When it comes to wine, we Northern Californians are spoiled. It’s easy for us to say, “We have Napa. We have Sonoma. Why visit a wine country farther away?”
Big mistake. Four-plus hours south of the Bay Area lies one of California’s truly stellar wine regions, Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley. If you’ve driven Highway 101 south, you’ve seen it from the car window. You’ve admired the rolling hills, possibly stopped for butter cookies in Solvang, and maybe remembered that the famous oenophile movie Sideways was filmed here.
But if you haven’t set foot in the Santa Ynez recently, you’ve missed out. Here is a relaxed, welcoming spot that has some of the best wine — and now, some of the best food — in California.
To understand what’s special about the Santa Ynez, take Highway 246 west from Buellton, famous for the Days Inn where Miles and Jack stayed in Sideways. (So famous that the motel just changed its name to the Sideways Inn.) It’s the road that reveals the valley at its best: oak-studded hills, soaring hawks, vineyards and a sense of nearing the sea. In a few miles you hang a right and follow a poplar-shaded drive to Melville Winery.
Melville is a Santa Ynez pioneer: in the 1990s, grape grower Ron Melville sold his Sonoma acreage and bought land here. Winewise, the valley was terra incognita. “It was totally scary,” his son Chad Melville recalls. “But my dad has always been a guy who likes to take risks.”
The risks paid off. What the Melvilles found was a region uniquely suited to producing a wide range of good wines. The Santa Ynez is, Chad explains, one of the few valleys in North America that run east-west instead of (like, say, Napa) north-south. At its western end is the chilly Pacific Ocean. With no hills to block them, ocean breezes flow inland. The western portion of the valley is considerably cooler than the eastern. That means that Melville shines producing cool-climate pinot noirs and chardonnays, while wineries in the hotter east produce excellent Rhône varietals and cabs. Today the region holds more than 100 wineries and is divvied up into five appellations: Santa Ynez, Santa Rita Hills (home to Melville), Los Olivos, Ballard Canyon and Happy Canyon.
But geography isn’t the only thing that makes the valley special, says another pioneer, Mark Crawford Horvath of Crawford Family Wines. Without dissing Napa or Sonoma, Horvath thinks Santa Ynez is more open to new, younger winemakers. “There’s just more room for the independent, small guys,” he says.
Spend a day wine tasting here and you see what Horvath means. Santa Ynez is a rangy, loping, uncrowded wine country. At tasting rooms, the person pouring your pinot may well be the winemaker. The winery look ranges from luxurious (tastefully Tuscan Melville) to unpretentious barely describes it — e.g., the wineries housed in the industrial buildings of Lompoc’s “Wine Ghetto.” Quaint they aren’t, but the wines are amazing.
If the wines of the Santa Ynez Valley have been good — OK, great — for a while, even the valley’s fans say that dining and lodging has taken time to catch up. Now it has.
One thing you quickly notice about the valley is that its small towns are distinctive. There’s Danish-themed Solvang, with its straight-outta-Copenhagen bakeries and statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. There’s Old West Santa Ynez. Los Olivos, with its gallery-and-tasting-room lined main drag, Grand Avenue, is the valley’s closest approximation to Healdsburg or St. Helena. Buellton is more everyday California town, albeit one with a famous Days Inn.
All have blossomed into first-rate dining and lodging destinations. In Solvang, British-born chef Steven Snook (he trained with Gordon Ramsay) serves an adventurous tasting menu at First & Oak, housed in a chic boutique hotel, the Mirabelle Inn. A few blocks away, a cutesy Danish motel has been transformed into the sleek Landsby, more Danish supermodel than Little Mermaid. In Santa Ynez, the redone Santa Ynez Inn resembles a mansion owned by your favorite wealthy great aunt. And two newish restaurants — Italian SY Kitchen and carnivore haven Brothers Restaurant at the Red Barn — make the tiny town a gastronomic capital. Los Olivos has quirky, tasty Sides Hardware and Shoes, run by the same siblings who run the Red Barn. And, perhaps taking a cue from Lompoc, Buellton’s Industrial Eats offers wood-fired pizzas in a stylish corrugated metal building of the sort that normally houses muffler shops.
But to experience the Santa Ynez Valley’s appeal at its purest, head to the Ballard Inn. Ballard is a tiny “township” of Solvang, with its own history as a Wells Fargo stage stop, and the world’s cutest little red schoolhouse. Here, Java-born, Santa Barbara–raised Budi Kazali has done two things really well. First, he’s created a country inn that is elegant and soothing. Second, the inn’s newly reimagined restaurant, The Gathering Table, is a marvel. It features Asian-accented French cuisine and a deep selection of Santa Ynez Valley wines. You can enjoy your dinner at one of the long communal tables Kazali insisted on. Because, as he says, “we wanted people to come here and make friends.”
Chances are you will. And chances are that once you get to Ballard and to the Santa Ynez Valley, you’ll feel that the drive was worth it.
If You Go
WINERIES
Crawford Family Wines 2477 Alamo Pintado Road, Los Olivos
Melville Winery 5185 CA-246, Lompoc
RESTAURANTS
Brothers Restaurant at the Red Barn 3539 Sagunto St, Santa Ynez.
First & Oak 409 First St, Solvang.
The Gathering Table 2436 Baseline Ave, Ballard.
Industrial Eats 181 Industrial Way, Buellton.
Sides Hardware and Shoes 2375 Alamo Pintado Ave, Los Olivos.
HOTELS AND INNS
The Landsby 1576 Mission Drive, Solvang.
Mirabelle Inn 409 First St, Solvang.
Santa Ynez Inn 3627 Sagunto St, Santa Ynez.
For more information:
sbcountywines.com
VisitSYV.com
Photos of Ballard Inn and Gathering Table by Tenley Fohl
