Full Belly Files | Six Central Coast Wineries in 24 Hours: Part One

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It’s taken more than a decade of experience, but I finally have a handle on how to make my wine and food reporting trips worthwhile for both my needs as a journalist/father and the desires of the people who’ve requested my attention.

To justify the time spent away from my family (which is disruptive) and writing (which is directly related to income), as well as the uncovered expenses I accrue (which is mostly just gas, as I tend to be well-fed and housed for free), I must schedule these trips as efficiently as possible, with multiple back-to-back visits.

That goes for both day excursions to nearby spots like the Santa Ynez Valley, where I usually line up at least two appointments per visit; and even more critically for overnight trips to Paso Robles or Temecula, where I usually need three or more appointments per day to make the drive. (The formula changes a bit when I’m being paid to speak somewhere, but not much.)  

To satisfy the expectations of those who invite me into their wineries and, sometimes, their homes, I try to spend meaningful time with them, and not just blast through in a cursory half-hour tasting session. I’ve learned to pace myself, leave time for delays and correspondence about other work, and ensure that, as much as possible, I’m neither in a rush nor obscenely tardy at any spot. The folks I visit often thank me for spending two hours or so with them, which makes this strategy all the more worth it. (I tend to make a lot of friends along the way as well.)

With that in mind, perhaps it doesn’t sound so crazy to have recently visited six wineries from the Santa Maria Valley into the S.L.O. Coast and up to Paso Robles in less than 24 waking hours? Here’s the first three wineries I visited (Cambria, Outward, and Chronic), and the last three will come next week (Nenow, Linne Calodo, Lopai).

CAMBRIA WINERY: Winemakers like Jill Russell, who’s been running the show at Cambria Winery for seven years, are getting a little tired of reading the recent spate of headlines (including my own) about the wine industry’s struggles.

When she looks out across Cambria’s 1,500 acres of Santa Maria Valley vineyards, all she sees is a steady investment in the future. There are the 250,000 vines that Jackson Family Wines (JFW) — for which Cambria is a flagship brand — just planted, for instance, and there’s a multimillion-dollar winery roof extension project that just finished to shade workers and grapes during harvest.  

The replanting projects are replacing many of the property’s oldest vines, planted in 1970. “Ten years ago, we fought to keep them in the ground,” said Russell, alluding to the allure of these old vines. “They always thrived in producing both quantity and quality. The quality is still beautiful,” she assured, but the quantity went way down in recent years. That’s due in part to the regional rise of grapevine disease known as “leaf roll three,” which hits pinot noir harder than chardonnay.

Based on the warming climate, they’re opting for more of the pinot noir clones 2A and 23 and heritage selections like Swan and Calera, which handle heat better than 667 and other Dijon clones. They’re also reorienting the direction of vineyard rows. For many years, north to south rows were used to mitigate the steadily blowing winds. Now they’re planting east-west blocks to embrace that cool breeze as an antidote to heat waves.

They’re also exploring other grapes. “We’re doing an aromatic white garden,” said Russell with a big smile. There’s now a small lot of viognier, grenache blanc, and chenin blanc, which is rising in popularity for good reason across the Central Coast. Once a workhorse grape used in every white blend, winemakers are realizing that chenin can make exciting single-variety wines while still serving as a shapeshifting, racy-to-rich blender needed to fill holes in other whites.

The Cambria story always comes back to chardonnay, of which we tasted a half-dozen or so over a Lucky Hen Larder lunch with Russell’s colleagues Anna Clifford (who’s the Jackson Family’s facility winemaker here, and also behind Final Girl Wines) and Lydia Richards, JFW’s PR manager.

Russell said that they’ve isolated chardonnay cuttings from the hillside Camelot block and are propagating them for future plantings. Those vines were originally Clone 4, a k a the heritage Wente clone. But as Russell explained, “It’s kinda turned into its own thing.”

Don’t be surprised if the Camelot Clone of chardonnay carries this vineyard and others into the next generation.

OUTWARD WINES: Natalie Siddique and Ryan Pace of Outward Wines, the climbing couple you may remember from this story last year, are awash in the incredibly exhilarating and often frustrating emotional waves that come with building your own business from scratch.

