History
The ridge was homesteaded in the 1880s; three French settlers bought it in 1906, planted grapes, and made wine until Prohibition. Justin Lacau ran it from 1935 as Frenchie's Ranch, a San Jose timber family logged it repeatedly after 1967, and by 1998 the place was a dumping ground with a few old vines still alive. With cuttings and counsel from John Alban, Brown planted Rattlesnake Rock in 2000, made a first vintage in 2002, and in 2003 raised a winery framed with estate-milled redwood; CCOF organic certification came in 2012. The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire took Brown's house, the equipment barns, and the whole estate crop to smoke; the winery survived with 1,800 cases of just-bottled 2019s inside, and some 600 damaged vines were replanted. Blake Yarger, formerly of McEvoy Ranch, makes the wines now.
The Site
Ten planted acres sit in blocks scattered inside 150 acres of second-growth redwood on Lookout Ridge, the divide between the Boulder Creek and San Lorenzo Valley drainages, at 1,250 to 1,400 feet. The blocks face mostly southwest on terraces, over fractured mudstone and sandstone with clay loams. Pacific wind cools the afternoons, fog fills the nights, and the vineyard is hand-farmed under cover crop, irrigated only two or three times most seasons. Redwood forest is unusual ground for vines and accounts for the small scale.
Vines and Blocks
Rattlesnake Rock, planted in 2000 at 1,300 to 1,400 feet and named for a bluestone boulder no one could remove, holds Syrah in Alban Cote-Rotie and Serine selections, the source of the wine's lavender and violet aromatics, alongside Alban Knolls Viognier and Pinot Noir. The Homestead blocks followed in 2007: Homestead proper carries Grenache and Roussanne in Alban field selections, 42 Terraces is Syrah on Alban's Power Block selection, and Rocky and Boulder were budded over in 2014 to Mount Eden clone 37 Pinot Noir. Old Corral, planted in 2006 and budded to Swan Pinot Noir in 2014, faces south and southeast on the far side of the ridge.
The Wines
Big Basin bottles this ground block by block: Rattlesnake Rock Syrah, Old Corral Pinot Noir, Homestead for Grenache and the Rhone whites, Grizzly Grenache, and a Syrah sold as Sixty-Two Terraces though the estate site calls the block 42 Terraces. The cellar has moved toward transparency: whole-cluster fermentation rose from 25 percent in 2009 to 100 percent by 2019, with native yeasts, neutral oak, a basket press since 2018, and bottling without fining or filtration. Grizzly tracks the estate's pull: the 2010 was a Grenache-led blend mostly from Coastview and Antle in the Gabilans; recent vintages are entirely estate Grenache. Odeon is the outlier, lately Cabernet from Betchart Vineyard at 2,200 feet near Ridge's Monte Bello, blended in some vintages with Rattlesnake Rock Syrah; Big Basin still buys across the Central Coast, though Coastview ended with the 2019 vintage.