrett famously put it when Chateau Montelena prevailed in Paris, “Pretty good for some kids from the sticks.”

Overall, what impresses about “Monterey” as an omnibus winegrowing region is its sheer ecological and viticultural diversity. As North American wines increasingly become defined by their regionality, overcoming the homogenizing effects of excessive focus on grape varieties, Monterey’s natural diversity can be expected to pay big dividends. What goes around, comes around. The “promise of Monterey” back in the early 1970s is being renewed nine-fold today, as the energized winegrowers and producers in each of Monterey’s nine AVAs mine these distinct terroirs for a diverse array of distinctive high quality wines.

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To see the complete list of wines earning Best-of-Appellation™ standing in this Monterey evaluation,
click here.

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Photos courtesy of Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association