Editor’s Note: With the change in ownership of Buttonwood Farm Winery & Vineyard earlier this year, longtime winemaker Karen Steinwachs needed a new facility in which to craft her own wine, Seagrape Cellars. Enter her colleague and friend Kathy Joseph, owner of Fiddlehead Cellars in Lompoc. We follow these pioneering winemakers, along with Steinwachs’ fiancé, Steve Escobar, who produces Le Pecheur Wines, through the end of 2022.
Imagine you’re a winemaker who wants to boost production, adding more cases with each subsequent vintage.
Along comes 2022, showcasing another cool, dry spring but packing a record-setting wallop of extreme heat late in the season followed by rain — rain! — just as harvest is hitting its stride.
Clusters maturing on vines suffered through more than a week of 100-plus-degree weather, triggering grapes’ dehydration, followed by a rainstorm that stalled over the greater Lompoc Valley, dumping nearly 2.5 inches.
The effect of the rain was two-fold: The moisture in clusters made them “ripe for botrytis (fungus),” and in the Lompoc region in particular, left vineyard roads so muddy they were impassable, according to winemaker Karen Steinwachs of Seagrape Wine Co.
This harvest was neither “easy or fun,” she said. It required lots of hand sorting of clusters to weed out unripe or moldy grapes, further reducing overall tonnage.
“We had to pull out all the tricks in our tool bag,” she said.
The end result, across the board, were lower-than-average yields; most of the other winemakers she knows are also “suffering because of the (decreased) supply.”
This year, Steinwachs is producing her Seagrape Cellars, and Le Pecheur, the label owned by her fiancé, Steve Escobar, at Kathy Joseph’s Fiddlehead Cellars in the Lompoc Wine Ghetto. After her 2022 vintage was in barrel, Joseph traveled to Europe for a long-planned vacation, and Steinwachs and Escobar worked their way to the proverbial finish line.
She estimates that Seagrape and Le Pecheur together will have a case production of abuot 800 cases from this vintage.
When we met at Fiddlehead on Oct. 25, Steinwachs and I shared a bottle of her 2018 Seagrape Chardonnay, sourced from Zotovich Vineyards in the Sta. Rita Hills. It was crisp and refreshing, a perfect example of the AVA’s stellar chardonnay.
On that day, still on the vine at Steinwachs’ and Escobar’s Joaquin’s Vineyard — one of two small vineyards behind their side-by-side parcels in the Los Olivos District AVA — were nearly ripe alicante bouschet grapes. Steinwachs estimated they’d be harvested the week of Oct. 31.
Escobar bought his “half” of the adjacent parcels first, in 2019, Steinwachs said. One parcel contains a green house, their current residence, and the other a yellow house, circa 1900, that they are nearly finished remodeling.
“I drove by that yellow farmhouse for years” before buying it in 2019, she recalled. The home is listed by Santa Barbara County as a “Place of Historic Merit.”
Escobar blends the Joaquin’s Vineyard alicante bouschet with his Le Peucher syrah, but this vintage may release “a little bit” on its own, Steinwachs said. Joaquin’s Vineyard was planted in 2017, and its other grapes are syrah, chenin blanc and melon de Bourgogne.
The couple’s second estate site is Jacks’ Vineyard, planted in 2021, and it contains sauvignon blanc and cabernet franc vines. This site will reach its third leaf (year) in 2023, making the grapes harvest viable.
“I’m very excited for Jacks’ cabernet franc grapes,” Steinwachs said. She worked with the grape she fondly calls “the femme fatale” for 15 years at Buttonwood, and is eager to harness its “violet and floral components” into a bottle.
— Laurie Jervis can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.