Vin de Ventura : Prophets Without Much Profit Dream of Wine-Making Triumph in Area

At first glance, it is a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. With no more than 12 acres of grapes, Ventura County yields more than 150,000 bottles of wine a year.

But the five wineries that produce vin de Ventura get most of their grapes and sell the lion’s share of their vintage far beyond the county lines. Their owners are prophets without much profit in their own land but they dream that the fruits of their labor will become more firmly established in a region now more respected for its lemonade than its wine.

“Europeans love their local wineries and take great pride in searching out the guy off the beaten path,” said Ed Pagor, the founder, chemist, chief bottler, marketing representative and sales manager of Rolling Hills Winery in Camarillo. “I think that feeling is going to catch on here in Ventura County.”

Sandwiched between an auto repair shop and a warehouse in a Camarillo industrial park, Rolling Hills imports its grapes from the rolling hills of Santa Maria, 100 miles to the north.

No wooden casks mark its entrance. There is no brick veiled with ivy, no tasting room, not even a sign. The dimly lit winery, crammed with oak barrels, flasks, measuring spoons, thermometers, gauges and the other paraphernalia of wine making, occupies a space about the size of a small two-bedroom apartment.

“If I can keep it going,” Pagor says, “it will take another five years to have really steady customers, which will allow people in Ventura County and the rest of Southern California to really know and appreciate my wines.”

Part-Time at First

A former sales manager for a Swiss aluminum company, Pagor started the winery in 1981 as a part-time operation. Last February, his employer of 18 years closed its West Coast operation, and he was out of a job. “I became a full-time wine maker the next day,” he said.

In 1987, he produced 18,000 bottles of wine.

A transplant from New Jersey, Pagor sells 75% of his wine in the Los Angeles area, which represents the nation’s largest consumer of wine. (So competitive a market is Los Angeles that the University of California, Davis offered a one-day class in Santa Rosa last fall on selling wine in Southern California.)

About 250 of California’s 650 wineries produce as much or less wine than Rolling Hills, according to the San Francisco wine-industry consulting firm of Gomberg, Fredrickson & Associates.

“A winery a month opens in this state, and many of these are lucky to sell enough wine to just break even. Many are producing wine for the love and art of it,” said Jon Fredrickson, the firm’s president.

On the average, he said, a winery must sell 36,000 bottles a year to cover expenses. Only one Ventura County winery sells that much.

In the last half of the 1800s, however, Ventura County was considered one of the most productive grape-growing areas in California.

Wineries and vineyards flourished in Ojai, Piru and Tapo Canyon. On Santa Cruz Island, wine makers blended island grapes into Zinfandel, Chablis, Muscat, Pinot Noir, Riesling and Burgundy and shipped most of the vintage to San Francisco for bottling.

But the industry was squeezed out by the thirst of the citrus business for cheap land, by disease and by Prohibition.

The flow of wine from area wineries stopped in 1949 for 30 years. It resumed in 1979, when a grocery store manager and a retail clothier created Leeward Winery, now the county’s largest and most profitable wine maker. The two men, Chuck Brigham and Chuck Gardner, began their commercial operation in a 1,600-square-foot warehouse across the street from what was to become Pagor’s Rolling Hills Winery.

“We spent 50 hours a week making wine, in addition to our regular jobs,” Brigham recounted. “We did everything ourselves, even the dirty work. The two of us used to leave for the Bay Area at 3 in the morning with 140 cases of wine to deliver and sell, then we’d drive back. It was quite an experience.”

Their patience has produced a wall full of awards. Two golds and a silver from the Orange County Fair honored the only three varieties that they produced their first year.

‘Really Proud’

“We are really proud of those first three awards,” Brigham said. “They really helped put us on the map.”

In 1982, Leeward moved from Camarillo to a spacious new facility in Ventura. The two-building complex features one of the county’s two tasting rooms.

A climate-controlled production facility is accented by a state-of-the-art bottling assembly line that can bottle, cork and label 2,640 bottles in one hour--five times the number that they could process at their old facility.

