Mount Eden Vineyards · Santa Cruz Mountains
The release is the middle of the story.
A bottle leaves the mountain carrying more than a vintage. There are people in its past, and other people still to come.
By Rob Urban · September 24, 2026
One wine, several beginnings
New to the table.
Not new to the world.
Mount Eden’s 2022 Estate Chardonnay supplies a useful little interruption to the way we talk about new things. Its vintage is 2022. The wine went into bottles in 2023. The release came in fall 2025.
Three dates, before anyone at home has reached for a corkscrew. Calling it simply a new release is accurate enough for a shop shelf. It leaves out most of the life that made the bottle possible.
The winery’s vintage record preserves those stages. That matters because a bottle does not stop belonging to its makers when it leaves them. Someone can meet their work years later, long after the harvest weather has changed and the people who picked the fruit have moved on to another season.
Mount Eden’s human history has the same layered quality. It is not one brilliant beginning followed by an uninterrupted victory lap. It is an ambition repeatedly taken up, made practical and entrusted to somebody else.
The romance and the responsibility
Somebody had to keep the mountain going.
A celebrated bottle can make the vineyard work visible. The business work deserves a place in the story, too.
Martin Ray bought the mountaintop property in 1943. He brought the influence of his mentor Paul Masson, including Chardonnay and Pinot Noir cuttings from Masson’s vineyard. The winery dates its founding to 1945; the Mount Eden name arrived in 1972, after Ray had lost control of the estate.
Those are different beginnings, not competing birthdays. The ambition survived a change of ownership and name. Survival, however, was not the same thing as stability.
Elin McCoy’s 2019 Decanter profile describes the operation Jeffrey Patterson joined in 1981: limited money, worn-out tractors and a property that nevertheless captured him. In 1983 he became winemaker, while Ellie Patterson took responsibility for the business.
Ellie told McCoy she had received just two days of training. Her previous work had included handweaving and horticulture. It is a wonderfully unvarnished detail: the person who would help sustain this famous wine estate did not arrive with a rehearsed wine-industry origin story.
The Pattersons gradually acquired shares and became majority owners in 2008. The long interval matters. Their connection to Mount Eden was first a commitment of work, then an increasingly substantial commitment of ownership. The reputation we encounter today rests on both.
Legacy that can grow elsewhere
Not every contribution fits on a label.
Before the Patterson era, Merry Edwards made wine at Mount Eden. In 1975, she selected promising Pinot Noir material from the vineyard. Her winery’s account traces that work to UCD 37, the selection also known as Merry’s Clone.
This is a different kind of legacy from a famous vintage. A vintage is a finite quantity. Plant material can be propagated, studied and put to work in another place. A careful observation in one vineyard can become part of somebody else’s future harvest.
Edwards’ subsequent work helped bring attention to the importance of matching vine selections to their sites. Her story gives Mount Eden a reach that cannot be measured only in the bottles leaving its cellar.
Nor did respecting the old vineyard mean leaving every vine untouched. Jeffrey’s years included substantial replanting. In McCoy’s account, he describes learning the site over nearly a decade and changing vineyard and cellar choices as his understanding grew.
That is the appealing tension here: care for what came before, without pretending that care means refusing to change anything.
A living vineyard cannot be preserved like an unopened box. It needs decisions. Its continuity depends on people willing to notice what is working, what is struggling and what the next planting will need.
Apprenticeship, return and responsibility
The next hands did not
all arrive the same way.
A résumé on the mountain.
In Laura Ness’s February 2025 profile for Edible Monterey Bay, Austin Chin recalls driving up to Mount Eden in 2016 while looking for vineyard work. He met Ellie, handed over his résumé and later received a call from Jeffrey asking him to return.
The beginning was not a ceremonial appointment. It was vineyard work, including learning to prune. Years of working with the Pattersons preceded his move into the lead winemaking role.
Ness also records Chin’s candid description of his initially awkward working relationship with Reid Patterson. Different personalities eventually became complementary ones. That is a more believable account of succession than pretending everyone arrived fully formed and instantly in step.
A return that was a choice.
The winery’s account says Reid initially resisted making Mount Eden his career. He studied chemistry and explored coffee before returning at the end of 2017. Today it identifies him as general manager, Chin as winemaker and Jeffrey as winemaker emeritus.
The distinction is important. This is not simply a father handing his exact job to his son. A family member and a winemaker who joined from outside have taken on different responsibilities, with experience accumulated beside the previous generation.
On the 2022 Chardonnay’s current vintage page, Chin’s wine notes sit alongside Reid’s account of the growing season. The record itself now holds more than one voice. A wine from the past becomes a place where the present team can explain what it has inherited.
Ron Tanaka
A friend remains
part of the place.
There is another name in Mount Eden’s story that belongs neither to an owner nor a winemaker. Ron Tanaka was a poet, artist and friend of the Pattersons. His photographs, poems and collages were inspired by the mountain.
Tanaka died by suicide in 2007. The winery’s 2020 announcement of the Tanaka Project described a Pinot Noir made in his memory, from a vineyard associated with his affection for the estate. The first release pledged 25 percent of its purchase price to NAMI Santa Clara County.
The announcement also explained that the label drew on Tanaka’s own calligraphy. It was a particularly personal way to remember him: his hand remained in the work, rather than only his name.
That is not a claim that wine is a treatment or an answer to grief. It is a documented act of remembrance and support. The current winery history continues to describe a contribution from the project to mental-health charities.
Here, the life around a vineyard becomes impossible to separate neatly from the business. Someone came to photograph a place, became a friend, and left work that the people who loved him still wanted others to encounter.
What the bottle carries
The story does not end at release.
Mount Eden’s attraction is not simply that it is old. Plenty of things are old. What makes the history worth following is the variety of contributions still visible inside it: an early ambition, a vine selection, years of business work, an apprenticeship, a return home and a friendship.
The winery’s Estate Tasting includes previous-vintage releases and a library Cabernet Sauvignon. Older work is still part of the welcome. A visitor can arrive in the present and encounter something the mountain made earlier.
That longer relationship also runs through Smith-Madrone’s mountain story and the very different people around Channing Daughters. The interesting part is not a generic claim about patience. It is who stayed, what they noticed and what they made possible for someone else.
At Mount Eden, a release date marks the moment a bottle becomes available. It does not mark the beginning of its meaning. And it certainly does not have to mark the end.
A few useful distinctions
Questions about Mount Eden.
Where is Mount Eden Vineyards?
Mount Eden is in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Saratoga, California, at 22020 Mount Eden Road. The estate sits about 2,000 feet above the Santa Clara Valley, reached by a private mountain road.
Can you visit without an appointment?
No. Mount Eden requires advance reservations. Its visit page currently lists weekday tastings, says the estate is closed on weekends and limits groups to six people. Check the winery’s current visit information before making plans.
Are Mount Eden and Domaine Eden the same property?
No. Domaine Eden is a separate nearby property acquired by Mount Eden in 2007, formerly the Cinnabar wine estate. The properties are related, but their names and wines should not be treated as interchangeable.
Why are the vintage and release years different?
They identify different stages in a wine’s life. Mount Eden’s 2022 Estate Chardonnay was bottled in 2023 and released in fall 2025. The harvest year, bottling year and release year should not be collapsed into one date.