Who’s Pouring at Natural Coast Wine Festival 2025?

A Few of the Nearly 60 Natural Wine Brands Coming to Santa Barbara on April 26

After years of enduring righteous diatribes from mostly young, typically big-city-based winemakers paired with pours of sour, funky, downright dirty wines, my destroyed faith in the natural wine movement was totally redeemed by one visit to the inaugural Natural Coast Wine Festival in 2023.

This is where Satellite S.B. owner Drew Cuddy and co-founder Lindsey Reed gather the sustainably minded winemaking stars of the Central Coast (and a bit beyond) under an appropriately welcoming umbrella. The roster of nearly 60 brands includes both established wineries that long made wine in earth-friendly ways — names you know like Municipal, Ojai Vineyard, Sandhi, and Tablas Creek — and even more brands you may have never heard about, but won’t soon forget: General Psychotic Activity, for instance, and Slamdance Koöperatieve and Mischief, to name just a few.

Most of these modern natural wines are clearly made, super fresh in style, and generally energizing in vibes. Here are four to catch when the third annual Natural Coast crashes onto East Haley Street on Saturday, April 26. See naturalcoastwinefest.com for festival details and tickets.

For a longer version of these profiles, see my Full Belly Files newsletter from last week at independent.com/fbf.

Ryker and Pooja Wall of Ídola Wine | Credit: Courtesy

Ídola Wine: Ryker and Pooja Wall’s path to launching Ídola Wines (idolawineco.com) went from Thousand Oaks to Cal Poly to Miami, where she studied to be a physician’s assistant while he worked as a sommelier and restaurant manager. The pandemic brought them back to the Central Coast, where he worked at Denner Vineyards before taking the winemaker job at Cordant Winery, which allowed them to start a label.

“We really feel that the simplicity and purity of natural wines communicates the raw energy of nature’s best,” said Ryker, who’s inspired by the Mediterranean wines of southern France, Sicily, and Sardinia. “For us, drinking wines with this intention and now making them has served as a major spiritual fulfillment in our lives.”

They’ll be pouring their “à la riviera,” a textural, fresh white blend of vermentino and chenin blanc, as well as their “n.v. so(u)lera no. 1,” a solera-style orange. “This is perhaps our most artistic, esoteric, and avant-garde wine,” said Ryker. “I love the play of textures from the blend of aged and younger wine. This one is just pure play and fun.”

Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini: Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini (chateauneuf.xyz) is the brainchild of two artists: Canadian choreographer Andrea Spaziani and Californian filmmaker Alejandro Fargosonini, who became enamored with winemaking after working as a personal chef in New York City.

“We don’t have fancy technology and do all the farming and winemaking ourselves, with our hands and feet,” said Fargosonini, who lives amongst their vines off the grid in a 1986 RV. “We grow over 70 varieties of grapes, including hybrids, and we have a program upcycling fruit that would otherwise be wasted from organic farms. We also embrace many ancient techniques and wine styles that almost no one else does in North America.”

Their Kummerspeck, which means “grief bacon” (a k a “the weight you put on from sadness”), is a rancio-style wine, cooked in glass outside for long periods of time. “It has dried golden fruit flavors, and lots of tertiary leather and soil things,” said Fargosonini, who’s also bringing the 9 Veils (a nine-grape co-ferment) and wines made from damson plum and nectarine.

Alejandro and Andrea of Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini, whose No Fuzz No Love is made from upcycled nectarines | Credit: Courtesy

Natalie Albertson is rebranding Wildflower Winery as Native Bloom | Credit: Courtesy

Native Bloom’s Wheeze the Juice, a carbonic grenache | Credit: Courtesy

Native Bloom/Wildflower: Bakersfield native Natalie Albertson’s journey to wine started simply by drinking it. But getting her WSET Level 1 and Level 2 degrees and spending time in the Sicily and San Diego wine scenes only made her want to make wine, so she completed the UC Davis Winemaking Certificate Program. During the 2020 harvest, Albertson launched Wildflower Winery (wildflowerwineryventura.com), which she is now rebranding as Native Bloom.

She farms a small home vineyard of pinot noir and sauvignon blanc in Carpinteria. “It’s overrun with snails and requires a lot of work, but I enjoy working in the sunshine and staying connected to vineyard care,” said Albertson. “Wine is an agricultural product and should be different each year depending on the microclimate of where the grapes are grown.”

Check out her “Wheeze the Juice” carbonic grenache. “This is the first wine labeled under our new name, Native Bloom Winery!” said Albertson. “I am a native Californian, a Native American citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and use native fermentation, so it feels right.”

Zach Petersen of Mazette Wines | Credit: Courtesy

Mazette Wines: Raised in the surf world of Dana Point, Mazette Wines (mazettewines.com) owner Zach Petersen is now riding waves of relevant wine experience, from the Lompoc cellars of Domaine de la Côte, to “cowboy-type” winemaking with buckets and river water in Australia, to the famed Domaine Alain Graillot in the Crozes-Hermitage appellation of France’s Rhône Valley. Today, he works at Cosecha Farming, learning all about vineyards from its founder, Chris King.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with making things: as a kid, bow and arrows, soapbox cars, then surfboards — eventually professionally — then beer. Anything I loved, I tried to make myself,” said Petersen. “That curiosity and desire to be involved in every step of the process eventually led me to wine.”

Along with syrah and grenache, Mazette is focused on sauvignon blanc. “It’s a true ‘farmer’s grape’ — incredibly responsive to vineyard inputs like canopy management, soil health sub-climate, and harvest decisions,” said Petersen. “Unlike chardonnay, which can be sculpted in the cellar, sauvignon blanc is a mirror of how it was grown. When farmed with care, it can translate minerality and site nuance in a way that excites me endlessly. I’m young and new here, but I hope to give Santa Barbara sauvignon blanc the attention it deserves as a beautiful wine that communicates our terroir very effectively.”

Try his blanc de blancs too, his attempt to make sparkling wine that people can actually afford. “I think we should all be drinking more bubbles — but bubbles are expensive,” said Petersen. “This wine is my answer to that. I’m working hard to put it on shelves for under $30. I think people will be surprised by what’s in the bottle.”

Jeff Bowers of Mischief Wines | Credit: Courtesy

Mischief Wines’ Emergency Romance | Credit: Courtesy

Mischief Wine: After working in fine art, illustration, and film festival programming in New York City, Jeff Bowers came to California six years ago for “more nature and open space.” With a background in home-brewing beer and cider for concerts that he hosted, he worked a harvest with Scotty-Boy in Buellton and “got hooked on fermenting grapes.” As the head of curation at Vimeo, the Hollywood strikes hit Bower hard, so he struck out on his own with Mischief Wine (mischiefwine.com).

Though he relies on grapes from small, family-run vineyards around the Santa Ynez Valley that are farmed meticulously, he’s not dogmatic on expressing the specifics of each place. “My goal isn’t about bottling some postcard version of terroir,” said Bowers. “It’s about creating light, energetic vin de soif wines with balanced acidity, a touch of chaos, and enough personality to keep you on your toes.”

His labels are rather hilarious. “Playful and irreverent on the outside, they hold ‘cheeky’ secrets inside — bare-bottomed characters and hidden stories on double-sided labels waiting to be discovered,” he explained. “I designed special die-cut labels where the characters lean out of a cut-out window, and when you finish the bottle, you can peer through the back label hole to see the character’s butt and a little narrative hidden inside.”