Daily Archives: August 31, 2008

It was a beautiful Sunday morning that had us driving up to the Four Gates Winery which is on top of a hill in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  The drive up the hill to the winery used to be a dirt road long ago, and with all the switch backs and the almost vertical climbs, it dumbfounds me how Binyamin (and many others who lived on the hilltop) ever drove up and down that mountain side many times a day.  Since then, the road has been paved and now by comparison, it feels like a highway.

As we drove to Santa Cruz we were greeted with the usual California traffic on a holiday weekend.  However, as we got further into and by Los Gatos, the road cleared up.  The drive in was truly beautiful for a couple of reasons.  First, I was not driving, a buddy of mine kindly agreed to drive us there.  Secondly, the day was just beautiful, and finally, as a passenger, it gave me a chance to look at the Santa Cruz Mountains long and hard with all the traffic!  Once we got the winery road, we drove up the hill and past the vineyard and to the winery itself.

The Four Gates Winery is owned, operated, run, and managed by a single man – Binyamin Cantz.  He is the chief and only winemaker, along with being the CEO, and sole vineyard manager.  Parenthetically, he is a man I am proud to call a friend and I state it here for full disclosure.  He has people help him every so often, which is great, but he is really the sole proprietor of Four Gates Winery.  Binyamin has been making wine for some 25 years now, more as a home winemaker to start, but that turned into a real passion for wine some 17 years ago, when he planted the vineyard.  The vineyard is planted on a lovely hillside with views (far away views) of the Pacific Ocean and parts of Santa Cruz.  In 1997 he released his inaugural vintage, which was a success, and to this day, some 11 years later, his 1997 Merlot is still quite lovely.

We met Binyamin in his house where he was cleaning out glasses for the wine tasting.  The house is a rustic home rebuilt recently with exposed roof beams and original wood floors.  Binyamin built his winery with his own hands and it is quite an ingenious layout.  The winery is built on a hillside with no sun direct exposure, as it is surrounded by large mature trees.  The winery building has two floors.  The top floor is where the crush and press occur for the wines and where the fermentation occurs for the red wines, the Chardonnay is fermented in barrels below (sur lie).  It is also used for bottle labeling after they are filled downstairs, and is a general storage for previous year vintages.  The ground floor is dug into the hillside and is cool in the hot summer days.  This is the perfect place to let sleeping wine lie, and as such, it is the winery’s barrel room.  After crush or press, Binyamin funnels the wine to the barrel room via gravity into the stainless steel settling tank.  From there it can be pumped into any of the barrels or smaller tanks, for whatever the situation calls for.  Once the particular varietal is finished living in its woodsy confines, the wine is blended in the tank before bottling. Read the rest of this entry →