Santa Cruz Mountains

Rhys Mt. Pajaro Vineyard

A neighbor tipped Kevin Harvey off to an abandoned apple orchard east of Corralitos, and Rhys bought it in early 2012 to test whether the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains could match the ridges thirty miles north. The whole vineyard went in at a density the producer had until then used only on its best experimental blocks.

History

Harvey planted his first vines behind his Woodside house in 1995, and Jeff Brinkman joined as winemaker in 2006. The first five Santa Cruz Mountains estates cluster at the northern end of the appellation, while Mt. Pajaro, the sixth, lies roughly thirty miles south of Alpine and takes its name from nearby Pajaro Ridge. Rhys gives 2013 as the planting year, though its own account of the work describes clearing the old apple trees and planting across 2014 and 2015. Early fruit went into the Alesia Santa Cruz Mountains blend, and the first bottling under the vineyard's name was the 2016 Chenin Blanc, three barrels of it. Vineyard-designated Pinot Noir and Chardonnay followed from the 2017 vintage, released in spring 2020.

The Site

The vineyard lies east of Corralitos in Santa Cruz County, seven to eight miles from Monterey Bay and inside the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, on northwest and southeast facing slopes. Rhys puts the elevation at 750 to 980 feet, while trade sheets circulate 717 as the low mark. Harvey's reasoning was ratio rather than absolute height: at that elevation and that distance from cold water, the season runs long and cool. The San Andreas splinters into a web of smaller faults here, leaving a patchwork of soils unlike the strata at Alpine or Horseshoe. Well-drained clay topsoil a foot to a foot and a half deep sits over rocky brown and black marine shale and sandstone, which Rhys identifies as the Miocene and Oligocene shale of the Mount Pajaro area. Of roughly fifty acres, 18.81 are planted, and the farming is organic in practice and dry.

Vines and Blocks

Pinot Noir takes 11.13 acres and Chardonnay 5.81. The remainder is divided between 0.94 acres of Chenin Blanc, 0.93 of Riesling and 0.86 planted to clones designated for sparkling wine. Blocks run from 0.2 to 2 acres, and vine spacing ranges from 3.5 feet by 2 up to 3.5 by 3.5, trained to vertical shoot positioning and pruned single Guyot. Rows that tight admit no tractor, so the blocks are worked by hand, and before Mt. Pajaro only Skyline and the Porcupine Hill section of Bearwallow had been planted so densely. The Pinot Noir is a Rhys massale selection drawn from experimental blocks at Alpine and the Chardonnay a set of Rhys field selections, while the Riesling is German material in 49AS, 1089, 1090 and 1091 and the Chenin clone 982, set in a cooler, lower part of the vineyard. The parcel given to sparkling wine is a cold northwest-facing block planted to Chardonnay selections widely used in Champagne.

The Wines

Rhys bottles Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and a Blanc de Blancs under the vineyard name, and the site also feeds the multi-vintage Perpetual Reserve sparkling alongside Bearwallow as well as the Alesia Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot Noir. The house reads a dusting of cocoa or mocha on the Pinot finish as a signature of the site, while the Chardonnay tends lean and stony, lemon oil over saline acidity. Ceritas began buying Chardonnay and Pinot Noir here with the 2023 vintage, the first fruit Rhys has sold from its Santa Cruz Mountains holdings by Ceritas's account.

This comprehensive guide is part of the WineSaint Wine Region Guide collection. Last updated: September 2026.