Sta. Rita Hills--20 Years of Excellence and Elegance

The Sta. Rita Hills Alliance threw itself a heck of a party this past weekend, as it's been 20 years SRH has been an official AVA--my how time flies when you're making great wine. But even better, it's 50 years since Richard Sanford and Michael Benedict planted the vineyard that bears their names, and fittingly, that's where the Wine and Fire festivities began on Thursday night.

I'm going to get a bit highfalutin here, so hang on, please. There's something holy about that mossy Sanford & Benedict barn. After all, it's not that often you get to stand where something began and by standing there totally feel history in all its effort and magic. Look at that wind whipping the banner in the photo, bringing the Pacific in thanks to Santa Barbara's famous transverse mountain ranges. That it's all beauteous scenery is just sort of bonus, but still. It makes me think of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, where a young and too-soon-dead Masaccio figured out perspective and then painted some stunning murals that kick-started the Renaissance. Michelangelo would stand in front of these master paintings for hours, tracking to crack the new code. And we sort of know what he ended up doing.

Well, Richard Sanford, fortunately still with us, is our Masaccio, and since several generations of filmmakers have stood in Sanford & Benedict Vineyard and made some of the best Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs California has ever tasted. Many of them were being poured at Thursday's event. Bryan Babcock (more on him in a bit) poured a Pinot from the AVA's first vintage, for instance. Twenty years meant its fruit had faded, of course it was a bit brickish, but the acid life made it clear what a wine it once was.

(And on a crucial side note, that's a cutout of Jim Clendenen, who's spirit infused the weekend. While his winery Au Bon Climat is in the Santa Maria Valley, as a force of nature, friend, teacher, there was no escaping his influence anywhere in the county, and yes, he did make S&B wines that are still sophisticated and delicious.)

Gray Hartley and Frank Ostini were both on hand, regaling the crowd with stories at the Hitching Post table, while taking us on a hop-scotching vertical journey through their S&B's, 2018, '16, '14, '01, 1999. As someone said, "Hey, we're drinking a wine from a different century." But it was all very much S&B, which in general features lip-smacking dark cherry to blackberry fruit, but then something special--a saline hint of that marine influence, some coastal herbal notes (no, not the recent coastal herb crop...), some floral notes. Always complex. An S&B Pinot, for me, is like when you meet someone you find intriguing and they only get more lovely the more you get to know them. 

Again, the oldest vintages were interesting to taste as how often do you get that chance?, but I'd still argue the sweet spot for the wines was eight or nine years, as that HP 2014 and Richard Longoria's 2013 were simply singing arias of Pinot magnificence that night. And it wasn't just the "old" masters of SB winemaking that knocked it out of the park--we also delighted in the very first Dragonette S&B Pinot 2019, a wee but big baby that's worth waiting out, the delicious, light on its feet Liquid Farm S&B Pinot 2018, and two wines from Tyler, who poured both S&B Pinot and a supremely elegant S&B Chardonnay.

And Full of Life Flatbreads kept is happily munching away as we sipped, with their usually fine flatbreads, but also some killer summer-in-a-cup gazpacho and corn served as "ribs." They take a bandsaw to the cobs and then roast them in the pizza oven, serving them slathered with a garlicky aoli. 

Friday we got to attend the sold-out Dinner Honoring the Pioneers of the SRH La Paulee, held at the Alma Rosa Winery. What a group of honorees that was--Wes Hagen was emcee, and he led a pre-dinner panel of  Bryan Babcock of Babcock Winery, Greg Brewer of Brewer-Clifton, Ken Brown of Ken Brown Wines,  Kathy Joseph of Fiddlehead Cellars, Rick Longoria of Longoria Wines, Bruce McGuire of Lafond Winery, Frank Ostini of Hitching Post, and Richard Sanford of Alma Rosa. Everyone reminisced abut Jim Clendenen to start, an emotional, but still often humorous beginning, for as Hagen said after, "We didn't hold a moment of silence because Jim would have hated that." Instead, Joseph recalled his kindness letting her make her second and third vintages at his production facility for free, Sanford charmingly called him a "rascal," and Ostini summed it up by saying, "He always offered us a challenge...Jim was as important as any winemaker in California."

