Explore Silicon Valley's Wine Tasting Underground
Explore Silicon Valley's Coolest Wine Caves and Cellars
Big, heavy wooden doors take effort to pull towards you. Slowly they creak open, revealing hidden underground tunnels filled with oak barrels. The heady aromas of toasted oak, vanilla and fruity wine envelop you from depths of the cellar, the unmistakable, intoxicating scent of a winery. Here, inside Byington Vineyard & Winery, wines age for up to two years, ensconced away in a dark, cool and mysterious environment.
Underground cellars have been used to store food and drink for eons. Caves are ideal for aging wine, providing constant cool temperatures and high humidity so wines can mature undisturbed, without exposure to light or movement. Caves are energy efficient, since they don’t require air conditioning.
California’s first wine caves date from the late 1860s in Sonoma and Napa Valley. Now, caves are commonplace there. However, within the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Santa Clara Valley, a mere handful of wineries boast caves or underground cellars. Many of these cool spots are open to the public and worth exploring–some architectural wonders and others complemented by winemaker lore and tales to tell. Here’s where you can chill out with the wine during Silicon Valley’s hot summer months.
Caves with Character
Byington Vineyard & Winery, Los Gatos
When you imagine what a wine cave looks like, Byington’s fits the bill. Built 40 feet below Wedding Hill, behind the mountaintop winery, this 360-foot-long cave is a perfect aging environment at 68º year round. Beautiful heavy wooden doors lead into the caves, built in the early 2000s. About 45 to 50 barrels of aging wine fill the caves, with a capacity of up to 14,000 cases of wine.
As the wines age, winemaker Andrew Brenkwitz checks on them as they evaporate water and become a more concentrated liquid. After one to two years, depending on the varietal and wine style, the wines are ready for bottling.
On weekends you can explore the caves on one of three daily tours. Two tours take guests into the vineyards, winery and cave, while the Barrel Tasting tour takes place in the cave, where five wines are sampled directly from barrel.
During a wine club holiday party in the cave they discovered that the acoustics are excellent for caroling, leading to some very festive parties. And that’s not the only time a special ambience has been noticed in the cave. Once, certified sommelier Vince Robledo recalls, there was a power outage as a cave tour was underway. “We did the tour by candlelight,” he says. “It was kind of spooky, but it ended up being a fun experience.”
Silver Mountain Vineyards, Los Gatos
“A dug-out cave is a tunnel, if you will,” O’Brien says. “A true cave only occurs naturally.”
The 60- by 40-foot box with 12-foot ceilings was built after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the original Silver Mountain winery, and is enveloped by earth on three sides. The winery equipment is on the second level, shaded by O’Brien’s “triple green canopy” roof. Triple green canopy refers to the sustainable aspect of not only the artificial cave, but the entire winery.
The wine bunker is temperature and humidity stable—55° on average and 75% humidity. The green canopy shades the cellar from heat and sunlight, while reducing energy use throughout the winery. The canopy also supports a photovoltaic solar system.
Winery visitors see the artificial cave on Silver Mountain’s tours. O’Brien wants people to learn about his certified organic vineyards—the first in the Santa Cruz Mountains—gravity flow and sustainable winemaking practices.
Silver-Mountain.squarespace.com
Historic Caves
Testarossa Winery, Los Gatos
To enter the tasting room, you walk through a former wine cellar. The Cave, a barrel-vaulted, 50-foot-long, hand-chiseled sandstone tunnel, was built in 1938 for the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. This addition to the historic 1888 Novitiate Winery was used for storing wine aged in large wooden casks. It became what is now Testarossa’s tasting room entry in the 1980s.
Yet the Cave is not the winery’s oldest cellar. That distinction goes to Cellar 1, another barrel-vaulted sandstone tunnel, built in 1892, the Santa Cruz Mountains’ oldest wine cellar. There is a natural spring behind the rock back wall of this underground cave, and sometimes you can see water drops on the sandstone.
There are almost 30 working cellars in the gravity-flow winery, which means wine flows from the top down during different winemaking stages, a gentler process than pumping it, to where wine is fermented then aged. Part of Cellar 5 belongs to Cellar R, where co-owner Rob Jensen stocks his personal wine collection.
