Low in Alcohol, High in Flavor: Meet the Lean Red Wines of the Central Coast

• By WineBottleMag
• April 5, 2025
• Alcohol Central Coast Flavor High Lean Meet Red Wines
• With 0 comments

California’s red wines achieved peak ripeness in the early 2000s, when even the traditionally nuanced grape Pinot Noir was subject to later harvests, extra-long extractions and extreme oak influence. The backlash to those overly flavored styles came in 2011 with In Pursuit of Balance, a movement upholding lighter, leaner wines. However, sometimes those wines swung too far the other way: so austere or acidic that they required advanced degrees to appreciate. 

Today, there’s a generation of winemakers who are managing to combine the best of both worlds: fresh, acid-driven, texturally fascinating wines that are low in alcohol (around 13% and under) and light in weight yet bursting with vibrant fruit flavors. Many of these vintners are located along California’s Central Coast, where proximity to the Pacific Ocean paired with abundant sunshine enables the exact ripening conditions required to achieve this style. 

“The only way to make compelling and super flavorful wine at that level of ripeness is to be choosing the right varietal for the right site,” says Sam Smith, who makes both Pinot Noir and Syrah in this low-alcohol, high-flavor style from Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Barbara counties. “Then the important thing is to have the right crop balance, the right amount of fruit-to-canopy ratio for any given site.” 

That doesn’t always mean low yields, especially for fertile vineyards that can hold more crop. Nor does it always require organic farming, though that usually helps. “Most organically farmed fruit is better quality, but not because it’s organically farmed—it’s because the farm gets more attention and more supervision,” says Smith. “It makes better wine because someone is in the vineyard way more frequently. Fewer things go unnoticed.”

Picking When to Pick

The single most critical decision each year is when to pick. “It’s really a tiny little window you have to jump through,” says Drake Whitcraft, who also makes Pinot Noir, Syrah and more from across California for Whitcraft Winery, preferring clay-rich soils for juiciness in red wines. 

That brief period of time when the grapes exhibit these vivid flavors happens right after underripe grapes would produce “thin wines with nothing much going on,” but before the grapes become “gobby, jammy and over-the-top.”

Whitcraft believes that larger wineries have a harder time achieving this type of crisp fruit quality because they often pick grapes at various sugar levels and then blend those lots into the finished wine. “You have a lot of different flavors in there, but it doesn’t necessarily make that ripe flavor,” he says. “Small producers who are picking their entire lot in one pick can achieve that easier.” 

In the winery, it’s all about preserving those pristine flavors. “If I did my job correctly on picking, I am very gentle with cap management to preserve that,” says Ryan Alfaro who makes Alfaro Family and Farm Cottage wines in Corralitos, just south of Santa Cruz. “I try to be very, very gentle. I almost get a slight carbonic situation going because I am not breaking up those clusters.”

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The Perfect Extraction Method 

Instead of punch-downs or pump-overs, the two primary extraction methods, Alfaro slowly racks the fermenting wine and then softly pours it back over the top of the grapes, a process called gravity rack-and-return. “You’re also not squishing and smashing those stems, which will raise the pH and lower the acidity because of the potassium in them,” says Alfaro. “The idea is not to have any green herbaceousness, but to give a slight perfume of savoriness.” 

Stems also add texture, which is key when not using new oak. “With bright fruit and acidity, if you can get the textural component, that’s the third dimension to make it pop,” says Alfaro, who presses off his wine while it’s still slightly sweet, usually less than two weeks after picking. It then ferments for a few days in the tank before going into used barrels. 

Smith occasionally uses small amounts of new oak for these wines, comparing it to fleur de sel. “There are certainly some foods that are amazing and perfect and could not be any better, but the other 99% of everything tastes better when it has a little salt,” he says. “Fleur de sel is the perfect analogy, because it adds a little flavor and also a textural component.”

Other brands from across the Central Coast that frequently fall into this category include Madson, Marbeso, Scar of the Sea, Outward, Joyce, Sandar & Hem, Thomas Fogarty, Trippers & Askers, Samsara, Beauregard and Assiduous. 

For Whitcraft, this style of wine confronts a common misconception that equates ripeness directly to sweetness. “My wines are sometimes very juicy and very giving on the fruit side yet have 12.5% alcohol and you can see through the wine in the glass,” says Whitcraft of his translucent bottlings. “That just proves the point that ripeness is not sugar levels.”

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Lean Red Wines from the Central Coast

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