History
The family that had farmed Bien Nacido since 1973 went looking for a colder site and found one by moving west, toward the mouth of the valley where the marine air comes in. The core Chardonnay and Pinot Noir blocks went in during 1999, and the estate label followed, taking the name Solomon Hills Estate from the 2014 vintage. Nicholas, Stephen and Marshall Miller hold the property, Anthony Avila has made the estate wine since 2013, and the vineyard is farmed under both SIP and California Sustainable Winegrowing certification. The name comes from Salomon Pico, an outlaw who worked the Camino Real through this valley in the 1850s and whose exploits are popularly counted among the sources of the Zorro legend.
The Site
About 190 planted acres lie across parcels split in two by Clark Avenue, roughly ten miles from the ocean by the estate's own reckoning and eleven by everyone else's. The land is not uniform: flat valley floor near the highway, gently rolling hills elsewhere, with sections of genuine slope. The soils are Garey series loamy sand, an old seabed laid down by wind, with Marina sand across the flatter ground. This is close to pure sand with almost no rock in it, and it holds no water at all, which makes irrigation the whole game and keeps yields very low. The estate picked its 2021 Pinot Noir at under a ton and a half to the acre. Published acreage figures for the site vary widely and few of them come from the owners.
Vines and Blocks
Chardonnay and Pinot Noir carry the vineyard, with a half acre of Syrah planted in 2005 on the Marina sand that yields two barrels a year for the Ojai Vineyard. The blocks are numbered rather than named. Block 53 holds the estate Chardonnay in clones 76, 95 and 96; blocks 1, 2, 3 and 50 hold Pinot Noir in Pommard along with 115, 667 and 777. Flying Goat draws a single acre of clone 113 off a southwest-facing slope south of Clark Avenue and a block of clone 23 to the north for sparkling wine.
The Wines
Solomon Hills Estate and the family's optik label speak for the property, alongside the Ojai Vineyard, CRU, Flying Goat and Paul Lato, whose Suerte is his cuvee name for the Pinot Noir here. The site's signature is tension rather than weight: bright, linear, high-acid wines that its own winemaker describes as powerful young and more elegant with age. Against Bien Nacido eight miles inland, the contrast the owners draw is shale and hillside there against sand and valley here.