I?m still recovering from a busy long weekend at Pebble Beach Food & Wine, a four-day festival that has almost nothing to do with golf. My job was to lead a few wine seminars, and two of them centered on historic California estates: Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Chalone Vineyard in Monterey County?s Pinnacles Mountains. I stopped at both Ridge and Chalone on my drive down to Pebble Beach from San Francisco. Visiting the two properties within a few hours of each other made it clear to me how many uncanny similarities they have. OK, the sites? climates are very different, and they grow entirely different grape varieties, but bear with me here. Both are mountain vineyards: Ridge Monte Bello tops out around 2,750 feet, Chalone at 2,100 feet. Both have limestone in their soils, that prized foundation for grapes. Both properties were initially planted to vines in the nineteenth century, then revived by ambitious vintners in the 1960s. Both wines? labels are virtually the same today as they were in their initial vintages: Ridge, with its stark lettering (fun fact: the font is called Optima); Chalone, with its black silhouette of the Pinnacles. The similarity that struck me most was how Ridge and Chalone managed to become icon vineyards in the mid-twentieth century despite their total remoteness. We?re talking about wineries on lonesome mountains in Cupertino and Soledad, not St. Helena or Healdsburg. And although there are now a handful of other vineyards near each estate, they remain the singular claim to fame for their respective…