The Ojai Vineyard
Appellation: Ventura County and Santa Barbara County
Proprietor: Adam Tolmach
Year Founded: 1983
Farming Practice: Organic
Fog Chaser
In the fastest-warming county in the continental US, Adam Tolmach keeps pressing toward the Pacific seeking the clarity of cool-climate wine.
Daybreak spills over the Ojai hills as we crunch across a patch of gravel at the end of an unmarked drive. A basketball hoop pokes above a cactus patch in one direction, leaning toward a rust-feathered tractor from the Radio Age. A hawk screeches its supremacy from a utility pole. This is not the way wineries look in tourism-office brochures.
And here comes Adam Tolmach, with a stemmed glass and a tin bucket, eyeglasses gleaming under a craze of white curls. “If you’re going to stand there in the sun…” says his wife, Helen, and crowns him with a preposterously brimmed hat. Straightening its wildest flop, Adam beams a bashful smile that wipes half the age off his face. Then we plunge into a chilly redwood barn stacked to the rafters with old French barrels, where a wine thief hangs from the nearest wall.
The man’s history here goes decades beyond the earliest vintage. His grandfather bought this land during the Great Depression, and Adam and four siblings grew up hunting lizards and scorpions beneath the live oaks. As a high-schooler he would scour the old orchard to make apricot wine. After earning a degree in viticulture and oenology from UC-Davis, he came back and tried selling sweet corn and melons. Instead of a living, he made all of $4,500. In two years.
In 1982 he joined Jim Clendenen to establish Au Bon Climat, whose Burgundian varietals became an overnight sensation. But nine years later, on the heels of being named one of the best wineries in the world by Robert Parker, Tolmach left—retreating once again to Ojai, where the self-effacing searcher had been experimenting with syrah and sauvignon blanc all the while. He’d spent his childhood “turning over every rock on the property”—and now he set about doing exactly the same thing, only across the whole windward side of California’s transverse ranges.
Tolmach’s first decade in winemaking had yielded two epiphanies: the haphazard “California sprawl” style of vineyard planting made it nigh impossible to produce grapes of consistent ripeness, but better farming could pay huge dividends west of the San Andreas Fault’s Big Bend—where maritime winds push cool fingers of fog deep into the east-west mountain chutes, tempering inland vineyards with Pacific air blocked everywhere else by California’s coastal ridge.
Those insights led him to transform virtually every part of his process. Inking long-term contracts to buy grapes by the acre rather than the ton, he worked with growers like Chris Hammell of Bien Nacido Vineyard to overhaul trellis systems, manicure leaf canopies, cull unripe fruit, drip-irrigate and water-stress the vines. Vineyards that had once yielded a mix of over- and under-mature fruit now produced smaller, uniform crops. In the cool breezes, you could let them ripen forever. And as the sugar levels mounted, so did critical acclamation for Ojai’s increasingly rich, thick, alcoholic Rhone reds.
There was only one problem: Adam didn’t like them anymore.
So he gripped the steering wheel and jerked hard—away from “huge scores” and runaway prices. “It was a poor business decision,” he allows, “because people get a lot of money for those big, bombastic things. And wines of delicacy and finesse just don’t sell for as much.
“But in a creative endeavor you can either sell out or not,” he adds. “Right?”
So he dedicated himself to what, by mainstream California lights, seemed a quixotic goal: achieving physiologically mature grapes at lower sugar levels, and coaxing magic from them with his secret weapon—the cold redwood barns we were now flitting between. He wanted New World wine to shimmer with Old World elegance. And he wanted every bottle to sing the song of its birthplace.
After a lifetime in this place, Tolmach could tell with his eyes closed when the winds off Point Conception were striking terror into the hearts of the oldest mariners. For the last 20 years, he’s followed his instincts further and further west, chasing the fog through two counties that are warming twice as fast as the continental US as a whole. “Syrah grown in a warm climate is really fruity and pleasant,” he says. “And in a cool climate it’s spicy and exotic—and actually interesting.” So he presses ever closer to the Pacific, ferreting out overlooked vineyards where the grapes can hang on the vine longer without getting desiccated and overripe. After a few Ojai vintages, these once-dismissed vineyards become coveted ones. Because whether it’s spring-coiled syrah or balletic pinot noir, each wine is a crystalline window into a tiny sliver of place and time. The crushed-shell salinity of Solomon Hills. The wind-whipped freshness of the John Sebastiano vineyard. The sculpted-chalk savoriness of Puerta del Mar…
Grapes from these plots find their way to other winemakers—and occasionally produce compelling results. But in the solar-powered refrigeration of Tolmach’s redwood barns, where malolactic fermentation slows to a crawl, they sit longer and longer on the lees, gaining the exuberant aromatics and suave intensity of the Old World wines they model—and many times surpass, never mind Adam’s knack for never being quite satisfied.
Meanwhile everything keeps shifting—the temperatures, the ocean currents, the winds they sling ashore. “I’ve been doing this 40 years now but there’s so much to learn,” Adam says. “If you think you nailed it, that means that you’re done.” So the experiments continue. This lot of Kessler-Haak fruit sits on the stems, imparting a cola roundness pierced by the single-berry portion’s bouyant pucker. Barbera ferments in whole clusters, sending red fruit aromatics out of the glass with a carbonic bounce.
