February trip to Santa Barbara County wine country (Part 1)

Santa Barbara Wine Country is just a couple of hours up the coast from me so I try to get up there several times a year. My wife and I just got back from our latest visit. I’ve got a lot to write about from this trip so I’ll release this report in three parts.

Since we were only there for two days we didn’t get to visit all of the wineries that we hoped to visit. The wineries we were able to visit were Stolpman Vineyards, Foxen Vineyards, Fess Parker Winery, Andrew Murray Vineyards, and Koehler Vineyards. We also had a good bottle of Hitching Post pinot noir and one great bottle of pinot noir from Ojai Vineyards. We were within a stone’s throw of the Consilience and Epiphany tasting rooms in Los Olivos around closing time on Monday, but we just ran out of time.

Here’s a quick rundown of the wines we had at Stolpman and Andrew Murray:

Stolpman Vineyards:
This is probably my favorite winery in the Santa Ynez Valley right now. I just love the wines they’re producing. Stolpman specializes in Rhone varietals, but they also have a fondness for Italian varietals. They combine the two in the wine that was one of my favorites from this trip. The 2006 La Croce is a 50/50 blend of syrah and sangiovese. At $60.00 a bottle it’s expensive, but it is a superb wine.

We also sampled the 2006 Hilltops Syrah, a 100% syrah grown on mountain slopes in the Santa Ynez Valley.

Another Stolpman wine that we tried was the 2006 Estate Syrah, a blend of 85% syrah and 15% viognier. Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate rated both the Hilltops and the Estate syrahs at 93 points. It’s hard to pick which one is better, but I probably preferred the Hilltops syrah just a tad. The Hilltops syrah retails for $45.00, while the Estate syrah retails for $30.00.

The 2005 Stolpman Malbec was an unexpected treat. While Argenitna is still the king of malbec, Stolpman did a great job with this wine. The 2005 Malbec is the last that Stolpman will produce. I talked with Tom Stolpman, the owner of Stoplman vineyards, while I was up there last week and he told me that the only reason they made the wine was that another winery who had ordered the grapes reneged on the order and left Stoplman with a lot of malbec grapes they hadn’t planned for. Winemaker Sashi Moorman did an excellent job for Stolpman with this one-time effort.

Stolpman also does great with white grapes. We sampled their 2006 L’Avion, a 90% roussanne, 10% viognier blend. It is one of the two or three best white wines being made in the Central Coast of California right now. It retails for $35.00.

The 2005 Angeli Blanc is a 100% roussanne aged for 22 months before release. It would be a superb wine to serve with a cheese and fruit course. It retails for $50.00. Of the two, I preferred the L'Avion.

One other word about Stolpman. While my wife and I were in their tasting room, one of the pourers opened a bottle of the 2006 La Croce. He brought it over to Tom Stolpman, who was talking with me and my wife. The pourer whispered that the wine was "corked" (a term for wine that, typically, has suffered a TCA contamination from improperly cleaned cork). Most wineries would have hidden the bottle and told the employee to just open another bottle so as not to hurt sales. What did Tom Stolpman do? He asked the room how many of them knew what a "corked" wine smelled like? Almost no one in the packed tasting room raised their hand. He then poured some wine into a glass and walked around the room letting his customers smell a "corked" wine. He told them if they ever got a wine that smelled like that they should send it back. He made no excuses, and turned the moment into a teaching opportunity.

Only a man who loves wine more than he loves the bottom line would do that. I was duly impressed.



Andrew Murray Vineyards:
I only sampled two wines at Andrew Murray: the 2005 Syrah Santa Ynez Valley, retail $25.00 and the 2005 Roasted Slope Syrah, retail $34.00. Andrew Murray is a pioneer in syrah in Santa Barbara County and the quality shows in their wines.

The 2005 Santa Ynez Valley Syrah is comprised of grapes grown on their old estate (70%) and grapes grown at their new Oak Savanna Vineyard (30%). It is a full-bodied wine, very dark in color, and loaded with red-fruit flavors and aromas of cherries, cranberry, and cassis and spicy notes of vanilla, pepper, and caramel.

The 2005 Roasted Slope Syrah, probably their most famous wine, is sourced 100% from a 14 year old Syrah vineyard that Andrew Murray himself planted. The vineyard has 5% Viognier inter-planted amongst the Syrah vines. Accordingly, the wine is a Cote-Blonde style blend of Syrah and Viognier that were picked and fermented together. This particular vineyard is a very shy bearer of fruit, with the average yield over the last few years being right around 1 ton per acre. The 2005 Syrah Roasted Slope is very dark in color, with complex aromas of black cherry, spices, white pepper, toasty oak and violets (from the Viognier). The co-fermentation of the Viognier with the Syrah yields a wine that is slightly softer and smoother for its young age, with the wonderful perfumed highlights of Viognier in the nose. The Viognier also brings out the elusive candied-violets aroma in Syrah. This is a very rich and full-bodied Syrah that could be consumed now, but will benefit from several more years of aging.

Sadly, the winemaker informed me on this trip that the 2005 vintage of the Roasted Slope will probably be the last of its kind since the particular vineyard that was the source of grapes for this wine was sold (by Andrew Murray's parents!) after the 2005 vintage. Unless the grapes are eventually sourced back to Andrew Murray, their signature wine will be no more.

In part 2, I'll write about Fess Parker, Foxen, and Koehler.
In part 3, I'll write about the food and wine experiences we had in the area this time.