Paradise Springs is not your usual winery. For openers, it’s not one winery but two – one facility in Virginia and another in Santa Barbara, California. This piece is about the West Coast branch; we haven’t visited the one in Virginia (yet). It’s a young winery; they started making wine in Virginia in 2010 and in Santa Barbara in 2015.
When we refer to Santa Barbara wines, we often include those made in the area surrounding the city, Santa Barbara County. And in fact that’s where Paradise Spring’s grapes come from. But the tasting room puts the funk in Funk Zone, Santa Barbara’s hot-spot wine tasting area. It’s situated on a parking lot and it has a hole of miniature golf outside. Tables outside are on artificial grass; no vines are in evidence. If you look at the building from just the right angle, it’s quite attractive, but it’s hard to avoid looking at the food truck in the parking lot and the visitors playing golf. To be fair, the interior of their facility is well-appointed but we only discovered it after we had enjoyed a rather extensive list of wines that we tasted outdoors.
Our server – excuse us, he’s an Experience Manager – was knowledgeable but decidedly casual. Taken together, everything about Paradise Springs would have turned us off, since we’re rather conventional in our wine tasting tastes. The saving grace is that we really enjoyed the wines we got to taste.
Not surprisingly, the Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs come from Santa Rita Hills and the other reds are made from grapes from the much warmer Happy Canyon. (It’s amazing how different the climate can be, with both areas in Santa Barbara County.) Our tastes run towards red wines, so we focused on those. One of their outstanding Pinot Noirs is sourced from Sanford & Benedict vineyard, among the best known in the county. There’s also a Rhône blend, which Californians insist on calling a GSM (Ugh! Yes, the Rhône makes wines from Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre but they sometimes use other grapes such as Carignan and Cinsault. Why do West Coast vintners insist on making wine from just those three grapes?)
There was one wine that stood out to us. They call it The Roshi and it’s a Bordeaux-style Meritage. This one is made from both Happy Canyon and Virginia grapes. Paradise Springs proclaims it as the only bi-coastal wine and we’re sure that that’s true.
When we’re wine tasting in the city of Santa Barbara, we generally stick to the up- and mid-town wineries that are, in general, quite classy. We do go into the Funk Zone too, but with some trepidation. The wineries in that part of town have improved recently, so we can’t just skip it. If you’re in the mood for sipping some serious wine in a hippy-dippy atmosphere, we recommend you put paradise Springs on your itinerary.