Wine Lover: Pinot noir, terroir in the Santa Cruz Region

If I asked you to find a Santa Cruz winery that didn’t produce a pinot noir, you would be hard pressed. Almost every winery in our region is not only producing pinot noir, but also growing or buying the pinot grapes locally.
What is the fascination Santa Cruz winemakers have with pinot noir, you might ask. The answer lies in the ever-important concept of terroir.
Terroir is a French word that means, essentially, growing conditions. Terroir could be anything from soil to sunshine, rainfall to ashes in the vineyards from a summer ridden with forest fires.
Every grape has its ideal growing conditions. Cabernet sauvignon likes lots of sun and heat; hence the reason it does so well in Napa. Pinot noir is a much more finicky grape and can’t take as much sun as grapes like cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel.
It’s our unique terroir that creates ideal growing conditions for pinot noir. The Santa Cruz region has a cooler climate than Napa, because of the ocean breeze and, most importantly, because of the fog that often sticks around until the early afternoon.
That fog is the key to the terroir. It cools down our valleys so that the pinot noir grapes aren’t inundated with morning sun. That is why so many of our local vineyards are planted with pinot.
My prediction — warning, the following is opinionated! — is that pinot noir will only become more prevalent in the Santa Cruz region. It is clearly the best-suited grape to our terroir, and most of the serious wines made in Santa Cruz come from pinot noir. For many wineries, it is their flagship grape — the one they stand by year in and year out.
When I taste wines locally, I always give pinot noir the most weight at any given winery. It is the one to judge most local wineries by. The more a local winery concentrates on its pinot production, the more I am interested in what it is producing.
The next time you are out tasting in Santa Cruz, or any other region for that matter, it is good to find out what grape is best suited to that region. That will help you determine what to buy and what to put emphasis on.
Remember, terroir is just as important as varietal, and in most cases it’s even more important.
– Austin Twohig is a certified sommelier and partner in The Santa Cruz Experience, which conducts winery tours in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Email him at au****@th********************.com.