Adelaida Vineyards & Winery: Profile plus 10 wines to try

Overheard in a restaurant almost never: ‘I’ll have the Pinot Noir from Paso Robles.’ This California Central Coast region is just too warm to grow Burgundy’s great grapes, they say. West Sonoma, West Santa Barbara… sure. Those are the pockets that nurture the thin-skinned, cool-climate variety.

Paso is the domain of Cabernet Sauvignon and its Bordeaux cohorts which thrive in Paso’s warm, dry climate. And increasingly Syrah and its Rhône cousins, which produce an exciting range of characters across this large region. But Pinot? Yes! Don’t be so quick to deny its polish here.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores of 10 wines from Adelaida Vineyard & Winery

To paint Paso Robles in broad strokes as a hot region is to do it a reputation-mangling disservice. In fact, the large appellation – whose impressive wine quality is generally ascribed to warm days and dramatically cooler nights during the growing season – contains varying microclimates shaped by soils and proximity to the cooling wind and fog off the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Almost a decade ago, vintners here succeeded in acknowledging the differences by subdividing Paso Robles into 11 smaller sub AVAs.

And as it happens, California’s oldest Pinot Noir plantings south of Sonoma County are in what is now the Adelaida District, in the hills on Paso’s west side: the 59-year-old HMR Vineyard, owned by the Van Steenwyk family’s Adelaida Vineyards & Winery.

Accident or destiny?

Dr Stanley Hoffman, a cardiologist from Southern California, planted the first 4ha of Pinot Noir on his family’s large Hoffman Mountain Ranch (HMR) in 1964. The vines are on their own roots, at 520m altitude and just over 22km as the crow flies from the Pacific.

A wine lover himself, Hoffman had grown a taste for fine red Burgundy, in part through a visit to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. On the advice of San Luis Obispo County’s agricultural advisor Jack Foott, he also planted some Cabernet Sauvignon and Franken Riesling (both of which met an early demise on that particular site), among other varieties.

But it is the Pinot Noir – and in the long run, Chardonnay – that prevailed in the old vineyard and. Instigated by their son David, the Hoffmans were inspired in the early 1970s to make Pinot under their own HMR label in the early 1970s.

They also brought on André Tchelistcheff – widely considered California’s post-Prohibition’s dean of winemaking – to consult in the vineyard and winery, which they proceeded to build and equip with the day’s newest tools, including then-innovative stainless steel fermenters. (By way of context for Hoffman’s 1964 experiment with Pinot Noir, Sonoma’s Joe Rochioli didn’t plant his first Pinot until 1968. Joseph Swan’s first vintage was 1973 – incidentally, also with Tchelistcheff consulting.)

This was new territory in every way possible. Adelaida’s ranch manager emeritus and resident historian Mike Whitener was 13 when the Hoffmans hired his father John, a prominent local farmer, to plant the first vines and manage the ranch.

This underscores just how uncharted the labour was in an agricultural scene rife with almonds, not grapevines. ‘It was pretty new to us,’ says Whitener. ‘There were vineyards around, plenty of Zinfandel, courtesy of the old Italian immigrants, but nothing like we were trying to do. I guess my dad did a lot of reading and research.’

Pioneering in Paso with Pinot Noir

Current ranch manager, Chad Taber, points to the original Pinot Noir rows, stretching all the way over the hill, from east to west. ‘The orientation was likely picked because it was the longest row you could get over the hill,’ he says. Whitener comments: ‘I think my dad came up with that on his own, just because it was the best way to do it. He had no idea about the sun having some effect on the grapes.’

Taber confirms the point. ‘Yeah, it was more practical than for sun exposure, but it turned out to be perfect – we have less exposure in the afternoon. If it had been planted in another orientation, it might not still be here today.’

