Full Belly Files | Natural Coast Wine Fest Is Coming

Andrea Spaziani (right) and Alejandro Fargosonini (second from right) from Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini are coming to the Natural Coast Wine Festival on April 26.

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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 gathers the sustainably minded winemaking stars of the Central Coast (and a bit beyond) under an appropriately welcoming umbrella. (He told me about the origins here and then about last year’s edition here.)

This year’s 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.

I couldn’t write about every producer, so I selected four brands that I didn’t really know about and sent them some questions via email. Here are those Q&As.

Make sure to stop by their tables and tell them I sent you when the third annual Natural Coast crashes onto East Haley Street on April 26. (I’m bummed to miss it this year, but will be enjoying nature itself with a bunch of friends and our own wines on Santa Rosa Island instead.)

Click here to buy tickets.

ídola Wine

Together since high school in Thousand Oaks, Ryker and Pooja Wall’s path to launching ídola Wines went from 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 the couple back to the Central Coast, allowing Ryker to learn about winemaking at Denner Vineyards in Paso Robles and then get the head winemaker job at Cordant Winery, where ídola was born.

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

Tell us more about ídola Wines.
Our focus is on Mediterranean varietals. We are incredibly inspired by blends from Provence, the Languedoc, Sicily, and Sardinia. We strive to make wines with verve, energy, purity, and texture. We really believe wine is a form of art and assemble our blends purely based on what we like — we are not tied to any kind of blending dogma. The wines serve to reflect our palettes and emotions in a point in time.

Which wines will you pour at the festival?
2023 a la riviera: This is our white blend, with vermentino, chenin blanc, roussanne. It is textured and fresh and a perfect wine for the days on the California coast. n.v. so(u)lera no. 1: This solera-style orange is perhaps our most artistic, esoteric, and avant garde wine. I love the play of textures from the blend of aged and younger wine. This one is just pure play and fun.

What else are you excited about for the festival?
The music, the people, the energy. This festival flies in the face of all the talk of “young people not drinking wine.” We have also gone the last few years and it is just incredible to see all the positive energy people bring to it.

See idolawineco.com.

Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini

One of the smallest natural wineries in the world — and one of the only ones focused on upcycling fruit that would otherwise be thrown away — Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini 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.

What makes Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini unique?
We don’t have fancy technology and do all the farming and winemaking ourselves, with our hands and feet. Everything is made 100 percent on stems, foot-crushed, and then shoveled into an old basket press. We grow more than 70 varieties of grapes, including hybrids, and we have a program upcycling fruit that would otherwise be wasted from organic farms. Usually they are fruits that are not commonly made into wine like plums, apricots, nectarines, blackberries, and many more.

We also embrace many ancient techniques and wine styles that almost no one else does in North America, like rancio, making sherry-esque wines under flor, six to 12-month macerations, and unique co-ferments and re-ferments.

We live off grid in our vineyard. Our Châteauneuf is a 1986 RV.

Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini’s No Fuzz No Love is made from upcycled nectarines.

Which wines will you share at the festival?
Kummerspeck: Meaning “grief bacon” or the weight you put on from sadness, this 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. It can open up for two days.

9 Veils: This is a nine-grape co-ferment that tastes like watermelon, rhubarb, and petrichor.

Plum Noumena: A 100 percent damson plum wine with some tannic bite.

No Fuzz No Love: A 100 percent nectarine wine that is plush, tropical, and has a background of mild oxidation.

What else are you excited about for the festival?
To try a bunch of other producers’ wines and the food, and to go into the sea! It’s gonna be a blast!

See chateauneuf.xyz.

Native Bloom/Wildflower Winery

Natalie Albertson is rebranding Wildflower Winery as Native Bloom.

Raised in Bakersfield, Natalie Albertson’s journey to wine started, like most of ours, simply by drinking it.

While building her first career as a nurse, she got more into seriously tasting wine, and pursued her WSET Level 1 and 2 degrees, meanwhile spending time around both the Sicily and San Diego/Temecula wine scenes. That only made her want to make wine, so she completed the UC-Davis Winemaking Certificate Program.

Native Bloom’s Wheeze the Juice, a carbonic grenache

By the 2020 harvest, Albertson, who had moved to Ventura County, was ready to launch Wildflower Winery, which she is currently rebranding as Native Bloom Winery. She also 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!”

What’s extra special about Wildflower/Native Bloom?
I use ancient techniques with modern technology. We love carbonic (especially grenache!), skin contact (10 days or less), pét-nat (disgorged), and lots of stem inclusion. My style is light, bright, and “Wildly Drinkable!”

What are you excited to share at the festival?
Sangiovese: Always a crowd pleaser!

2024 “Wheeze The Juice” Carbonic Grenache: This is the first wine labeled under our new name, Native Bloom Winery! I am a native Californian, a Native American citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and use native fermentation, so it feels right.

After four-and-a-half years, we are having to rebrand thanks to a trademark dispute with a large winery. So it’s time to move on and look forward to the newly refreshed brand.

