History
Bradley Brown, the youngest sibling, bought the derelict Frenchie's Ranch above Boulder Creek in 1998, planted the Rattlesnake Rock estate vineyard in 2000 under John Alban's guidance, and made the first Big Basin vintage in 2002. Derek reached wine earlier and by another road: an underage raid on their father's cellar, seven years in Paris on Apple's payroll, then leave from the office to work the 1994 harvest for the Reynaud family at Chateau des Tours in Vacqueyras. He planted Brokentop in 2005, and Big Basin gave the site a vineyard-designate bottling in 2014. The winery calls it the second estate vineyard and labels the wine Estate on trade sheets, though its vineyard index lists Brokentop among the sources rather than beside Boulder Creek.
The Site
Big Basin's vineyard page describes Brokentop as a ridge-top property five miles from the Pacific, in the hills above Santa Cruz, while the tech sheet for the 2020 puts the same ridge top overlooking Monterey Bay, a couple of miles from the water; winemaker Blake Yarger, in a 2021 interview, placed it in Scotts Valley. The vineyard page reads 700 feet, east-facing, fifteen to twenty percent slope, on Lompico variant loam; the tech sheet for the 2020 reads 800 feet, southeast, twenty percent, over sandy clay loam on fractured shale and sandstone. Lompico is a moderately deep, well-drained upland soil of these mountains, weathered from sandstone, shale, conglomerate and granodiorite, with rock inside the top forty inches. Altitude is not the argument here. The appellation runs down to 400 feet on its ocean-facing flank, and Big Basin's own estate sits at 1,300 to 1,400 feet; proximity to the coast is what the winery credits for the cool-climate result.
Vines and Blocks
One variety, one selection: Viognier on Alban clone 1, the budwood Big Basin lists as The Knolls, planted 2005. The same material grows in the estate's Rattlesnake Rock block beside Alban's Cote-Rotie Syrah selection, the thread back to John Alban, who propagated Rhone cuttings in California when world Viognier plantings were reckoned at roughly fifty acres. No blocks are named at Brokentop and no acreage is published; releases of 32 cases from 2020, 29 from 2021 and 35 from 2023 suggest well under an acre in production.
The Wines
Big Basin is the only buyer on record. The 2020 went through native primary and malolactic fermentation, spent eighteen months in French oak and went to bottle unfined and unfiltered at 13.5 percent, the same long barrel elevage the winery gives its estate East Terraces Viognier. That estate planting went in to be co-fermented with Syrah, a job Yarger reduced and then eliminated to push the reds toward leather and sage; Brokentop's fruit goes into a stand-alone white. Yarger said in 2021 that it made stunning Viognier but that he did not need two Viogniers, and floated Picpoul or Chenin Blanc for the estate ground. Both have outlasted the question so far: a 2022 East Terraces was released in 2025, a 2023 Brokentop in 2026.