1850
I The 19th-century dreams of hardscrabble immigrants longing for home that put the Golden State on the global wine map…
II Post-World War II corporatization that landed jug and boxed wines in the refrigerators of millions across America…
2023
III Modern winemakers drawn to old vines and oddball grapes farmed by growers increasingly attuned to sustainability…
These chapters in the ongoing saga of San Benito County directly reflect the long arc of California viticulture, a twisting tale of trials, trends, booms and busts whose pages continue to turn today. Underlying it all is the belief that San Benito’s location between the cooling breezes of the Monterey Bay to the west, the blaring sunshine of the San Joaquin Valley to the east and the eccentric soils unearthed by the San Andreas Fault present a world-class location for wine grapes.
That’s what the first people to make wine there bet on more than 150 years ago when they planted vines even before contemporaries who made Sonoma and Napa much more famous. That these lands south of Hollister and east of Salinas have not yet fallen to overdevelopment only sweetens the setting, even if that otherwise idyllic isolation provides plenty of challenges to widespread popularity.
I’ve known the region since childhood, golfing past rattlesnakes with my dad and exploring bat caves in the Pinnacles, long before it became a national park. My more recent