And the search deepens. The latest chapter represents the culmination of what you could fairly call an 18-year courtship. In 2021 Adam and Helen became the sole owners of the truly unique Fe Ciega vineyard at the western end of the Santa Rita Hills, from which they’d been making a pinot noir since 2003. Planted to four clones in 1998 on a wild, wind-whisked south-facing slope whose light clay is drained by a substrate of fractured shale and sandstone, Fe Ciega quickly outstripped the hopes embedded within its name—which is Spanish for Blind Faith. Its soils, sun exposure, and the fog that rolls up its slope from the Santa Ynez River yield pinot noir that melds power, acidity, minerality and meatiness in deeply layered bottlings marked by lifted fruit and floral aromatics.
Since buying the 43-acre plot (nine of which were under vine), the Tolmachs have taken Fe Ciega fully organic, planted a couple small blocks of Chardonnay and Syrah, and began a tiny trial of Paseante Noir, a UC-Davis hybrid varietal bred for resistance to Pierce’s Disease.
It’s all a long way from the apricot wine of his teenage days, but Adam’s sense of wonder and openness to what’s possible in this region seems to only gain energy with age. Which you can say about many of his wines, as well.
Wines:
Varietal/Blend: Chardonnay
Vineyard Area: Chardonnay Clima Frío is drawn from grapes grown on exceptionally cool sites across Santa Barbara County.
Soil: Rancho Ontiveros (56%), Yellow Foxtrot (44%).
Vinification: Handpicked followed by a native yeast-fermentation with a portion of whole-cluster inclusion. Malolactic fermentation in older French oak barrels.
Maturation: 9 months with a gentle filtration and fining before bottling with minimal s02.
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Tech Sheets:
Varietal/Blend: Sauvignon Blanc
Vineyard Area: From McKinley Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley AVA—the same rows have been under contract for over twenty years.
Soil: Shallow, low vigor topsoil atop a stony bedrock
Vinification: De-stemmed, pressed and fermented in neutral French oak barrels, stirring of the lees and blocking malolactic conversion. Regular topping up until bottling in spring.
Maturation: 9 months in barrel
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Varietal/Blend: Ambulo Blanc (60%) and Caminante Blanc (40%)
Vineyard Area: From a 1.2-acre parcel around the town of Ojai in Ventura County.
Soil: Well-draining, very fine sandy loam topsoils over sandy clay loam.
Farming Practice: Organic
Vinification: Hand-picked and pressed with an overnight settling before racking the juice to neutral French oak barrels. Neutral yeasts are used to start the fermentation and the wine is then left on its lees for six months. Malolactic fermentation is blocked using minimally effective sulfur.
Maturation: 6 months in neutral French oak barrels with a gentle fining and filtration prior to bottling.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Chardonnay
Vineyard Area: Drawn from vines in Bien Nacido’s I-block since 1991, which is on the lower part of the Santa Maria Bench where the alluvial soils are fine and gravelly.
Soil: Fine and gravelly alluvial soils
Vinification: Hand-harvested, pressed and then fermented in barrel. Stirring of the lees and allowing malolactic conversion to occur naturally.
Maturation: 11 months in French oak barrels (15% new)
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Chardonnay
Vineyard Area: Just west of the boundary of the Sta. Rita Hills, adjacent to the Santa Ynez River’s last bends before meeting the ocean. There’s a near-constant coastal breeze and marine layer traveling up the riverbed and this oceanic influence lends a combination of subtlety and finesse.
Soil: Alluvial - sandstone
Vinification: De-stemmed, pressed and fermented in newer, steam-treated neutral French oak barrels, stirring of the lees, allowing malolactic conversion and regular topping up until bottling in spring.
Maturation: 11 months in French oak barrels
Varietal/Blend: Chardonnay
Vineyard Area: The vineyard is on the southeastern end of the Santa Maria Valley on an east-west oriented bench — vines were planted in 1997.
Soil: Sandy, silty loam
Elevation: 700 feet
Vinification: De-stemmed, pressed and fermented in newer, steam-treated neutral French oak barrels, stirring of the lees and allowing malolactic conversion to occur naturally.
Maturation: 11 months in barrel with regular topping up until bottling in Spring
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah
Vineyard Area: Syrah Clima Frío is drawn from grapes grown on exceptionally cool sites across Santa Barbara County.
Vinification: Handpicked followed by open-top native yeast-fermentation with a portion of whole-cluster inclusion. Malolactic fermentation in older French oak barrels.
Maturation: 11 months with a gentle filtration and fining before bottling with minimal s02.
Marketing Materials:
Tech Sheets:
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir
Vineyard Area: Pinot Noir Clima Frío is drawn from grapes grown on exceptionally cool sites across Santa Barbara County.
