Work was slow. Life was slower. My wife and I had 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 who had recently moved into the apartment downstairs provided one.
It turned out they’d been winemakers in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but for the moment they’d come home to L.A. to be close to family while they worked to start a label all their own up in Santa Barbara County.
The four of us spent the summer sharing bottles on our terrace — laughing, listening to records, marveling at the empty streets below.
Before long, I’d run through most of my bottle stash. To hell with it. Uncork the good shit.
Occasionally our new friends would go up north to do cellar work; always returning ready to pour something new.
In those days, they had a foot in both worlds.
Meanwhile, I was having trouble shaking the feeling that the walls were closing in.
When harvest came, I more or less begged for the invite to Buellton.
They probably expected I’d hang around a while, post a few Instagrams and go on my merry way.
Instead, I put my back into it. And got invited back.
By 2023 I had two barrels of my own in the stack.
In the before times, I had these romantic notions about what a winemaker would be:
Wild eyes. Calloused hands. Foot on the gas of an old pickup, blazing half-cocked along trellised hillsides in the afternoon sun. . . or climbing into the winery rafters to draw a barrel sample of the Super Special Reserve — invisible in inventory, never ready in time for a club shipment, and yet always singing when a hated rival or potential lover happens into the room.
Turns out, the stereotype is pretty goddamn accurate.
Which sure as hell doesn’t mean that heart, hurt, sweat and sacrifice aren’t being poured into that juice along the way.
Winery hours are long. The risks are real. Especially for the vineyard crews who show up before dawn, run lug bins in 100º heat, and hang back to haul away cuttings while the rest of us sneak off 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.
