All That Video...

VineStories is a wine education website which introduces consumers to limited-production wineries through mini-documentaries. Check it out here!

Bryan Babcock

Peter Cargasacchi

Rick Longoria


Our road trip and tasting at palate food+wine

Recently, a group of Sta. Rita Hills winemakers joined forces with chef/owner Octavio Becera at palate restaurant. Writer Patricia Decker was there, and noted: “Glass after glass of sultry Pinot Noir seduced eager fans of the finicky grape at the Sta. Rita Hills winemaker dinner at Palate Food & Wine in Glendale on Sunday April 3rd. Over 20 different wineries cast their spell on the crowd, who clamored for more California Pinot, and couldn't decide which was their favorite.”
Read the entire article here.


Pinot Noir Recommendations from the 2008 Vintage

San Francisco Chronicle wine writer, Jon Bonné, profiled the 2008 Pinot Noir vintage, and noted:

“..several Sta. Rita sites showed more delicate fruit than the robust 2007s, and that extra bit of brightness helped bring them back to a more classic Pinot expression.”

Read the full article here.


Thoughts on the 2009 Vintage

During a recent gathering of the Sta. Rita Hills Alliance at Fiddlestix Vineyard, Wes Hagen caught up with a few winemaker to hear their thoughts on the 2009 vintage. Click here to watch the video.


Transverse Transcendence - Los Angeles Times Magazine

Wes Hagen writes about Sta. Rita Hills and the art of Pinot Noir for the LA Times.

There are barely a dozen hospitable locations for growing world-class pinot, many in California (Central Coast, North Coast, Monterey County), the Willamette Valley of Oregon, New Zealand (include, if you must, parts of Australia and Tasmania) and, of course, Europe, with isolated exposures in Germany, Alsace, Austria, Switzerland and France (Champagne, Burgundy). A perfect storm of climate and rarefied dirt is required to make a palatable pinot...and to make a profound bottle takes nothing short of a miracle.

The miracle of the region’s microclimate, which allows the Santa Rita Hills to produce glorious pinot noir, began about 20 million years ago deep under the Pacific Ocean. During a violent tectonic shift in the Miocene epoch, the Pacific tectonic plate crashed against the North American plate, and mountains rose out of the ocean in a north-south orientation.

Read the entire article here.


Fiddlestix VineyardBill Daley, of the Chicago Tribune, recently profiled our cool climate appellation in the newspaper’s food section. “With the Pacific Ocean just 11 miles to the west and, thanks to the coastline's sharp curve eastward at Point Conception, also nine miles to the south, Sta. Rita Hills is blessed with a unique climate that winemakers began to realize would be ideal for France's cooler weather grapes, notably pinot noir and chardonnay. Coastal fogs and ocean breezes keep such a lid on the heat that temperatures rise roughly one degree for every mile you travel east through the area.”

And since this is the Food section, Daley recommends “Serve Sta. Rita Hills pinot noir with broiled, mustard-coated chicken thighs, roast beef sandwiches, roasted duck, grilled pork tenderloin, grilled salmon, roast chicken and your Thanksgiving roast turkey.”

Read the entire article here.


Steve Heimoff, West Coast Editor for the Wine Enthusiast wrote about Sta. Rita Hills in his blog:

In California (as everywhere), wine regions want to be thought of as special. A region that’s perceived as special can charge more money for their wines, which in turn lets them invest in their viticulture and enology and make the wines even better. This is why every wine region in California is secretly jealous of Napa Valley (not that they’d admit it).

But not every wine region can be special. It’s a law of the universe. In this day and age of marketing, though, wine regions do the most amazing things to promote themselves as special. They form regional associations, charge dues, and hire publicists to, well, publicize their attributes and paint them in the best possible light. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re a wine region and you don’t blow your own horn, you’ve got a problem.

Which makes it all the more remarkable when a new wine region comes on the scene and achieves fame even before they have a functioning association and with hardly lifting a finger to promote themselves. I’m talking about the Santa Rita Hills appellation of Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley.

Sta. Rita Hills (as the name must appear on the label to avoid a conflict of interest with Chile’s Santa Rita Winery) is probably most famous as the main location of the movie Sideways, but that film did not create SRH’s fame. I can’t even recall that the words “Santa Rita Hills” were ever uttered in the movie. (If anyone knows, please tell me.)

Besides, wine critics are not about to salivate over a wine region simply because it’s in a movie.

No, the critics began praising SRH in the ‘90s, and the pace has simply accelerated in the 2000s. Today, I think it’s safe to say that SRH stands as one of the greatest places in the New World to grow Pinot Noir (and they do a great job at Chardonnay and Syrah and Pinot Gris and perhaps one or two others).

And they got there on their own — not with fancy marketing packages and press kits and events with celebrity auctioneers. Not with spin and hype. Not by luring in big spenders with resorts and great restaurants and golf courses. They did it the old-fashioned way: They earned it. (I can still hear John Houseman saying those words.)

Read the complete blog here.


Fiddlestix VineyardA pictorial essay of California's newest 'hotbed' for Pinot Noir

Grape Nutz visited the appellation one Fall weekend and took some great photographs. View the essay here.