Dave Phinney Settles Into Santa Barbara’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Vineyard

For being just two short turns off of Highway 246 and about three minutes from Home Depot, the views from atop Our Lady of Guadalupe Vineyard rival some of the best in Santa Barbara County. 

Due west, across the low-lying sprawl of Lompoc, float the white caps of the Pacific Ocean, peppered with glimpses of Vandenberg’s rocket launch towers. Back to the east, you can peer into both corridors of the Sta. Rita Hills appellation, from the northern knolls that line the highway to the more dramatic southern stretches that tumble toward the Santa Ynez River. Then there’s the vineyard itself, where more than 120 acres of pinot noir and about seven acres of chardonnay cascade across the slopes, comprising their own enological empire. 

But as vineyard manager Amy Whiteford shows all of this off to me, she’s steadily relaying the property’s many problems, at least when it comes to growing wine grapes. The nutrient-deficient soils needed years of adjustments to plant the vines. The salty water requires a cutting-edge reverse osmosis machine to satisfy the fruit. Recent rounds of winter storms triggered mini debris flows that sent young chardonnay sticks adrift. And that’s before accounting for the regionally famous fogs and winds that cycle through almost every day, making even warm seasons barely sufficient for farming much of anything. 

“This block right here is pure diatomaceous earth — we have to spoon feed the vines,” Whiteford explains of the silty ground beneath our feet atop one peak, the brilliantly green hills otherwise inspiring pleasantly bucolic thoughts. “It’s a very marginal place to grow grapes. Most people will not have planted up here.”

So, yeah, it’s pretty, but it’s also a pretty horrible place to grow wine grapes. Then why would Whiteford’s boss, Dave Phinney — the wildly successful vintner who founded and sold The Prisoner and Orin Swift brands, affording him the ability to plant vines anywhere on the planet — choose these very hills to develop his only American vineyard? 

“I started with a love of the area from a personal standpoint and that developed in a more professional standpoint,” Phinney told me over the phone from his home in St. Helena. He made the personal connection while still in high school, visiting friends at UCSB. The professional one came as he bought pinot noir for his brands, teaching him that the Sta. Rita Hills can deliver both power and poise in a glass. 

“Never let a winemaker plant a vineyard or build a winery after he or she has had a liquidity event,” Phinney said with a self-deprecating laugh. “We are gonna do all the things that no one did.” 

That’s exactly what he did by purchasing the land for Our Lady of Guadalupe (OLG) in 2015, five years after he’d sold The Prisoner — reportedly for $40 million to Huneeus Vintners, which later sold to Constellation for $285 million — and right before he sold Orin Swift to Gallo, which multiple sources claim was for $300 million. 

“We found corners to uncut,” explained Phinney of how he approached OLG, as most call the land and brand today. “But the end result of all that work, money, and time is that everything really has paid off in the wine.”

The origin story of this wine world superhero is a very California tale, fitting for a fifth-generation native of the Golden State. He was born in Gilroy and moved to West Los Angeles when he was a week old. But by 13 years old — his global outlook enhanced by regular stays in Bristol, England, where his professor parents spent their sabbaticals — he wanted out of L.A. and lobbied to attend a boarding school in Lake Tahoe. 

“It influenced my sensibility, and there are parts of L.A. that I enjoy,” said Phinney. “But I am more of a country mouse.”

Visiting during Halloween, Phinney “quickly learned that I had to recuse myself from UCSB.” He thought he’d fail out of school living the Isla Vista life. “It was way too much fun.”

Instead, he studied political science at the University of Arizona, thinking he might be a lawyer or go into politics. But after interning for the public defender’s office and a congressmember, Phinney explained, “I realized I didn’t want to have anything to do with being an attorney or anything to do with politics.”

A bit lost entering his junior year, he was invited to study abroad in Florence, where one of roommates, Tom Traverso, hailed from a well-known wine retail family in Sonoma County. They’d taste wines together nightly. “It was very important that my early wine education was by a contemporary dropping F-bombs,” said Phinney. “It was very demystifying and not snooty.”

He instantly appreciated wine’s direct link to farming, a culture he always respected. “Anything agriculture-related is just salt of the earth to me,” he said. “To be able to combine that with winemaking, that’s when the proverbial lightbulb went off.”

