Work was slow. Life had become monotonous. We’d taken the same walk around the neighborhood so many times, I was surprised we hadn’t worn tracks into the pavement.
We needed a diversion. The couple that had recently moved in downstairs provided one.
They turned out to be winemakers who’d come home to L.A. from the Santa Cruz Mountains, wanting to be closer to family while they worked to establish a cellar of their own up in Santa Barbara County.
Our new friends had a foot in each world in those days—
And meanwhile, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were closing in.
The four of us spent that summer sharing bottles on our terrace, laughing, listening to records, and marveling at the empty streets below.
Before long, I’d run through most of my bottle stash. To hell with it. We started uncorking the good shit.
When harvest came, I begged for an invite to Buellton. An interest had become an obsession. I needed to know how the wine we’d been drinking got made.
They probably expected me to hang around a few hours, take photos and go on my merry way.
I put my back into it instead.
And so I was invited back. By ‘23, I had two barrels of my own in the stack.
In the before times, I had these romantic ideas of what it was to be a winemaker:
Calloused hands and wild eyes. Half-cocked in a pickup truck, blazing along trellised hillsides in the afternoon sun. Up in the rafters, jumping barrel to barrel, pulling samples of the Totally Insane Stuff most of us will never get to taste.
The stereotypes, it turns out, are pretty damn accurate.
But a hell of a lot of heart, headaches, and sacrifices still get poured into the juice along the way.
Winery hours are long. The risks in the vineyard are real. Especially for the crews, who show up before dawn, run lug bins in the heat, and hang back to haul away cuttings while the rest of us sneak away to sniff our stems of Chablis.
It’s now been six vintages since I first set foot in a vineyard without paying for the privilege.
Most days, I still feel like that guy who begged his way into the cellar.
But with each passing harvest, I notice callouses on my own hands. . .
And, on occasion, a pair of slightly wilder eyes staring back in the mirror.
