The Novitiate & the Foothills

Jesuits from Santa Clara College bought the hillside in 1886 to build a novitiate and paid for it with sacramental wine, with novices picking the grapes; the first harvest was on October 11, 1888. The winery ran for 98 years, and in 1997 Diana and Rob Jensen reopened it as Testarossa. (Jesuits West)

Because it kept making altar wine through Prohibition, the old Novitiate winery is counted as the fourth-oldest continuously operating winery in California. (Wikipedia) Much of its hillside vineyard was later sold to the town as open space. (Wine History Project)

The mountains behind town became the Santa Cruz Mountains American Viticultural Area on December 4, 1981, one of the first defined by mountain terrain. (Wikipedia) Twice a year the Chamber’s Wine Walk pours wines from the region in downtown shops. (Los Gatos Chamber)

Off Highway 17, two eight-foot white cats by sculptor Robert Paine guard the gate of the estate where Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field lived from 1925; the cats appear on the town seal. (Wikipedia, NUMU)