By Kelly Garrett
This story first appeared in Vine Times magazine.

First of all, Burrell doesn't rhyme with Shirelle. It should sound like Berle, as in Milton. Or burl, as in redwood. Which is how it sounded when the original Burrells carved out their homestead along the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1853.

It was still pronounced that way in the 1870s, when the first Burrell School was built on land donated by pioneer Lyman Burrell. The pronunciation didn't change when the little schoolhouse burned down in 1889, or when it was rebuilt in 1890, or while it sat there abandoned for a good chunk of the 20th century.

However, now that the old school building is home to one of the more intriguing wineries in the suddenly renowned Santa Cruz Mountain Appellation, opportunity for mispronunciation has multiplied as quickly as the vines that Burrell School Vineyards proprietors David and Anne Moulton have planted on their mountaintop acreage. The misplaced accent is so common that even winemaker Dave Moulton will bow now and then to popular practice and let the natural trochee shift to an iamb. When you've got 17 planted acres to look after-not to mention a 122-year-old redwood house to maintain, there are more important battles to fight.

In a sense, the mispronunciation of Burrell by outsiders is a reminder that the Summit is not like the rest of the mountains. Summiterians are a breed apart. They're not completely understood by that percentage of the lower-elevation population that's even aware of their existence.

The thing is, lovers of Santa Cruz Mountain wines tend to bisect the viticultural area into the fog-visited ocean side and the valley-facing slopes above Santa Clara and the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. Burrell School is above such distinctions, plunked down as it is right on the rangetop divide. Just a few miles off Highway 17 on the Loma Prieta side, the hamlet it's part of straddles the line between Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties.

This is rough and remote country and always has been. It's also been (in fits and starts) wine country for 150 years--and never so significantly as today. The future bodes even better, with the Moultons and Burrell School having recently taken some big steps to create even more quality wines from on high.

Many of the Burrell School vines occupy the same land where Lyman Burrell grew premium quality grapes-wine and table-in the 1850s. Other settlers followed suit, and something of a rim-of-the-world wine boomlet ensued. Everything from Riesling and Semillon to Merlot and Cabernet thrived on the ridge tops. Then, as now, the days were sunny, the nights cool, and the growing season long.

As suitable as the geography was for cultivation, growing grapes and making wine at the top of redwood-forested mountains was no walk in the clouds in those days. When they weren't fighting off grizzly bears and mountain lions, the growers were grappling with the nasty effects of overlogging on the topsoil and with runaway brush fires, which they sometimes extinguished with their wine supply (or so the story goes). After the turn of the century, phylloxera dealt the death blow.

The Moultons bought the old schoolhouse and surrounding acreage some 30 years ago with every intention of following in the pioneers' footsteps by growing grapes and making wine on the premises. In fact, the Moultons' motives for settling the Summit weren't all that different from their 19th century predecessors.

"We came to the Summit because we wanted to be self-sufficient," Dave said. "We wanted to raise animals, grow our food, and do the vineyard thing."

They did plant a few vines, with which Dave practiced the home winemaking skills he'd been honing since 1968, helped along by volunteer work at Mirassou.

However, the first order of business was restoring the old schoolhouse. Turning the dilapidated eyesore into their aerie-like home was a major piece of alchemy, as the before-and-after photos in the adjacent tasting room attest. The building's of much historical significance, but Anne and Dave-the latter an electrical engineer and longtime Silicon Valley executive-did it on their own, without grants, public funds, or sponsors.

"Restoring the school was something of a distraction from our vineyard plans," Dave said. "But we fell in love with the building, and we had to make it right. Still, here I was, a winemaker all excited about buying vineyard land, and it was going to be a long time before the winery got rolling."

What got it rolling also got it rocking. The Burrell School is a stone's throw from Loma Prieta, the highest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains and about as close as you can get to the epicenter of the 1989 quake without being on it. The schoolhouse survived, but the damage was enough to move the Moultons first into a friend's RV and then into a new gear.

