Santa Barbara Dreamin'… Part One & Part Two

BY ANTONIO GALLONI | SEPTEMBER 14, 2018

I first visited Santa Barbara over a decade ago. Immediately I was struck by the finesse of wines born from microclimates that are strongly influenced by the Pacific Ocean. Subsequent visits have only reinforced my long-held view that Santa Barbara is one of the world’s elite grape growing and wine producing regions. This report focuses mostly on the 2016s, which are just being released onto the market. In 2016 Mother Nature gifted producers with the conditions to make striking wines of grace and finesse. 

Netting is used at Refugio Ranch and other properties to keep the wildlife from feasting on grapes

The 2016 Growing Season

After a brutally challenging growing season in 2015, producers welcomed the much more benign conditions of 2016. In 2015, growers had to deal with severe drought, poor weather during flowering that lowered yields dramatically, and then unrelentingly hot and dry weather that accelerated the final phase of ripening and led to a very early harvest. As I have written before, the impact of vintages like 2015 where ripening is fast and the window to pick is narrow goes well beyond the actual quality of the fruit and wines. Producers in Santa Barbara, and elsewhere in California, to be fair, often rely on outsourcing and/or shared facilities that can be bottlenecks. If a large amount of fruit ripens at the same time, it is obvious that outsourced vineyard management companies can’t pick everything at the same time. Some fruit will inevitably be left on the vine longer than is optimal. Custom crush wineries and other shared facilities are then stressed in their ability to process a larger than normal amount of fruit in a timely fashion. Those facilities also often have limits on tank time and other constraints that present challenges well beyond those created by Mother Nature.

Two thousand sixteen, on the other hand, was a relatively uneventful year. It was the last year of a drought cycle, and in some areas plants struggled after dealing with depleted resources, but those appear to have been isolated instances. There were very few days of excess heat, and the only real period of spikes occurred in mid to late September, after quite a bit of fruit had been picked. Harvest started early, in August, but the year did not present the sort of alarming conditions that cause vineyard managers and winemakers an enormous amount of stress because of out-of-control rapid sugar accumulation at the end of the growing season. In most cases, growers had the luxury of being able to pick when and how they wanted. And therein lies the Paradox of 2016.

Tasting through the range at Ojai

The Paradox of 2016

Given the relatively stress-free nature of 2016 and lack of extreme weather, I expected to find fresh, vibrant wines. Instead, because 2016 did not present a need to pick shockingly early, as a whole, the 2016s (the Chardonnays in particular) are soft, open-knit wines, mostly with medium-body structure and concentration that bear the signatures of a year with higher yields and less overall stress. But that is not the case everywhere. “In 2015, yields were tiny. Mother Nature took over,” Sashi Moorman told me. “Whereas in 2016 we had great balance in the vineyards, with a good bit of rain early in the year that took the vineyards off to a good start. Still, yields were low in 2016 and we achieved more concentration than we expected,” he added. “Yields were down for us in 2016,” Chad Melville explained. “After four years of drought, I think the vines were just depleted, and so they only had a little left to give.”

Looking back at 2015, yields were punishingly low and growers were forced to pick early in order to avoid excessively high sugars in a very early-ripening year. That combination, in turn, produced wines with both stunning concentration and energy. In other words, as compelling as 2016 is – and it is a terrific vintage – only a few wines reach the levels of the 2015s. It may also be that some growers were tempted to leave a little more fruit on the vine to compensate for brutally low yields in 2015, and ultimately that shows up in some vines. Today, Pinot appears to have the upper hand over Chardonnay among Burgundian varieties. Even so, the wines show a good bit of site definition, which is always a good sign. Syrahs and Cabernet-based reds are typically released later, so I will have better idea about those wines next year.