The Wild King Vineyard’s Natural Wisdom

What if everything you’ve ever been told was wrong?

This quandary is at the heart of an ongoing, initially accidental farming experiment happening right now in the Santa Maria Valley. Given that all of modern agriculture proclaims to know about what it takes to grow high-quality wine grapes — a formula reliant on irrigation, fertilization, cultivation, and meticulous year-round attention — how could an untended patch of pinot noir produce some of the most delicious results winemakers have ever seen, especially during the drought-addled vintage of 2021?

Despite no water for the entire growing season, no nutrients added to the soil, no pruning to shape the vines into efficient fruit-making machines, and no spraying of anything — organic or otherwise — to fight back the foggy region’s notorious mildew, these vines alongside 101 in the sandy hills east of Orcutt produced tiny berries (prized for intense flavors), widely spaced clusters (which hinders mildew), and a hefty load of fruit.

“It’s incredible,” vintner Will Henry told me a few weeks after that year’s harvest from what he dubbed the Wild King Vineyard, located down the road from his home. “How do I do this again? I am still trying to figure it out.” 

Henry, who started Lumen Wines with veteran winemaker Lane Tanner a decade ago, was so excited by the fruit that year that he sold some to a few friends, including Gavin Chanin of Chanin Wine Co.  

“I’m mesmerized by the whole thing, to be honest,” Chanin told me last month. He’s worked with some of the best vineyards around Santa Barbara County since breaking into the industry right out of high school in 2007 and, like most winemakers in California, is accustomed to tidy, picturesque vineyard rows. But the Wild King’s head-to-toe, scraggly bushes made him rethink the status quo and believe that these plants, which grow like weeds in the wild, were tapping into some sort of natural wisdom. 

“It was special to see how a vine wants to behave and how a vine can protect itself,” said Chanin. “It was really just a unique opportunity to see what vines did a thousand years ago.”

Henry also sold some grapes to Jessica Gasca, whose brand Story of Soil is focused on organic and biodynamic vineyards that often look more rugged than pristine. She was skeptical, especially during the 2021 harvest. 

“It was some of the ugliest fruit that I’ve ever seen in my life,” recalled Gasca soon after that harvest. “But you don’t have to have pretty looking fruit to make really good wine.” Upon sampling her wine and Henry’s after they fermented that fall, she was even more enthused, explaining, “This must be a magic vineyard because this wine tastes so awesome.”

As the Central Coast critic for Wine Enthusiast who likely tastes more Santa Barbara County wines than anyone else each year, I can concur. The finished Wild King wines are much more concentrated, spicy, and lush than most of their counterparts from the Santa Maria Valley. I gave Chanin’s bottling — the only one submitted for an official review so far — a score of 96 points, which is exceedingly high on my scale. Casual tastes of other Wild King bottlings have been similarly impressive. 

No wonder that I too have become enamored by this story of nature versus nurture, accepted versus unorthodox, known versus unknown. Could it be that this cast-aside property holds keys to a more sustainable farming future? Or was it just a total fluke? 

Henry’s discovery of the vineyard was the latest in a lifetime of wine industry evolutions. The son of Warner Henry, whose wine group was one of the first promoters of family-owned California wineries, Will moved from just selling wine to making it with Lane Tanner by starting Lumen in 2012. Three years later, he bought land in the rolling hills south of Clark Avenue and began planting the five-acre Warner Henry Vineyard there in May 2021. 

That’s when he realized that a nearby vineyard wasn’t looking so hot. “He let it go completely wild,” said Henry of his neighbor Douglas King, an aerospace executive who planted the seven acres of pinot noir in 2007. But the vineyard proved better for frustration than finances, so King stopped farming following the brutal 2020 harvest.

“One day I popped over the fence, and the fruit looked insane,” said Henry, whose wine buddies were also shocked. “That’s what is totally freaking all the vineyard guys out. How did they get that quality and spend nothing on the farming?”

Henry called Randall Grahm, the founder of iconoclastic brands such as Bonny Doon, The Language of Yes, and Popelouchum, and who’s known for out-of-the-box thinking. Grahm saw a similarity to a technique called box pruning that he’d seen in Monterey County.   

“They treated the vines like a hedge,” said Grahm. “I was initially skeptical of that vineyard, but I was really pleased with it. It does everything you want a vineyard to do: produce evenly ripened fruit, in fairly small berries, that’s flavorful.” 

That technique remains one potential tool for replicating the 2021 results, but like the other vintners involved, Grahm is open to learning whatever Wild King has to teach. “I’m a Tory, I’m very old fashioned,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m also open to new ways of thinking about everything in every possible way, especially in light of climate change.”

The two years since 2021 have been rough on the Wild King Vineyard. Despite wanting to let nature take over, Henry had to water the vines to keep them alive and prune most of them to enable fruit to grow. Mildew nearly wiped out the 2022 vintage, although the two acres that he left wilder fared better. He did a complete “reset” in 2023, farming the vines like his estate vineyard, which produced a tiny amount of pristine fruit, still not enough to sell to friends. 

“I hope next year we are gonna come out swinging,” said Henry, who plans to test various “natural” strategies in certain blocks as the years roll on. “Assuming we have a good year, we’ll have some wild fruit to work with again.”

That wildness is what has everyone watching, even if just to discover small lessons that can be applied more broadly to an industry facing an uncertain future of droughts, floods, and who knows what else. 

“There’s no question that the vines like to go wild,” said Henry. “It’s figuring out how wild can you go without losing your shirt.”

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The Wild King Vineyard winemakers will pour and discuss their six renditions of the 2021 vintage during an educational panel on Sat., Dec. 2, 3-5 p.m., at Pico Los Alamos, 458 Bell St., Los Alamos. Mixed six-packs of the wines will be available to purchase. Attendance to the $40 event is limited to 40 guests. See losalamosgeneralstore.com or click here for tickets.