Women Winemakers Wow at Community Celebration

Community is too often a bullshit word, cheaply thrown about to either make people work harder than they are getting paid to work feel better about their crummy jobs or to convince consumers what they're buying is somehow blessed with kindness and not just transactional.

And then there's the rare event like the Sixth Annual Women Winemakers Celebration held on Sunday, March 12 at Mattei's Tavern, Auberge Resorts Collection (that's not as bad as Francis Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, at least). It really felt special, over 30 Santa Barbara county women winemakers, and 13 culinary participants, and women photographers and musicians and florists and press agents having fun, exhibiting terrific taste and talent, and welcoming all. Like magic the event even had blue skies in this sodden excuse for a Southern California winter that those of us who drove from the ocean side of the mountains figured was just more of the drizzly same.

In her moment before the attentive crowd co-organizer Karen Steinwachs of the terrific Seagrape Cellars said she was spurred into action by Patricia Arquette's call-to-arms Oscar speech in 2015 (this year's fest also happened to be on Oscars Day), and she realized "there are more women winemakers here than anywhere in the world--why not play that card?" Six years in Steinwachs and her team certainly have the play down perfectly, even if she jibed, "Trying to manage sold-out event is much more difficult than selling an event in the first place." 

That sell-out was capped at a number that meant plenty of room to move, especially in the gorgeous outdoor grounds at the back of Mattei's (although it's crucial us tall folks duck heading under the scenic, yet low-beamed, water tower). The food-to-drink mix was as smartly designed and thoughtfully ratio-ed as the Santa Barbara Food + Wine Festival at the Natural History Museum back in the days when the wise Meridith Moore ran that delightful event. (And not surprisingly, she was brought in to help organize this one this year.)

The community reached across winemaker generations, with longtime stalwarts like Kathy Joseph of Fiddlehead and Lane Tanner of Lumen pouring alongside names new to me (at least) like Anna Clifford of Final Girl Wines and Alice Anderson of âmevive. And then a long list of some of our regions best winemakers no matter gender: Alison Thomson of Lepiane, Jessica Gasca of Story of Soil, Angela Osborne of A Tribute to Grace (Gasca and Osborne were at the same inspiring table, even), Amy Christine of Holus Bolus and The Joy Fantastic, Rachel DeAscentiis of Say When, Anna deLaski of Solminer. The list could go on and on. Simply put--if there's a wine you like locally, the odds are good a woman made it.

The utter creativity on display also impressed. Sure, you could have a special SRH Pinot at many a table, but then there was the refreshing zest of Dreamcôte's Prickly Pear Hard Apple Cider, or the winningly floral Grüner Veltliner from Camins 2 Dreams, or a tantalizing Sparkling Rosé Méthode Champenoise, in half bottles, of all impractical things as sparkling is just that, from Future Perfect.

Future Perfect's logo also connected to the 2023 beneficiary of this non-profit event, The Rainbow House, the first LGBTQIA+ community resource center in the Santa Ynez Valley. Inc. Their hope is to create a refuge for the queer community that stands as a beacon of acceptance and peace.

The Mattei's team at work on their two dishes--I only ended up trying the delicious duck wonton-y item on the left, alas. And, alas here I didn't write nearly enough about the delicious food, like Melissa Scrymgeour's gumbo z'herbes and black eyed peas (a tribute to Nawlin's great Leah Chase), and Erica Velasquez's yellowtail "hamachi" sashimi gorgeously plated, and Jessica Foster's ever-exceptional confections, and Theo Stephan's olive oil blood orange cake. 

Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann admitting that at least on this day she had a cushy job.

Emmy Fjerstad of Forsu Wines, her business so small it doesn't even have a website.

Petit Verdot, Dolcetto, and more at Final Girl.

And then as final evidence of community, yep that's Alecia Moore of Two Wolves doing the palms up in the black t-shirt in the Barn (sounds like a Clue guess!). You might know her better as Pink, or should I type P!nk, selling out a SoFi Stadium near you soon. But for the day she praised her team, poured well-crafted wine, chatted (her table did have the longest line all afternoon, even if everyone was cool about it and didn't get all selfie-demanding or anything, so go SYV!), and then won the raffle for the Estrogen Collection of over 50 bottles of women-made wine. 

The afternoon couldn't have been a more powerful celebration of International Women's Day.

WOPN Wine Winds Back Time

It's not every day I swirl and sniff a wine and almost cry. But it's not every day I get to taste a 1997 Foxen Julia's Vineyard, and suddenly get sensorily sucked back a couple of decades into my life when I was a much younger man just beginning to learn and love Santa Barbara wines. Julia's Vineyard was one of the first vineyard designates I can recall once I moved out to California in 1994 (beyond the venerable Bien Nacido, of course), and something about that lovely enveloping barbecue+spice+deep fruit nose erased years for me today at a Julia's Vineyard Seminar and Luncheon at the Wine Cask today as an estimable overture to World of Pinot Noir.

