SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. – The San Luis Obispo region of California is known for the beauty of its coastline and a relaxed pace of living, but despite its long history of winemaking, it has never broken through with the public as a coveted source for great wines. This may soon change.
In the last decade, a handful of energetic, experimental, highly talented growers and winemakers has settled on the San Luis Obispo Coast, or SLO Coast (pronounced slow), where they are making small amounts of exceptional wines that express the region’s singular coastal character.
Among them are Scar of the Sea, run by the husband-and-wife team of Mikey and Gina Giugni, and Lady of the Sunshine, Gina Giugni’s own label; Outward, owned by Ryan Pace and Natalie Siddique, also husband and wife; Dunites, run by Tyler Eck and Rachel Goffinet, yet another couple, and Phelan Farm, whose proprietor, Rajat Parr, is a world-renowned sommelier and former partner in several wine enterprises who left them all behind to farm and make wine in Cambria on the northern edge of the SLO Coast region.
They’ve recently been joined by Jaimee Motley of Jaimee Motley Wines, who was formerly based in Sonoma and Napa Valley, and her husband, Nico Cueva, formerly the winemaker at Haynes Vineyard in Napa. They moved down to the area last year, when Motley made her first SLO Coast wines. Adjacent to this group is Alice Anderson, proprietor of Âmevive Wine in Los Olivos in Santa Barbara County to the south. She doesn’t make wine in San Luis Obispo but is a close friend and kindred spirit, and she makes wines of a similar freshness and savory character.
“We all kind of grew together in the wine world and have spent many hours tasting wines together,” Siddique said.
Winemaking is not new to San Luis Obispo County. Missionaries planted grapes there more than 200 years ago, while Saucelito Canyon in the Arroyo Grande Valley has one of the oldest California vineyards, planted in 1880, and Alban Vineyards in Edna Valley pioneered growing Rhône varieties in California.
But those areas are inland. The San Luis Obispo Coast appellation did not even exist until 2022. It’s a big area, recognizing sites along the coast while also encompassing Edna Valley and Arroyo Grande Valley.
What links the winemakers working on the coast, beyond tight friendships and a certain outsider mentality, is a conviction that regenerative organic farming is best for the wine and the planet, and that wines ought to be made with minimal intervention. Until recently, none owned a vineyard, instead leasing land or buying organic fruit.
Beyond that, they each follow their own muses, making wines that range from classic pinot noirs and chardonnays, the grapes most often associated with the region, to styles, blends and grapes rarely seen in California.
Rather than using new oak barrels to add richness and complexity to his white wines, Mikey Giugni of Scar of the Sea has employed vineyard soleras in which each year, a portion of the wine made from a particular vineyard is added to the previous year’s wine from that vineyard.
With each year, as wine from the new harvest is added to the solera, a little is removed to add to the new vintage wine. Over time, this solera will get more and more complex as more vintages are mixed in, and the wines removed for the new bottling will be, too. It’s reminiscent of sherry’s solera system and Champagne’s perpetual reserve.
“We now have soleras for all our farming sites,” Mikey Giugni said. “All our wines would be soleras if we had the money, space and time.”
His 2023 Bassi Vineyard chardonnay incorporates a small amount of his Bassi solera, which was started in 2019. It’s beautifully balanced with a stony, saline quality.
Inspired by her husband’s solera experiments, Gina Giugni began a solera for her Lady of the Sunshine wines.
“It’s one of the very few times Gina’s adopted one of my methods,” Mikey Giugni said.
Her 2024 SLO Coast sauvignon blanc was fresh, lively and vibrant, while a ’24 albariño from the Bassi Vineyard was savory and saline.
Their reds, too, are lovely, like a pure, precise 2024 Lady of the Sunshine from Chene Vineyard in the Edna Valley and a savory, salty 2020 Scar of the Sea syrah from the Bassi Vineyard.
