The Cupertino Courier

Photograph by Robert Scheer

Emilio Estrada of Sunset Winery trims early growth grapes from the vines. These grapes will mature sooner than the majority of the zinfandels in the 100-year-old vineyard.

The Grapevine

Immigrants' roots, new vines bear fruit in Cupertino's wine country

By Pam Marino

They came to California from Europe during the last century, searching not for gold but for the golden sunshine and rich soil they had heard about. They were winemakers who traveled across an ocean with the carefully packed roots of their families' finest vines.

Once in the Golden State, they sought a climate much like the one where their vines had come from, and they found a mountainside near Cupertino with just the right number of cool evenings and warm days to nurture the grapes.

Before Prohibition (1920-1933) eight different vineyards produced wines along Monte Bello Road, off a Stevens Canyon Road near the Stevens Creek Reservoir.

Some of the vines that came from those immigrant roots more than a century ago are still growing and producing grapes, now joined by new vines to make up Cupertino's very own wine country.

There are vineyards up and down today's Monte Bello Road. Some are the mini-vineyards of the homes that dot the mountainside; some are commercial, and three are attached to bonded wineries: Fellom Ranch Vineyards, Ridge Vineyards and Sunrise Winery.

"It's almost the last commercial agriculture left in Cupertino," says winemaker Rolayne Stortz of Sunrise Winery.

The owners and workers who today tend the grapes and produce the wines sing the praises of the mountainside.

"The earth is just excellent," saleswoman Delia Montesinos of Ridge Vineyards says of the well-drained soil with natural springs underneath.

For those who live and work in the vineyards, the climate is like that of, Bordeaux, France, and the wines taste better than any wine produced from grapes grown in a valley. But it is more than that.

"It's a lifestyle rather than just a job for us," Stortz says. She and her husband Ronald, an accountant, live in a house built in 1886 by Vincenzo and Secundo Pichetti, two brothers from Italy who planted vineyards off Monte Bello Road in the 1870s.

"The financial rewards really aren't that great. It's the lifestyle that's the payoff," says Roy Fellom III, a sixth-generation Californian whose grandfather, Roy Fellom, a prominent state senator from San Francisco, bought the family's Cupertino land in 1929.

Fellom says being associated with the land and producing something that makes people happy are part of the lure of this lifestyle.

The views from the vineyards are some of the most breathtaking in the area. All of the Santa Clara Valley and much of the San Francisco Bay stretches out below.

Ridge's winery and its upper vineyard, not open to the public, are at 2,600 feet. The wine-tasting area and lower vineyards are at 2,300 feet. From the spot outdoors where the wine is poured each weekend for grateful tasters, there is a spectacular view.

Ridge Vineyards began in 1885 when an Italian doctor from San Francisco, Oseo Perrone, bought 180 acres to start the Monte Bello Winery. He used native limestone to build a unique winery and cellar into the mountain on three levels. The winery is still in use today.

The land changed hands in 1940, and then again in 1959, when some Stanford Research Institute (SRI) engineers bought it. Finally, in 1986, Akihiko Otsuka bought the land, but the winemaking techniques used by former SRI engineer Dave Bennion and Stanford philosophy graduate Paul Draper are still utilized.

Ridge is most famous for its Monte Bello wine, an estate cabernet produced from the century-old vines first planted by Perrone. Each year the wine goes through 300 blind tastings before it is bottled. "It's our baby," Montesinos says. Monte Bello wines have won numerous awards.

Bottles of Monte Bello, depending on the year they were produced, can sell for as much as $180. The latest vintage--1992--sells for $100 a bottle. A 1989 bottle, produced during California's major drought, goes for $60.

Ridge's other cabernets are priced in the $20 to $30 range. They also sell a chardonnay, a mataro, a merlot, a petite sirah and a zinfandel. Prices range from $16 for a 1995 zinfandel to $40 for a 1994 merlot.

On Monte Bello Ridge, the grapes grown include cabernet, cabernet franc, petit verdot and merlot. Montesinos says the vineyards are too high up to produce chardonnay grapes. The high altitude is better for cabernet because of the longer ripening season. Grapes in Napa or Sonoma are harvested August through September; on the mountain they are harvested in September through the end of October.

Ridge gets the rest of its grapes from other vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Sonoma Valley and Paso Robles. They either buy the grapes from growers they have a longstanding relationship with or harvest from vineyards they own or lease.

No matter where the grapes come from, they are all transported up Monte Bello Road to the winery where they are crushed, fermented and bottled. Ridge produces about 60,000 cases each year.

At 17100 Monte Bello Road, Ridge's wine tasting takes place every weekend from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

"The people who come up here are longtime fans," Montesinos says. Because of the trip up the mountain, it is hard to visit lots of wineries in one day, as so many do in Napa or Sonoma.

