Winning Wines : Ventura County’s five wineries are tiny compared to the giants of the industry, but they more than hold their own when it comes to taste tests.

In the garage space of an industrial park off the roaring Ventura Freeway in Camarillo sit bathtub-size vats of purple mush. The gray concrete room echoes with the sound of piped-in opera--loud enough to overwhelm any of the swampy gurglings that percolate up from the mush, a dangerous looking space goo if there ever was.

Ed Pagor is alone here, stirring the mush, using a long steel paddle to push clumps of floating debris below the inky surface. But he’s quite happy in his tedium, lost in the singular purpose of his operatic cave. For he knows that in a few years the contents of these white plastic vats will be fine wine. Cabernet Sauvignon, in fact, that will sell in better restaurants here and in Los Angeles.

A few miles north, within sight of the Ventura Freeway in Ventura, Brooks Painter enters a warehouse and brushes by a board that is covered in bright orange, purple, and blue ribbons. They’re awards from California’s major county fairs honoring wines Painter has made. Chardonnay. Cabernet Sauvignon. Merlot. Pinot Noir.

Painter takes a seat in an office lined with beakers, glass measuring tubes, and testing devices. He is anything but high-tech in his speech, however, which is passionate, even lyrical--on the subject of Pinot Noir. “It’s a misunderstood variety,” he says. “Too many have gone for too much flavor and extraction from the grapes. The beauty and finesse is in its nuance. So we’re going for more delicate and aromatic compounds in the wine.”

Yet a few more miles northward, in Oak View, beneath hawks floating above a seared, desolate hillside vineyard, an otherwise sane fellow named Adam Tolmach is knee-deep in grapes, “jogging” his way toward a world-class cuvee. It’s the crush at his Oak View winery--and while he’s not exactly stomping for juice, he can’t resist hopping into the vat to help feed the mechanical crusher.

If Tolmach is in the best of his form, the wine he is making will achieve national, even worldwide, recognition. Whatever the outcome, it will be a singular effort from a singular kind of guy--a nectar from a maker so finicky that he refuses to delegate winery work to anyone other than his wife because “it might not get done as I would do it.”

“Plus,” says Tolmach, who collaborates to a degree with his wife, Helen Hardenbergh, “I enjoy doing everything.”

Ed Pagor owns and runs Rolling Hills Vineyards, a one-man winery--there are no vineyards in sight--in Camarillo. Brooks Painter is the winemaker at Leeward Winery, a five-person show in Ventura. And Tolmach, with his wife, owns and run The Ojai Vineyard, a vineyard and winery in Oak View.

They join two other Ventura County commercial winemakers: Carmel Maitland, who owns and runs Old Creek Ranch Winery, in Oak View; and John Daume, like Pagor a one-man show, also in Camarillo, also without vineyards.

These five are Ventura’s emerging wine industry. And they have two key things in common.

First, they love wine as well as its commercial potential, making them manufacturers of products they truly care about. As a result, they blend the personal with the professional, and it’s often difficult to separate the two. Second, they are making credible to downright memorable bottlings of specific varieties of wine in a part of California that’s as unknown for wine as it is well-known for lemons.

Their settings can be modest and unlikely.

Pagor and Daume work out of rented warehouses steps from the highway. Not a vineyard in sight. Grapes are trucked in.

Indeed, Leeward, by far Ventura County’s largest and most commercially successful winery, is just such an off-the-highway warehouse operation--except it does feature a welcoming tasting and sales room open to the public. Only Old Creek and The Ojai Vineyard have surrounding picture-book acreage planted in vines from which they make wines, though both buy substantial amounts of grapes from Central Valley growers.

The warehouse setting, it is worth pointing out, is not an unusual circumstance in France, which is loaded with vineyardless entrepreneurs who truck grapes in to their garage-like wineries. But in California, whose Napa and Sonoma valleys have forever forced a postcard image upon wineries, it makes Ventura County vintners the odds guys out, poor country cousins in a very rich, bucolic family.

But truth, enologically speaking, is in the bottle. Leeward’s lush Edna Valley Chardonnay or Ojai Vineyard’s hauntingly deep Oakview-grown Syrah are standing head-to-head with serious, more established competition.

While Leeward racks up ribbons from competitions as far away as Atlanta, Ojai Vineyard has found its way onto the wine list at Bouley, arguably New York’s finest restaurant, and earns favorable comment in the latest edition of “Wine Buyer’s Guide,” by wine guru Robert Parker Jr.

