How the Ocean Influences MarBeso Wine

Colin McNany’s Buellton-Based Brand Showcases the Seasides of Santa Barbara

By Matt Kettmann Fri May 31, 2024 | 12:24pm

Kisses from the sea have long been putting fuel in Colin McNany’s tank, from his Palos Verdes childhood to his college days in Santa Cruz to his current winemaking adventure in Santa Barbara County.

“Everywhere I’ve traveled in my life, it’s always about the ocean,” said McNany, whose work and play have taken him from Australia’s Margaret River to Mallorca in the Mediterranean. “We hang out at the sea, and then gravitate toward the vineyards in the hills. That’s where I found the love for cool-climate varieties.”

As the proprietor of MarBeso Wine — which translates to “sea kiss” in Spanish — McNany proudly proclaims on each bottle how far those grapes were grown from the coastline: 12.6 miles for his pinot noir from Our Lady of Guadalupe Vineyard near Lompoc, for instance, or 14.8 miles for his Ascona Vineyard pinot, which is grown on peaks between San Jose and Año Nuevo. He emphasizes the freshness of those grapes by picking at lower sugars, not messing with them in the cellar (native yeasts, neutral wood, etc.), and releasing them quickly.

The consistent results, from the pinots and chardonnays to darker reds and wackier white blends, are exhilarating wines of electric acidity, farm-fresh fruit, and pleasurable culpability. MarBesos are the kind of wines that somehow empty much faster than they should, yet leave you feeling energized and alive rather than warmed and weighted.

“The concept is to taste sense-of-place rather than winemaking,” said McNany of his hands-off approach. “When you’re sourcing high-end fruit, the idea is to let the vineyard speak rather than the winemaker.”

His philosophies on wine and life were largely shaped by his studies in agroecology at UC Santa Cruz, where he was taught both age-old and cutting-edge concepts about farming in tune with nature. One of his professors was agroecology pioneer Steve Gliessman, who owns the dry-farmed Condor’s Hope Vineyard in the Cuyama Valley with his wife, Robbie Jaffe. McNany became their winemaker 15 vintages ago, opening his eyes to the breadth of Santa Barbara County’s landscape, which stretches from chilly sea to the scorching high desert.

Credit: Courtesy

But the Santa Cruz Mountains were his first fascination out of college, when he got right into planting vineyards for Byington Winery in 2006. “I was really enchanted by the vineyards in the sky there, at 3,000 feet in elevation, surrounded by redwoods,” said McNany. “It’s a pretty special spot to grow fruit.”

He soon became more interested in what happened to the grapes after they came off the vine. “I realized there was more fun to be had in the winery for a lot of different reasons,” he explained.

Meanwhile, he was tasting wine with the region’s luminaires, like Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard and Ryan Beauregard, whose father planted much of the appellation. “I found out fundamentally that I had a good palate,” said McNany. “That skyrocketed me to take this tool of winemaking and travel abroad.”

Harvests in New Zealand and Australia and ensuing trips to Chile, France, Portugal, and Spain opened his mind further. “Wine is just an incredible time capsule for art and history and food and geography,” said McNany, who’d later serve on Wine & Spirits magazine’s tasting panel for a half-dozen years. “It’s human culture in a bottle.”
In 2009, he settled in for the long-haul with La Honda Winery, a Redwood City–based brand that planted backyard vineyards for nouveau riche venture capitalists and then made those grapes into wine. “In 10 years, we installed 150 vineyards,” said McNany, who learned how to manage tiny-lot fermentations and large-lot blends. “We were basically Silicon Valley’s winery.”

After a decade, he was ready for a change. “That structured environment was not necessarily where I wanted to be in the wine industry,” he said. “I wanted to chase quality. I wanted to climb the ladder even further.”

With his wife, Hannah — they met way back at Byington when she was catering a gig — and newborn daughter, McNany moved back south to help his mom manage a portfolio of apartments, dealing with vacancies, replacing floorboards, and putting up drywall. His mom had been alone since McNany’s dad died in 2012, and the timing of the young family’s move was fortuitous, as the pandemic soon took hold. “It was a blessing in disguise that we were all down there together,” he said.

He also had time to think. “I had a deeper conversation with myself,” recalled McNany, who was debating whether to leave wine for good. “This is all I’ve done. This is all I’ve known. If I don’t try to do it myself with my own brand and show the world what I’m capable of, I’ll have that question of ‘What if?’ in the back of my mind my whole life. That’s when I said, ‘Let’s do this.’”

His father, who’d been a bond trader, had left Colin a small inheritance, so the son decided to put that money to work. “Why don’t I invest in myself? I believe I can outperform the market,” he thought. “Investing in yourself is a critical skill to learn, as scary as it can be financially.”

MarBeso was born during the 2019 vintage in the Buellton warehouse space formerly occupied by Bonaccorsi Wine Company. The project remains small at about 1,000 cases (plus 600 for Condor’s Hope), but is steadily growing. McNany frequently hosts appointment-only tastings, which is his primary sales tool, though is likely to make a couple larger-lot wines for distribution this coming harvest. “We’re trying to teach people to take the pretentiousness out of wine,” he said of how he presents wines like the Magic Hour, an ever-changing, sometimes orange-ish, sometimes pink-ish blend of various grapes. “Wine is supposed to be fun and delicious.”

He just finished renovating a 150-year-old farmhouse in Los Alamos this summer, so that his family — now including a baby boy — could finally move here full-time. With that, the future seems strategically set for MarBeso and the McNanys.

“The wine industry is a pretty cool way to grow up,” believes McNany. “Down in L.A., it was like death by Tesla. Life moves so fast down there, it’s impossible to slow down. Coming here, we can slow down and enjoy these years. That is a key piece of the family winery style.”

See marbesowine.com.

The Cuyama Buckhorn is hosting a winemaker dinner featuring the coastal wines of MarBeso and the high-desert wines of Condor’s Hope on June 15, pairing Colin McNany’s wines with the cuisine of Chef Hugo Vera. See cuyamabuckhorn.com/happenings or click here to reserve seats.