Morgen McLaughlin, the executive director of the Santa Barbara Vintners, will leave July 21 to take a similar position for the Willamette Valley Wineries Association in Oregon.
Matt Murphy, owner of Santa Maria’s Presqu’ile Winery and president of the board of the Santa Barbara Vintners, released the news to member wineries in an email late last week.
When I emailed McLaughlin Friday morning, she confirmed her departure and new position, but declined to comment further, saying media announcements would be forthcoming the week of June 19.
“While we are sorry to see her go, I hope you will join me in congratulating Morgen on this exciting next step in her career and in expressing my deepest gratitude for the work she has done over the last four years advocating on our behalf,” Murphy wrote in his email.
The Willamette Valley Wineries Association, based in Portland, includes more than 500 member wineries, making it more than twice the size of the group McLaughlin currently leads.
McLaughlin started with Santa Barbara Vintners on April 19, 2013, one day before the organization’s annual Vintners’ Festival in Solvang.
During her four-year tenure in Santa Barbara County, McLaughlin traveled seemingly endlessly — to locales as distant as China and as close as Los Angeles, working hard to promote local winemakers and vineyards via pop-up tastings and elite dinners.
During her first year on the job, I literally bumped into McLaughlin at every wine or tourism event I attended, and told her so. She just smiled.
McLaughlin also organized varietal-specific tastings for the wine industry at various wineries, bringing together winemakers and vineyard owners, tasting room employees and local wine media representatives.
For the first time, she introduced Santa Barbara Vintners — formerly the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Association — to social media, primarily on Facebook and Twitter.
McLaughlin came to Santa Barbara County from the Finger Lakes Wine Country Tourism Marketing Association, a regional tourism-marketing group in Corning, New York.
McLaughlin replaced longtime executive director Jim Fiolek, who resigned in early 2013.
Prior to relocating west, McLaughlin served as president and CEO of the New York association, beginning in 2007. From 1994 to 2006, she co-owned and managed a small winery and vineyard in Connecticut, where she supervised wine production, grape growing and marketing.
McLaughlin and her husband, Nathaniel Smith, have three sons.
— 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.