History
Dan Lester was a Watsonville real estate developer and a lifelong treasure hunter; the Lester Estate labels carry an embossed piece of eight in his honor, from the 1622 wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha off the Florida Keys. Viticulturist Prudy Foxx and her husband Mark planted it in two pieces: a lower block in 1998 on a dying apple orchard, an upper block in 2001 over an abandoned Christmas tree farm. Fruit went to other cellars from the start, with David Bruce and Pichetti taking the 2001 crop and Soquel Vineyards, Cinnabar, Thomas Fogarty, Martin Ranch, Alfaro and Big Basin following. Lester died in 2014; Patty Lester's daughter Lori and her husband Steve Johnson built the Lester Estate label afterwards.
The Site
This is the Pleasant Valley pocket above Corralitos at the southern end of the appellation, next door to Storrs and in the same neighbourhood as the Alfaro and Kimari plantings. Monterey Bay lies about three miles off with nothing in between, so fog holds the rows through most summer mornings and ripening runs long. Published elevations range from roughly 450 to 600 feet on a naturally terraced slope whose rows face east to south-southeast. The soils are nutrient-poor sandy loam over old seabed, free draining, with roots reported past thirty feet. Foxx, who founded Foxx Viticulture in 1997, keeps it close to dry: no herbicide, two or three short irrigations a year, a winter cover crop of barley and bell beans, and yields near two tons per acre.
Vines and Blocks
There are no named parcels, only the lower block and the upper, planted on wide eight by eight spacing and trained to a lyre trellis that shades the ground and exposes the clusters. Pinot Noir takes about ten of the acres, with one to two acres each of Chardonnay and Syrah depending on the source. The clonal spread is broad for a vineyard this small: Pommard, Swan, Mount Eden, Wadenswil 2A, Mariafeld, 122 and the Dijon selections 115, 667 and 777, and Sante Arcangeli has drawn Martini fruit from here too. The Chardonnay is the Robert Young selection and the Syrah is Hermitage and 877. Published counts of the planted area run from twelve to fifteen acres while the mapped outline covers about eighteen.
The Wines
Lester Estate keeps no house winemaker. Several vintners each choose their own rows, work with Foxx through the season, and bottle one to two hundred cases under a code name rather than their own: Mercurio for John Benedetti of Sante Arcangeli, Traviso for Ross Reedy of VML, Brando for Ian Brand, and Domingo, which has passed from Ed Kurtzman to Emiddio Justin Massa. Dan Person of Carboniste makes the traditional-method Brut and a sparkling rosé of Pinot Noir. The group gathers once a year with barrel samples to taste the same ground against itself. Beyond the estate, Big Basin has bottled a designate across many vintages, often with a high share of whole clusters, and Waxwing, Rexford, Soquel, Alfaro, Farm Cottage and Darling have all carried the vineyard's name.