Back in Arizona, he interned with an ag professor, planting a one-acre experimental vineyard, and worked at the Rum Runner retail shop in Tucson. He liked the vines more than the sales, so applied to 50 different Napa wineries as he approached graduation in 1997. Only Robert Mondavi Winery replied, and he took the only real harvest job they had: the bottom rung of the night shift.

“You can’t get any lower,” he said. “You’re not even the dishwasher. You’re handing dishes to the dishwasher.”

Being the only white guy in an all-Mexican crew would shape his outlook on life. “After a week, they realized I wasn’t gonna be the token lazy white boy,” said Phinney, who joined some of them on a mostly Oaxacan soccer team. “They gave me a nickname and took me in like family. It molded me into who I am as an adult. A lot of my work ethic is from that time.”

About two decades later — after starting and selling the aforementioned brands and another called Locations, launching a wine project in the French Pyrenees, and even starting a distillery in Vallejo — that camaraderie and culture led to him naming a vineyard and wine brand Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

“The name personifies Mexico, and it’s a very respectful and personal thing for me,” said Phinney. “My whole family knows it. I’ve got more Our Lady of Guadalupe art and paraphernalia than any middle-aged white guy should have.” That iconography further reflects the L.A. surf-skate-punk rock culture of his youth, and, as Phinney readily admitted, “It’s also a little bit gangster, which I like.”

After her own two decades up north in the Napa-Sonoma scene, OLG vineyard manager Amy Whiteford was eager to return to Santa Barbara. Born in Mill Valley but raised from 7th grade on in Birmingham, Alabama, the UCSB graduate left town in 1998 with a degree in environmental studies, and, like Phinney, fell on the wine path in Italy. “All the noise was quieted,” she recalled of becoming enraptured by the wine, food, and farming culture there after college. “This is what I want to do.”

A UC Davis master’s in viticulture led to work with Pahlmeyer and then Stagecoach Vineyard, where she sold a lot of fruit to Phinney, who hired her to run his Orin Swift vineyards in 2013. She led the development of Our Lady of Guadalupe from afar the first few years but moved down with her two young kids in 2021, just in time for the first true commercial harvest at OLG.

“This is the only in-house, standalone estate project,” said Whiteford of where OLG fits in Phinney’s diverse portfolio. That includes the Savage & Cooke distillery on Mare Island in the San Francisco Bay and Department 66 winery in Maury, France, which I visited this past August, thanks to meeting Whiteford a month earlier.  

About half of the vineyard’s harvest is sold to nearly 40 winery clients from around California, and the rest goes into the OLG brand, which currently produces just one chardonnay and one pinot noir each vintage under the supervision of assistant winemaker Chris Hussey. “We wanted to get the chardonnay and pinot right and expand within that,” said Phinney, but a reserve pinot is likely on the horizon and maybe a bubbly too. “The vineyard is set up perfect for sparkling. It would make all the sense in the world.”

Though his previous brands are notorious for being powerful and ripe, Phinney — who still does oversee such winemaking at Orin Swift as the contracted winemaker — reminds me that he’s also made Grand Cru Burgundy. “We’re not a one-trick pony,” he said, explaining that Santa Barbara’s sunny-yet-cold climate can do magical things. “We’re trying to make that bolder California style, but not lose the Burgundian influence. In the Sta. Rita Hills, you can do that.”

As this onetime wunderkind grows into his fifties, he also sees OLG as a focal point in a conscious move to calm down. “For 20-something years, it was all about growth,” said Phinney, who’s hoping to simplify his life in order to spend more time in both Santa Barbara and Maury. “It was fun, don’t get me wrong. But actually now settling into something and just refining it and refining it, it’s a little cathartic.”

Dave Phinney, Amy Whiteford, and Chris Hussey will be pouring OLG Vineyard and Department 66 wines on Sat. Dec. 14, at Taste of the Sta. Rita Hills in Los Olivos (11 a.m. and 1 p.m.) and at Corks & Crowns in Santa Barbara at 4 p.m. See tasteofstaritahills.com and corksandcrowns.com. For more on Our Lady of Guadalupe, see ourladyofguadalupe.com.