What’s fun about the fest for you?
I’m looking forward to seeing friends who I often miss because we’re small wineries handling every aspect of our businesses! I’m also eager to taste the interesting wines that people are making.

See wildflowerwineryventura.com.

Mazette Wines

Raised in the surf world of Dana Point, Mazette Wines owner Zach Petersen is now riding waves of relevant wine experience.

He’s worked in the Lompoc cellars of Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte in Lompoc; with “cowboy-type winemakers” in Australia, who processed 90 tons from 15 acres all by hand, with just five-gallon buckets and river water; and for 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.

Tell us more about your background.
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. That curiosity and desire to be involved in every step of the process eventually led me to wine.

What’s up with Mazette?
Mazette is rooted in farming. Whether the wine is from one of my “pocket” vineyards or even when sourcing fruit, I work to understand the site and growing season as if it were my own. Every decision in the cellar stems from my time in the field. I believe that this connection between holistic farming and winemaking creates a certain “aliveness” in the bottle. The wines I make aim to capture time, place, and process, honestly, in a bottle.

What grapes are you making?
I’m especially focused on sauvignon blanc, grenache, and syrah. Sauvignon blanc in particular is a grape I didn’t fully appreciate until I started farming it. It’s a true “farmer’s grape” — incredibly responsive to vineyard inputs like canopy management, soil health, subclimate, and harvest decisions. 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.

Price is important to you as well, right?
Transparency and accessibility are also central to Mazette. I believe great wine doesn’t need to be expensive. Whether it’s a sparkling wine or a structured red meant to age, I want people to feel good about reaching for my wines time and time again.

Which wines are you most excited to share?
Sauvignon Blanc: This is my first release of Sauvignon Blanc, and I think it’s a great introduction to what I hope will be a long journey with the varietal. It saw a relatively late harvest and underwent a slow fermentation in Hermitage cigar barrels. It’s got the texture and complexity of old-world S.B., but drinks like you’re a kid with a juice box on a hot summer day — serious, but super fun. It’s unmistakably Santa Barbara in character, and I’m excited for people to experience that translation.

Blanc de Blancs: This is something I’ve been dreaming up for a long time. Trying to make bubbles affordable, I drew on my background in brewing and my experiences at past wine jobs. I am developing a kind of proprietary approach and do everything I can to build texture and that brioche-y character reminiscent of champagne, while pulling it away from being overly fruity or simple. I think we should all be drinking more bubbles — but bubbles are expensive. This wine is my answer to that: Mazette Blanc de Blancs that I’m working hard to put on shelves for under $30. I think people will be surprised by what’s in the bottle.

See mazettewines.com.

Mischief Wines

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 homebrewing 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 Wines.

Where do you source grapes for Mischief Wines?
My fruit comes from small, family-run vineyards in Santa Ynez and Los Olivos, farmed sustainably and organically or biodynamically whenever possible. These growers care deeply about their land and vines, delivering fruit that needs no artificial manipulation — just a little guidance to become wine that is fresh, vibrant, and alive.

What’s your philosophy in the cellar?
My goal isn’t about bottling some postcard version of terroir. 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. Crafted with minimal intervention, no conventional additives, and only a whisper of SO₂ when needed, each bottle aims to surprise, delight, and leave you reaching for another glass.

What’s the story with the labels?
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. 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.

See Me Eat, Drink, and Speak!

Speaking of events, I’ll be speaking at the following affairs, for which tickets (even the pricy ones!) are already flying off the shelves. Buy now before you’re left out.

Lotusland is hosting the first-ever Farmer Forward Dinner on May 16.

Lotusland’s Farmer Forward Dinner: This one actually came out of this Full Belly Files newsletter, in which I suggested making farmers a bigger part of special dinners. Lotusland’s Rebecca Anderson gave me a ring, and this is what we came up with: the Farmer Forward Dinner, featuring veggies are more from Jacob Grant at Roots Farm, seafood from Get Hooked!, cooking by Duo Catering, and wines from The Hilt, all on the historic property’s epic grounds. I’ll write more about this one later, but don’t wait to buy tickets. Click here for details.

Winemakers and chefs came together to sample cheeses and pick the best pairings | Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

Cheese the Day!(s): This is an official Santa Barbara Independent soirée series pairing The Cheese Shop’s fromage selections with eight different wines from across Santa Barbara County on May 7 and 14. I wrote about the details here, and you can buy tickets here.

The Santa Barbara Culinary Experience Grand Tasting takes place at the Presidio again in 2025. | Photo: Courtesy

S.B. Culinary Experience’s Grand Tasting: I helped gather the winemakers that will be pouring at SBCE’s Grand Tasting on May 17 at the Presidio, and will be moderating two panels: one about unique sites for pinot noir, the other about grape varieties that are new or at least resurgent in Santa Barbara. Here’s a bit more about SBCE as a whole, and here’s the link to tickets for the Grand Tasting.