The remote paradise has seen an influx of producers and artisans practicing their trades by hand
Photography by ALANNA HALE
Words by CHRISTINE LENNON
By the time you reach Spreckels and take the exit for Highway 68 from the 101, you’ve likely noticed that the drive to Carmel Valley Village is not your typical road trip. The 15-foot-tall plywood likenesses of local farmers dot the sprawling fields — painted in meticulous detail by Monterey County artist John Cerney in the 1990s — as if you’ve pierced through a portal in time. They remind you that your modern concerns are better left behind. When you follow the winding mountain roads, through pockets of fog and mist and a nearly 40-degree drop in temperature, you marvel at the view and understand why this remote pocket of Northern California, with just 4,500 residents and surrounded by fertile land, is both a longtime favorite and a newly popular destination.
It’s abundantly clear why Monterey County is expanding its airport to accommodate the many visitors who arrive for destination weddings, golf trips, family holidays, and wine-tasting weekends without the white-knuckle driving. It has also become a necessity to service the many new residents who fell so in love with the hard-to-reach paradise that they put down roots here.
“The area has blown up a lot recently, but in a great way,” says Gwynneth Aldis, an artist who works with her parents and her twin sister, Megan, a filmmaker, running Tancredi & Morgen, a 38-year-old housewares shop in the valley selling vintage hotel silver, French Champagne bowls, and distinctive textiles. “In the pandemic we saw a lot of young families come here to buy homes, which no one anticipated, so there was an influx of very kind people who are so invested in the community and want it to thrive. This area has a pulse right now. It hasn’t changed in a lot of ways — that keeps it really special. But this next generation has been able to contemporize the amenities. My parents have had the shop here since my sister and I were born, but we’ve fallen in love with the place all over again.”
The Carmel Valley was inhabited by the Esselen and Rumsen Native communities, and later it was part of the 6,600-acre Rancho Los Laureles Mexican land grant in the 1830s that included much of Monterey County. Neighboring Big Sur and Carmel-by-the-Sea have received significant attention over the past century for their majestic coastal beauty and as havens for some of America’s greatest artists. What the Valley has that both those communities lack, however, is consistent, warm sunshine for a few hours on most days of the year. The coastal fog retreats every morning and returns in the evening to create a microclimate that allows for verdant gardens, thriving fruit trees, corduroy-like rows of Bordeaux grapes, and grazing pastures for animals. By the 1920s, it was established as a supply hub for ranchers and cowboys. Hacienda-style houses using Carmel stone and terra-cotta roofs became popular retreats for visitors from Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The first business to put the small town on the national map was Earthbound Farms, the organic food pioneer that introduced American grocery stores to pesticide- and herbicide-free salad in a bag in the 1990s. Its founders started on a 2.5-acre plot of raspberries in 1984 and transformed it into a $500 million clean-agriculture powerhouse.
“We’ve fallen in love with the place all over again.”
GWYNNETH ALDIS
In 2019, Earthbound was sold to Bruce and Linda Taylor of Taylor Farms, who hired a team to revive the market, café, and five-acre experiential farm. Operations manager T.J. Silva runs the property, which grows pick-your-own berries and flowers and hosts private events and tours. He’s developing a regenerative farming program focused on soil health, advancing the healthy agricultural practices at Earthbound and Taylor.
“The Albion strawberries we grow here are used in the kitchen for pastries, lemonade, and smoothies,” he says. “We grow garlic and dry it for a garlic-braiding event that one of our longtime farm workers, Janna Jo [Williams], hosts. And the greens and vegetables we grow are delivered to restaurants within a 30-mile radius.” Considering the community’s size, a surprising number of restaurants and caterers welcome those deliveries.
Local produce and unpretentious cooking rule here. Visitors and locals alike devour the al pastor tacos at Meg’s at the Chevron station and buy eggs at one of many roadside stands. But they also support Jerome’s, a specialty-food store owned by the Bernardus Lodge chef Jérôme Viel and his wife, Jessica, and savor bold Syrah and Merlot made in family wineries in the hills. Twenty-five wine-tasting rooms still dominate the retail culture, and tractor rides are available to take patrons around town. But there are also a handful of elegant stores, like the Olivia & Daisy bookshop, and a small but impressive hyperlocal food scene has emerged in recent years.
Nearby Carmel Valley Ranch, which opened as a golf club in 1981 and became a resort a few years later, has 179 suites and hosts more than 50 weddings annually. After a renovation in 2019, the ranch embraced the region’s agricultural heritage, started a thriving beekeeping program to pollinate the grapevines and flora, and opened a corral for a small herd of goats milked for cheese made on-site, as well as cows and alpacas. Wedding guests are always delighted to be served a beer on the back of one of the resident burros, led by farmhand Salvador Preciado. Hotel guests can also suit up and learn about the bees and honey production.
Many of the larger vineyards with tasting rooms, like the 100-year-old Holman Ranch, the storybook-ready Folktale Winery, and Pelio, double as event spaces. A community of caterers, including Annie Hobbs’s Mirth Kitchen, cook for parties held there and host pop-up tasting events in the town’s small-business district.
Sophie Hauville, a co-owner and the primary cheese-maker at Carmel Valley Creamery, recognized that rare combination of sophistication and homespun charm when she and her business partners, Ken Howe and Justin Saunders, started their small operation last year. Hauville, a native of Normandy, was working in business and marketing in Chicago and San Francisco before taking a hiatus in Big Sur. She rented a cabin next to a goat farm, intending to stay for a few weeks. When COVID-19 restrictions interfered with her return to the city, she started watching her neighbor, cheese-maker Charlie Cascio, make yogurt and cheese. A new passion was born.