And the wines of Oak Creek, Rolling Hills and Daume all bear, for the better, the considered marks of their quality-conscious makers. None of Ventura’s wines are generic.

They form a small agriculture. Together, they produced a mere 22,000 cases of wine last year, with 13,000 of those cases coming from Leeward alone. An established, respected Sonoma winery such as Simi sells that much of just one of the several varieties it produces. But increasingly those 20,000 cases are of wine that competes well in the California marketplace and annually improves in quality.

Herewith a profile of each winery, with tasting notes on popular current releases and information on tasting room and retail sales facilities.

LEEWARD WINERY

Chuck Gardner and Chuck Brigham were both amateur winemakers when, in 1979, they opened Leeward in Oxnard, at Channel Islands Harbor. From the outset they showed a clear preference for classic, full-blown California-styled Chardonnay, and they succeeded with it.

Chardonnay accounts for 80% of the winery’s annual production of 13,000 to 15,000 cases. Leeward’s Central Coast Chardonnay, the winery’s mid-price mainstay and bestseller, bespeaks the style: broad tropical fruit flavors, firm acid, a clear presence of vanilla and toast from oak barrel aging. More muscle than nuance, it’s a big, fine wine at $11 suggested retail.

Thinking big, Gardner and Brigham moved to larger quarters in Ventura and, in 1989, hired Brooks Painter, a UC-Davis viticulture/enology graduate who’d worked in boutique wineries near Santa Cruz.

Painter successfully bridges technical proficiency, ensuring taste and style consistency among Leeward’s wines from year to year, with old-fashioned palate-driven winemaking techniques. As a result Leeward’s lineup under Painter is bolstered by a concentrated but soft-on-the-tannins Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, a supple Napa Valley Merlot, and, most notably, a concentrated, cherry-bright but floral and velvety ’90 Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir ($14) made from grapes grown in the exclusive Bien Nacido Vineyard.

Leeward continues, as it has successfully since founding, to release a Reserve Chardonnay from Edna Valley grapes. Its opulent 1991 release ($15), redolent of pear and pineapple and perfectly held in check by firm acids, is easily the star of its formidable Chardonnay lineup and worth seeking out either in stores or at the winery.

Leeward Winery, 2784 Johnson Drive, Ventura. 656-5054. Leeward has a full tasting facility, free of charge and open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the winery. All wines are available for retail purchase, including some unavailable in stores as well as a curiosity piece among Chardonnays: the all-Ventura-County-grown Chardonnay from St. George’s Ranch in Somis. Souvenirs and brochures also are available; they’re flanked by all the shiny prize ribbons bestowed upon the wines. Tours of the winery--you’ll see rack upon rack of French oak barrels--are available for the asking.

THE OJAI VINEYARD

Where Leeward is out front in production and eagerly embraces the public, The Ojai Vineyard puts out a precious 3,500 cases annually and is so low-profile that the sign denoting its near-hidden property is the printed side of a cardboard wine box nailed to a post in the ground. There is no tasting room, there are no tours. Wines are not sold from the winery.

Adam Tolmach and his wife, Helen Hardenbergh, like it that way. They live on these 17.5 acres, first cultivated by Adam’s grandfather, and have planted 5.5 acres in Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon. It gets very hot here in the Ojai Valley, so Chardonnay and other varieties seeking cooler microclimates are purchased elsewhere and trucked in.

Until recently Tolmach was the founding partner, with Jim Clendinen, of the much-celebrated Au Bon Climat winery in Santa Barbara County. Tolmach is a UC-Davis graduate but eschews putting too much science into the wine. Indeed, he’s something of a gnarly Francophile when it comes to wine, having been deeply influenced by working the harvest in Burgundy in 1981.

As a result his white wines are traditionally styled with the discipline and restraint of fine white Burgundies, a la Chassagne Montrachet. Tolmach’s ’91 Reserve Chardonnay, of grapes from the Talley Vineyard in San Luis Obispo County, is a tightly knit, perfumed example--as coy and complex as Leeward’s Edna Valley is extroverted and direct. Since Tolmach only sells a scant 100 cases of Ojai Vineyard wines to Ventura County retailers--dealers and restaurants in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and New York buy most of it--you’ll have to ask around for it. (Note: One key Ventura County showcase for Ojai Vineyards wines has been the restaurant at Wheeler Hot Springs, which often features one of Tolmach’s Chardonnays by the glass.) The ’91 Reserve is worth the search, though, even at suggested retail of more than $20.