The magic of Testarossa’s cellars, winemaker Bill Brosseau points out, is the authentic character, or Testarossa terroir. “In some of our older caves, there is a deep sense of history and of those who crafted wine before us,” he says. “The diversity of natural wine yeasts that have held on all these years create a wonderful equilibrium in our wines, lending to a wine experience that you do not experience in newer wineries.”
A nighttime view of Testarossa's entry cave. Photo courtesy of Testarossa Winery
Guglielmo Winery, Morgan Hill
You won’t find wine caves in Santa Clara Valley, but there is one infamous underground cellar. Third-generation winemaker George Guglielmo and brothers Gene and Gary grew up in the family house over a wine cellar. Guglielmo say his grandfather Emilio bought the property in 1925, along with the house and a partial dug-out basement.
The front bedroom trap door led down to the cellar, where his grandfather made a couple hundred gallons of wine during Prohibition. Emilio’s wine was transported to and sold in San Francisco. Fortunately for them they were never raided by federal agents. Once Prohibition ended in 1933, Emilio dug out the rest of the cellar and filled it with oak and redwood tanks, ranging in size from 500 to 2,000 gallons, for a capacity of about 20,000 gallons. About half of the tanks and that cellar are still in use today, though it is not open for public viewing.
Guglielmo recalls storing cheese, apples and salumi on top of the tanks to let them ripen and age.
“I was always dragging hoses and helping,” he says. “I can remember my dad filtering wine; he’d start filtering in the morning, we’d filter wine in the daytime, then he’d come and eat dinner and after dinner go out and clean everything up.”
Visit Guglielmo and you’ll see the entrance to the cellar under the house, where winery offices are now located.
Mount Eden Vineyards and Domaine Eden, Saratoga
By 1991 they outgrew the cellar and blasted out a cave with explosives. The cave’s tunnels comprise 4,300 square feet, full of Chardonnay barrels for fermenting and aging the wine, and the winery’s bottling line.
When the Pattersons bought the former Cinnabar Winery in 2007, they gained another cellar at what is now Domaine Eden. The subterranean structure is a cut-and-cover construction, where the ground is excavated, almost like an inverted swimming pool, then covered with a metal cage and shotcrete (concrete sprayed on at high pressure) to look like a cave. All the Pinot Noirs and Cabernets are fermented here.
Ellie offers an explanation as to why wine caves are rare in the Santa Cruz Mountains. “If you go north [of Saratoga] there is a lot of solid rock so they can just drill in with a rotary,” she says. “Here the ground is more unstable. We had to put in six-foot rebar all over because we do not want the caves to fall in.”
The by-appointment tasting experiences at Mount Eden include a visit to the Upper Cellar.
Two of Silicon Valley’s newest and of course most high tech wine caves are not open to the public, but the benefits of their cave winemaking can be tasted at local tables and tasting rooms nonetheless. For Ryhs Vineyards in Los Gatos and Clos de La Tech in La Honda, the investment to construct expansive hillside wine caves (one of which is 30,000 square feet!) offers the best of the old world and new world of winemaking processes. Modern tech barrel monitoring meets old school processes like gravity flow and cave-cooled temperatures for fermentation, barreling and bottling.
For all the practical and environmentally friendly aspects of wine caves and underground cellars, there’s no denying a certain mystique and romanticism in fine wine tucked away into the earth, undergoing a slow, gentle transformation. Whether in an old-school cave full of character or amid modern tech splendor, through the alchemy of oak, peace, solitude and time fermented grape juice emerges as a harmonious beverage that brings people together.
Getting the Most Out of Your Wine Cave Visit
When temperatures soar, head to one of the cool wine caves and local cellars open to the public. The chilled, humid, dark and mysterious environment averages 53°–58°. Here’s how to navigate your wine tasting adventure:
• Bring a jacket, sweater or wrap, especially if you are in the cave for a dinner or seated tasting.
• Wear closed-toe shoes, preferably flats (no stilettos) with rubber soles. Working caves may have wet floors.
• For optimal social media photos, ask fellow cavers to light the scene with their camera’s flashlight.
• When barrel tasting, resist the urge to swallow. The developing wine is not as pleasant as finished wine in the bottle. Instead, sip and then dump the rest.
• Cave lore is fun. At Byington, the story goes that the cave excavating machine was put up for sale on eBay. At Testarossa, the lore goes that in case of a nuclear attack, you’d be safest in Cellar 5. There’s plenty of wine, and the winery’s cheese closet is nearby, providing nourishment for weeks.
