[Noozhawk’s note: Part of an occasional series profiling local winemakers.]
One man with a passion for new adventures grew his life into one focused on overseas travel. He would spend a year or two stateside, and then take flight on back-to-back world trips.
Matt Kowalczyk, now a winemaker with more than 12 harvests to his name, was born in Detroit. He relocated to Boulder, Colo., and graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Colorado. In 1990, he moved west to San Diego, where friends from college resided.
Kowalczyk landed a job in environmental administration at Johnson & Johnson, but he opted to honor an urge to explore the world.
“In the early 1990s, I took two round-the-world trips,” Kowalczyk said.
In 1995, he returned to Southern California, settling at UCLA to pursue a graduate degree in environmental management.
The next year, he moved to Geneva and France, where he worked for the United Nations. It was during his time in France, Kowalczyk recalled, that the process and artistry of making wine first drew his attention.
In 1997, Kowalczyk married his first wife, Rebecca, and continued to travel while pursuing his career. For one year, he lived and researched in Norway as a fellow in the Fulbright Program, studying clinical toxicology. The program sends scholars and professionals abroad to lecture and/or research in varied academic and professional fields.
In 1998, the couple returned to San Diego and settled into their lives, according to Kowalczyk.
On Jan. 15, 2000, a freak accident would turn his life upside down. While he surfed off an Encinitas beach and his wife sunbathed onshore, a large section of bluff broke loose and slid to the beach, burying and killing his wife.
“I quit work and traveled to Guatemala,” Kowalczyk said.
In the haze of mourning, he stuck to the road, searching for the meaning of life. A family with whom he lodged there christened him “buscador” — Spanish for “the searcher.”
Perhaps Kowalczyk says it best on his website: “I have traveled all over the world for a multitude of reasons. In the beginning, it was a limitless, passionate search for the sole purpose to experience. It morphed into a ‘higher purpose’ existential journey and evolved further into a confused search for meaning. Then it slowly grew into a truth. The one truth of it all. The search is the truth.”
In Fallujah, Iraq, during 2003 and 2004, Kowalczyk spent a year “building a base camp” as a civilian contractor and within six months had paid off grad school, he said.
Early in 2005, he moved to Santa Barbara, intrigued — along with thousands of others — by the portrayal of the winegrowing region in the film Sideways, released in late 2004.
Kowalczyk was hired as an apprentice with owner/winemaker Mike Brown of Santa Ynez Valley’s Kalyra Winery and worked his way into assistant winemaker, a gig he kept until 2017.
It was at Kalyra in 2006 that Kowalczyk launched Buscador, the label that honors his “search” for the meaning of life. “Love your search” is the catch phrase printed on the labels and corks of Buscador Wine bottles.
During the years he cellared at Kalyra and grew Buscador, Kowalczyk met and married Stephanie Lopez, a fellow biologist and travel aficionado. The two reside in Santa Barbara, where Lopez, an environmental consultant, works full time at Rincon Consultants and markets Buscador.
In April 2017, the couple were the first producers to open in a small business park at 140 Industrial Way in Buellton, which has gained a reputation as a burgeoning areas for wine, beer and food.
“I like Buellton because it’s up and coming, and the neighborhood is an organic one,” Kowalczyk said.
He utilizes his space for both production and tasting, which benefits consumers, he said.
“I love to taste people on wines straight from the barrel. People also love to talk to the owner/winemaker,” so Kowalczyk solos at the bar during the tasting room’s hours, from noon to 5 p.m. Friday and Monday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
He said he and Lopez have “zero” employees, instead relying on friends during the harvest’s long hours. Lincoln, the couple’s 4-year-old yellow lab, accompanies Kowalczyk to work.
Asked to share his favorite part of winemaking, Kowalczyk described it as “the ability to create something artistic,” as well as the union of social, science and business.
Buscador now averages a production of 750 cases per year, Kowalczyk said. There’s no distribution, only direct to consumer from the tasting room and via a growing wine club. He limits production to about 75 cases of each varietal.
With Buscador, Kowalczyk specializes in “variety,” pure and simple. Ranging anywhere from 15 to 20 wines during a given vintage, he continues to grow the label. New with the 2018 vintage is a “classic California chardonnay” to be released in 2020, Buscador’s first zinfandel, sourced from Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara, and a grenache, he said.
Kowalczyk favors Rhone whites aged in American oak barrels “for the time on the lees” and steers them toward being “very approachable” at a younger age by limiting their time in barrel, he said.
Among the current Buscador releases are a pinot noir, a cabernet franc, a cabernet sauvignon, a petit verdot, a syrah/petit verdot blend, another red blend, a sauvignon blanc and a chenin blanc.
— 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.