Vinification: This fruit was handpicked at night in the beginning of month and was ready to press at the winery in the morning. Between all lots, an average of 11% whole-clusters were used going into the fermenters, with a very modest sulfur addition. Inoculation began immediately with house-cultured native yeast (derived from fruit picked during sampling) and pumped over twice each day until the wine became dry. It soaked on the skins a few more days before being pressed, settled, and barreled down into French oak barrels (6% new). Malolactic fermentation was spontaneous and slow. After aging on the lees for 9 months with no sulfur added, the wine was gently fined before bottling with minimal so2.
Marketing Materials:
Tech Sheets:
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir
Vineyard Area: Bien Nacido 40%, Puerta del Mar 29% and Kessler - Haak 20%, and Peake Ranch 11%
Soil: Varying soil types, from sandy, clay-loam, alluvial to chalky and gravelly
Vinification: About 10% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 14 months in French oak barrels (20% new)
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir
Vineyard Area: Just west of the boundary of the Sta. Rita Hills, adjacent to the Santa Ynez River’s last bends before meeting the ocean. There’s a near-constant coastal breeze and marine layer traveling up the riverbed, and this oceanic influence lends a combination of subtlety and finesse that’s deliciously different from our sites in Sta. Rita Hills proper.
Soil: Deep, gravelly Mocho soils strewn with calcareous (chalky) rock, making the soil chemically similar (if not structurally) to the carbonate-rich soils of Burgundy
Vinification: Usually de-stemmed with open-top fermentation and regular pump-overs during maceration.
Maturation: 15 months in French oak (25% new)
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir
Vineyard Area: The estate's Fe Ciega vineyard is situated on the western end of the Santa Rita Hills
Soil: Rich clay loam with sand and shale fragments
Elevation: 350 feet
Exposure: South
Vinification: About 10% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 15 months in French oak barrels (18% new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir (Pommard 5 and Mt. Eden clones)
Vineyard Area: The estate's Fe Ciega vineyard is situated on the western end of the Santa Rita Hills
Soil: Rich clay loam with sand and shale fragments
Elevation: 350 feet
Exposure: South
Vinification: 17% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 11 months in French oak barrels (27% new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir (clones Dijon 115 and 667)
Vineyard Area: The estate's Fe Ciega vineyard is situated on the western end of the Santa Rita Hills
Soil: Rich clay loam with sand and shale fragments
Elevation: 350 feet
Exposure: South
Vinification: 17% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 11 months in French oak barrels (27% new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Varietal/Blend: Pinot Noir
Vineyard Area: Kessler-Haak is planted in the northern half of the Santa Rita Hills along Route 246 right next to Clos Pepe — vines were planted in 2005 and are very low yielding.
Soil: Varying from very sandy to loamy sand soils with patches of clay loam as well.
Vinification: About 50% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 15 months in French oak (33% new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah
Vineyard Area: Syrah from John Sebastiano 66%, Roll Ranch 13%, Bien Nacido 2.5% and Grenache from John Sebastiano 18.5%
Soil: Varying sandy, shaley soils
Vinification: About 20-30% whole-cluster inclusion depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 16 months in neutral French oak barrels.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah
Vineyard Area: Drawn from steep hillside vines at John Sebastiano which is on the eastern edge of the Santa Rita Hills. Fog comes in regularly each morning and evening. Ojai's rows are located on the upper blocks of the vineyard.
Soil: Linne soil, which is a chalky and well-draining clay loam with lots of shale
Vinification: Hand-harvested and fermented with 25% whole-clusters. Regular pump-overs during maceration.
Maturation: 16 months in French oak barrels (22%. new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah
Vineyard Area: From Z-block at Bien Nacido in the Santa Maria Valley — vines were planted in 1995
Soil: Los Osos clay loam and Franciscan shale over marine volcanics
Elevation: 700 feet
Exposure: West
Vinification: A small portion of whole clusters are used depending on the vintage, open-top fermentation with regular pump-overs.
Maturation: 20 months in French oak (25% new oak). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah (98%) and Viognier (2%)
Vineyard Area: Drawn from Roll Ranch in Ventura County which is the southernmost vineyard of Ojai's sites and with most dramatic diurnal shift due to its elevation.
Soil: An alluvial decomposition of the local mountain, Topa Topa, which is a red sandy loam that is extremely nutrient poor.
Elevation: 1,000 feet
Vinification: The fermentation tank is loaded with whole-clusters including a small amount of Viognier and then smothered with de-stemmed fruit. (71% whole-clusters). Fermentation starts with the addition of Ojai's house-cultured yeast (derived from fruit picked while sampling). Pump-overs are performed during maceration.
Maturation: 22 months in French oak (21% new). Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Marketing Materials:
Varietal/Blend: Syrah 54%, Carignane 33%, Paseante Noir (Hybrid) 8% and Riesling 5% (each stated by vineyard order aove)
Vineyard Area: Roll Ranch (Ventura County), Camp 4 (Santa Ynez Valley), Ojai Vineyard Estate (Ventura County) and Kick-on Ranch (Santa Rita Hills)
Vinification: Whole-cluster pressed with barrel fermentation on the lees
Maturation: 5 months in neutral oak barrels
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