Area wine harvest begins

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Few places show the pulse of the wine industry in Santa Barbara County like the Lompoc “Wine Ghetto.”
For most of the year, the blue and white metal buildings that make up the Sobhani Complex at the junction of Highway 1 and Highway 246 appear mostly dormant, with the metal folding doors shut tight on barrel rooms, wine presses and gleaming stainless steel tanks.
But when August stretches into September and the county’s wine grapes begin to weigh heavy on the vine, the “ghetto,” as it is often referred to, springs to life -- littered with French oak barrels, picking bins full of grapes and portable bottling lines.


For those who know a hefty number of local wineries are housed at the “ghetto,” the sudden presence of zooming forklifts and delivery trucks in the area are obvious signs that the county’s wine grape harvest is officially under way.
The unassuming “ghetto,” which nearly 30 different wine labels call home, has provided a refuge for many local winemakers from the common stereotype that a winery must be a multi-million-dollar facility, surrounded by several hundred acres of vineyards, ponds and forests.
A glaring difference to this stereotype is the “ghetto” who’s closest neighbor is Home Depot.
For winemakers like Steve Clifton of Palmina, Rick Longoria of Longoria Wines, Ross Jay Rankin of Imagine Wine and Kris Curran of Sea Smoke Cellars, the “ghetto” is the place to be.
“It’s wonderful to be able to walk outside your door and be able to talk to 11, 12 or 15 different winemakers and talk about the different situations they’re facing,” Clifton said. “Its a tight knit community and everyone helps each other.”
As of yesterday, Clifton had jumped head first into the “crush” season, with 20 tons of white grape varietals already squeezed dry.
Clifton, who is co-owner of the Brewer - Clifton brand, which is also located at the “ghetto,” said the ability to focus all of his energy and money on what goes into the bottle, as opposed to a fat mortgage on a piece of prime property, is what helps make his and much of the wine produced at the “ghetto” highly desirable.
“Here it’s not about driving up or walking up to some grande chateau -- they’re metal industrial buildings -- but when you taste the wine inside the barrel or even better, inside the bottle, that’s where 100 percent of the energy is being focused,” Clifton said. “
In the winter of 1998, Longoria became the first winemaker to hunker down in the industrial complex -- a natural move due to the “ghetto’s” close proximity to the Santa Rita Hills appellation. He was also the first person to receive a business license from the city of Lompoc to make his wine there.
Since then, dozens and dozens of winemakers and winery owners have flocked to Lompoc. And when the “wine ghetto,” filled up, a similar block of industrial buildings popped up on the west side of town that Longoria said some refer to as “pinot west,” or “pinot prison” due to its close proximity to the United States Penitentiary there.
“[Lompoc’s] getting a lot of attention as the new wine destination in our county and it’s kind of been cool to be a part of that,” Longoria said.
Longoria began crushing Pinot Grigio yesterday, while Clifton was busy doing the same.
Just down the alley was Rankin, winemaker and president of Imagine Wine, who was busy bottling his Paradise Mountain Syrah.
Rankin, and many of the other wineries in the “ghetto,” use portable bottling lines to bottle their product. Portable lines generally are automated bottling systems that are housed inside a decked out trailer. They pull up for a day or two, and for a price will quickly pump out the finished product, labeled, foiled and ready to hit the shelf.
The existence of such lines allow small wineries the luxury of not having to purchase a pricey piece of equipment that takes up a significant amount of space.
Rankin, who produces about 1,500 cases of wine, crushes, ferments, and ages his wine in the Presidio custom crush facility in the “ghetto.” Several other small labels are also made using Presidio equipment.
Rankin said he’s happy to be located in such close proximity to so many established labels, which aside from the ones mentioned above, include Fiddlehead Cellars, Flying Goat Cellars and Stolpman Vineyards.
“The ghetto is a really unique place,” Rankin said. “It’s a bunch of eclectic winemakers who make really good wine in small quantities.”
Curran, who is the head winemaker at Sea Smoke and also makes wine under her namesake label, Curran, echoed the sentiments of the other winemakers when it comes to the “ghetto.”
“It’s all about a lot of very small, artisan producers and we for the most part really enjoy each other,” Curran said. “We enjoy the banter even if we totally disagree but it’s a community. We’re very much a community down here.”
Curran said Sea Smoke owner Bob Davids initially planned to build a production facility in Buellton. But when the final plans were ready to get the stamp of approval, the city had a change in heart, Curran said.
In the face of not having a facility for that year’s harvest, Curran said she told Davids she would find a temporary production facility. She settled on a building in the “ghetto,” which is located directly across from Presidio and Brewer - Clifton and adjacent from Longoria and Stolpman.
“We were only supposed to be in the ghetto for a year and we all just kind of fell in love with it over there,” Curran said. “If something breaks, we borrow things. I don’t know if you get that in other places. We do have a very special group.”
The one thing that pops up time and time again in a conversation about the “ghetto” is the quality of wines made there.
“These [wines] that are touted in some of the finest restaurants in America and sold to some of the highest end wine club recipients, you probably wouldn’t immediately think they came from metal sided industrial buildings,” Clifton said.
Curran echoed Clifton’s view that the focus of the wineries located in the “ghetto” are on the wine and not the image.
Longoria also said making good wine requires the investment and reinvestment of resources into improving the process, but said the high number of quality producers in the “ghetto” in part can be traced to the small number of cases produced.
“Size alone is in itself a quality function,” Longoria said. “Most wineries that produce under 8,000 cases should be a little above the norm.”
Whether its a big producer like Firestone Vineyard, or small like Palmina, the wine grape industry in Santa Barbara County has established itself as a major player in the agriculture industry, bringing in $107.3 million last year and topping out at No. 3 on list of the county’s most lucrative cash crops, according to an annual county agriculture report.
“I think we’re very fortunate in Santa Barbara County,” Curran said. “All of this is just a blast. It’s great. It brings together great people and it brings together great minds.”

Full disclosure: The author is the son-in-law of Rick Longoria.