California
Dreaming
The
Winery Estates of Paso Robles
By
Jason Barlow
Paso
Robles
is a land of wine maker dreams, located on California's
fertile central coast between Monterey and Santa Barbara. It
is the variety of climates, the diversity of soils, the caress
of cool ocean breezes, and the nuance of vivid imaginations
that give this region such magic. The power to fulfill so many
visions is what drew the numerous winemakers and owners to this
region. It has the greatest diurnal temperature swing of any
appellation in California, due to its proximity to the Pacific
Ocean, and its calcareous soils offer wine makers the ideal
conditions to make great wines.
Success stories continue to mount, with winery owners making
award winning wines under nature ís fabulous watchful
eye. Some seek to mimic the growing conditions of other great
varietals found throughout the world, where other wine makers
take advantage of their position under the sun by creating experimental
blends, with some very notable outcomes for the wine taster.
With longer growing seasons for wine grapes, Paso Robles vines
receive all the needed time in the world to produce fully mature
fruit, while overnight cooling keeps the grapes' acid
chemistry in balance. Respectful winery owners and their wine
makers take extraordinary care in the vineyard, carefully controlling
sun exposure, pruning for low yields, extracting the best that
nature has to offer, and then passing it on to you, the winery
visitor and taster, who has embraced these wines with volumes
of repeat business year after year.
Here you will find beautiful wine estates at the height of their
mature beauty, a musical step beyond tourism, where owners still
pour for you behind the wine tasting bar, engaging you with
tales to regale and connect. Sip their wine and carry their
romantic stories of hard work and great passion back to your
own everyday life, and remember with fondness that you met that
owner, heard of his journey, and get to be reminded of it every
time you take a sip of his personally crafted blends, his favorite
grape, his "raison d'etre", if you will.
Maybe you will be inspired, too. The region itself offers an
experience we hope will live on, for this close knit community
historically started planting and building in the late 70s and
80s with the preponderance starting in the early 90s. That means
that many of these wineries are just coming into their 20th
year of existence. Long enough to put the hardest toiling years
behind them, but short enough to remember that every expense
is an added expense, and frugal spending is still the name of
the game.
A fact of life is, if you're not moving forward, you're
losing ground, so to expect everything to remain the same for
the wine enthusiast visiting the region is not fair. Capture
this experience while you can, for soon they may be as successful
as the Napa and Sonoma wineries, who have hired their replacement
behind the wine tasting bars. There are over 170 wineries to
visit, up from 35 some ten years ago, and there is still land
to be had.
The Viticulture Area
The different avenues of success are as varied as their total
24 square mile appellation, or 26,000 acres of collective wine
grape vines could present. Within this confined viticultural
area, there are over 45 different soil series found in the Paso
Robles growing region. What is truly unique about this region,
is that the soils have a high ph value of 7.4 to 8.6,
that are not the norm for other growing regions of California.
Calcareous shale is most available in the west side hills where
dense clay based soils combine with plentiful rainfall to make
it possible for some vines to be dry farmed without supplemental
irrigation. Beautiful eye catching rolling hills found on both
sides of the Salinas River are covered with sandy, loamy soils.
Then, in the Estrella River plain commonly referred to as the
watershed area, loam and clay are layered in with sand, offering
yet a different opportunity to grow grapes. As you read throughout
these different wineries, you will see that in many cases, the
soil type was chosen for the type of grape the winery owner
wanted to grow, or the revelation of the soil type dictated
what type of grape the winery owner could grow.