In one big vineyard, aworld of its own
Regular drivers of Highway 101 traversing the Central Coast know this routine. Somewhere just south of King City, the terrain grows a bit scrubbier, the hills pull back and the vines begin. You can’t miss them: row after endless row, a sea of vineyards in the Monterey County sun. They continue nearly to the tiny, forlorn townof San Ardo, some 20 miles south, and they symbolize the sheer scale of California’s prowess.
Farther up the Salinas Valley, there is fancier Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Andin an era when small is beautiful, small wineries are the topic of conversation that Monterey would prefer to discuss.
Yet this is Monterey’s great grape engine, the driver of many of the wines you’ll see on the shelf marked as Central Coast. It is a spot intrinsic to the growth of California wine, but one rarely discussed.
Those roadside vines are an obvious totem, but unless you take a detour on Jolon Road, which wanders from King City through the Santa Lucia Mountains and Fort Hunter Liggett before curving back toward 101, you’re likely tomiss one of the most impressive stretches of vineyard: San Bernabe, thought to be the largest contiguous vineyard in the world when the Indelicato family bought it in 1988. Until a recent sale of acreage, it was still considered theworld’s third-largest.
Grand beginnings
Its current owners, the Indelicatos, have been working not just to appreciate the scale of their operation, but to viewit as a collection of many smaller plantings — to find top-quality parcels and farm San Bernabe as an unusual hybrid: both on the large scale required to keep California’s wine engine chugging, and, on amore meticulous scale, for top-quality wines.
“For the first time,” says Charlie Hossom, a longtime industry veteran and, since last year, Delicato’s director of vineyard operations, “the motivation is getting the right variety in the right place.”
I’ve been curious about the scale of Monterey farming for a long time, and, recently, Hossom and his general manager at San Bernabe, Grant Cremers, who has farmed the site for more than two decades, agreed to takeme on a tour.
It is hard to express the scope of the operation. As I turned from Jolon onto Oasis Road, which crawls along the hills outside King City, not only was I surrounded by vines, but also by parcels of open field, land yet to be replanted, thatwould dwarf many of Napa’s larger plantings. The Santa Lucia range looms to thewest, and the rolling, arid hills of eastern Monterey stretch to the east, agricultural California’s equivalent of Big Sky territory. This is the California wine country found in old black-and-white photos, from the days before wine became an effete pursuit.
San Bernabe (Ber-NAH-bay) got its start in 1972, a grand project conceived by Prudential Life Insurance and Southdown Land Co. Like many finance companies, Prudential saw profit, or at least a tax break, in vineyards.
While the North Coast mostly offered small, irregular plots, Monterey promised land at scale — the produce expanses of the Salinas Valley shifted toward grapes.
The financiers dived into Monterey with a vengeance. Entities like the Monterey Farming Corp., now Scheid Vineyards, planted thousands of acres; today, those live on in spots like the Scheid family’s 875 acres of San Lucas Vineyard and the San Lucas parcel owned by Boisset-controlled Lockwood. These account for some of those endless rows along the highway.
Prudential discovered, as most companies do, that vineyards are not an easy investment.
Enter the Indelicatos, who bought the property from Prudential in 1988. At the time, the 8,500 acres of vines at San Bernabe were believed to compose the largest vineyard in theworld; even a fewyears ago, itwas considered the largest in the country. End to end, it once stretched at least 5 miles. Even now, the relatively narrow property runs about 3 miles long.
Still, it is not quite as huge now. There are some 2,800 acres of vines in the ground, part of 5,000 plantable acres and 7,800 total. The family sold off some bottom ground near the Salinas River, and two years ago sold 3,400 acres to a holding company that controls thousands of acres across California, owned by TIAA-CREF. After a generation, the land was back with an insurance company.
“Five thousand acres of vineyard in any one place is still a sizable agricultural risk,” says Hossom.
San Bernabe remains an enormous undertaking, with a core staff of 55 people and another 250 doing pruning and seasonal work. The San Bernabe area has its owna ppellation, the result of petitioning by the Indelicatos about a decade ago. And when nine mechanical harvesters are sweeping the vineyards, Hossom says, “harvest is something to behold.”