In 1987, Leeward produced 114,000 bottles of wine, 63% of Ventura County’s total production for the year. Two Chardonnays (a Central Coast and an Edna Valley) accounted for 75% of the company’s total production. The winery also makes an Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and a Santa Maria Valley Pinot Noir Blanc known as “Coral.”

The San Francisco Bay Area is Leeward’s largest wine market, accounting for nearly 35% of sales, followed by a region composed of Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties.

And Ventura County? “Unfortunately, we sell more wine in the city of Sacramento than we do in Ventura County,” Brigham said.

‘The Local PLace’

Only Ojai’s Old Creek Ranch Winery sells all its wine in Ventura County. “When we set up the winery, we wanted to be the local place where people could buy wine in Ventura County,” said Chuck Branham, one of the owners of Old Creek and a physiology teacher at Ventura’s Buena High School.

“With an annual production as small as 14,400 bottles of wine, we don’t have time to market and sell wine in Los Angeles,” Branham said.

And with the tasting room selling 65% of the winery’s production, the economic necessity to sell outside the county is reduced.

Old Creek, which is on a working 350-acre ranch, is surrounded by orchards, from which visitors as far away as Brazil and Japan pick boysenberries, apples, pears, plums, peaches and table grapes.

It routinely attracts visitors from Los Angeles and even plays host to an occasional tour bus full of wine aficionados, Branham said.

Old Creek is one of just two county wineries that make at least some of their wine--a Chenin Blanc and a Sauvignon Blanc--from their own grapes. The other winery is the Ojai Vineyard near Oakview, owned by Adam Tolmach, whose mother, Jane Tolmach, served as mayor of Oxnard from 1973 to 1974. The Tolmach family winery is the only one in Ventura County that grows all its own grapes.

‘Best Fruit Possible’

Doing so allows maximum control over the grapes, “which lets us grow the best fruit possible,” Tolmach said.

The winery can only produce wines from varieties that grow well in Ojai’s climate, forcing it to stay away from grapes that need cooler weather, such as Chardonnay. The result is three dry table wines: Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon.

The winery, which planted its first vineyard in 1981, produces just 12,000 bottles a year. Most of it is sold in the Bay Area, then Los Angeles County, Santa Barbara County, and finally, Ventura County.

“I can sell wine quickly and in large quantities in the Bay Area,” Tolmach explained. “It seems to me that the market for Ventura County wines in this county is just developing.”

Tolmach works at his winery on weekends, and during the week, commutes to another winery near Los Alamos, in Santa Barbara County, in which he has invested.

A Decade Ago

Ten years ago, most of the county’s wine makers were making wine in garages and back rooms. “Most home wine makers dream of owning their own winery,” remarked Old Creek’s Branham, a former home wine maker.

“Doctors and lawyers have that dream; business people have that dream; even my brother, who oversees the production of 3 million gallons of Zinfandel a year, has that dream. And he’s in wine up to his ears.”

John Daume, the area’s newest vintner, is referred to by many of the county’s wine makers as being the man widely responsible for inspiring area wine makers.

Daume is owner of a Woodland Hills home wine-making shop that, since opening in 1970, has supplied Southern California hobbyists with everything from filters to grapes. But his influence has been most widely felt through his leadership in Cellarmasters, a club affiliated with his shop. It was there that Leeward Winery’s Brigham and Gardner, along with Rolling Hills Winery’s Pagor, were bitten by the wine-making bug.

‘Share Everything’

In 1982, Daume decided to put his advice into practice and opened the John Daume Winery. In the 1,600-square-foot warehouse where Leeward Winery began, across the street from Rolling Hills Winery, he makes a Chardonnay, Fume Blanc and Pinot Noir. He keeps his costs down by borrowing equipment from Rolling Hills.

“This is anything but a cutthroat business,” Daume said. “Pagor and I share everything. I borrow his filter, he borrows my pump. He borrows my forklift, I borrow his portable bottling tank.”

Competition? Daume, the man who helped the industry get going in Ventura County, says: “Oh, sure, it’s there. But it’s not winery working against winery, or owners trying to knock their competition off a restaurant’s wine list. It’s where it should be: side by side on your store’s shelf.”