Behind the Bottle

Tasting Terroir In Wines | A Look at Lester Family Vineyard Wines

By Mary Orlin | February 08, 2021

Photo Courtesy of Lester Estate Wines

The sound of a wine bottle being uncorked, and the glug, glug, glug of liquid flowing into a wine glass is inviting. You swirl and lift the glass to your nose. You might smell lemons or cherries, an herbal bouquet, a distinct earthiness or sweet vanilla. Sip and all those sensations flood your mouth. You taste fermented grape juice, be it white, pink, red or bubbly. And you taste the wine’s terroir, the expression of the place where the grapes were grown.

Terroir, pronounced ter-WAHR, is one of those geeky wine terms that gets thrown around in tasting rooms and woven into tasting notes. Just about every winemaker out there says his or her wine starts in the vineyard and tastes of that vineyard. (Eyeballs rolling now?)

Indeed, terroir is a nebulous term, the French word for earth, soil. Yet there’s no denying that wines grown in certain places are distinctive. A Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains just tastes different than a Pinot from the Sonoma Coast.

Think of terroir as the story of the vineyard. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Lester Family Vineyards in Aptos is on the southern end of the appellation in the Pleasant Valley subregion of the Corralitos district. Dan and Pat Lester purchased the 210-acre Deer Park Ranch in 1995. While much of the ranch consists of rolling hills, pastures and majestic redwood groves, 15 acres are dedicated to Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines.

Lester is the perfect place to explore terroir since nearly a dozen winemakers tell the vineyard’s tale through their own wines. Each interpretation is unique, yet there is a unifying core. “For me, the commonality is texture, the wines have depth,” says Lester’s viticulturist Prudy Foxx. She planted the vineyard beginning in 1998 and has farmed it ever since.

The Lester family sells grapes to Santa Cruz Mountains and Santa Clara Valley wineries including Alfaro, Big Basin Vineyards, Martin Ranch Winery, Sante Arcangeli Family Wines, Soquel Vineyards and Waxwing Wines, among others. And the family just released wines under their own label, Lester Estate Wines, with three different winemakers crafting these wines.

“This vineyard is a palette of colors to a winemaker,” says Steve Johnson, Lester Family’s brand ambassador (he is married to Pat and Dan’s daughter Lori), referring to the selection of clones for each variety and where they are planted, be it in the upper or lower vineyard.

“This vineyard is a palette of colors to a winemaker”

- Steve Johnson, Lester Family’s brand ambassador

Steve and his team work with the winemakers, adding, for example, the Pinot Noir clone Swan to the palette when vintners requested it. The Swan clone variation—propagated by notable Sonoma County winemaker Joseph Swan—is coveted for bringing pretty aromatics, elegance and earthiness to the final wine blend. But providing winemakers with choice clones is just one part of the story.

Photo Courtesy of Lester Estate Wines

Essential Elements

Soil and its health is a crucial part of the terroir. For example, being herbicide-free, the sandy soils at Lester have a notable bacteria population, which is beneficial to vine health. “When you look at vines, everything you see above ground is only half of the vineyard,” Prudy says. “The other half of the vineyard is below in the soil, the same height or at least size of the vine you see on top. The soil microbiology here is key.”

When people talk about terroir, it is soil, but it also encompasses climate—hot or cool temperatures, wind, fog and rain. Then there’s the amount of sunlight per day, the difference in day and night temperatures, what direction the vines face and being on a flat or sloped plot. The Lester vineyard is east-facing, planted at roughly 500 feet in elevation, about three miles inland from Monterey Bay. That proximity to the large, cold body of water means Lester is a cool-climate site, which results in fresh wines with crisp acidity.

"The fog comes in and gently bathes the fruit,” says Prudy. “I call it a facial. This gives the skins incredibly complex phenolics [flavor compounds, color and tannins] because the skins get this daily facial.”

Add to that how vine growth is managed, how much—or, in Lester’s case, how little—irrigation is used, and you begin to understand terroir’s complexity.

Photo by Mary Orlin

Tasting Notes

When you taste any of the wines from Lester Family Vineyards, a common core runs through them: cherry fruit, white pepper spice, aromatic intensity, vibrant acid, rose and violet floral notes, lush mouthfeel and long finish. That complexity and texture are Lester terroir hallmarks.

Given that common terroir, you might expect all the wines made with Lester fruit to taste the same. But they don’t. Each bears the individual winemaker’s fingerprints, transforming a single grape in his or her own way. Think of the wines as siblings, a single grape to many wines.

No two winemakers work with the same clonal mix, or follow the same winemaking practices. That explains variations in aromas and flavors, even in the same varietal from the same vintage.

Factors include when grapes are harvested—some clones ripen earlier than others. Some winemakers prefer higher acid levels in the grapes. When it comes to crushing grapes, some put whole clusters into the press, upping the wine’s texture and earthiness; others opt for a mix of whole clusters and de-stemmed berries. Then there’s the yeast that ferments the grape juice into wine. Most winemakers use native yeasts—ones occurring naturally in their wineries—and those yeasts add their own unique spice.

Add to that how the winemaker assembles the final blend and how the wine is barrel aged. Aging programs run the gamut of some new French oak barrels mixed with neutral one- and two-year barrels; others use more new French oak. The result is each winemaker’s interpretation of the core Lester terroir.

Photo Courtesy of Lester Estate Wines

It Takes a Village

People—landowners and growers—are also part of the terroir, and that concept holds true at Lester. “Prudy totally understands every aspect of what it takes to grow grapes and how the terroir reflects the grapes,” says Thérèse Martin of Martin Ranch Winery. She makes wines under her label Thérèse Vineyards and Soulmate, a collaboration with winemaker husband Dan Martin. “The cool-weather Syrah from Lester brings out the white pepper expression of that vineyard. You can smell it when the fruit comes on property.” Thérèse gets some of that white pepper in her Pinots too.

Martin Ranch Winery’s wines tell one story; Bradley Brown’s Big Basin Pinot tells another. Bradley is the first winemaker to pick grapes in Lester’s vineyard each year, after those picked for sparkling wines. Bradley judges ripeness on what he calls a Burgundian ethos. “The ideal we look for in a Pinot is that finesse, that aromatic complexity and beauty that jumps out of the glass, that intensity of fruit on the palate, especially in its youth,” he says. “Lester produces these really small clusters and berries year in and year out. There is always a lot of power and intensity.”

The common thread of texture and aromatic complexity is also what you’ll find in Sante Arcangeli winemaker John Benedetti’s wines. “I really like the earthiness of the Lester fruit, and also that fact that it tends towards a lusher mouthfeel,” John says.

Lester Estate Wines debuted this year with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and a rosé of Pinot Noir, all made by Sante Arcangeli’s John Benedetti, and another Pinot Noir crafted by August West and Sandler Wine Co. winemaker Ed Kurtzman. The Pinots are noticeably different, yet share the Lester terroir complexity and texture DNA.

Having multiple winemakers under one label is unconventional, Steve admits, but he sees it as a way to express the many aspects of the vineyard’s terroir story. “Each winemaker brings a different lens,” says Steve.

Prudy calls it a symphony. “Steve is the maestro, the symphony conductor in all this,” she says, “and the winemakers are the musicians in this.”

Mary Orlin is a James Beard Award– and Emmy Award–winning wine writer and TV producer. She is a certified sommelier and WSET Advanced certified. Most recently she was the Mercury News wine writer and was executive producer of NBC’s national wine show “In Wine Country.”