"We went off to France to recoup and spent time at the vineyards of Bordeaux," Dave said. "When we came back in 1990, we were ready to go. The earthquake had literally shook us back to the mission we'd come to the Summit to carry out."

Chardonnay grapes soon covered the slopes behind the schoolhouse. To this day, they make for a stunning view from the deck outside the tasting room as you look out over the glistening vines across the mountains toward the low sun in the west. The winery was bonded in 1994, the tasting room opened in 1995, and production steadily increased to about 4,000 cases annually, heading for 5,000 by 2004.

"That's as big as I want to get," Moulton says. "I want to be able keep making all the wine myself. I have some help, but I don't delegate the critical stuff."

Moulton subscribes to the auteur approach to wine production. He grows the estate grapes, buys the other grapes, and makes the wine himself in a facility that he built. Until recently, he did most of the selling as well.

His is the highly personal, small-scale style that's been getting the Santa Cruz Mountains so much attention lately. Because of that style, Burrell School wines get the kid-glove treatment.

"I firmly believe in being gentle to the wine all the way through the process, " he said. "I'm making the wine the same way they did 100 or 200 years ago, without bruising it or beating it up."

What that means in practice is moving things around without pumps. If anything has to get from one container to another, gravity will have to get it there. So when the time comes, Dave syphons the wine out of the oak barrels, avoiding the unwanted air that pumping tends to let in.

"I move it slowly," he said. "The big wineries can't take 10 minutes to empty each barrel-they'd never finish. But I've only got 300 barrels filled in the first place."

What's particularly noteworthy about the Burrell School operation is the Moultons' commitment to growing their own grapes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. While many of the area's wineries have been forced to move in the other direction-reducing or eliminating their own harvest, buying more of their grapes, or relocating their vineyards outside the mountains, Burrell School estate plantings have shot up in the last few years. That investment is just about to pay off in the form of several new estate bottlings to go with the Chardonnay.

"The goal is that by 2003, 80 percent of the wines that we make will be from our own estate-grown grapes," he said. "That's hard to do in this day and age, but everything starts in the vineyard. By being in control of the fruit, I can at least try to get the complexity I want and grow the flavor I think will be perfect for what I'm trying to do."

To do that, the Moultons planted some Merlot on their home parcel to keep the Chardonnay company, and they're in the process of budding over some of those Chardonnay plants into Pinot Noir.

More important, they recently bought 70 acres a few miles away near the Lexington Reservoir on the Los Gatos side of the hill. They've planted 11 acres of it with Syrah, Cabernet Franc, more Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Those grapes are all nearing their debuts.

"We've planted everything we want to plant," Dave said, which is a statement that few vintners in the Santa Cruz Mountains can make.

As much anticipated as the upcoming estate vintages are, Burrell School already has a well-deserved reputation for excellent wines, thanks to Dave's winemaking skills and high-energy work ethic. The signature wine, of course, is the Chardonnay, which you may sip at the tasting room (weekends only), while admiring the vines it came from not 20 feet away.

However, the reds from purchased grapes have received almost as much praise, including 1998 and 1999 Zinfandels, from the Dry Creek Valley's Talty Ranch, and an eyebrow-raising 1998 late harvest Zin that the Moultons' like to show off by serving it with chocolate. Their proprietary blend, "Old Schoolhouse Red," is 83-percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 17-percent Cabernet Franc, and 100-percent pleasant whimsy-in the mouth and on the label. On the back of the bottle, a Burrell School motto is repeated several times in a child-at-the-chalkboard hand: "I promise to sip my wine."

Anne and Dave Moulton (also with the accent on the first syllable, in case you were wondering) do their share of sipping at sunset from their vantage point high above the fray. "You work the soil, watch the grapes mature, and then it all comes together in a glass," Dave said. "That's why we're doing what we do."

Burrell School Vineyards, 24060 Summit Road, Los Gatos, 408.353.6290. Tasting weekends.

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