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Feature Article
Appellation America’s Best-of-Appellation™ Evaluation Program identifies the Chardonnays that best typify the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, and the taste profiles of the region’s varied sub-areas.
The Santa Cruz Mountains:
San Francisco’s Heart, High On A Hill It Calls...
The Santa Cruz Mountains AVA is a myriad of mountain glens and mudstone hilltops with chilly enclaves tucked in between. Within each of these, the variability in soil type, exposure, fog influence, and diurnal temperature swings manifests so uniquely that each ten-acre plot can experience a climate all its own. Indeed, this is terroir diversity that boggles the mind; diversity that is well represented in a multiplicity of styles found the in the region’s best Chardonnays.
by Clark Smith
October 3, 2008
Long before Napa Valley became home to California’s celebrity back-to-the-landers, the Santa Cruz Mountains had been the breed’s spiritual center for a century. What a fluke of nature is this gift of terroir, worthy of Montrachet, and yet within taxicab range of Northern California’s major metropolitan centers – at first San Francisco and Stanford University, then later the Silicon Gulch. Scores of gentry have been unable to resist the allure of establishing commutable micro-vineyards, and now a hundred top sites sit above the hubbub like jewels in the city’s crown.
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