On the exhilarating front, they just moved into their own winery in a Grover Beach warehouse, which was formerly used by Rabobank for storing armored cars and, perhaps auspiciously, money bags. They converted the space themselves, installing drains, insulation, and so forth just in time for last year’s harvest.

“Luckily, 2023 was a late vintage,” said Pace. “We were still buying equipment and modifying shit to make it work right up until harvest.”

Then they turned their attention to making the space comfortable, getting wall-to-wall mural painted with their favorite places (Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Channel Islands, etc.), building a kitchen, and erecting a mezzanine that serves as an office and storage. “It’s all been learning by doing,” said Siddique. “And lots of tools borrowed from very good friends.”

One of those new friends is Jeff Root, the owner of Jan’s Place in San Luis Obispo, a 24-person-capacity wine bar where the vinyl spins constantly. He tricked out their kitchen with a turntable and sound system, and they’ll be hosting occasional record parties there, called “Jan’s Place presents Outward Sound.”

The location, a half-mile from the shoreline and in between vineyards that they source from Santa Barbara to the S.L.O. Coast, already seems ideal for winemaking. “Even when S.L.O. is in the 80s, here it’s 60 degrees or less,” said Siddique. “We can roll up the doors in the morning and it’s just cool marine air.”

The neighboring businesses in this blue-collar, seaside warehouse district include a number of cannabis operations, as this area was supposed to be Grover Beach’s “Green Zone.” (Like early legal many weed business dreams, that hasn’t exactly happened.) There’s also Topco, which conveniently makes racks for wine barrels, and Hotlix, the candy company that puts scorpions in lollipops.

Breaking in a new space for a winemaking style that relies on native yeast can be tricky, as there isn’t much ambient yeast on-site. Their first fermentation did take a week to start last fall, but then everything took off just fine.

As for the frustrations, many were wrapped up in that winery development, as they endured the usual time-consuming journey of dealing with permits, deliveries, contractors, and so forth. But they’re also facing a unique challenge that many emerging wineries face: losing access to vineyards where they’ve spent efforts establishing site-specific bottlings. “We put a lot of effort to build these wines and then get booted,” said Pace.

They’re addressing that by picking up contracts on small, backyard vineyards that they can control for the long term, including one in nearby Arroyo Grande that grows chardonnay and another in Santa Ynez Valley that grows sangiovese. And they’ve been doing that the whole time with the syrah vineyard that sits in the Solvang backyard of Ryan’s dad, Randy Pace.

The most exhilarating news of all may be that they hope to soon plant a one-acre vineyard in their own backyard, below the home they just bought with Pace’s mom. Located on a hilltop outside of Arroyo Grande, with epic, nearly 360-degree views from the Guadalupe Dunes to the Edna Valley, the property features a south-facing slope that fans out across already cleared land chock full of fossilized scallop shells and other unique rocks.

“Check this out,” Pace said as he showed me one of those fossils. “These are everywhere out there.”

They’d only moved into the house a couple weeks before when I visited, and they were leaving for Europe the next day. But they still invited me to crash in the spare bedroom and prepared a tasty dinner of roasted salmon, a root vegetable tian, and cherry galette. Along with a couple other friends, we were joined by Jeff Root of Jan’s Place as well, and spent hours talking about wine, music, and much more. It was suddenly midnight.

When I awoke, Pace and Siddique were already gone, so I helped myself to some coffee and avocado toast, took in the views of their vineyard-to-be one more time, and hit the road for my next stop in Paso Robles, trying hard to stay on schedule.

CHRONIC CELLARS: [Remember how I said that I don’t like scheduling short visits anymore? Well, sometimes I do try to jam one in at the last minute when the opportunity arises, like if a winemaker emails you about something else but has an open slot. That’s what happened here in this hour-long visit, but it all worked out!]

Kip Lorenzetti was literally selling toilets before he got into the wine business. The Yreka-raised, UCSB-educated (he worked at Freebirds!) winemaker for Chronic Cellars — where he took the reins from cofounder Josh Beckett in 2019 — was a plumbing wholesale rep when a bottle of Francis Ford Coppola Ivory Label cabernet flipped his lid.

