History
Corralitos was orchard country before it was vineyard country, and the Alfaro purchase in 1997 is part of the shift that changed that. The conversion came by way of a Rex Hill Reserve Willamette Valley Pinot Noir at a Lake Tahoe dinner in 1996. The first vines went in on the Lindsay Paige parcel in 1998, the home block followed in 1999 and the Ryan Spencer hillside in 2001, and the estate has grown to roughly sixty acres under vine across the Corralitos hills. Through the 2000s a second label, Martin Alfaro, run with childhood friend Joe Martin, handled purchased fruit. The family bought the Trout Gulch vineyard above Aptos in 2021, a dry-farmed 1980 Bernard Turgeon planting they had farmed under lease for more than fifteen years. Ryan Alfaro is now head winemaker, with his own Farm Cottage label named for the redwood cottage on the ranch.
The Site
About fourteen acres in the home block, on southeast-facing slopes at roughly fifteen percent grade. Published elevations run from 500 to 730 feet depending on the source. The soils are nutrient-poor sandy gravel loam, and the bay lies three miles off, and the fog and marine air off it temper the sun on the slope. Richard Alfaro farms by hand and irrigates to deficit, and between the water regime and the thin soils the vineyard yields one to two tons per acre in most vintages.
Vines and Blocks
The home vineyard is all Pinot Noir: nine blocks of Dijon clones 113, 114, 115, 667, 777 and 828 at 1,361 vines per acre, none of them carrying a proper name. The named plantings sit around it. Lindsay Paige, the 1998 original, is just over seven acres on a northwest-facing hillside at nearly 2,000 vines per acre: ten Pinot Noir clones, two and a half acres of own-rooted Wente Chardonnay and an acre of the Muscat clone CH 809. Ryan Spencer, planted in 2001 on steeper ground at more than 2,300 vines per acre, carries the estate's named blocks: Billy K in Merlot, La Escalera in terraced Syrah, Mrs. K's in Syrah with heritage Pinot selections (Swan, Mount Eden, Martini, Pommard). Mary Katherine, planted in 2008 at the 850-foot summit, grows own-rooted Pinot Noir from a suitcase selection said to come from Vosne-Romanee beside Robert Young Chardonnay, and La Playita, the coolest corner of the farm, holds three acres of Gruner Veltliner.
The Wines
Alfaro bottles the home vineyard under its own label and folds it into the A Estate Pinot Noir, blended with about a quarter Trout Gulch fruit in recent vintages. Richard Alfaro also sells fruit widely, which is why the vineyard's name appears on other producers' labels. Big Basin has made an Alfaro Family Vineyard Pinot Noir across many vintages from clones 115, 667 and 777: native fermentation, seventeen months in French oak, no fining or filtration, 161 cases in 2019 at 13.2 percent alcohol. The wines are dark-fruited and firm for a site this cool, which growers here attribute to the poor gravelly soil rather than to the climate; Big Basin calls supple texture and a baking-spice finish the vineyard's signatures, at naturally low alcohol.