The panel also concluded with the naming of the 2021 Vintner of the Year, Bryan Babcock. Presenting the award, Hagen recalled decades ago when Babcock pulled him aside and said, in contradiction to some press at the time, "This isn't the west side of the Santa Ynez Valley, it's the Santa Rita Hills." And certainly the evening was a proof of that.

For, as you might know, a La Paulee dinner has its roots in Burgundy as a harvest celebration. The feast featured winemakers bringing their best wine both to impress and to say thank you to their crucial community. Things began with lots of sparkling from Flying Goat, Kessler-Haak, Pali, Sanford, and Spear, with Aaron Walker's Sparkling Rosé of Pinot Noir a definite highlight (plus, I got at least this picture!).

Then throughout the meal it sort of came down to what winemakers were sitting nearby as to what wines you got to enjoy. Luckily, we were next to Greg Brewer who shared a wealth of big bottle brilliance, from a 2011 S-D Chardonnay to a 2009 Ampelos Vineyard Pinot. Again, Brewer's wines proved a decade is a sweet spot for SRH wines, so if you have some stashed, drink up. (If you didn't hang on to any, that makes plenty of sense, too.) The honorees/pioneers were pretty good about making the rounds, too, so you got a sip of Babcock, a splash of Longoria, a taste of Fiddlehead, plus Kathy Joseph's story about how she beat rock promoters to the word Lollapalooza. Plus, many fun folks to dine with. (Side note: Wine Alliance, make it clearer you want guests to bring wine too, or drop that maybe they should. And no, I'm not just whining because I did bring a bottle and most other guests didn't.....)

And, of course, there was food, plenty of it, courtesy of the team from the Alisal Ranch led by chef Anthony Endy. Buffet feeding is always a bit tricky, but they pulled it off with aplomb and a lot of red oak--it was a true, classic Santa Maria style feast. But that said, it's always hard to compete with all the wine buzz at an event like this.

At that point I was celebrated out, but there were more events--focused tastings on aging wines, sparkling, and a grand tasting on Saturday at La Purisima Mission. It's been an amazing 20 years for this AVA, and one can only look forward to the next 200. To leave you with one last Sanford & Benedict image, here's a view out the barn itself, with all apologies to John Ford's The Searchers for the framing.

Htiching the SB Wine Wagon to Some Amazing Pioneers

I'm going to try to tell the story of an event in a single bottle. Last Saturday (11/23) was the Third Annual Heritage Tasting held by the Pioneers of Santa Barbara County, a fantastically temperate fall day at Pico in Los Alamos. (Quick digression--do you want Chef Drew's praline bacon with some Lindquist syrah? Well, do you want the taste equivalent of a millionaire dollar lotto card on your tongue?) And sure, the winemaking starpower was there, with Richard Sanford and Fred Brander and Karen Steinwachs and Doug Margerum, for instance, along one row of tables so tight they couldn't swing a wine bottle without conking one of their compatriots.

And that's just the start of all the goodness that Morgan Clendenen, organizer, cheerleader, wrangler, planner, rogue viral video content maker, promoter, brought together for this spectacular shindig to remind us of them that got us here. You can go read the list at the website, but we're talking back in the days before our AVAs were subdividing like mops for Mickey Mouse to fight.

What anyone there most learned, however, is pioneers don't just get encased in amber. Nope, this group just keeps pioneering--messing with hops in their Sauv Blanc, making one of the first Amaros in the U.S., figuring out how to tame, but only enough, the wildness of an extreme vineyard site like Radian.

That pioneering knows enough, though, not to forget. (Wise winemakers watch paralleling the folly of the tyro creative writer who ignorantly declares, "I don't need to read what's come before--I am new!") So look above at what Frank Ostini and Gray Hartley are doing now--a Chenin Blanc. Frank is quick to point across the tasting at Louis Lucas pouring his own Lucas & Lewellen Wines, saying he was smart enough to hang on to some 40 year old Chenin vines amidst the more profitable chardonnay (because, you know, give the people what they white want). And now Hitching Post is making Forerunner (a lovely forwards and backwards cap-tipping name, no?), a snappy blast of pear, persimmon and a zip of lime zest. Pioneering indeed.

