History
The vines went in on what was then Miller Ranch, on Trout Gulch Road. Turgeon came to wine sideways, a carpenter south of San Francisco who volunteered for harvest and cellar work with Martin Ray and David Bruce in the 1960s, planted 300 acres in Arroyo Seco in 1972, and co-founded Turgeon & Lohr with Jerry Lohr before selling his share to Lohr in 1984. What he bought in 1987 was in disrepair, short of vines and short of drainage, and his son Gerry has described the recovery as a matter of relentless gopher trapping, French drains and irrigation. The family later ran a small label under the vineyard's name in Santa Cruz. Richard Alfaro, whose estate vineyards lie inland at Corralitos, took over the farming under lease and replanted diseased and underperforming vines. Alfaro puts the lease at more than fifteen years before the 2021 purchase, while a 2021 profile dates his arrival to about 2009.
The Site
Published elevations run from 600 feet through 720 and 750 to 800, so the honest figure is somewhere between six and eight hundred, with Alfaro giving 750 to 800 on a gentle slope. The soils are sandy loam of the Elkhorn series over marine-derived subsoils, the uplifted seabed that runs under this end of the range, and Alfaro farms the vineyard dry, without irrigation. Proximity to the bay does the cooling, helped by a forested coastal drainage that Ceritas reports keeps summer highs below roughly 80F, and harvest regularly runs into mid-October.
Vines and Blocks
Alfaro counts twelve acres of Chardonnay and four of Pinot Noir, while the mapped footprint is just under sixteen. Turgeon-era accounts describe a nineteen acre planting with seven acres of Pinot Noir, so the red has shrunk. On the Chardonnay the sources genuinely conflict: Ceritas, Arnot-Roberts, Kutch and Farm Cottage all call it Wente selection, while Alfaro's vineyard page states plainly that the twelve acres are Robert Young. One detailed account of the replanting has the vineyard originally almost entirely Wente, with Turgeon's replacements a Dijon clone on SO4 rootstock that Kutch identifies as clone 17. The Pinot Noir runs Mount Eden, Pommard and Martini. Ceritas bottles a wine labelled TG 36 alongside its standard Chardonnay, and what the 36 denotes is not published anywhere.
The Wines
Ceritas has made Chardonnay here since 2014 and Pinot Noir since 2015. Arnot-Roberts ferments its Chardonnay in stainless steel and ages it in neutral wood, Kutch presses whole clusters and ferments with native yeast, and Ryan Alfaro's Farm Cottage, whose first vintage was 2019, gives the wine ten months in neutral wood. Alfaro Family bottles both varieties as estate wines. That is a dense roster for sixteen acres, and it reflects how few old Chardonnay plantings of this quality sit so close to the coast. The wines are taut and saline, carrying the low alcohol and high acid that the site's cold and its sand encourage.