A cousin was friends with longtime Baileyana winemaker Rob Takigawa, so he worked the 2010 harvest with Orcutt Road Cellars and changed careers. Before more recent gigs at Terravant in Buellton and Wild Horse in Templeton, he endured almost four years making massive blends for Bronco Wine Company in the Central Valley company town of Ceres.

“You’re making the same picture with different colors all the time,” said Lorenzetti of keeping those big-batch Bronco wines consistent each vintage. Life there wasn’t so exciting, and if you get Kip talking, his stories of residing in a bad part of Turlock sound like a stand-up routine.

At Chronic, he’s in charge of making about 30,000 cases of five different wines for the broad market, which are all priced in the $15 to $25 range. Their syrah-led Sofa King Bueno blend is still my favorite wine name ever, but I’m continually impressed by the flavors and textures that this brand can get into wines at that price.  

That’s the big job, but Lorenzetti may spend more time on the smaller batch wines for their Paso Robles tasting room visitors and wine club members. That lineup — including their only white, a chalky Rhône blend called Stone Fox, and the tempranillo-powered Love Insects, get it? — includes 16 different wines but only amounts to 3,500 cases.

Keeping all of those wines consistent in both quality and relative value follows the same formula that Josh and Jake Beckett — the son of the founders of Peachy Canyon, where they both now work again — established when they launched the brand in 2004. “It’s all about finding great sites and forming really good relationships,” said Lorenzetti.

The most eye-opening part of my visit — other than his insight that alicante bouschet does indeed taste like chicory — was learning about Chronic’s “Midnight Maker” line of wines. In between the free run juice part of the grape processing, when the released liquids flow right off the grapes, and the pressing part, when they’re squeezed out, Lorenzetti leaves them overnight in the tank for 12 hours and collects everything that bleeds off. It takes six tons of this to result in one barrel, but don’t worry, all that before and after juice is used too.

“This is how Grange is made,” he said of the famous Australian wine made by Penfold’s. The result is an intense, dark but not overly extracted wine with layered tannins. “It doesn’t always work,” said Lorenzeti. “It’s grape-specific and site-specific.”

When it does work? “They’re gonna age a long time,” he promised. And they’re only $75.

Coming next week: visits to Nenow Family Wines, Linne Calodo, and Lopai Cellars, with another stay at Inn Paradiso.

Last Chance for STARS of Pinot Noir

A truly upscale gathering of pinot noir producers goes down next Thursday down in West Hollywood at Tesse Restaurant, where the STARS of Pinot Noir event takes over on July 18 from 6 to 9:30 p.m. I’m running the panel that starts promptly at 6 p.m., which comes with dinner, and then I’ll be tasting my way through about 40 tables of highly curated wines from all over the West Coast, with a bit of Burgundy and New Zealand tossed in as well.

The event is the nearly 20-year-old brainchild of wine educator Ian Blackburn. To get a better understanding of what it’s all about, and what he’s all about, I interviewed him for this Q&A.

Check it out, and then buy tickets for the event here. If you’re going VIP or early access tickets, use FRIENDSofMATT to get $20 off per ticket. You can thank me there!

From Our Table

Here are stories you may have missed, especially since I didn’t file a Full Belly Files last week:

• The Lake Fire is pretty close to the Santa Ynez Valley vineyards, causing some concern over smoke taint, so I contributed some reporting to this article by Jean Yamamura earlier this week.
• Lauren Chiou previews the California Wine Festival, which comes to the Chase Palm Park and elsewhere along the waterfront next weekend.
• The legendary Esau’s Restaurant in Carpinteria is now serving dinner, so I asked manager Justin Fitzgerald why, and he gave some insight in this article.
• McConnell’s is teaming up with See’s Candies on a new ice cream series, and Leslie Dinaberg has that story here.
• In case you didn’t see last week’s cover story, which was one of the most popular issues online and anecdotally in a while, Roger Durling and I teamed up to profile eight of Santa Barbara’s better-known bartenders.