Wine & Vines revisits Santa Barbara wine country

Wines & Vines, April, 1991 by Philip Hiaring

Wines & Vines revisits Santa Barbara wine country

Wines & Vines' association with wine growing in Santa Barbara County -- one of the newest wine regions in California's modern wine history -- began in the late Sixties, when we first heard that a San Joaquin Valley vineyardist, Uriel Nielson, had planted a 120-acre plot of classical wine grapes on a mesa near the Sisquoc river, not far from Santa Maria, on the northern edge of the county.

Research turned up the fact that he was selling his South Coast fruit to The Christian Brothers in the Napa Valley; they found the quality excellent, equal to that found on the North Coast.

The next development was chronicled in the November, 1971, Wines & Vines, which pictured Louis Lucas on the cover and had a detailed account of how Lucas, with his brother, George, Jr., and partner Al Gagnon, had planted 800 acres of mist-propagated wine grapes in the summer of that year, the same season that Nielson took off his fifth crop and continued selling his grapes outside the area.

After that article, the next journey Wines & Vines made to the new wine growing region was to report on the opening of the Firestone Vineyard in 1975 with Brooks and Kate Firestone welcoming guests. Their enterprise now turns out 80,000 cases annually in a handsome, state-of-the-art plant and is the largest producer in the county. (The Firestones also have acquired Carey Cellars at Solvang and make 7,000 cases a year under that label.)

As Louis Lucas (now a resident of Los Olivos) recalled for me during a visit last October to Santa Barbara County, the Lucas-Gagnon venture -- called Tepusquet Vineyard -- planted varieties recommended by Beringer Vineyards based on the Beringer experience in Napa.

Beringer was to be the buyer of the fruit when the vines bore three years down the road. Only trouble was that the white wine revolution intervened, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot noir and Merlot fell from consumer favor for a time. Even among white wines, Beringer-recommended varieties such as Riesling and Gewurztraminer commanded a fraction of the demand generated by Chardonnay.

About the same time, own-root plantings also were made by the Flood Estate and others. In those years, the harvest went north and east; there were no wineries in Santa Barbara County except that established in the city of Santa Barbara in 1962 by Pierre Lafond. Less than half the crop is crushed by local vintners. The rest goes to approximately 50 wineries outside the county.

Such names as Beringer, Robert Mondavi and Kendall-Jackson have bought extensive vineyards in the Santa Maria Valley, including Tepusquet. Of the three, only Jackson, on land once owned by Tepusquet, has installed a new winery (although Mondavi has acquired the 20,000-case Byron Vineyard & Winery). Jackson's plant is called Cambria Winery & Vineyard and its acre-square new cellar has a potential of a half-million gallons -- which would make it by far the largest in the county but is about at the 10,000-20,000-case level now. Beringer acquired the Estrella property nearby in San Luis Obispo County, modernized it, and re-named it "Meridian." It gets part of its fruit from Santa Barbara County where it has 3,000 acres of grapes.

Since the plantings of a generation ago, 26 small, quality-minded wineries have been established. The Flood Estate (building on the silver fortunes of Jim Flood in the 19th century) has its Rancho Sisquoc winery with a capacity annually of 3,000 cases, as part of a giant family ranch.

The industry in the county produces about 325,000 cases annually and has gone from nothing to a $21 million business in little more than 20 years.

The reason is climate. Unlike other Pacific Coast ranges, the Santa Ynez mountains run east and west, creating three valleys open to the Pacific and allowing fog and ocean winds to flow inland. The valleys are the Santa Maria to the north, the Los Alamos and the Santa Ynez. West of U.S. 101, near Lompoc (famous for Vandenberg Air Force Base and huge fields of flowers for the seed trade), the climate is Region I, coolest on the U.C.-Davis scale of I through V. Farther east along a 50-mile stretch, it is Region II. At Lompoc, the Babcock family (Walt and Mona with their winemaker son, Bryan, found Cabernet unsuited; it didn't ripen until January.) The Babcocks specialize in Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc and Riesling, and share with the rest of the county's winemakers the knowledge that their Riesling is world-class but unappreciated by their customers. Firestone's general manager, Patrick Will, for example, considers Riesling "the greatest white wine in the world but it gets no respect except in Germany and Alsace."

Wines & Vines took part in the fifth media visit conducted by the Santa Barbara County Vintners' Association in 1989 and 1990. It may be the last. The reason is that the California Wine Commission recently was voted out of existence and as a result $62,000 in matching funds formerly going to the SBCVA is no longer available. That money financed the media visits (averaging about $1,000 a visiting journalist) and made up about 30% of the Association's $200,000 budget. Ironically, it was small wineries like those in the county that voted out the Commission, while its revenue came mostly from large wineries.