Norm Yost, a longtime vintner and one of the first in Santa Barbara County to produce sparkling wine, will be honored as Vintner of the Year for 2025 during Wine & Fire’s La Paulée-style dinner on Aug. 15 at Babcock Winery.
“I feel grateful and blessed being selected as Vintner of the Year by my peers,” Yost said. “After a career spanning 45 years in the wine industry, it’s extremely satisfying to be recognized with this honor.”
The Sta. Rita Hills Wine Alliance’s Wine & Fire award is one of three recently awarded to Yost, co-owner with his wife, Kate Griffith, of Flying Goat Cellars in Lompoc.
“We’ve won the trifecta for awards this month,” Griffith said.
Flying Goat won the “Golden Bear” award from the California State Fair’s Commercial Wine Competition for its 2021 “Goat Bubbles” pinot meunier.
Griffith and Yost traveled to Sacramento for the July 21 presentation, awarded to the winery for collecting Double Gold, Best of Show Sparkling and 99 points for the vintage — the winery’s first using the pinot meunier grape.
“What an honor for our first release of Goat Bubbles pinot meunier,” Yost said.
He sources the fruit from Riverbench Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley. Pinot meunier, closely related to pinot noir, is a mutation derived from cloning, and is the third grape variety allowed in Champagne, along with chardonnay and pinot noir.
Flying Goat’s third award is the Spirit of Small Business agribusiness entrepreneurship award from the Pacific Coast Business Times and will be awarded Aug. 21, Griffith said.
Yost graduated from the University of California, Davis with a degree in environmental science “but quickly found my way to the wine industry (in Napa), along with my roommate,” he said.
Today, after having worked more than 45 vintages in regions ranging from Napa, Sonoma, Oregon and western Australia to Santa Barbara County, Yost said he relishes “the diversity of those growing regions in my portfolio, and the enthusiastic camaraderie of fellow winemakers from around the world.”
He calls harvest his favorite time of year in winemaking. When he and his team press off the grapes, it’s when “art and science and winemaking come together.”
In a YouTube video shared by Griffith, Yost detailed a favorite day during the long hours that a harvest demands: He ends the day with a punch down, a cold beer and some “old time” rock-and-roll.
Yost founded Flying Goat Cellars 25 years ago, naming the label after “Never” and “Epernay,” two pygmy goats he owned. He said the playful goats were his pets and lawnmowers, and they provided endless entertainment with spiral loops, flipper turns and straight-legged leaps.
Yost was one of the first Santa Barbara County winemaker to produce sparkling wine. I asked him how he launched his now extremely popular sparkling line.
“During the heyday of the movie ‘Sideways’ and the singular focus on pinot noir, I was challenged by a wholesale account to set my brand apart from all the other pinot noir producers in the county,” he said.
“Since I had experience producing sparkling wine in both Northern California and Oregon, it seemed like the perfect niche market in Santa Barbara County for me to pursue — no one else was doing it.”
While his original favorite grape for sparkling wine was pinot noir from the Sta. Rita Hills, during the past few years pinot meunier “has really piqued my interest,” he noted.
He described the process he uses to produce his sparkling wines:
“My first step is to seek fruit that meets my parameters to make great sparkling wine. The unique climate and geography of the Sta. Rita Hills provides an ideal location for high-acidity, low-phenolic fruit.
“Once in the winery, I specialize in the methode champenoise, which is the traditional method used in Champagne, employing a secondary fermentation in the bottle. We age some of our base wine in neutral French oak barrels to enhance the texture and provide body prior to tourage bottling, which is part of the traditional method.
“Our wines are handcrafted in our own facility in Lompoc, rather than being processed elsewhere, which gives us more control of the finished product.”
Flying Goat’s total case production is 750 cases each of still and sparkling wines, and production continues at the West Laurel Avenue facility that also houses Ampelos, Liquid Farm and Tatomer. Flying Goat was the first winery to open there in 2008.
Yost spent about 10 years teaching the yearlong winemaking class at Santa Maria’s Allan Hancock College. (True story: I took his class and made wine that was actually quite tasty!)
Since his departure from teaching, Yost has served both as a guest lecturer in the Viticulture & Enology Department and on the committee of the same name.
As of Tuesday, all of the Wine & Fire events spanning four days (Thursday through Sunday) were sold out except for Thursday’s Barn Party Kickoff at Peake Ranch, Saturday’s Grand Tasting at La Purisima Mission in Lompoc and Sunday’s passport events at various wineries. Click here for more information.