Tolmach’s style in red wine also is French but rustic, as in the wines of the Rhone Valley. On his fireplace mantle is a dormitory-style row of empty bottles of favorite wines. Near center? A Paul Jaboulet Hermitage La Chappelle, one of the Rhone’s truly great, rustic, peppery, broad-beamed reds, principally of Syrah grapes.

This may be where Tolmach is most distinctive, not to mention more affordable. His Syrah is from vines on his Oak View property, yielding grapes of intensity and terrific color extraction. The Ojai Vineyard’s ’91 Syrah, at $14 suggested retail, is certainly the most distinctive red wine produced in Ventura County and a contender with many of California’s best: deep purple in color, it bursts with bright fruit and currant flavors, with faint cedar and pepper notes.

Tolmach, an Oxnard native, and Hardenbergh, a biochemist by training, met while picking Au Bon Climat grapes in 1982. Hardenbergh started working the Ojai Vineyard in 1984, with Tolmach “phoning in instructions on what to do each day” while working at Au Bon Climat. Finally, in 1991, Tolmach returned to the Oak View property full time.

Ojai Vineyard will remain small, focusing even more intensively on quality. “We just want to make the best wines possible,” says Tolmach. “We don’t really want to expand much, if at all. You have to live your life as well as do your business. I enjoy doing this, doing everything connected to it. I’d rather be happy than be a millionaire.”

Besides the Chardonnay and Syrah, Ojai Vineyard makes Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon.

OLD CREEK RANCH WINERY

If you ask the engaging owner of this spectacular 850-acre property, she will tell you: “My friends conned me into making wine.”

That’s sort of true. But Carmel Maitland is someone who does only what she wants and only what seems like good business. That’s how she got to this ranch in the first place. She was living a “corporate life” with her late husband in Encino, took a drive north, and, in anticipation of their retirement, bought the ranch on a whim in 1976. “I was so struck by its beauty,” she says.

A small, long-out-of-use winery existed on the property, and its stone-foundation remnants and a few broken walls remained. While Maitland established and continues to operate a ranching operation with cattle and horses, a pair of home winemaker friends would always ask about the ramshackle winery facing her house. If they didn’t actually con her, they did persuade her, in 1981, to get the winery going again.

She did, with the help of some part-time partner-winemakers, and found success in well-made, ready-to-drink varietal wines. Old Creek pandered to neither the soda pop nor wine-snob crowd; its wines were always down the middle, simply made in traditional methods with an accessible, well-balanced result.

Word spread that good, reasonably priced wines were being made on the ranch, and people kept showing up. The result, after 12 years of operation, is that Old Creek is in the uncommon and somewhat enviable position of selling a whopping 75% of its wines directly from the winery, at retail price. No distributor, no wholesalers, no shipping; just loyalists who report to the comfortable tasting room or pack a lunch and sit on the deck overlooking the property. (The remaining 25% goes to retail shops and restaurants, including Pastabilities and the Shields Brewing Co., both in downtown Ventura.)

Maitland still maintains an open door--indeed, she likes meeting folks who take the bother to find Old Creek Road (off California 33) and then drive, at one point through the gurgling creek itself, to its terminus: the entrance to her ranch and winery. Visitors are delighted to find how casual things are.

Indeed, her winery is sufficiently low-tech that she calls her bottling line “five friends and a picnic table”--that is, a gaggle of fun-loving wine hobbyists filling and corking each bottle in a human production line. “It’s not real work,” says Maitland. “We have fun doing it. We’re an unruly bunch.”

The exception to that, of course, is in the winemaking. The current-release Merlot ($9) is soft and filled with plummy fruit--a perfect picnic or barbecue red. The Chardonnay ($8), if a tad light, is balanced, with sunny citrus flavor held in check by time in wood. The Johannesberg Reisling ($7) may be Oak Creek’s lone concession to the spritzer crowd, as it pleases quickly with off-dry fruit and has a finish as glad as Kool-Aid, but then party wines do need to exist. The winery’s current total production of nearly 2,000 cases includes a lusty Cabernet Sauvignon and two whites grown in 12 acres of vineyards facing the winery: Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc.

