7 of the Best Small Wine Producers in Southern California to Try Right Now

 

While most people know the sad tale about how the auto industry and its corporate fellow schemers offed public transportation in Los Angeles, few know what Prohibition and urbanization did in Los Angeles' flourishing wine production. Indeed, the original seal of the County of Los Angeles — from 1887 until a surprisingly late 1957 — was a cluster of grapes.

In the last 30 years, wine production has exploded throughout Southern California. Take Santa Barbara County, which was named the Wine Enthusiast's wine region of the year in 2021. In the late 1980s, there were 29 wineries; today, there are well over a hundred (one might have opened during that sentence). And even Temecula has survived glassy-winged sharpshooters eating nearly half their vines in the 1990s and a bad rep thanks to recovering from that disaster to become one of the state's hottest wine regions. Now, Southern Californians are making wine from the Mexican border to the Cuyama Valley. Here are just a few of the best small producers.

Want to read the rest, then do so at KCET's website. (And thanks for having me back, KCET!) (That's Say When in the photo above.)

Drink What You Like for NYE

Drink what you love. That seems simple enough. But especially around this time of year, it's easy to believe we deserve to indulge in special potable treats, and it's easy to look to professionals on how to indulge in those treats. So we read up and assume high scores are the highway to nirvana. If that fails, we might pay a whole heck of a lot on a bottle as that must mean something, and then assume we're drinking an amazing wine.

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Strong Spirits for the Holidays

Santa has it hard, children. If you believe he visits all the houses around the world in one night, realize that it's a task as tricky as completing the torturous drive west on the 10 freeway from Santa Monica to downtown on a Friday night under 20 minutes. Even if you just believe he's Mom or Dad, "Santa" still has to buy the presents, wrap them up, and place them under the tree without waking you.

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The Mile High Wine Club: An Interview with an Airline Sommelier

When L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti claims, "LAX will be the busiest Thanksgiving airport in the country for a third year in a row," you assume that he says that with a unique mix of pride and worry. For many of us, this weekend kicks off a stretch of air travel, whether jetting off to somewhere fun or somewhere obligatory.

So that makes it time to look at how airlines choose how you arrive properly lubricated. American Airlines has spent a lot of time and money ($2 billion "to enhance the entire customer travel experience") of late, and one part of that is upgrading their wine service, particularly for Business and First Classes. For its inaugural flight to and from Los Angeles to Sydney on December 17th, you can savor pours from a rare $850 bottle of 2010 Penfolds Grange, one of Australia's most esteemed wines.

American Airlines has also been working with wine consultant Ken Chase to update its lists. SoCal Spirits interviewed Chase recently about his work with American.

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Outside the Box Drinking for Thanksgiving

Perhaps no holiday can seem as traditional as Thanksgiving. It's easy to feel as if the proscribed menu leaves its deep rings on us just like the ones on the canned cranberry sauce Aunt Emmaline plops out into an heirloom dish each year. So while it's not my place to suggest you shake up your meal, I can certainly offer you a bunch of out-of-the-box options for potent potables. You don't have to fall back on chardonnay as the only white wine to go with a bird (although many certainly do), or pinot noir as the only red (ibid), or worse yet, fall for the marketing scam that is Beaujolais Nouveau.

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It's Time to Move Fast on SLO Wine

It's not everyday you get to sit in a historic lighthouse accessed by a particularly winding, cliff-hugging road offering eye-popping vistas, so why not taste a pinot noir while you sit staring out the window at the glittering Pacific? It's a wine made from grapes all grown within five miles of the Pacific, too. But that's the way things roll in San Luis Obispo wine country.

They like to call it SLO Wine Country, but the acronym reverberates in both positive and negative ways for the 30 or so wineries in the region. The laid-back charm of the slightly sleepier beach towns of Pismo and Avila is hard to deny -- wonderful restaurants are taking off (try Ember in Arroyo Grande and The Spoon Trade in Grover Beach); the idyllic drives through the Edna and Arroyo Grande Valleys match more acclaimed California wine regions but with far less bustle and traffic, and it's easier to have more personal chats with winemakers in this region.

