The land is mountainous, rugged and can be foggy, the topsoil is thin and poor and yields tend to be low. In the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation, just west of Silicon Valley, producers craft excellent Pinot in spite of serious challenges.
These are not the only Central Coast sources of good Pinot Noir, but they are the major ones. So we’ll break things down a bit with a brief look at each of these: Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey and the Santa Lucia Highlands, Santa Maria Valley and Sta. This of course is because the Central Coast appellation is enormous, and it contains several stellar Pinot Noir regions within it, all of them kept cool by elevation or proximity to the ocean (or both).
Let’s start with the obvious – Central Coast Pinot Noir is an incredibly broad category.
