Celebrating 50 years since the planting of the historic Bien Nacido Vineyard, the owners have opened a tasting room on the southern edge of the esteemed site in Santa Maria.
Six years after pouring the slab for the new hospitality center, its doors are poised to open this coming Memorial Day weekend, said Nicholas Miller, chief sales and marketing officer and executive vice president for the Miller Family Wine Company.
The grand opening of the tasting room will be Thursday, May 25, at the vineyard’s entrance, 3503 Rancho Tepusquet Road. The celebration will continue Friday and Saturday, May 26 and 27, with live music on Friday and a food truck on Saturday.
The “Gatehouse at Bien Nacido” marks the first time that the vineyard has ever been open to the public.
Citing the Gatehouse’s rural location, tastings will be available only by appointment, said Tommy Gaeta, senior director of marking and hospitality for Miller Family Wines.
“This is a destination site, less so for walk-in guests,” he said. “And that’s the type of client we hope to cater to.”
Each tasting flight will include five wines. Cheese and charcuterie plates will be available for purchase, “as we believe that food enhances wine,” Gaeta noted.
Tastings will be seated inside or out on the adjacent patio. Upstairs is a “loft” with a view of a newly planted block of chardonnay. This space is available for private events such as board meetings, Gaeta said.
The new facility was designed to resemble Bien Nacido Vineyard’s historic Ontiveros Adobe with dormer windows and a low-slung, adobe-style white wall on the perimeter, Miller said.
Hours at the Gatehouse will be from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Thursday through Monday.
Since September 2015, the Miller family has operated a tasting room in Los Olivos, which offers wines from both Bien Nacido and one of the family’s other vineyards, Solomon Hills, located just south of Clark Avenue in Orcutt.
The former Los Olivos tasting room site is now the pop-up tasting room for optik wines, the label produced by the Miller family with winemaker Joey Tensley.
The Millers, a fifth-generation California farming family, purchased the land now known as Bien Nacido in 1969 along with an adjacent parcel that had been included in the original land grant.
Together the parcels, which the family christened Rancho Tepusquet, equaled more than 2,000 acres. Included in the deal was the Ontiveros Adobe, which was built starting in 1857.
In the early 1970s, Stephen Miller and his late brother, Robert, realized that the site’s soils and climate were ideal for growing grapes, and the first vines were planted in 1973.