2023 — A Cool Year, A New Start, and a Vineyard Still Figuring Me Out

Montebello Road Vineyard, Cupertino, California

2023 was a cool year. Not the romantic kind — the kind that keeps you waiting. NOAA graphs showed it, growers muttered about it, and up on the mountain you could feel it in your bones. Spring apparently stalled, summer never really arrived, and the whole season felt like someone had pressed a slow-motion button on the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I landed at Vidovich Vineyards that July with almost no context — straight off a stint at Failla in Oregon, where winter rain and Willamette mud had been the daily soundtrack. I stepped into the Santa Cruz Mountains with basically a blank notebook and a lot of assumptions that would turn out not to apply here.

I didn’t know the vineyards yet. Didn’t know the wind patterns, the temperature swings. I didn’t know which sites run hot, which ones sulk in the shade, or how far you could push Cabernet before it pushed back.

Lake Vineyard — the familiar one

The Lake Vineyard was the first place in 2023 that made sense to me.

Neary Quarry - Lake Vineyard, Los Altos Hills

Even without knowing the Santa Cruz Mountains yet, the site itself gave clues. You can see it in the shape of the land — the old Neary Quarry, now transformed into a small lake reservoir — a carved-out basin where heat pools, lingers, and reflects off the surrounding slopes. It’s not one of those icy, wind-gnarled mountain sites fighting the Pacific every afternoon. It’s the opposite:
a warm pocket tucked inside a famously cool region.

From a geological standpoint, it’s an anomaly.
From a farming standpoint, a blessing.
From a winemaking standpoint, a place where Cabernet actually feels comfortable.

In 2023 — a year where cool weather stretched everything thin — the Lake Vineyard behaved almost as if the season didn’t apply to it. While the rest of the mountains were stuck in a long, slow rhythm, Lake had momentum. Phenology moved along without anxiety. The fruit looked confident. Even in July, arriving with basically no institutional memory, I could tell the site had its own internal clock.

When I walked the rows for the first time, the berries tasted like Cabernet is “supposed” to taste:
• dark fruit already forming
• skins with early structure
• seeds tracking toward maturity
• acidity still lively but not screaming

It was a contrast to Monte Bello Road, where everything felt a step behind and a little bit stubborn.

At Lake, the canopy was healthy, the fruit exposure clean, and the tannin potential obvious. Even in a cool vintage, the basin effect buffers the vines — heat pooling in that carved-out amphitheater, radiating back long after the sun dips behind the ridge. The site warms in a way that doesn’t match the rest of the region, and you taste that difference every year.

This is why the Lake Vineyard can give you deep, dark mountain fruit without tipping into overripeness… why it holds structure even in softer years… and why the wine always carries that unmistakable balance between warmth and restraint.

In 2023, that balance showed immediately.
The fruit came in ripe, clean, and without any of the question marks that hung over Monte Bello Road. The Cabernet felt settled from the fermenter onward — relaxed even — as if the season’s drama happened somewhere else entirely.

It was the wine that required the least negotiation. A straightforward relationship: vineyard → fruit → ferment → wine. No power struggle.

If Monte Bello Road was a conversation, Lake was a nod.

It also reinforced something I hadn’t yet learned about this region:
Los Altos Hills is its own kind of terroir.
It’s mountain fruit, yes — but shaped by a warm basin, sun reflection, moderated wind exposure, and the lingering thermal mass of what used to be a quarry. That old industrial scar turned into a microclimate that Cabernet thrives in.

In 2023, the Lake Vineyard Cabernet became the anchor — the familiar footing in a vintage that refused to behave. It showed depth without force, shape without hardness, fruit without excess. It felt grounded. Stable. A wine that carried the warmth of its site through a year that was anything but warm.

Montebello Road — the curveball

Montebello Road, Cupertino, California

Then there was the Monte Bello Road Vineyard.

If the Lake Vineyard was a familiar handshake, Monte Bello Road was a raised eyebrow. A larger site, steeper, more exposed, higher up where the vintage really showed its teeth in 2023. Ridge Vineyards called the year “unusually cool and exceptionally late.” They weren’t wrong.

Budbreak lagged. Veraison dragged out. Sugars crawled.
And the pH? It just wouldn’t move.
We were sitting sub-3.2 deep into fall — something I’d never experienced before.

By the time leaf fall started knocking on the door, phenolic ripeness still hadn’t landed. Seeds weren’t there. Skins wanted more time than the canopy had left to give.

That was the moment the vineyard taught me lesson number one:
This place does not care about what you think Cabernet should be.
It will be what the year lets it be.

The call

I picked it when nature made the decision for me. Cool year. Barely-ripe tannin. Numbers still stubborn. A vintage defined by everything the textbooks warn you about and the kind of tension sommeliers quietly love.

I let it go wild — native fermentation, with a small portion inoculated just to keep the train on the tracks. No chest-thumping extraction, no heroics. Just listening.

The aromatics were the first surprise: lifted, herbal at the edges, mountain-pure.
The palate: austere, linear, the opposite of the broad-shouldered vintages that came before.
The frame wasn’t the usual Monte Bello Road frame — but that is the beauty of a real vintage. You can experience the year we lived through.

The philosophy — or the moral compass

100% Cabernet Sauvignon.
100% single vineyard.
No safety nets, no blending partners, no trying to make it look like something it wasn’t.

Just a true reflection of a site in a cold, stubborn, strangely beautiful year.

A moral compass vintage — the kind that reminds you why we bottle vineyards independently in the first place. Not to chase consistency, but to show the terrain honestly, even when the terrain hands you something lean, wiry, and whispering instead of shouting.

The part I didn’t expect

2023 Vidovich Vineyards - Monte Bello Road Cabernet Sauvignon

For all its edges, the wine has nuance. A kind of quiet intricacy. It doesn’t have the size of previous years, but it has intention. An invitation rather than a statement.

And maybe that’s what 2023 was for me:
Arriving somewhere new with no inherited wisdom, learning a vineyard the hard way — by letting it teach me through a difficult season.

Time will tell what Monte Bello Road really wants to be. Sites like this take years to understand, decades to master. But 2023 was the first chapter — a cool, slow, unforgiving initiation I’m strangely grateful for.

Vintage variation isn’t a nuisance. It’s the whole point.
When the glass smells like the year that was — cool mornings, slow ripening, low pHs, leaves dropping before sugars said yes — that’s when you know you’re on the right path.