Of course it doesn't hurt to have Julia herself at the lunch tasting: The vineyard was planted in 1988 when she was 6 months old. (And yes, Katherine's Vineyard, famed for its chardonnay, is named after Julia's sister.) It's owned by Jackson Family Wines, the ninth-largest wine enterprise in the United States that owns 55 wineries globally (including Brewer-Clifton, Byron, Cambria, Nielson locally).

But despite all that BIG, they certainly care about small, and about relationships. For the event featured five wineries/winemakers who have been making beautiful juice from Julia's grapes for decades now: Cambria (as they get to play with the whole vineyard), plus Lumen/Lane Tanner, Byron, Hitching Post, and Foxen. MC master sommelier Michael Jordan (no relation to any other famous MJs) asserted that he not only "had a flag and a drum for the Santa Maria Valley," citing its 212 days of hang time for pinot grapes, more than anywhere in the world, but also, "if there was an American Grand Cru designation, Julia's would be it."

Surely there's nothing better than tasting through bottlings of this vineyard from 1996 to a 2018 Lumen barrel sample that Lane Tanner cleverly compared to tasting cookie dough, as we had to imagine what it would be like after it had time to "bake," so to speak. (It's going to be a scrumptious cookie.) As she said about Julia's in general, "There's always a smokiness...I always imagine that bar you go into late at night and there's a gorgeous woman at the end of the bar and you don't know if you should go there....."

Fanciful, sure, but it's a vineyard that leads to wine that leads to such heady thoughts, something to dream on. For as Jordan put it, "We like to over-complicate ans over-simplify at the same time, not just as sommeliers--it's the human condition." A wine as profound as one from Julia's let's you find a just right space, with flavors expansive yet precise, with structure exact and elastic.

(The panel, from l-r: Michael Jordan, Lane Tanner, Will Henry, Jonathan Nagy, Frank Ostini, Bill Wathen, Dick Dore, Gray Hartley, Julia Jackson, Jill Russell.)

A Wide Wide World of Pinot and More

(photo credit: Jeremy Ball)

There's no such thing as a World of Pinot Noir in Santa Barbara without the two gentlemen in the photo above, so let's start with them, which is pretty much what I did Friday at WOPN since there they were as I entered the ballroom at the Bacara. How can you not want to visit Gray Hartley and Frank Ostini from Hitching Post? Yeah, Yeah, movie, blah blah blah. We're talking guys who make killer juice and seem to enjoy it more than practically anyone and therefore you better too. They were kindly pairing up 2007s and 2014s of Julia's, Highliner, and Bien Nacido, and what we quickly learned was SB pinot does age well (we learned this again when Rick Longoria poured his 2013 and 2008 Fe Ciega).

OK, so the danger with any review of a WOPN weekend is diving so quickly into the details you forget the broad strokes, plus, simply put, so much great wine! I'm not going to write about every luscious swirl and sip, and frankly I admitted early on Friday in my notes "you're going to run out of adjectives for lovely, George," and late on Friday I wrote, after inhaling deep on a Brewer-Clifton 2008 Sta. Rita Hills, "I want to smell like this--everyone would love me!" That was Friday. I was back Saturday too, and at that point was reduced to pleasured grunting, practically.

One important thing to stress first: if you didn't realize it, we live in a golden age of pinot noir. First, cause people know what they're doing with it now, even in California where we've only had decades and not centuries like those lucky French to practice. But you can even get fascinating stuff from Spain (try Alta Pavina) or Austria (Weingut Wieninger). Second, because the world is one big market until someone messes that up (no tariffs, please). Third, who knows where our climate goes in a world where the EPA is run by someone who doesn't believe in the EPA? (I'm looking forward to that first atheist pope.)

 

 This year's WOPN was also a stunning showcase for what people are doing with the fruit from Gap's Crown on the Sonoma Coast. Expression, Guarachi, Lutum, Ram's Gate, Black Kite, Saxon Brown--the brilliant wines just kept coming from this spot that hits some magic warm enough yet sea-breeze-cooled calculus. It's never really cheap but it's always luscious.

Then there's these lessons, too--perhaps we're supposed to be looking at chardonnay from Santa Barbara anyway. The folks who were semi-sneaking pours of it delighted (well, Sonoma's Hirsch did too), and part of that was just the break from more cherry and berry; think of the chard as palate cleanser, if better than any sorbet. But winemaker Matt Dees from The Hilt insisted, "The chardonnay is so much better," and he could be right. 