Old Creek Ranch Winery, 10024 E. Old Creek Road, Oak View. 649-4132. Old Creek’s bucolic setting and warm staff make it well worth the drive. It’s open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Most wines are available for free tasting and all are available for retail sales, including some overstocks at clearance prices. Take Old Creek Road from California 33 in Oak View to the end, proceeding slowly to the winery, on the right.

ROLLING HILLS VINEYARDS

Ed Pagor was West Coast regional manager for a Swiss metals company that supplied aerospace firms. Then, as his company’s business shrunk with its main buyer, his job was eliminated.

“I was selling industrial use aluminum on one day and wine the next,” says Pagor. “I’ll tell you, the wine’s a lot more personal, a lot more fun.”

Pagor grew up in Passaic, New Jersey, amid immigrant populations that made wine in home basements for family consumption. He picked up the habit. “Wine was always on the table,” he says. “One thing led to another.”

After moving to California, he started making varietal wines as a hobbyist--about 50 cases a year--and found himself to be pretty good at it. He expanded production and started Rolling Hills in 1981 as a part-time venture but found, by the time of his layoff in 1987, that “I was making five times more wine than I had sold.” So he was well supplied to make the switch to full time.

Pagor has carved out a specialized niche by selling directly to exclusive Los Angeles restaurants that, in the case of Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabasas, offer Rolling Hills by the glass as their “house” wine as well as by the bottle. Since Pagor is a one-man show, he not only makes and sells the wine but delivers it too.

Pagor’s winemaking style is traditionally European. Wines under his Rolling Hills label tend to be everyday and true-to-character, reflecting the fleshy Central Coast quality of his principal grape sources.

It’s in Pagor’s special-effort bottlings, however--Grenache, Pinot Noir, and a Rhone-style blend called “Alexis”--that he hits the enology home runs.

These are big, ambitious wines that reward with layers of bright fruit and lingering complexity. His Grenache, a little-seen variety here but common in France, is particularly memorable: It is sufficiently concentrated and broadly structured as to benefit from decanting, and then, after exposure to air, continues to expand in its floral and spiced flavors. These special-effort wines are bottled with stylish, distinctively designed labels that simply say Pagor.

Sadly, only a few retail outlets carry Rolling Hills wines, among them Conejo Provision in Thousand Oaks and Bristol Farms markets in Pasadena and Manhattan Beach. Wines are sold at the winery, but Pagor often is not there. Worse, during winemaking season, he’s often too busy to halt winery operation to take the time to sell a bottle or two to the intrepid wine-lover. So feel lucky if you see Rolling Hills; otherwise, order the wines through a retailer or call the winery direct to know when Pagor will be available for sales.

Rolling Hills Vineyards, 126 N. Wood Road, Camarillo. 484-8100. Pagor does receive calls at the winery.

DAUME

John Daume may well be the dean of home winemaking in Southern California. His shop, the Home Wine, Beer, and Cheese Making Shop in Woodland Hills, is a buzzing nexus of garage vintners. As customers stream through bemoaning their latest brix or racking problems, Daume advises calmly, cautiously, even dissuading one from the purchase of a tiny new Czech oak barrel “because it’ll over-oak it, with too much surface-to-volume ratio.”

But Daume, a longtime home winemaker who has taken extension courses in enology at UC Davis, invests most heavily in his own vinification skills by owning and operating a 2,000-case-a-year winery in Camarillo.

He, too, is traditional in his approach, though without guilt about putting the broad beam of oak in his wines. While this can stilt his otherwise focused, barrel-fermented Chardonnay ($10.95), it better suits his exceptional spicy, deep, opulent Zinfandel, made from Paso Robles grapes and a relative bargain at $6.95. Daume also puts out a Vintner’s Blend that combines Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot; and a Pinot Noir of grapes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

Finding his wines can be difficult. His main market is Los Angeles. But Daume wines do appear on the wine lists in some Ventura County venues, among them the California Grill and the Crab House restaurants, both in Camarillo.

Better still is the good news that Daume hosts two large annual parties at his Camarillo winery. The public is invited; the parties are set up open-house style.

His spring bash, called a Jimmy Buffet Beach Party, is held on the first Sunday of April. Soon approaching is the Christmas Party, scheduled this year for Dec. 5--expect a happy crowd at this one, as last year’s drew 300 people who were eager to taste, enjoy accompanying foods, and buy their favorite Daume wines.

Daume Winery, 270. N. Aviador St., Camarillo. 484-0597.