After nearly two decades of hustling behind the scenes for countless other winemakers and grape growers, Kira Malone is ready to run her own race. The accomplished decathlete and mother of two daughters unveiled her Pars Fortuna line of pinot noirs late last year, finally achieving what she’s sought since entering the wine business as a Cal Poly grad back in 2008.
“How do I propel myself with my passion, which is winemaking?” she’s been pondering for years. “To have complete oversight over the whole process now is fulfilling.”
Malone hails from generations of farmers in Lemoore, California, where her great-grandfather settled after leaving the Azores 120 years ago. “They’ve done dairy cattle to cotton, alfalfa to corn, and it’s now mostly pistachios and almonds,” said Malone, who remembers being picked up from school and putting on her “cotton jumping clothes” to go work in the fields. “It was just the best way to grow up. I still get nostalgic.”
That said, staying on a farm wasn’t the plan. “Originally, I wanted nothing to do with a rural life,” said Malone, who used her prowess at track and field to get a full ride to UC Berkeley. She got a taste of city life, but realized how disconnected many people were to the way the world worked. “People didn’t know where their food came from,” she recalled.
Her Olympic aspirations all but vanished when she was injured during her freshman year. Seeking a change, she transferred to Cal Poly to study business, but she didn’t quite jive with the other students. Then a wise academic advisor suggested she take some ag classes. “No one was in Banana Republic shirts. No one was in closed-toed business shoes,” said Malone. “I felt absolutely at home.”
Her initial thought was to pursue a communications degree in agriculture, in order to help others recognize the importance of farmers. But then a wine and viticulture class convinced her otherwise, and she wound up getting a minor in that along with her business degree in 2008. An internship and then job at the Central Coast Vineyard Team — which was developing the forward-thinking SIP, or “Sustainability in Practice,” Certification standards — included meeting Julian Malone, who she’d later marry.
Kira’s crash course in the entire wine industry was underway, leading to her first harvest in 2009 at Halter Ranch, three months in New Zealand, and then three years working in the Santa Maria Valley for Kenneth Volk Vineyards, which sourced from vineyards all across the Central Coast. “It’s like going to university,” said Malone of working for the “mad scientist” wine genius Ken Volk. “That’s how my wine career began, and it was all before I was 28 years old.”
That was an era where everyone put in 15-hour days. “But that wasn’t conducive to being a new mom,” said Malone, so she started her own mobile lab called Brix Analysis, run out of her kitchen, to keep her head in the game. Numerous consulting gigs followed, as did work for the cannabis and California-grown coffee industries, and then a custom crush job at Phase 2 Cellars in San Luis Obispo.
“I’ve been very scrappy my entire career,” said Malone. “That’s what it’s taken to make it here.”
The impetus to make her own wine first flashed in 2012 and then more seriously in 2016. But she aborted the latter because her husband had been hired by Sea Smoke Vineyards and he agreed not to be involved in any other wine project.
Come the harvest of 2023, Malone decided it was time to go all in, setting a release target of her 40th birthday in March of this year. She harvested fruit from John Sebastiano and Riverbench vineyards in 2023, picked up Donnachadh as well in 2024, and crafted the story of Pars Fortuna.
The name comes from an astrological birth chart point that indicates one’s hidden talents and reveals the path to unlocking them through perseverance and fortitude. “It represents my entire winemaking career,” she said.
The bottles are decorated with beautifully drawn roadrunner, the speedy species Malone first glimpsed while for Volk at the mouth of Tepusquet Canyon. “It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” she explained of the racy bird, which is fairly common yet hard to spot. “You know they’re always there, but it’s a very lucky day when you find one.”
Today, Malone makes her wine at Chuck Carlson’s place in Santa Maria. She produced 200 cases of pinot noir in 2023 (a Santa Barbara County cuvée that’s mostly Riverbench, and a single-vineyard John Sebastiano) and then about 300 in 2024 (from JSV and Donnachadh fruit).
This summer, the Malones are moving south, where her husband, Julian — who recently left Sea Smoke, and the wine industry at large — now runs Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, made famous in the Biggest Little Farm documentary. But Pars Fortuna will keep running from its Santa Maria homebase, as Malone is just the first few steps into what should be the true marathon of her winemaking career.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she said. “But it feels great.”
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Kira Malone will pour Pars Fortuna wines at Good Land Wine Shop on Tuesday, June 3, 5:30-7:30 p.m. See parsfortunawine.com.
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