About Stolpman Vineyards
It wasn’t really a “lawyerly” thing to do. But in 1990, attorney Tom Stolpman planted a vineyard in Santa Barbara’s largely uncharted Ballard Canyon.
Stolpman’s wife, Marilyn, had put the notion into his head while they were honeymooning in Napa Valley. Once he’d fully caught the wine bug, he started getting more serious about the idea, and began to search for a parcel of land where he could grow vines.
He knew exactly what he wanted: limestone soil and a site close to the ocean. Ballard Canyon, located in the Santa Ynez Valley, fit the bill perfectly: Not only did it have limestone, but cooling winds that originated from the cold Arctic flow just offshore in the Pacific Ocean and swept through the steep hillsides in the afternoons, sucked in by the desert heat to the east. This wind-tunnel effect ensured that the fruit would never get too ripe as it sat in the canyon’s heat during the day. Combined with the chilly nighttime temperatures, this allowed the grapes to retain a juicy acidity.
Everything looked great, but there was one problem: Ballard Canyon receives very little rain during the year. However, rather than use precious water reserves to hydrate the vines, Stolpman turned to dry-farming: providing the vines no irrigation, which would force them to dig deep into the soil in search of moisture. Of course, the vines needed to survive long enough to get their roots that far down, so for the first five years of their lives they received just enough irrigation to keep them going. After that, they were left to fend for themselves.
This practice resulted in a natural reduction in yields and an increase in concentration in the grapes the vines eventually yielded. There also turned out to be a silver lining to the lack of water: Phylloxera, the root louse that ravaged Europe’s vines in the late 19th/early 20th centuries and still exists today, doesn’t like arid environments. This allowed Stolpman to let many of the vines grow ungrafted, and today around two-thirds of them are own-rooted.
All this was a risk, to be sure, but it was eventually ratified by the vineyards’ success—and by the flood of growers that took Stolpman’s lead and flocked to Ballard Canyon.
The winery now has a full-time workforce, dubbed “La Cuadrilla”—a Spanish word for a matador’s entourage of assistants—who work the vineyards with meticulous care. There’s no mechanization: Everything from vine training to pruning to harvesting is done by hand. When the time comes to pick the grapes, the team makes multiple passes in each row, selecting only the fruit that looks fully ripe while letting the remaining bunches hang and mature for a few more days.
In the cellar, many of the grapes go into production uncrushed or left in whole clusters, then foot-trod to ensure a gentle extraction. The juice undergoes native-yeast fermentation, during which it receives no sulfur or other additives, then ages in neutral oak.
Tom’s son Pete took the reins at the winery in 2009, and made several changes. First, rather than selling the majority of their fruit to other winemakers, he kept most of it for Stolpman, ramping up the winery’s production. He also added custom concrete and carbonic fermenting tanks to the cellar facilities. Finally, he augmented the profit-sharing program for La Cuadrilla, giving the team the proceeds from 10% of all the bottles the winery turned out.
Stolpman is both a trailblazer and a standard-bearer, and they’ve rightfully earned their place in the pantheon of Santa Barbara wineries.