In 2004, Pacific Palisades resident Tim Perr founded a wine label to showcase small-lot pinot noir with his friend and business partner, Scott Knight. They named the brand Pali as a homage to their beloved beach town.
Meanwhile, Aaron Walker, a native of Southern California, was deep into his studies at San Diego State University with the goal of becoming a teacher. After graduation, he worked in restaurants, first in San Diego and then Del Mar, where wine was considered vital to fine dining.
In 2006, he got the opportunity to work the harvest for the late Michael Bonacorssi, a fellow food and wine geek, and the rest, as his story goes, is history.
Hooked after his first harvest, Walker followed his newfound passion into gigs with Joe Davis (Arcadian), the late Seth Kunin (Kunin Wines), Stephen Dooley (Stephen Ross) and Gray Hartley (Hitching Post Wines).
Walker found extra work as a server at the iconic Hitching Post restaurant in Buellton, and it was there that he first sampled Pali’s wines — then being crafted by winemaker Brian Loring (Loring Wine Co.), whose facility was adjacent to Pali Wine Co. on Aviation Way off West Central Avenue in Lompoc.
Along the way, he met and later married Gray Hartley’s daughter, Emily, and the couple now reside in Orcutt with their two children, August, almost 7, and Penelope, 5.
In June 2007, Walker joined Pali as Loring’s assistant winemaker. I first met Walker around 2010 after he had replaced Loring as Pali’s winemaker and around the time Kerr and Knight launched their sister label, Tower 15.
Unlike Pali, which is solely pinot noir and chardonnay, Tower 15 — named for a lifeguard tower on Will Rogers State Beach in the Palisades — encompasses red and white Rhone and Bordeaux blends and single varietals grown from grapes sourced throughout the Santa Barbara County and Paso Robles regions.
While Tower 15’s production is about 5,000 cases per year, Pali has the lion’s share at 20,000, Walker noted. Of that number, two of Pali’s pinot noirs — Riviera (a Sonoma Coast vineyard blend) and Huntington (a Santa Barbara County vineyard blend) — number nearly 16,000 cases, he added.
Together, “we have 35 SKUs across two brands,” he said, meaning there are quite a few different barrels to track through harvest.
Around 2008, Walker launched MoonWalker Wines with his longtime friend and college roommate, David Muñoz. After nearly a decade, the two pulled the plug on the brand in 2017, Walker said: “It was just time to stop; neither of us had time” for a side project.
In 2010, Walker gained general partnership in Pali, a promotion that translated into “lots of time on the road” to keep Pali’s owners updated on the various facilities. He visits each of the now five tasting rooms every month, coordinating staff meetings and supervising the sites’ keg programs, he noted.
Pali’s Lompoc and Funk Zone tasting rooms were among the first in Santa Barbara County to utilize a keg program for wine, and “kegs require constant rotation, as the wines in them moves quickly,” he said.
All five tasting rooms offer wines by the keg (glass or growler), and consumers really favor the concept. That means that “our volume in kegs keeps increasing,” Walker said.
The tasting rooms are in Lompoc at 1501 E. Chestnut Court (across from the Wine Ghetto), at 116 E. Yanonali St. in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, at 2130 India St. in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood, at 811 Traction Ave. in the arts district of Los Angeles, and at 500 S. Anaheim Blvd. in Anaheim’s packing district.
How can Pali Wine Co. operate five tasting rooms between Lompoc and San Diego?
Pali’s main production facility is the winery in West Lompoc, but the Lompoc tasting room is also a satellite winemaking/barrel storage site. That affords the brand two additional off-site tasting facilities, according to California’s ABC Type 02 (Dupe 02) Winegrowers license.
The Anaheim tasting facility also is a licensed winery (production), Walker noted. Its license covers the fifth off-site tasting facility. The first SoCal site to open was in San Diego, followed by Anaheim and then Los Angeles.
With ample tasting facilities, Pali now focuses more on direct-to-consumer sales and relies less on outside distribution.
“We’re really hitting our stride now with the business,” Walker said.
In 2016, Walker crafted Pali’s first sparkling wine, a rosé of pinot noir, which he hopes will be released in time for the holidays this year.
While he continues to source grapes from Sonoma County and Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Walker’s immediate focus is Pali’s estate vineyard off Gypsy Canyon Road in the Santa Rita Hills. The site was planted in 2012 to 45 acres of pinot noir and five of chardonnay, he said.
It is surrounded by Hilliard Bruce on two sides (south and west) and lies just east of Cebada Wines’ vineyard. All of Pali’s high-end pinots now are sourced from this estate, Walker said, with the fruit from sites in Sonoma and Oregon used for the multiple-vineyard blend pinot noirs.
New starting with the 2018 vintage is pinot noir from the famed Bien Nacido Vineyards. Pali “was waitlisted there for years,” Walker noted.
Another longtime and local vineyard source for Pali is the former Huber Vineyard just a couple of miles east on Highway 246. While its new estate vineyard matured, Pali leased Huber from longtime owners Trudi and Norm Huber from 2013 to 2016, Walker said. In 2017, he added, the Hubers sold their site to Montecito resident Lady Leslie Chapel, who renamed it. Walker continues to produce Pali’s hearty Dornfelder wine from Chapel Vineyard, as well as vineyard-designate pinot noir and chardonnay.
At Pali’s estate vineyard, Walker and his vineyard manager have battled Pierce’s Disease. He estimates having lost about 10 percent of initial vine plantings to the deadly bacterial disease, which is spread by an insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter. The bugs’ natural habit are native shrubs and low trees such as those that border the vineyard on the west and north. The disease stunts and eventually kills grapevines.
— Laurie Jervis blogs about wine at www.centralcoastwinepress.com, tweets at @lauriejervis and can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.