A day in the life: My trip to Santa Maria Valley
Woke up at 6:30 on a gloomy, foggy Saturday morning at the lovely Radisson in Santa Maria, so close to the airport that, walking Gus, I could see the ghostly forms of little planes sulking on the grey tarmac, across a weed-choked lot. Gus kept smelling the gopher holes but nothing came out to smell him back, fortunately.
The hotel is bursting with tourists. They don’t seem to be wine people. Everybody smiles as Gus trots by, off leash, staying loyally by my side. I stash Gus in the room while I grab some eggs and bacon and much-needed coffee. The line for the single toaster is so long, I decide to forgo my English muffin. Ah, the joys of the on-the-road hotel buffet. Two cups of java later, I am sufficiently fueled to get through the day.
It’s still too early to leave for my first appointment, so, back in the room, I flop back and leaf through the new Tasting Panel magazine. Fattest I’ve ever seen it: Life is good for Andy Blue and Meredith May. See Karen MacNeil’s column, a bit of poesy on the virtues of “place.” A photo of my old buddy, Phillip Pepperdine, whom I met when he was brand ambassador for St.-Germain; now he’s with Bowmore.
More pix of handsome, runway-ready Karl Wente, who seems to be a fixture in Tasting Panel. I always like Fred Dame’s “A Conversation With…” article. This month his guest is Ryan Stetins, somm at Parallel 37 in the S.F. Ritz-Carlton, a restaurant considerably “more approachable” (Fred’s words) than its predecessor, The Dining Room, which always got high marks from the critics but is no longer in tune with the weltanschauung. I personally don’t like it when a waiter puts a napkin in my lap. “Thank you, but I can do that by myself.” The overly-formal clearly is on the way out in favor of cazh (as in casual), which is fine by me. I also always like reading Randy Caparoso’s take on things. This ish, he muses on the 2011 Rutherford Cabs, and comes down loving them. As did I. The conventional wisdom is that 2011 was a tough year (nearly every winemaker I’ve ever talked to about it has called it “challenging”), but I found the Cabs pretty good, especially if they were from hillsides. In retrospect, the vintage was not so awful as is commonly said.
Drive up the 101 a few exits, get off at Betteravia, and head east past Pappy’s Mexican down Santa Maria Mesa Road to Cambria, where I have a nice visit with Denise Shurtleff, the winemaker. Then it’s around the bend to Byron, where I meet up with Jonathan Nagy. He takes me on a tour in his truck of the Santa Maria Bench, the uplifted, northern section of the Santa Maria Valley, about 400-800 feet above sea level, where the alluvial sandy soils are fine and well-drained. As with most benches, this is the tenderloin of the appellation, home to vineyards including Cambria, Bien Nacido and Byron’s Nielson, which was the first modern vineyard (1964) ever planted in Santa Barbara County.
The Santa Maria Valley is remarkably cool despite its southerly latitude because its east-west orientation allows maritime air to funnel in. This photo of Jonathan looks toward the west;
you can see that fog out there by the Guadalupe Dunes, about 20 miles away. The bench itself is called that because it resembles a bench: The Tepusquet Ranges are the upright back, the seat itself is where most of the vineyards are, and then there’s a big dropoff, which you can see in this picture,
of about 200 feet, down to the Sisquoc River. This shot shows the bench from below.
After my visit, I drove out to the Guadalupe Dunes, on the beach.
The nearby little town of Guadalupe, pop. 715, is pretty basic. The interesting thing is how the wind starts howling in every day around noon or so. This picture shows Old Glory flapping stiffly towards the east.
That same wind sweeps into the Santa Maria Valley and is why it’s a cool place (in both senses of the word) for Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Syrah. Around 3 p.m. the fog starts piling in, carried in on the winds.
(Sorry about the sideways thing!)
It’s a very dramatic effect. Unfortunately, and from my experience of many years, few people really understand the Santa Maria Valley; in fact, it’s the least understood major Cru in California. The valley itself has few if any nice places to stay or eat, unlike the more famous Santa Ynez Valley to the southeast. Consequently, even wine writers don’t get there much on their junkets. Ditto for sommeliers. We’ll be having an event on Dec. 2 down in L.A. on the Santa Maria Valley and bench, in order to let folks know what’s going on. I’ll be writing more about this later.
It is odd, by the way, that I’m taking notes on my Santa Barbara trip in a Napa Valley Vintners notebook. It’s because I have about a million of them. Memo to Napa Vintners: The spiral is really tough on us left-handers.
Anyhow, after Guadalupe, it was back to the Radisson, where I ended the day with a perfectly fine dinner of crab cakes and Ahi tuna salad in the hotel restaurant, followed by my fave, a vodka gimlet with freshly squeezed lime juice at the bar, which even had a decent three-piece rock band. I sometimes complain about life on the road, but you know what? I kinda like it, especially when Gus is with me.
I also like the Napa Valley Vintner notebooks, especially the size and how they lay flat. I now find them on Amazon for $4 each, unbranded. As a lefty I don’t get much grief from the spiral though.
Please do:
“We’ll be having an event on Dec. 2 down in L.A. on the Santa Maria Valley and bench, in order to let folks know what’s going on. I’ll be writing more about this later.”
The biggest embarrassment in the wine trade down here in La-La-Land is the absence of a “clearing house” of information on trade tastings and seminars in town.
Importers/distributors/brokers don’t share information to avoid conflicting event dates.
[A webmaster friend volunteered to create a password-controlled website for all the trade to list their events. No one lobbied agreed to participate. One more self-inflicted wound by the wine industry.]
As a consequence, a common query: “Hey Bob, where were you yesterday? The [fill-in-the-blank theme or hosted] tasting was at [fill-in-the-blank restaurant or hotel].”
And the common reply: “Sorry — nobody ever told me about it.”
We in the retail and restaurant trade feel like in Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.”
“Same as it ever was . . .”
~~ Talking Heads