History
Ten of the property's roughly forty acres were developed in the summer of 2009 with Rex Geitner consulting: 8.7 acres of Pinot Noir, 1.3 of Chardonnay. Dave Gollnick grew up farming dairy cattle with his father in rural Northern California, and the wines that pointed the couple toward this range were Ridge and Mount Eden. In 2013 Master Sommelier Bob Bath told Ehren Jordan of Failla about a vineyard beside a redwood grove on Alpine Road; Jordan flew down, took the winemaking, and has held it since. The earliest estate release still offered is a 2013 Chardonnay; the Gollnicks work the place themselves.
The Site
The vines lie on Mindego Hill above Alpine Creek near La Honda, ringed by parks and open-space preserves, eight to nine miles from the Pacific with San Francisco Bay off the other shoulder. Elevation runs 675 to 935 feet, the slope faces south at a grade of twenty to thirty-five percent, and the season accumulates only 2,200 to 2,400 degree days. Ten to eighteen inches of silty clay loam lie over fractured shale and sandstone of the Purisima Formation, latest Miocene to late Pliocene marine rock west of the San Andreas; Rhys's Alpine, the other vineyard on this road, works the same formation several hundred feet higher. Mapping the vine rows alone returns under eight acres, the usual gap between planted acreage and the ground a canopy covers.
Vines and Blocks
The Pinot Noir is Dijon material, clones 114, 115, 667, 777, 828 and 943, on 420A and 3309, spaced seven feet by four for roughly 1,600 vines to the acre. Two tons per acre is the estate's stated norm and the crop can fall far below it: the 2015 Pinot Noir came in at 0.8. Pruning, training, lateral removal and thinning are done by hand, over cover crops and compost. The young vines were watered sparingly for five years and irrigation was then withdrawn from every block, dry farming that has held through drought vintages. No block names are published, but the estate's Block Reserve Pinot Noir in 2021 and 2022 shows the parcels are kept separate.
The Wines
Jordan makes the estate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in small lots: native ferment, nothing added beyond a little sulfur at bottling, no fining or filtration, a quarter new François Frères, eleven months in barrel, alcohols in the mid-thirteens. Failla, Jordan's own label, bottles a separate Mindego Ridge Vineyard Pinot Noir designate, through at least the 2023 vintage. Kutch added the site in 2019 and takes both varieties. Ceritas came in with 2022 and picked on September 14, the last of its sixteen harvests that year. Thomas Fogarty's Nathan Kandler uses a quarter to half whole clusters and two winters in Chatillon oak. Tolosa, Sandar and Hem, and Novovino have bottled designates too, Sandar and Hem in both colors. The wines are cool-toned, firm and saline, which is what south-facing shale at 900 feet on the bay side of the ridge should give.