The Giugnis make their wines in an unglamorous industrial complex between the San Luis Obispo airport and a junkyard. In 2024, they bought the Bassi Vineyard near Avila Beach, from which they had been buying grapes since 2019. This makes them rare among their peers, who mostly are buying grapes.
“We built the winery before the vineyard,” Mikey Giugni said. “By building a cash flow first, we didn’t need investors.”
The vineyard also solves a problem that had bedeviled them.
“There’s not enough organic fruit – we had to jump around,” Gina Giugni said. “Having fruit security is real.”
Perhaps none of the group has strayed as radically from the conventional as Parr, who, as a sommelier and author, stood for the great, classic styles of wine. He still does. But now, in the cold, foggy, windblown coastal area of Cambria, where late spring frosts are an annual danger and harvests can last well into November, he is focused on little-known grapes from Jura and Savoie in eastern France, like gringet, jacquère, mondeuse, savagnin and pink chardonnay, a quirky mutation of the mainstream variety.
Parr believes that though these grapes might require explanation to the average American consumer, they are best suited to his area. He bristles at the notion that they might be considered oddball.
“If nobody plants them, we’ll never know,” he said.
Because of frosts and powdery mildew issues, his yields have been painfully low. But his wines, like a 2025 Autremont Blanc, a blend of gringet and jacquère, tasted from barrel, and a 2023 gringet, are superb: resonant, savory and alive in the glass.
Parr found he was starting from scratch in his switch from sommelier to farmer and winemaker.
“I tried to buy bees to help with pollination,” he said. “The bee guy said: ‘Why are you coming to me? I go up to your place to collect bees.’ He saved me $5,000.”
By exchanging ideas with the winemaking community, reading books and watching YouTube videos to learn the basics of pruning and other necessary practices, Parr slowly found his way. He is now farming three vineyards in Cambria.
“It’s been painful and not rewarding financially,” he said. “But I believe in the place.”
Aside from making gorgeous wines, Parr’s connections throughout the wine world have brought welcome attention to the area.
“Having Raj move to the area has been super helpful with his megaphone in the industry and has been great for our community,” said Siddique of Outward.
Siddique had worked in the outdoors industry and met Pace while rock climbing. Pace fell in love with the area as a student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. After working in wine at other producers since 2008, he and Siddique decided to devote themselves to Outward in 2021.
Each of the wines I’ve had from Outward have been strikingly good, including most recently a focused, multidimensional 2024 cabernet sauvignon from Potrero Vineyard and a lively, complex 2024 chenin blanc from the Shell Creek Vineyard.
“We see ourselves making California wines, even though their saltiness, freshness and tension might differ from people’s associations with California,” Siddique said.
Eck of Dunites was working in Santa Barbara County when he met Goffinet, who was finishing up at Cal Poly. While visiting her, he saw vineyards on the SLO Coast that he thought were remarkable.
“The SLO Coast had no reputation,” he said. “I didn’t know the producers, and I felt like there was an underappreciation for those vineyards.”
The first vintage of Dunites, named for a group of Bohemian thinkers who settled in the local beach dunes in the 1920s and ’30s, was in 2015.
I’ve enjoyed a rich yet racy ’24 albariño and a lively, savory ’24 chardonnay, and I’m looking forward to trying one of several Dunites syrahs.
“There’s a real, true fingerprint that comes through in the wines because we are so coastal, just a couple of miles from the ocean,” Eck said.
While the wine world seems in a period of retrenchment, these producers are planning ahead. At their Bassi Vineyard, Mikey and Gina Giugni are planning to plant four acres of hybrid grapes, which are resistant to powdery mildew, and require fewer sprays over the course of the year and less time on a tractor, diminishing their carbon footprint and saving the soil from compaction. And Pace and Siddique of Outward are going to plant a small vineyard near their home.
“In a time when we see this doom and gloom around the wine industry,” Siddique said, “the SLO Coast has an energy of optimism.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Dining and Cooking