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Rhone Rangers Offer Up All of Grenache's Guises

 (photo courtesy Larry Schaffer)

You might not trick anybody if you ask him or her what's the most commonly grown wine grape in the world. Most people would guess or know it's cabernet sauvignon. But you could win quite a few bar bets asking people what's the second most commonly grown wine grape globally.

Meet Grenache. A work horse in the Rhone region of France, a favorite in Australia, a cornerstone of the Spanish wine industry (some think it originated there, where it's called Garnacha), Grenache has a checkered history in the U.S. Because as much as the varietal can make delicious wines -- think Châteauneuf-du-Pape -- it also can grow prodigiously, and for years was crucial to filling millions of jugs of wine coming out of California's Central Valley. And you know how it is when you're cheap and loved by everybody -- you don't get the best of reputations.

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Fall Brews to Choose

It's that wonderful time of year when we wake to a chill in the air, and the leaves turn magnificent. Wait, this is Southern California. So to celebrate fall, we do things like brew special potent potables to commemorate the season -- deeper, darker, and spicier. Here's a rundown of some of the fun stuff out there now, with two wild cards -- a new cider from a cherished longtime producer and a beer from New York that's too cleverly marketed to ignore.

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On Golden Bud: InBev Beer Giant Purchases Golden Road Brewing

The announcement in late September that Anheuser-Busch InBev purchased L.A.'s Golden Road Brewing, followed by the news InBev finally figured out terms to acquire SABMiller (for $106 billion -- it's the fifth largest corporate takeover bid ever) left me thinking of the once over-heated satire, now sad prophecy, Network. For this isn't a tale about the future of craft beer. It's about, as Ned Beatty's character Arthur Jensen puts it in a fervid speech, "One holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven...multinational dominion of dollars."

Taste or not, craft or not (and has any term been sold to us more than "craft" in the last decade?), both parties have put up a good front about the sale. While Golden Road didn't respond to KCET's request for an interview, there is a video both parties released, featuring Andy Goeler, CEO of Craft, AB, chatting with Meg Gill, CEO and co-founder of Golden Road.

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Babak Shokrian: Buying A Vineyard for the Long Haul

It's not unusual for people from the film industry to wind up involved with wine -- it's a cool thing to blow money on -- but Babak Shokrian's got a more complex back story than that. Born in Teheran, Iran, he moved with his family to the U.S. at an early age, got a degree in anthropology from UCLA, and began work in film.

While he just released the film Shah Bob on the festival circuit (where his previous one America So Beautiful met much success) he's also got a burgeoning project in Santa Barbara County, the Shokrian Vineyard -- what used to be known as Verna's and owned by the Melvilles.

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La Paulée: A Wonderful Way to Celebrate Wine Harvest

Sometimes seemingly fancy words can hide serious fun. That's often an issue with wine and French -- if you don't speak the language, it can quickly feel like they're not snobbing with you, but snobbing at you. So let's demystify this word as it's the time of year you hear it the most -- la paulée. Heck, it's even got an accent. In its simplest form, it's a harvest dinner where winemakers and guests all bring a special bottle of wine as a way to delight in the season's bounty.

"It is a wonderful opportunity to share wine that you love with others and to meet new people in a more casual environment than at a traditional wine dinner," said Morgen McLaughlin, Executive Director of Santa Barbara Vintners. "The dinner is served family-style and guests are encouraged to try other guests' wines."

That's definitely what will happen at la paulée on Friday, October 9 as part of a Celebration of Harvest Weekend in Santa Barbara.

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Morgan Makes the Most of Monterey

It's a chilly morning, even in early September, but that's just the Santa Lucia Highlands (SLH) showing off, modestly in a cloak of fog. People grow grapes here for the great swings of temperature, and the surge of marine layer that barrels down the Salinas Valley from Monterey Bay. That cool-in-the-morning-warm-into-the-day pattern leads to a long growing season. That's a lot of hang time for fruit, and the flavor just builds.

