When I joined Doug Braun and two colleagues outside the Allan Hancock College winery on a blustery December afternoon — Braun’s final day of teaching — he held his retirement “project,” a 4-month-old puppy, Coal.
Coal would likely become the focus of Braun’s attention as he segued from a 30-year career teaching at both Hancock’s Lompoc and Santa Maria campuses. During his tenure at the college, Braun witnessed the Viticulture & Enology program morph from a handful of classes in 1987 to a department with its own vineyard, solid connections in the Central Coast wine industry and a bonded on-campus winery where students now craft award-winning wines.
Today, students in the program can discuss the benefits of organic wines, concrete eggs as aging vessels and in-barrel fermentations, Braun said.
On that December day, Alfredo Koch, coordinator of Hancock’s Viticulture & Enology program, and Kelsie Norris, winery operations and lab specialist, praised Braun for his decades of service. The trio’s camaraderie was obvious.
“Braun really cares” about the department, Koch said. Of the longtime instructor’s pending departure, Koch said, “I’ve been crying for a week.”
Braun returned Koch’s praise: “Working with Alfredo has been an absolute joy,” he said.
He described Norris as ideal regarding her devotion to the program. In early December, Norris was nearing maternity leave through May of this year.
“She’s the most organized of the three of us,” Braun said.
He still plans to consult for regional winemakers, and will pop into classes here and there. “I’ll know if they screw up,” he said with a laugh.
Braun came to Hancock from California State University, Fresno, where he taught undergraduate classes in that university’s viticulture and enology program. Culling coursework from the Fresno program, Braun and others designed the curriculum now offered at Hancock, he recalled.
Starting in the 1990s, Braun led his Hancock colleagues to introduce new grape varietals into the 4-acre campus vineyard and led clonal research on various varietals.
Along with other instructors — among them winemakers Norm Yost, Michael Larner and Larry Schaffer, and viticulturists Michael Walsh and Ric Fuller — Braun also honed a working relationship with Santa Barbara County’s growing wine industry, eventually earning the campus program the recognition it has today.
Winemaker Yost of Flying Goat Cellars recalled meeting Braun in 1998, when Yost was the newly hired winemaker at Foley Estates and Lincourt Wines.
“I had just relocated from the Willamette Valley,” he said, “and Braun was one of the first area winemakers that I met.”
Braun and Yost found themselves sourcing pinot noir grapes from the same vineyard, what then was known as the Santa Maria Hills Vineyard on Clark Avenue and Telephone Road, Yost said.
“In the summer of 2000, Doug was selling off excess pinot noir from his section of that vineyard, and at the same time, I was thinking about producing a small amount of pinot under my own label,” he said. “Little did I know that this would be the beginning of my own brand, Flying Goat Cellars.”
Yost said he considers Braun one of the early pioneers of the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, since he started his own production facility there in 2000.
“Eventually, Braun’s Presidio Winery became an incubator for many small startup brands in Lompoc,” Yost said. “He offered custom winemaking services for Huber Vineyards, Prodigal, Imagine, Ethan (Lindquist) Wines, Fiddlehead and Flying Goat Cellars.”
In 2004, Yost started teaching at Hancock and taught winemaking at Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria.
“Those early years were very challenging as a teacher because we didn’t have a winery for winemaking. It was very much a ‘garagiste’ method of making wine — no hot water, no tanks, no refrigeration, no lab and no classroom,” Yost recalled. “I know that Doug was very instrumental in helping with the on-campus vineyard at the Santa Maria campus. This vineyard has become a great hands-on teaching tool for the viticulture program and source of grapes for the Allan Hancock College label.”
Braun was also very involved with the design and layout of the on-campus winery, Yost said. The winery received its bond to sell wine in 2014.
“Doug and Alfredo (Koch) have devoted a lot of energy and enthusiasm to make Hancock’s viticulture and enology program an outstanding learning experience,” he said. “We’ve strengthened the relationship between the Hancock program and the industry. Ultimately, that’s what it’s about,” especially when the program’s graduates want jobs in the Central Coast’s wine industry.
Koch, he said, “has a big task in keeping the industry involved in our program here.”
Indeed, Koch, a native of Argentina, studied winemaking and viticulture at Bordeaux Sciences Agro in Bordeaux, France, during 2014, and a year later, started teaching there. He then designed a program for Hancock’s Viticulture & Enology students to continue their studies in Bordeaux, France.
“They study two years here, and one year there,” he said.
After launching his own label, Presidio Wines, with his wife, Angela, in the Lompoc Wine Ghetto, Braun had a tasting room in Solvang on Atterdag Road off Mission Drive (Highway 246). Several years ago, he sold the label to a large winery invested in some Santa Barbara County vineyards.
Braun’s vineyard source for most of his Presidio wines was his vineyard of the same name, which he and partners planted in 2000 along La Purisima Road. (The site is now owned by Brook Williams and his siblings, who purchased it in 2012 and renamed it Duvarita Vineyard.)
For decades, Braun taught the class “Sensory Evaluation of Wine,” which I took from him in 2008. Over the class’ two semesters, students learn from Braun how to evaluate wines from around the world for both quality and flaws.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when classes were exclusively online, teaching that class over Zoom was a “nightmare,” he recalled with a laugh, primarily because the program had to hand deliver wine samples to students for the class. “But we did it!”
“Certain classes were very difficult (during the pandemic), like the hands-on winemaking class,” Braun said.
Students expressed gratitude for Braun and the program at large.
Jezebel Delgado of Santa Maria was enrolled in Winery Operations with Braun, whom she described as a “very eccentric teacher” and one who discussed topics ranging from wine law to grapes.
“He teaches every aspect of wine production and is a wonderful teacher,” she said.
Nic Tasca, a native of Catalina, praised the program for luring such “a high number of local students.” He graduated from the program in 2019 and continued to assist with the 2020 harvest. Tasca is also president of the V&E Wine Club, he said.
— Laurie Jervis tweets at @lauriejervis and can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.