Straight Out of Lompoc

It all started with a single sentence. Robert M. Parker Jr., the world’s most influential wine critic, was looking back on a year’s worth of tastings, and highlighted the Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs made by a tiny winery in an obscure region near Santa Barbara.

“The Brewer-Clifton offerings were the single greatest revelation of my 2001 tastings,” he wrote in his monthly newsletter, the Wine Advocate.

Never mind that the actual reviews and ratings of those wines won’t be released until later next month. Parker had tipped his hand in a way that he rarely has before, and it touched off a fever among wine lovers around the world.

Brewer-Clifton, a two-man winery operating out of an industrial park near Lompoc, was suddenly one of the hottest labels in the business, being mentioned in the same breath as the greatest wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, not to mention Napa Valley.

Greg Brewer, partner in the enterprise with fellow winemaker Steve Clifton, was overwhelmed. The winery is so small that Brewer’s cell phone number was the one listed for contacts. “That’s when we discovered his cell phone only holds 60 messages,” Clifton says. “We were getting 75 to 100 requests a day.” The winery’s mailing list went from 250 to 1,050 in one month. Wine shops from Los Angeles to New York were begging for more wine, and collectors were speculating that a new cult wine had been born.

“It got pretty gnarly,” says Brewer. “Answering the phone, I was talking to people who said they would do anything just to get on the waiting list to get on the mailing list.”

Paul Smith of Woodland Hills Wine Co., a longtime retailer and champion of California wines, was floored by the response. “It was unheard of,” he says. “We’d already sold through one shipment of these wines before Parker came out. After that, we sold through another one and people were still looking for it. They were really shaking the trees.”

Of course, most of these desperate people have never actually tasted the wine, so powerful is Parker’s recommendation they were following blindly. And chances are, they won’t taste it anytime soon. Brewer-Clifton made only about 1,400 cases of the 2000 vintage that Parker raved about, and most of that had already been shipped to clients on the mailing list and a few high-end restaurant and retail accounts.

Right now, stocks are limited to a few scattered bottles in a very few fine wine stores, and on some restaurant wine lists, such as Spago’s in Los Angeles and Jean-Georges’ in New York. There hasn’t been time for the wine to filter down to the auction market, but Smith says that’s inevitable. “This is really a cult wine in the making.”

It’s little wonder then that Brewer, 32, and Clifton, 37, seem dazed by the whole experience. After all, they started their winery only six years ago. And it was only a couple of years before that that the laid-back pair of Southern Californians were at the bottom rung of the wine professional’s career ladder--hustling for minimum-wage tasting-room jobs and waiting tables, in an area that has always been regarded as promising if never quite delivering.

Now they’re in the eye of a hurricane, a storm that arrived quite suddenly after Parker dropped his bombshell.

“Their single-vineyard Burgundian-styled Chardonnays and extraordinary Pinot Noirs from the cool micro-climates of Santa Barbara, particularly those from a new appellation called Santa Rita Hills, are astounding,” he wrote last December. “These two gifted winemakers have an incredible future. Quantities are extremely limited, so it is incumbent on you to get some now.”

“I was, like, wow,” Clifton says. “It was amazing.”

Equally amazing was the opposite response. Before more than a handful of people had tasted the wine, the backlash had already started. One notably sarcastic critic wrote: “I haven’t tasted Brewer-Clifton. But the good thing about Parker is that, when he really likes a wine, you know exactly what it will taste like.”

This kind of attention may be typical in the Napa Valley, but certainly not in Santa Ynez. Though wines have been made here for a couple of decades--and some good ones too: Santa Rita Hills neighbors Babcock Vineyards and Sanford Winery are much admired nationally--it has never seemed to reach the critical mass necessary for widespread popularity.

The new Santa Rita Hills appellation may change that. It lies along one of the few east-west breaks in the wall of mountains that line the California coast, allowing the cool coastal temperatures to penetrate inland. Stretching from just east of Lompoc to just west of Buellton, the area is 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the Santa Ynez Valley.

“Because it’s cooler, we get a lot more hang time out of our grapes,” says Clifton. “That means they take longer to get ripe, but that the flavors are much more developed.”

Once known mainly for growing cabbage and broccoli, the area is experiencing a vineyard boom, something that is almost certain to accelerate now that it has its own appellation and all the attention drawn by its new heroes.

Brewer-Clifton owns no land itself. Instead, it buys small quantities of high-quality grapes--usually an acre or less--from carefully selected vineyards with which it has long-standing relationships. This sense of place is at the heart of what the winery is all about.

“The thing I like about Santa Rita is that it’s like a nice, little neighborhood feeling,” Brewer says. “It’s just a few of us, and we’re really tight.”