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In The Ghetto with Lompoc Wines and Moretti

It's not every day the word "ghetto" gets used affectionately, but the wines that come from Lompoc in Santa Barbara County are far from ordinary too. As the closest town to the famed growing area of the Sta. Rita Hills, Lompoc has the honor of being the site of numerous winemaking facilities hidden away in affordable warehouses. Hence, the Lompoc Wine Ghetto.

One of the Ghetto's biggest boosters is Moretti Wines, run by Jeni and Antonio Moretti. In fact it was Jeni's "dumb or bright idea," as she calls it, "to start an association that was long overdue. We just added a new winery so are up to 31."

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Paso's JUSTIN Winery Nominated for Winery of the Year

When winemaker Scott Shirley says, "I think this is the appellation for luxury and ultra-premium cabernet sauvignon in the United States," it really means something that he's referring to Paso Robles. Sure, he's been the winemaker at JUSTIN Winery since 2012, so you might think he has to say it. But given he moved to Paso to take the JUSTIN job, leaving Napa Valley after working at both the Hess Collection and Opus One, that claim bears a lot of weight.

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Grape Harvest 2015: Early, Tasty, Very Small

That I'm writing my harvest column a month earlier than last year, which featured winemakers talking about the surprisingly early 2014 harvest, is a hint something historic is afoot. Welcome to Drought Does California, 2015 edition.

Up in the Santa Lucia Highlands, long-time grape-grower Rich Smith (a veteran of 42 harvests) said a week ago, "We've already got hang-time. We've got color in syrah which is usually still green. That means low yield and smaller berries, so the skin-to-volume ratio goes up, which makes winemakers happy and growers not so much."

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Hahn's Got Monterey on the Wine Map

Hahn Family Wines has something to crow about, and not just because "Hahn" means rooster in German. The sneakily large outfit (producing about 400,000 cases annually) that builds its top wines from small lots is one of the stars in the blossoming Santa Lucia Highlands (SLH) Appellation. That's a still-under-the-radar spot you might have viewed while flying up the 101 from Gonzales on your way to San Francisco.

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Bryan Babcock's Revolutionary Farming is Making Some Fine Pinot

It's mighty easy to go along doing things the way people before you did things. After all, you figure they knew something. Plus if you do something differently and it doesn't work, everyone's going to say, "Why didn't you do it the way we all did?"

Add it all up and innovation doesn't come easy. But that hasn't stopped Bryan Babcock. Not to take all the thunder out of the story, but as the owner of Babcock Winery & Vineyards in Santa Barbara's premium Sta. Rita Hills appellation, he was on a James Beard Foundation list of Top Ten Small Production Winemakers in the World.

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Paul Lato: Good Story, Great Pinot Noir

Paul Lato is one winemaker whose own story is almost as good as his amazing wines. His highly acclaimed pinot noirs -- always rich and site-specific -- perhaps come from an approach that thinks of wine as food and not drink. Born in Poland, having worked as a sommelier in Toronto, he was drawn to California's Central Coast in 2002.

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A New Santa Barbara Highlight: Dave Potter's Potek Winery

Potek's label might seem inscrutable at first glance, but this is a wine that deserves contemplation. It turns out the lettering is based on traditional Romanian rug stitch patterning. The winery is named in honor of the winemaker's great grandfather, Berl Potek. The story is that his name seemed inscrutable to immigration agents at Ellis Island in the early 20th century, and thus they changed it to Benjamin Potter.

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Craft Distillers Push to Overturn Prohibition-Era Sales Laws

While Ian Cutler, the man behind Cutler's Artisan Spirits based in Santa Barbara's Funk Zone, started his business "to revive a long family history in the California spirits industry" -- his grandfather ran a moonshine operation in Oakdale -- he wishes history didn't hold such a strong grip on his current operation.

Want to read the rest then do so at KCET's Food Blog.