“A neigbor taught me to milk his goats by hand.”
sophie hauville
“I ended up staying there for three years,” Hauville says. “Charlie had a creamery that he lost in a fire, so he brought his goats and his cheese-making operation over to the Carmel Valley Ranch resort. He was planning to retire, so he asked me if I wanted to take it over — he taught me how to do it. I was milking the goats by hand, making the cheese. It was more interesting than doing spreadsheets.”
Once Hauville saw how fascinated the resort’s guests were by the process, she decided to start her own creamery. She went to France to get tips from some of her favorite cheese-makers there. Back in the valley, she sourced milk from nearby dairies, including Schoch and Claravale. She set up shop in an old general store and restaurant built in 1927, run by beloved shopkeeper Rosie Henry (memorialized with a hand-carved bench near the entrance) from the 1940s to early ’80s.
“We’re making cheese in the three big families, which are soft, a bloomy rind, and hard,” she says. “Then we make several variations. We have this Cowboy Camembert and one with a layer of ash, called the Lady Gray. Then we have a lactic set version with a little bloomy rind, called the Leo.”
The aging rooms have picture windows to give customers a peek into the process. And the response from the neighbors, some of whom arrive on horseback and tie up to a hitching post in the parking lot, is so great that she can barely keep up with the demand.
Another popular newcomer to the Village is Ad Astra bakery, owned by chef and baker Ron Mendoza, which opened its second location in the Mid-Valley Shopping Center. Mendoza worked in California restaurants for decades and trained as a pastry chef at The French Laundry, the Michelin-starred Napa Valley landmark owned by Thomas Keller. He started baking sourdough about six years ago inside a 400-square-foot kitchen at Other Brother Beer in Seaside.
“We started selling at farmers markets, and then restaurants started asking for it. We quickly outgrew that space, and now our new spot in downtown Monterey — a commercial bakery with about nine seats to dine in — is about 3,000 square feet,” says Mendoza, who expanded the bakery menu to include focaccia, ciabatta, and outstanding cinnamon rolls. “We just opened in the Village, and the locals are so happy we’re there. We took over a small coffee shop, and we’re offering a lot more sit-down food, hoping to get a beer-and-wine license soon. As with everything I tend to do, I’m there to fulfill a need. No one was making Tartine-style sourdough on the Monterey peninsula. The new place came from the same idea. There was nowhere to go in the Valley to relax with coffee and pastries in a nice environment.”
Aldis of Tancredi & Morgen says that Ad Astra is opening at the ideal time and that Mendoza knows how to contribute to the Valley, with its relaxed culture, lack of pretense, and slow-growth mentality.
“We just opened in the Village. No one was making Tartine-style sourdough on the Monterey peninsula.”
Robert mendoza
“Ron has fostered all of this young talent across the peninsula. He’s educating and training so many young people here so he can pass on the knowledge, not gatekeep it,” she says. “Our mentality is that if one of us does good, we all do good.”
No matter whom you speak to in Carmel Valley Village, the subject of community is top of mind. Locals are excited about Hacienda, an animal-feed store that has started hosting line-dancing parties and bingo nights with food and drinks to help connect neighbors. And transplants and longtime residents alike try to support growers and makers who embody the Valley’s values, like Mary Ellen and Bill Parsons.
The couple owns Parsonage Winery and lives on land with 6,000 vines just a few minutes down the road from their cheerful but elegant tasting room. They produced their first small batch of wine in 2000. Since then, they’ve earned a stellar reputation for their big, bold reds, like a velvety Syrah that ages in French oak barrels inside a barn. They run the family business with help from their three daughters, two sons-in-law (including winemaker Frank Melicia), and six grandsons, whose faces you can see smiling in family photos on the tasting room wall.
“It’s incredibly hard work, so I can’t tell how much the younger boys love [it],” Mary Ellen says with a smile. “But we’re still going.”
“It’s a real family operation and super hands-on,” Melicia adds. “When you’re trying to compete with everybody in the business, you have to produce the best possible grapes, and ours are spectacular. People forget that this job is 95 percent farming. We make wine for a three-month period. But today, for instance, our middle son is out there raking under the vines all day in the hot sun.”
Melicia says they “absolutely need” tourists to help support local purveyors and that most of their customers are introduced to their label through the tasting room. “It’s a certain kind of person who really appreciates the family story, that we’re a small winery with three generations working to make it happen,” he says.
Mary Ellen is a self-taught quilter, and images of her work grace the labels of the wine bottles. The quilts hang on the tasting room’s walls. She sells them but says it’s hard to put a price tag on the months of labor required to produce one. Sipping the beautiful Parsonage wine, chatting with Mary Ellen about her art and her family, and soaking in the unfiltered summer sunshine and the cool breeze, one can feel entirely at home in this place. It’s easy to understand why people who come here are reluctant to leave.
“People came here because they wanted to live in utopia, and they found it. It used to be that no one knew it was here. But we’re just out here in the sunshine, a short drive away from the fog. Please come see us,” Melicia says. “Just don’t honk your horn.”
Feature image: The sunset view at the Carmel Valley Ranch, overlooking a small vineyard and a golf course designed by Pete Dye.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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