San Benito County contains just two licensed wineries, but both have produced wines that influenced California wine culture far beyond their modest production. The county's Gavilan Mountain terroir — Jurassic limestone on the Mount Harlan AVA, fault-line soils in the Cienega Valley — is as geologically distinctive as any in the state.
Calera Wine Company's Mount Harlan estate is the centerpiece. Josh Jensen spent years searching California for limestone soils before finding this seam at 2,200 feet in the Gavilan Mountains. His reasoning: Burgundy's greatest vineyards grow on limestone, and if California was to produce Pinot Noir of equivalent complexity, it needed equivalent geology. The result, from the 1970s onward, has been wines of extraordinary depth and individuality.
DeRose Winery in the Cienega Valley works on the opposite side of the Gavilan range, farming old vine Zinfandel and heritage varieties in soils directly influenced by the San Andreas Fault. The unique seismic activity that makes this valley geologically unstable also creates the soil disruption that old vine advocates prize for producing wines of concentrated character. Both estates are off the main wine circuit but deeply worth seeking out.
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