Dear readers, please don’t try this on your own.
I’m reporting on my experience after a press trip organized by the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance. Our itinerary included winery visits but also highlighted things to do beyond wine. For instance, wineries like Turtle Rock distill spirits, Sans Liege produces cider, and Giornata Winery has ETTO Pasta Bar — and you can visit them all in Tin City, an urban makers market far from the vineyards.
Many wineries offer a range of hospitality, adventure, and sporting experiences, including glamping, farm-to-table dining, e-bike touring, ax-throwing, and even truffle hunting. You’ll also find wineries with full-service restaurants and onsite lodging, which might inspire you not to leave the premises for a day or two, which could be a good or bad thing.
The organization of this trip allowed me to achieve a record: encountering 35 winemakers in 3.5 days. I hope you don’t think poorly of my overindulgence. It’s something I do well, and it was a “business” trip after all.
Paso Robles is located in central California, about midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, on U.S. Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo County. The wine region promotes its reputation as an outlier renegade and embraces the contrast to its better-known, more polished brethren in Napa and Sonoma Valleys.
Following is a rundown of Paso wineries beyond the wine. It’s worth noting that there are over 200 wineries in Paso Robles, and many other wineries I haven’t mentioned offer things to do and drink that don’t involve wine. Hey, I got to know 35. You’ll need to do the rest yourself.
Spirits in the Vineyards
Kory Burke of Dresser Winery in East Paso explains his decision to plant Agave and launch a Tequilla distillery in partnership with Steve Cass of Cass Winery and a few other winery folks. In 2020, Kory bought the proverbial ranch and built his wine brand, lock, stock, vineyards, and barrel. A five-bedroom home now hosts visitors as an Airbnb and tasting room.
So, is adding a Tequila business a bad decision? “The weather here is similar to Jalisco, Mexico,” Burke says. “That’s why we’ll be growing here. And why not have diverse income streams? Plus, we have a built-in audience, our sizable wine club.”
He expects his distilling business to bankroll his wine business.
Wineries are Also Becoming Distillers
He’s not alone. Paso Robles winemakers excel at multi-tasking and multi-tasting. Several wineries, including Cass Winery and Castoro Cellars, have spawned distillery businesses that sell direct-to-consumer spirits.
Alex Villicana at Villicana Winery discovered distilling as a byproduct of winemaking by bleeding off the juice and turning it into grape-based spirits like gin, vodka, and liqueurs under the Re-Find Distillery label.
Don & Claudia Burns, owners of Turtle Rock Vineyards, also make distilled spirits at Tin City Distilling. If that isn’t enough to keep them busy, they will add a coffee roastery to their operations.
Steve Cass and winemaker Sterling Kragten of Cass Winery are developing a distillery with the aforementioned serial entrepreneur and multi-tasker Kory Burke of Dresser Winery.
Other wineries we didn’t visit are doing the same, including Castoro Cellars’ Bethel Road Distillery & Winery and Donati Vineyards. There’s also an official Paso Robles Distillery Trail to explore if you imbibe the hard spirits.
Most wineries I know in other regions are tapped out running a wine business alone and operating in an environment with flat wine sales. Not these Paso hustlers. They realize that additional revenue streams are key to their survival and are hedging their bets against changing consumer tastes and thirst for other adult beverage options.
Multi-Sport Drinking
Cass Winery embodies and embraces the point of this article: the multiplicity of experiences beyond wine available to Paso visitors. “Camp Cass” makes it easy – e-bikes to explore the vineyards; archery and ax-throwing; painting, olive oil tasting, and cooking classes; and hiking, helicopter, and motorcycle sidecar tours.
Castoro Cellars, one of the largest certified organic vineyard properties in Paso, offers e-bike vineyard tours, disc golfing, and yoga classes, in addition to wine tastings. Like many wineries looking to expand their activity portfolios, Castoro hosts live concerts during the season and the popular Whale Rock Music Festival each September.
Eating and Drinking
Paso’s vintners show they can eat and drink with the same gusto.
Winemakers and foodies Brian and Stephy Terrizzi of Giornata Wines own ETTO Pasta Bar Restaurant and ETTO Pastificio, a pasta-making and specialty goods store in Tin City.
Winemaker and owner Clay Sellkirk at Le Cuvier Winery sustainably dry farms the estate’s vineyard. When you visit, you can taste the wines with this pairing menu at the full-service restaurant open for lunch with reservations.
Andy Niner, owner of Niner Wine Estates, offers traditional tastings and tours and a full-service restaurant serving lunch with produce from the chef’s onsite garden and olive oil sourced from the estate’s olive trees.
Cass Winery offers a full lunch menu and charcuterie plates at Cass Café.
Beyond the wineries I visited, several others offer dining experiences. Click here for additional restaurant listings.
Cider
Distilling tree fruit – apples and pears – into hard cider is a growing business in Paso Robles, as it is around the country. Here are some wineries that have added cider to their portfolios:
Curt and Cara Schlachlin, owners of Sans Liege Wines, have tasting rooms in Paso Robles and Pismo Beach. They also make cider in Paso at Tin City Cider in Tin City.
If you’re interested in cider, there are two other wineries making cider that I wasn’t able to visit, but you might try. Lone Madrone Winery makes Bristols Cider, and you’ll find the Cendre Wines and Cider tasting room in downtown Paso Robles.
High Glamping
Dina and Jeff Hevert, owners of Vinyl Vineyards, own a camping resort with RVs and Vintage trailers. They host tastings and concerts targeting younger gens just coming to the wine scene, and their retro approach and vintage trailers appeal to wine lovers of any age.
Alta Colina Winery has 1950s and 1960s vintage camping trailers and wine tastings onsite.
Lodging Large
Dresser Vineyard has a 6,300-square-foot, five-bedroom home listed on Airbnb that sits atop their 25-acre vineyard.
Cass Winery has two properties available. The first is the Geneseo Inn, former shipping containers developed into eight high-end hotel rooms overlooking the vineyard, and The Farmhouse, a three-bedroom, two-bath private home.
Miscellany
Caelesta Vineyard has developed a “truffiere,” one of only three truffle farms on the West Coast. They offer truffle hunts during the winter harvest season, events, and wine tastings year-round.
The Blending Lab is a winery that specializes in blending wines and offers blending classes in Paso Robles and Los Angeles. Magdalena Wojcik and winemaker Michael Keller also sell blending kits so you can share the experience with friends and family when you return home.
The Wine Lifestyle
At the end of the day, “Wine Life” in Paso Robles turns out to be about more than just wine. It is all about getting together with people, drinking, and doing any number of things you may not find elsewhere or even have thought of. Forget stuffy rules. Paso’s philosophy is that life should be enjoyed, not overanalyzed.
Fun and beverage diversification makes delicious business sense, and the sheer variety of everything available here works for consumers, too.
While you may not shatter my 3.5-day 35-winery achievement (a testament to Olympic-level hydration and snacking), setting your own personal best won’t be difficult.
You may also enjoy:
- Barnacles and Albariño: Rías Baixas Wines and Galician Gastronomy
- The Tastes of Baja California, MexicoMexico’s de Guadalupe
You can subscribe to Carl Giavanti’s international Winemaker Interview series Wine Characters for a fresh take on the people behind the bottle.
