Full Belly Files | The Backroads of San Benito

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on June 1, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Far more than enjoying a glass of something especially unique or delicious, my favorite part of writing about the wine industry is driving down empty roads in the middle of nowhere through landscapes that — aside from perhaps more recently planted grapevines — remain almost exactly as they were centuries ago. In fact, when I was asked out of the blue a decade ago to become Wine Enthusiast’s critic for the Central Coast and Southern California, the primary reason I agreed was because it gave me so many more roads to explore beyond my backyard of Santa Barbara County.

Since then, I’ve traveled deeply from the redwood mountaintops of Bonny Doon, fire-scarred canyons of Cachagua, and fog-drenched mosslands of San Simeon to the savannahs southeast of Paso Robles and dusty hills surrounding Temecula. But there’s still so much more to explore, and that’s what keeps me wading through the more mundane parts of the job, like tasting two dozen wines before lunchtime almost every morning that I’m home. (Sounds dreamy, perhaps, but it’s pretty rote.)

The most effective quench for my empty-road thirst might be San Benito County, which, aside from the suburbs and strip malls of Hollister, remains an extremely rural, often outright desolate collection of ranges and dales lying between the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys. You can drive for miles and miles without seeing so much as a rickety barn and a couple of cows, so much that you may wonder whether you slipped through a time warp or just missed a turn. I got my fix of that last week, when I spent three days up there meeting with winemakers and grape growers while touching vines that, in many cases, date back to the late 19th century.

Having grown up in nearby San Jose — where I imagine my ancestors encountered a similar landscape when they started raising sheep there in the 1850s — I’ve known the region since childhood: golfing with my dad and uncles at Ridgemark and San Juan Oaks, and looking for bats in the caves of the Pinnacles, long before it was a national park. I’ve also visited much more recently as a wine writer as well, once writing this story that included the rebirth tale of Eden Rift.