Contrary to modern winemaking fashion, which emphasizes winemaker “signature” over the old-fashioned values of regional and varietal flavor, Brewer and Clifton try to be as uninvolved in the making of their wines as possible.

“I’m obsessed with sushi chefs,” says Brewer. “That’s what we try to be like. You know: serving that great piece of fish that was caught this morning off this particular reef that had spent its whole life eating only this one thing. You’re not going to make it better, you’re just trying to keep from screwing it up.

“There’s this trippy pedestal people put winemakers on. But when you’re working with fruit that’s this good, it’s just assembly.”

Despite being made from the same types of grapes, all grown within six miles of each other, and vinified in exactly the same way, there is no mistaking one Brewer-Clifton wine for another. This Chardonnay has a pronounced herbal character, that one has a texture like syrup. One Pinot Noir has a scent of wild strawberries, another the high-toned perfume of raspberry liqueur.

The one characteristic they all share is that they are huge wines that still have pronounced, clearly articulated flavors. They are monsters, but they are so well-knit and harmonious that you almost don’t notice their size. They’re like Shaquille O’Neal in the pivot: 7-foot-1 and more than 300 pounds, but somehow still nimble and graceful.

Eventually, the plan is for Brewer-Clifton to make six Pinot Noirs and six Chardonnays--all from the same set of vineyards.

The pair have been friends for eight years, partners for six. They met while they were scrambling for a start in the wine business, trying to live in Santa Barbara while working minimum-wage jobs.

Brewer was raised in the Pacific Palisades and taught French at UC Santa Barbara before being bitten by the wine bug. Clifton grew up primarily in Orange County. He was a musician, then ran a nightclub/restaurant/art gallery in Laguna Beach. That’s where he started to learn about wine.

“We were on a couple of different committees together for the Santa Barbara County Winegrowers Assn.,” says Brewer. “We found that we had a lot in common .... There weren’t that many people our age or with our interest in wine, so we ended up hanging out all the time. We kind of bonded.”

Soon, the plan for Brewer-Clifton was hatched. But it took them a full year to save the $12,000 they needed to start the winery. “Living in Santa Barbara, working as assistant winemakers for $6.50 an hour, waiting tables, there’s not a lot left over,” says Clifton.

Even today, the winery is definitely bare-bones. Far from a grand chateau, it’s a 2,500-square-foot cement-floored warehouse in an industrial park just outside of Lompoc. The appearance is more like that of a struggling hot tub dealer than glamorous winemaker.

That’s not something that’s likely to change any time soon. Despite their success (even before the Parker mention, they were selling out of all their wines within a week of release), there’s only so much money to be made selling such small amounts of wine, even at $40 to $50 a bottle.

To support his wife and two children, Brewer works full time as winemaker at the much larger, much grander Melville Vineyards and Winery down the street, owned by the family of financier Ron Melville. Clifton, who is single, runs a line of Italian varietals, called Palmina, on the side.

Not even Robert Parker is likely to change that. “Honestly, financially, it’s not going to make us rich,” says Brewer. “We grossed $250,000 for the 1999 vintage, we’ll probably do $350,000 this year because we’re making more wine. Next year we’ll probably be around $400,000.”

That’s not much, particularly when the pair pay so much for their grapes. They bought the Chardonnay that went into their Mount Carmel bottling for $2,750 a ton, among the highest prices paid in the county. A ton of grapes will make about 60 cases of wine, meaning they’ve already spent about $45 a case before the grapes even reach the winery.

The main financial benefit of the Parker review has been to raise the percentage of wines sold to the mailing list from 10% to 15% to what they hope will be about 50%. This is important because wineries get paid the full retail price from mailing-list sales, as opposed to the roughly half they get from wine stores and restaurants.

“That’s sweet,” says Brewer. “It lets us buy cell phones and travel some and pay our taxes out of the company instead of out of our own pockets the way we’ve done before.”

But there’s not much more money available. Selling anything more than 50% of their production to the mailing list would mean cutting out some of the restaurants and retailers who have supported them through the thin years and whose exposure is key to maintaining a high-end brand.

Raising prices is one obvious alternative--particularly when wines from Napa are going for hundreds of dollars a bottle. But the pair vow to keep their prices reasonable. “That whole California cult Cabernet thing just feels so wrong,” says Clifton.

And so Brewer and Clifton wait for next month’s review, knowing that in some ways it has already changed their lives, but in others it will be hardly noticeable.

“It’s kind of weird, we’re not on pins and needles waiting for this to come out, but we’re still totally stoked,” Brewer says. “I’m just really concentrating on enjoying the whole thing right now because I don’t know if it will ever happen again. I mean, how can it?”