Howit started
The Indelicatos got their start in 1924, when patriarch Gaspare Indelicato set up shop in Manteca (San Joaquin County) and began growing grapes, making table wines after Prohibition. Later, Joe Ciatti, whowould become one of Californa’s great wine brokers, made Gaspare a proposition: Make wine for Almaden, one of the state’s major producers in the 1960s.
Gaspare’s three sons took over that business and also started selling bulk wine to other producers, and when the 1980s rolled around, Ciatti offered another proposition: Make wine for Glen Ellen, whichwould become one of the great successes of that decade’s varietal wines.
Itwas the height of the craze for “coastal,” one of the trends that drove a lingering fascination with Monterey. To find coastal Chardonnay to feed the fighting varietalmaw, the Indelicatos came downto San Bernabe. They liked it enough that they asked Prudential if they could buy 120 acres at the edge of the huge property. Soon, Prudential offered the rest.
At that point, the vineyard was a huge source of both grapes and bulk wine. But the third genera- tion, including Charis and Jay Indelicato, decided they should sell some of that wine themselves. Today, Delicato sells 7 million cases a year.
Still, the family’s interest has turned toward the small and, as Hossom says, “how specific we're getting about farm
The initial plantings were a random patchwork - "basically whatever got planted by Prudential was whatever showed up on the nursery truck that day." The vines were established on their own roots and watered by overhead sprinklers, an interesting if not efficient means for such a large plot.
The Indelicatos replanted in the mid-1990s and added drip irrigation, but their vines choices were dictated more by what the
market wanted than what would be appropriate.
21 varieties
Over time, though, San Bernabe has diversified, and is the site of 21 varieties, from Grenache and Sauvignon Blanc to Riesling and Pinot Noir. More are coming, including Tempranillo and Malbec. “Andwe can ripen them all,” Hossom says.
This is feasible because of a “sweet spot” where the Santa Lucias bend slightly, providing less direct exposure to theweather and wind that charge down the Salinas Valley. (Although nearly everyone in Monterey claims to be sitting on a sweet spot.) With somuch land, there’s also a happy diversity of soils; thewestern side is composed mostly of old soils on the Pacific Plate, dotted with calcified shale and sandstone; the eastern side is essentially sand dunes.
You have likely drunk wine from San Bernabe. Grapes go to buyers both large and small. There’s Chenin Blanc that goes into Pine Ridge’s popular bottling, and Riesling that goes to Fetzer and to Delicato’s own Loredona label. The small Birichino winery makes a remarkably good Malvasia Bianca from San Bernabe.
The vineyard’s scale makes it easy to think in the usual industrial terms. But the Indelicatos have kept it so that it doesn’t feel that way. There’s awooden viewing post on a slight rise to the west, and the only large building in the operation is the on-site winery. That winery is used for bulk wine sold to other companies, but winemaker James Ewart is also installing a “micro winery,” including the sort of open-top fermenters used by fancy Pinot Noir producers.
Enter the falcons
This is part of the Indelicatos’ desire to focus on quality, in part with their Noble Vines line that encompasses their popular 337 Cabernet, aswell as new offerings like 667 Pinot Noir, partly sourced from San Bernabe, and the Limestone Ridge Chardonnay from their Fog Head label.
While farming is still largely conventional, the crew at San Bernabe is experimenting with cover crops in away reminiscent of top Cabernet makers. They have hired falconers to provide effective bird control— a single falcon can protect 800 acres of grapes, chasing off migrating starlings. Even more than the 80 owl boxes, it is a notably humane solution—“99.9 percent no-kill,” according to Daniel Hedin, one of the contract falconers.
By design, the workings of this part of Monterey are meant to be viewed from a distance. The area has not a single tasting room— the closest are in Greenfield and in remote Lockwood. Quietly, San Bernabe and Monterey’s other grape fields roll along, slaking California’s thirst.