Or it could be all the wine is better in so many fine hands, from old-timers like Lane Tanner, pouring a 1991 Lane Tanner pinot that still held some fruit and fascinating graphite, to Square Peg, dryfarming pinot in Sonoma in the middle of a zinfandel vineyard. Because then there's even something like Dolin's non-WOPN pour, The Blue Note, a Bordeaux blend...from the hills above Malibu. Like I said, it's a wonderful, unbelievable world.

Lumen Lights the Pinot Way

So far in our run of stories, we've talked about folks who've been around for awhile, like the Hitching Post, and folks coming to World of Pinot Noir for the first time, like Balletto. And then there's a winery like Lumen, which is new (2012 is yesterday in the world of wine, and just imagine what the French might say), but the project of two wine veterans, Will Henry, who had 20 years of distro experience with his family's The Henry Group, and esteemed winemaker Lane Tanner, whose first vintage in the area was 1981 when she was oenologist for Firestone. She later made some of the region's best Pinots under her own label until she retired it in 2009.

"Being a newer winery certainly has its challenges," Henry admits. "For one, we have to make a name for ourselves in the marketplace, and we have done so by keeping our prices very low--which isn’t exactly easy in terms of getting a return on our money." And he does mean low--it's hard to get a Pinot this good at $29, or a Chard that good at $25. "Lane thinks I’m nuts for selling our wines for what we do, but I am more interested in long-term success than short-term gain. And I can’t tell you how much I learn from and SB vet like Lane--the education is invaluable. Regardless I think we are poised for great things ahead, and that we are part of a group of wineries that will certainly make big waves in the world of Pinot."

Henry doesn't think Lumen is alone with the wave-making, either. "I love making wine in a region that is on the cusp of becoming something much bigger than it currently is," he enthuses. "Even though we have had some pioneers (like my partner) making killer Pinot here for decades, Santa Barbara County has just in the past few years become more widely recognized as a producer of some of the world’s best wines. And unlike Napa, we aren’t selling an image--it’s all about what gets into the bottle. We have such an amazing group of winemakers here that are utterly dedicated to the craft, and are more focused on the quality of wine they produce than building monuments to their egos. SBC is the real deal, and I’m proud to be part of it."

It doesn't hurt he gets to work with a master like Tanner, who made food-friendly non-monster wines even before it had become cool to do so. No ego, indeed. "The message I most want to impart about Lumen Pinot is that it is real," Henry says. "This wine is not manipulated in any way. We source the very best fruit from cool-climate vineyards and make an extremely honest bottle of wine out of it. Lane’s winemaking abilities are truly phenomenal, and she has one of the most developed noses (yes, the one on her face) of any winemaker I have ever worked with. Her nose trumps any kind of lab analysis, so when we run into challenges in winemaking, we are usually way ahead of any problems that might arise. Our wines are super-clean, and extraordinarily well-balanced, due to Lane’s amazing winemaking ability. They also age extremely well."

Since Lumen is small and young, their table at Friday's tasting won't be huge. "We currently have only two Pinot Noir’s on the market--our Santa Barbara County, and our Sierra Madre Vineyard--and those are what we will be pouring," Henry explains. "The SBC is a great representation of Santa Maria Valley, where we source all of our Pinot fruit. We take from three vineyards there, and it is a fantastic (and affordable) cool-climate wine. The Sierra Madre Vineyard represents the apex of what Lane and I can produce. It has, over the past three decades, become Lane’s favorite vineyard, because the wines that it yields are the prettiest, most complex and interesting, year in, year out. This bottle contains a barrel selection from Sierra Madre Vineyard, from the best vintage of the decade so far (2013), and WOPN is a unique opportunity to taste it. More single vineyard Pinot’s are online for next year, though."

Even though Henry is also in the midst of another big project, opening up a restaurant, Pico, in Los Alamos, that doesn't dim his excitement for World of Pinot Noir. "There is a reason so many people are fanatical about this grape," he says. "It produces the most seductive wines in the world, and can have so many different personalities. I also love seeing how our little wine region of Santa Barbara County has become an important player in the world of wine, especially concerning this varietal. We truly are producing some of the best Pinots on the planet right here in our backyard."

Lumen Lights the Wine Way

Despite what a great story it would make, Lumen Wines did not come about when Will Henry flashed his surfer's six-pack abs at Lane Tanner. "Quite honestly, he wasn't a shirt-taker-offer until later in the relationship," Tanner admits. But then she jokes, "But one day I said to him, 'That work you're doing with the barrels looks like it's really hot, maybe you should take your shirt off.' Once he did, you couldn't get him to keep it on."

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