History in a Glass with Richard Sanford

If you may permit me to be fanciful for a moment, spending time with Richard Sanford, the first representative from Santa Barbara in the Vintners Hall of Fame at the CIA in Napa (that's the good CIA, btw), is like spending time with John the Baptist. At this point he's a holy figure people turn to for wisdom; he was the one who announced, before anyone was ready, "Prepare, ye, the way of the pinot" in what would become the famed Sta. Rita Hills AVA; and to be indelicate about, he's lost his head in business a few times. (I don't see how Salome plays into this already over-burdened metaphor.)

So it was a great honor to be invited to spend a media lunch at his El Jabalí Vineyard where he now makes Alma Rosa Wines with head winemaker Nick de Luca, who also joined us for the event. And the few hours made it very clear exactly why his wines are so delicious--because when you drink them, you drink history. "I'm approaching fifty years as a wine grower," he told us at one point, and then half-joked, "It scares me." But then he put his El Jabalí Vineyard into such a long context it seemed like a story torn from a James Michener novel. He told tales back to the land grants, but mostly from the 1970s on when he arrived in Santa Barbara County after his time in the Vietnam War and turned to the land and farming for refuge and peace. "In the 1970s you could still dry-farm garbanzos here and it would have made sense," he said, "but not anymore--the land's too expensive."

So instead you have the beautiful growth of these 37 year old vines.

Getting to chomp on some of the grapes you taste why the wine is so delicious--the flavor is all there waiting already. (The grapes were less than a week away from getting picked.) "The leaves are turning just at harvest," Sanford pointed out. "That's what they want. Chemically forced vineyards are too happy. Nature wants the plants to settle down."

He and de Luca were particularly proud of their shift to the Simonit & Sirch method of pruning, an Italian system that is much more precise and delicate than most typical U.S. pruning regimens. "All the pruning removes outer shoots, so we don't interrupt the sap flow," he explained. "The lifespan of vines is greater pruned this way. And with age, you get an elegance to the wines."

Of course, in addition to discovering this most delicate of pruning systems, Sanford has been farming organic before anyone thought to make it a marketing term. Part of that was a desire to be very kind to the land after the horrors of a war that thought napalm was a wise weapon, but it was Richard's wife Thekla who made the push. "It took two years, and we had to be innovative," is how Sanford describes the process, telling a story of the vineyard crew blasting bugs off the vines with flames, not poison, during one infestation.

Add it all up, and de Luca points out, "When we have healthy grapes, we can use little to no sulfur." He quickly insisted, "But we're not making natural wine. It all comes down to hygiene. If I knew I was going to have a major surgery, I'd want it on the floor of winery."

Just to focus on two of the enlightening wines shared with us that afternoon, I'd like to write about the 2011 and 2016 El Jabalí pinots. The older wine was aging well under screwcap, for as Sanford insisted, "It's a wine of the people." He delighted in the "forest floor that develops with age" and the translucent color, citing Michael Broadbent telling him, "Richard, you sohuld be able to read a newspaper through a good Burgundy." Turns out the news you can read through it is a review praising its grace and still plenty of fruit seven years after release. Sanford accurately said, "There's a lyrical quality to these wines that lasts," and then he slowly drew his hands apart to emphasize his point. Meanwhile the wine slowly set out taste buds at attention.

The just released 2016, on the other hand, was ridiculously delicious given its youth. de Luca said El Jabalí was always their most tannic wine, so they massaged it with oak. He shared a line from a French friend about barrel-aging, "If the wine is so good, why are you afraid?" Alma Rosa isn't, so this pinot gets up to 50% new French oak, but it's integrated well, helping with structure but not tasting like you've bit a barrel in the least.

Oh, and if you're going to be drinking wine this good, you better have suitable food to match. Fortunately the lunch was catered by First & Oak, with Executive Chef JJ Guerrero himself making our meal. Here's the main, a breast of duck (my guess would be sous vide first, then pan-roasted?), with English peas, charred romaine filled with mustard seed so it seemed to be a whole new plant, pearl onion, gnocchi, and a mint velouté (you know, one of the mother sauces).

We're pretty lucky to live where we do, you know.

