Chasing Wine Dreams and
Embracing Curiosity with
Trippers & Askers
The Poetic Spirit Behind
Hayden Felice and Andrew Fitzgerald’s
Santa Barbara County Wine Brand
By Matt Kettmann | May 16, 2024
It took a full, occasionally stressful year for Hayden Felice and Andrew Fitzgerald to come up with a name for their wine brand. But when they eventually settled on Trippers & Askers, an ode to the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself,” everything felt right.
“It’s a nod to the ethos of that particular section of the poem, which is about experimentation and following your spirit and your dream,” said Felice, whose first tiny vintage was in 2020 before ramping up to 1,000 cases the next year. “It’s also a bit of a nod to me, about being a young, inexperienced, inquisitive winemaker, and that notion of being curious and asking questions and learning by doing.”
Not that Felice, who handles day-to-day operations and production for the brand, was inexperienced with wine in general. A native of the Philadelphia Main Line, he ditched suds for sips while studying 20th-century poetry at Amherst College. “It was definitely odd,” he admitted. “I was at keg parties with a glass of wine.”
He headed to the big city after college, working as a manager and sommelier for 11 years at Tom Collichio’s Craft and CraftBar empire in New York City. “Craft had just opened and it was wildly popular and successful,” said Felice, who started there in 2001. “Every celebrity in New York was there. It was a very crazy time, very high stakes, a whole different level of anything I’d ever experienced.”
He was delivering cases of Petrus to investment banker parties in the Hamptons, and serving the wealthiest of clientele, including one older man who’d regularly order top-shelf Burgundy and Bordeaux, then only finish half of each bottle, leaving the rest for the staff. “It was super high-level wine, which invariably would trickle down,” said Felice, whose crash course in fine wine was immediate and intense.
By 2012, he was preparing to open a new restaurant when one of the investors ran into some money troubles. That gave him a second to pause. “If I open this restaurant, I’m never leaving New York,” he realized. “And I’ve never lived in California aside from a three-month stint in 1997.”
He followed a woman to Venice in the fall of 2012. The relationship quickly failed, and he was back in the game, briefly at Shutters on the Beach and then opening seven concepts at once inside of The Line Hotel. That was followed by working for Chef Ludo Lefebvre at Trois Mec and Petit Trois.
In 2016, Felice married Lucy Firestone, a cousin to Santa Barbara’s well-known Firestone clan, and they moved here to start a family. Felice was hired to open the short-lived Somerset on Anapamu Street and then worked at Les Marchands, where he deepened his connection to winemakers like Ernst Storm and Dave Potter of Municipal Winemakers.
In 2020, he made his first barrels at Potter’s Potek Winery on East Haley Street. Come 2021, Felice told his friend Fitzgerald, a banker by career, that they had to get more serious. “If we’re gonna make this a business, I need to start working on it as a primary thing,” said Felice, who had no interest at that point in returning to the restaurant hustle. “I was out long enough that the prospect of going back wasn’t that appealing to me.”
Trippers & Askers expanded to produce chardonnay, rosé, pinot noir, and syrah, all from the Sta. Rita Hills and all in a lean, fresh, mineral-driven style. “Big, rich, chewy wines haven’t really been my thing for a long time,” said Felice. “I’m not approaching this from a dogmatic standpoint, but I feel like all of the wines have sufficient flavors, if not more flavors than you might expect initially based on their look, their color, their alcohol. There’s decent enough concentration to pick early and make lighter, fresher wine without really sacrificing flavor.”
No doubt, with Whitman as their muse, the experimentation and exploration of wine will continue for Trippers & Askers, which added Carmel Valley cabernet sauvignon and Sta. Rita Hills gamay noir in 2023.
“Our wines aren’t for everyone, especially people who like full-bodied wines,” said Felice. “But I feel like, trend-wise, people are starting to gravitate toward something lighter for multiple reasons.”
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