The winery sells its wines during tasting hours but ships most of it through orders from customers in the 13 states where its legal to ship wines, and around the world. Montesinos says Ridge's biggest following outside the United States is in England; the wines were recently favorably reviewed in the London Times. Ridge also ships to Asia. In Cupertino, the wine is sold at Bateh Brothers at the corner of Stevens Creek and Foothill boulevards.

Down the road from Ridge, at 17075 Monte Bello Road, is the Fellom Ranch Vineyards. Fellom is more of a family affair than a corporate enterprise. Thelma Fellom, Roy Fellom III's mother, is instrumental in the operation and management of the winery, he says. Fellom, his wife and their three children live on the land. Come harvest time, Fellom's five sisters, their families and friends come out to pick the grapes.

"It's always a big affair with lots of food," Fellom says. All the young Felloms, 16 in all, help harvest. The payoff to volunteers is lots of good food and wine, he says.

Fellom's family grows cabernet sauvignon grapes from vines that were planted by one of the original winemaking families at the turn of the century. He buys zinfandel grapes from a vineyard in Saratoga.

When the first Roy Fellom bought the land in 1929, he allowed a Yugoslavian family on the mountain to care for the vines and harvest the grapes for their own use as payment. The Fellom family always talked about having their own winery, however. Roy Fellom II and his son, the current Fellom patriarch, eventually replanted their 12-acres to add to the original vines, and in 1987 the winery became bonded to sell wines.

Currently the family produces 1,500 cases each year, 500 of the cabernet and 1,000 of the zinfandel.

Fellom says the wines are moderately priced, at $12 to $20 a bottle. He prefers to sell the wine directly to customers on his mailing list, and through appointments at the winery. Locally the wine can be purchased at the Stevens Creek Market on Stevens Canyon Road.

Closer to the base of Monte Bello Road at 13100, is Sunrise Winery, located in the Pichetti Ranch Area of the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve. Rolayne and Ronald Stortz have leased the winery and three acres of zinfandel vines from the open space preserve since 1982. It is perhaps the most historic of the three current wineries.

The Pichetti brothers came to America in the 1870s and first worked in a Jesuit winery with ties to Santa Clara University called Villa Maria, located closer to the Stevens Creek Reservoir. The Jesuit brothers helped Vincenzo and Secundo secure their own land on Monte Bello Road. The pair built their first house in 1876 and sent for their families from Italy.

In 1886 the two brothers built a larger house, which they added onto in 1893. Secundo and his family did not stay on the mountain, however. His wife ran into a grizzly bear one day, and she demanded that the family move into town away from the wild animals.

Stortz says there is a story that the Picchettis were able to survive Prohibition by paying off the local sheriff. Whenever federal investigators told the Sheriff they were coming to town, he would tip off the Picchettis, who would shut everything down until after the investigators left.

Despite this alleged arrangement, the Picchettis wound up tearing out many of their beloved grapevines to replant the land with fruit trees. Prune trees, pear trees and a few apricot trees remain from the Prohibition days, Stortz says.

In 1975 the Picchetti family sold the land to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

Stortz and her husband, who were amateur home winemakers in the '70s, eventually started producing wines professionally at a winery above Boulder Creek. In 1982 they moved their operations to the old Picchetti Winery, which had fallen into disrepair.

The wine-tasting room is a historic barn the Picchettis used. Sunrise is open for tasting 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. There are benches outside for picnics. Exotic birds, such as peacocks, roam freely on the property, just as they did when the Picchetti family lived there.

Stortz produces 2,500 cases of wine each year. She makes a chardonnay, a white riesling, a pinot noir, a cabernet sauvignon, an estate zinfandel from the Picchetti's original vineyard, and a port. The cost runs from $7.50 for the port fo $20 for the 1991 cabernet sauvignon. She sells 95 percent of it directly out of the wine-tasting room, and by mail to fans around the country.

Under the barn is the winery itself, where Stortz crushes and ferments the grapes from the vineyards, along with grapes that are bought from outside vineyards.

Next to the modern equipment Stortz uses, is equipment from a century ago.

A beautiful oak wine barrel used at the 1904 World's Fair, decorated with carvings of grapes and vines, sits in the basement. Crushers and other equipment from the turn of the century sit unused; Stortz says she hopes to get the equipment running again for demonstration purposes.

Looking at the old equipment in the now-silent barn, one can almost imagine the Picchetti family working there, perhaps chiding each other one minute, and laughing heartily with one another the next.

"I sometimes feel as if they're still here," Stortz says.

Although Cupertino's wine country on Monte Bello Road is not as large as Napa's or Sonoma's, Stortz says the plus is that it is not as hectic, either. "It's a nice wine region to visit," she says of the Cupertino area.

And, according to the region's families, its a nice place to live, too.

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