As it turns out, these old vines narrowly escaped another potential demise. In 2012, Jeremy Weintraub, a veteran of high-scoring Cabernet Sauvignons, joined the Adelaida team as winemaker. As he describes it: ‘When I was first driven through the HMR Ranch and the Pinot Noir vines were pointed out to me, my first thought was, If I take this job, those vines are coming out tomorrow.’

His doubts about them hinged on the conventional wisdom surrounding the variety in general. ‘At the time,’ he says, ‘I presumed that great Pinot Noir could come only from cool climates, and that only from a cool growing season could you make a Pinot that was light in colour and body but wildly complex in the nose’ – his preferred style.

He was proven wrong before midnight. He took some older bottles from HMR home and, after tasting them, began questioning his own assumptions.

‘While it’s true that great Pinot Noir does come from cool climates,’ he explains, ‘it’s not the cool climate that makes the Pinot great. Temperature is only one component. If a cold growing season were the main thing, Icelandic wines would be held in higher regard.’

Creating believers

Weintraub has had more than a decade now to study and shape the wines from HMR, and he attributes the high quality of its Pinot to three main factors: ‘The high-pH limestone soil, the average vine age, and some divine combination of orientation, slope and aspect.’

The first of those elements, he argues, is pivotal. It’s hard to imagine now, but more than a few million years ago, this whole region was under water, the floor of a prehistoric sea.

Marine fossils and impressions can still be widely found embedded in the rocks. But more to the (scientific) point, he says, the old muddy sediment on the bottom of the ocean back in the day was rich in calcium carbonate, leading to the high pH soils today. He puts it in simple terms: ‘That calcium concentration inhibits the ability of vines to pull in potassium, and wines low in potassium are high in acid.’

Case in point, the 2020 HMR Vineyard Pinot Noir is lively and fresh. It’s engagingly aromatic with a panoply of forest botanicals, earthy florals, black and red fruits, and exotic spices. Plush-fruited Russian River Valley Pinot, it’s not. ‘Even if I wanted to make a colour-saturated, high-alcohol Pinot Noir as you’d find in the Russian River, I couldn’t do that with HMR,’ Weintraub laughs.

For the record, Adelaida’s Chardonnay will also make an impression. The 2021 HMR Vineyard Chardonnay is juicy, fresh and delicately aromatic, with a limestone-driven minerality that renders it distinctly savoury.

Preservation and the future

These are qualities Adelaida means to conserve. As in any vineyard about to turn 60, individual vines fail and microplots must be replaced. As blocks are pulled out, Taber and team take the trouble to propagate cuttings – in essence, to replant the vineyard with itself. But it wasn’t always thus with HMR.

Between the Hoffman’s ownership (which they were forced by unfortunate circumstances to give up in the early 1980s) and its purchase in the mid-90s by Don and Elizabeth Van Steenwyk, what had grown to be about 16ha under vine at HMR suffered from the benign neglect of less-than-involved owners.

Under Adelaida Vineyards & Winery, HMR became part of a growing estate vineyard portfolio which the Van Steenwyks had already begun assembling over a massive patchwork of 728ha. This includes Viking Vineyard, planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Syrah. Then there’s Anna’s Vineyard, with varieties as diverse as Picpoul Blanc to Grenache Blanc, and Cinsault, Grenache, Mourvèdre and Petite Sirah.

Not to mention Michael’s Vineyard, namesake of Mike Whitener, who still lives between the head-trained Zinfandel and those first HMR Pinot Noir vines he helped his father plant in 1964.

‘It must have been a wet spring,’ he says, ‘because the mustard and weeds in there were two to three metres high. My dad was trying to cultivate it, and I’d run ahead down the rows and find the little plants — try to find him a straight line. I was running back and forth like a chicken out there.’

The Adelaida team are the third guardians of HMR now, but its Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are part of California’s vinous heritage still flying under the radar. Yes, Paso Robles is a warm region, but its pioneers proved that more than Zinfandel grows in these hills.

Adelaida Vineyards & Winery: 10 to try from this Paso pioneer

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