Ceritas Pinot Noir Mt. Pajaro Vineyard 2023

Mt. Pajaro represents something genuinely rare for John and Phoebe Raytek: in 2023, Ceritas became the first outside winery ever permitted to purchase fruit from Rhys Vineyards' celebrated Santa Cruz Mountains holdings — vineyards famous for producing some of California's most collectible, allocation-only Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Mt. Pajaro sits east of Corralitos, roughly thirty miles south of Rhys's better-known northern sites like Alpine and Horseshoe, in a stretch of the mountains where the San Andreas Fault splinters into a web of smaller faults, creating an unusually complex tapestry of soils — well-drained clay topsoil over rocky marine shale, at around 900 feet elevation and just seven miles from the cooling influence of Monterey Bay. Planted in 2013 and farmed organically and dry, the site is tended with the same exacting precision Rhys applies across their own estate. In the cellar, Ceritas ferments the fruit on native yeast with gentle extraction, ageing the wine around eleven months in roughly 20% new French oak before a further rest in stainless steel — the same purity-focused, minimal-intervention philosophy the Rayteks apply across their entire portfolio.

The result channels the site's singular geology directly into the glass: saturating red fruit and saline minerality meet a subtle, cocoa-like earthiness, all wrapped in the fine-boned elegance critics have described as "fantastically detailed" in recent vintages. It's a wine of real precision and restraint rather than overt power — pure, mineral, and unmistakably a product of place.