The Wild, Wide World of WOPN

Illustrating a story about a 2018 World of Pinot Noir Grand Tasting (that's their adjective, and it isn't just puffery with more than 150 producers usually pouring at least two wines each...see, it takes a grand amount of even parenthetical words to describe the grandiosity) with a single bottle of wine might seem perverse, but in this case I promise it isn't. There's my first taste of a very long day (this will actually be two blog posts, it's that long a day into night) last Friday at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara, and I choose it specifically because its winemaker was sitting next to me. That would be Karen Steinwachs, who people probably know better from Buttonwood, but then she's got this even smaller designer label to make pinot and chardonnay, and she just happens to be on WOPN's Board of Directors, too. That mostly means she does a lot of work and can talk to the press and say clever things (very much so--she's one of our wittier winemakers).

Turns out the media room makes you very glad you're media; call me fake news all you want, I'll just be over here pouring myself another sample of delicious pinot. Like Seagrape's 2015 Jump Up, a perfect expression of the magic of the Sta. Rita Hills--both light on the balls of its feet and a bit ballsy, too--think Gene Kelly jammed into a bottle. Sure there's cherry, spice, pomegranate, but it's how every tasty bit adds up to a greater whole that makes the wine so lovely.

And that's the best way to think about the somewhat daunting event. You enter into Bacara ballrooms that look as big as a football field, and while some of that is tables of food and cheese and lots of Fiji water (hello plastic, goodbye sustainability), most of it is producers pouring wines and stories. You might walk in just as Santa Barbara legend Richard Sanford walks in, and you feel all historical--he spotted greatness here (well, not at the Bacara--you know what I mean) before nearly anyone. So you go drink at the Alma Rosa table, and he tells you "It's fun again, George," as he's the kind of man who remembers your name and uses it, and times better be jolly as the wines are joyous, especially the 2015 Barrel Select he shares that's blueberry, blackberry, violet, but more than anything, delicate.

But there's so much to taste there's no good way to list all my notes, not even the highlights, like Greg Brewer pouring a 2007 Ampelos Vineyard pinot (yum!) as he discusses the 10-20 year out sweet spot he believes our local pinots find, using a metaphor of flowers that when you get them they aren't quite open and full yet, and then dead the very next day, no, he sees Brewer-Clifton wines opening and opening, growing into their beautiful bloom.

And, of course, WOPN's not just local wines, because why buy the cow when the SYV's a car-ride away? (I think I mixed a bad metaphor there.) No, you can try a producer like Nimrod from Hungary, where the volcanic soil leads to a more minerally wine, and perhaps a better cuvee with only 20% pinot, but mostly built on kekfrankos, and I'm not trying to be wise to say that's just Hungarian for Blaufränkisch, but now you can see how far from just pinot we are, let alone Santa Barbara. 

Of course you've got people like Josh Klapper from Timbre sharing a hard cider (very refreshing, especially amidst all the cherry/berry bursts elsewhere), and tables pouring regions/AVAs for you--Morgen McLaughlin was back in town repping Willamette Valley and their typical Oregon earthy-shroomy notes, for example--and soon you run into people you know, and people you just know as you've met them at another table, and everything is a bright bow of delight. 

That's what a grand tasting can do for you--prove pinot is doing very well and you can do better if you drink enough of it.

Richard Sanford and a Living History of Santa Barbara Wine

Of the 44 people enshrined in the Vintners Hall of Fame (housed in the Culinary Institute of America in Napa), only one has made his career in Santa Barbara. That man is Richard Sanford, who figured out years before people were even sure grapes could grow well in what would become the Sta. Rita Hills, that the region would be the perfect spot for pinot noir. "I've been out proselytizing for forty years," Sanford, director of winemaking at Alma Rosa, says. "I always knew Santa Barbara would be the wine area for Los Angeles just as Napa and Sonoma are for the Bay Area. But these kinds of things take generations -- so much of this is word-of-mouth."

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

A Lot to Say about Chardonnay

While the AVA of Sta. Rita Hills might only be a decade recognized, it seems like a center of the winemaking world when longtime giants Ken Brown and Richard Sanford are sitting next to each other on a panel about chardonnay from the area. Brown, Zaca Mesa's first winemaker in 1977, and founder of Byron Wines (which he sold to Mondavi), is talking about one of the AVA's newest vineyards, Rita's Peak. Sanford, planter of the ur-area vineyard Sanford Benedict in 1971 and now owner of Alma Rosa, is dropping tidbits like "it was called pinot chardonnay at that time" and extolling the virtues of his Rancho El Jabali. (Not surprisingly their wines, to my palate, are the two best of a very high quality tasting.)

Want to read the rest then do so at the KCET blog.