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

Back in the early 1970s, when it was still possible to do such a thing, folks of varying ages and income brackets settled into Santa Cruz County to re-invent themselves under the influence of old redwoods and new lifestyles. Some of them were dreamers. Some of them were fools. Some of them were winemakers.

The Roudons (Bob and Annamaria) and the Smiths (Jim and June) were of the latter persuasion, when they left computer-industry careers in 1972 to start a little winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains. When you think about it, 1972 is a rather interesting year to have made that particular career change. Many of the techies who would later put Silicon Valley on the map were still in swaddling clothes. Also, a good percentage of the current crop of Santa Cruz ***vinmeisters*** weren't much older.

There was no such thing as a Santa Cruz Mountains appellation, when the Roudons and Smiths bought some property near Scotts Valley that would become their estate vineyard. The area itself was pretty much a backwater, viticulturally speaking. Only a handful of people were growing grapes and making wine. Not too many more were drinking it.

However, the Roudons and Smiths knew what they wanted and went for it. Unlike many of the would-be creative types who streamed through the mountains in those days, they knew what they were doing. The guys were high-tech engineers, after all. They could make things work. Plus, they already had the actual winemaking part down.

"I learned how to make wine in Europe when I was stationed in Germany," said Bob Roudon, who holds the winemaker title in the business. "And after several trips to France, I learned even better. The grapes in California are more suited to the southern French winemaking style than the German."

The proof of their success is that, 30 years later, you're reading about Roudon-Smith Winery. After 30 trends later, they're still producing wine in their original French-influenced way. The "French style" can mean a lot of things, of course, but for Roudon, it's a minimalist concept.

"It's a very simple process where we do the least possible to get a stable wine into the bottle," he said. "Unless it needs something in particular, we minimize any kind of handling and let the wine make itself." That sounds basic, but as applied to their Estate Chardonnay, it borders on the revolutionary.

The obscenely popular Chardonnay is an unlikely symbol of a winery's trend-bucking ways. Indeed, most wineries make it because it's as close to a sure thing with the American palate as they're going to find. However, Roudon-Smith doesn't make Chardonnay the way most people like it. Or, to rephrase that in a more meaningful way, Roudon-Smith doesn't make Chardonnay the way most people assume they like it, the way they're told to like it, and the way they usually find it.

a steely character
"The very commercial, very popular, California-style Chardonnay has that buttery taste-very ripe with lots of oak," said Michael Walters, the assistant winemaker at Roudon-Smith who's taken over most of the hands-on work in recent years. "Ours is more the French-style Chardonnay. It's crisp, not buttery, and not overwhelmed by oak or anything else."

That's the way most Santa Cruz Mountain-grown Chardonnays would taste if the winemakers left it alone. "This is a very cool region at night," Roudon said. "That keeps the acidity high and the pH low. So the wine has a sort of steely character. Our wines are different because we keep the natural acidity."

Most California Chardonnay producers trade crispness for butteriness by putting the wine through an acid-lowering process called malo-lactic fermentation in the barrel. Roudon-Smith doesn't do that. Nor does it harvest late (as many others do), so the sugar levels aren't so sky-high. It also goes easy on the oak.

The result is a crisper, more food-friendly wine that lives much longer than Chardonnay is thought to be capable of. Roudon recently opened a bottle of his Estate Chardonnay that was old enough for the vintage to match the last year the Dodgers were world champions. Yes, it was delicious. More interestingly, though, it was clearly recognizable as Chardonnay. However, it tasted noticeably different from what most of us are used to in a Chardonnay.

"When it was young and hard, it might have scared some people away, because it's more like a French wine than a California wine," Roudon said of the 1988 Estate Chardonnay. "Then it gets this patina. But if it were a typical overripe, buttery California Chard, it would have been dead long ago."

One would think that more producers would offer a lightly-oaked, natural-acidity Chardonnay, if for no other reason that to stand out in a Chard-glutted market. However, only small wineries like Roudon-Smith can indulge in such rebelliousness. "Mega-marketers with huge advertising budgets pour their money into oak, and 'buttery' is a word that will sell some wine," said Walters. "That feeds a facile conception of what wine is."

The Roudons and Smiths recently did their bit for the cause of overcoming that conception by bottling two nearly identical (non-estate) Chardonnays, not from the Estate but a Monterey Chardonnay. The only difference between the two 2000 Monterey Chardonnays is that one was oaked and the other (whimsically sub-titled "Oak Free") never saw the inside of a barrel. The two are selling about the same, and the responses after informal taste tests have been revealing.

"People who thought they didn't like oak and were ready to prefer the Oak Free often found that subtle oak treatment could be enjoyable; it was too much oak that they hadn't liked," Walters said. "And others who were fond of very oaky Chardonnays were surprised that they actually liked the Oak Free."

While Chardonnay is the flagship wine at Roudon-Smith-and the only grape grown at the estate vineyard-they've produced reds, as well. The grapes for the 1998 Merlot and the 1996 Syrah are from the Meeker Vineyard near Paso Robles, a favorite with several Santa Cruz Mountain wineries. "We follow suit with the red wines, too," said Roudon. "We don't use a lot of heavy oak with them. For a lot of people, this is a refreshing change from all that oak they usually taste."

mal malo-lactic
Still, most Americans apparently don't want a refreshing change, especially with their Chardonnay. So, one wonders if Roudon ever considered doing it the popular way-malo-lactic fermentation and all.

One doesn't wonder for long. Guys who bolt Silicon Valley on the eve of the high-tech boom to grow grapes in a redwood forest as a rule aren't concerned with popular trends. "Our sales would probably be better if we did," he said matter-of-factly. "But then I wouldn't like the wine."

This is a man with his priorities in order.

After three decades, Roudon-Smith is at a crossroads. Bob Roudon and Jim Smith are semi-retired and spend much of their time in France and Tahiti, respectively. June Smith continues tirelessly with her community projects and promotional work, but there's less to promote-about 2,000 cases, down from 10,000 at its peak. Annamaria Roudon lost her battle with cancer in 1996, and the estate vineyard (owned now by close friends and associates of the two families) has been renamed in her honor.

The signature Chardonnays from Annamaria's Vineyard will keep on coming, but what else Roudon-Smith will be offering is still to be decided. One possibility is more of the GewŸrztraminer they've been dabbling in (71 cases of the 2000 Santa Cruz County). True to form, it's not sweet, as many assume a GewŸrz must be. In fact, it's a very dry lunchtime kind of thing. "Another hard sell," Walters boasted.

Roudon-Smith's reduced inventory is entirely voluntary; they could sell much more if they felt like making it. However, things change and time passes. The Santa Cruz winemaking scene certainly isn't what it once was. There's a lot more good wine than ever before-and a lot more wine drinkers.

However, for the Roudons and the Smiths, there's less camaraderie than there was when the names were limited to Ahlgren, Bargetto, Burnap, Smothers and a few others.

"The old guard-we don't get together as much any more, but we're still very close," Roudon said. "Now there are so many wineries that I don't even know them all. But I know that not many of them can drag out a 1988 Chardonnay."

Roudon-Smith Vineyards, 2364 Bean Creek Road, Scotts Valley, 831.438.1244. Tasting, 11-4:30 Saturday or by appointment.

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