The Wines
Dierberg Drum Canyon Vineyard Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay 2022
Dierberg Drum Canyon Vineyard Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir 2022
Star Lane Vineyard Happy Canyon Sauvignon Blanc 2024
Star Lane Vineyard Happy Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon 2021
Star Lane Vineyard Happy Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon “Astral” 2019
The Judgement
Pop music rarely traffics in dystopian gloom, but 1969 gave us a notable exception. Zager and Evans scored a number-one hit with “In the Year 2525,” a relentlessly grim tour through humanity’s future in which “everything you think, do and say, is in the pill you took today.” The song marched forward in 1,010-year increments, each verse darker than the last, arriving finally at mankind’s extinction. It was, to put it mildly, not a blueprint for optimism.
Jim Dierberg had other ideas.
When he established his Santa Ynez Valley wine operation in 1997, he wasn’t thinking in quarters or even decades: He was thinking in centuries. His stated vision is a 250-year plan, the kind of enduring ambition that makes most business models look like Post-It notes. He planted not for himself but for generations he’ll never meet, with the conviction that the land he chose, and the wines it would yield, deserved that kind of faith.
The land(s) he chose, as it turns out, are fascinatingly contradictory. Dierberg’s Drum Canyon Vineyard sits in the valley’s cool western reach, where marine air rolls in off the Pacific and pinot noir and chardonnay thrive. Star Lane Vineyard occupies almost the opposite environment: the warm, sheltered eastern end of the valley, with enough heat accumulation to ripen cabernet sauvignon and other Bordeaux varieties to their full, structured potential. Same valley, two different worlds. Night and day.
To navigate both, Dierberg enlisted Tyler Thomas, a winemaker whose resume included Sonoma and Napa tenures and who appears constitutionally incapable of being limited to one idiom. Most winemakers plant their flag in a single climate and defend it for life. Thomas moves between Dierberg and Star Lane with the ease of someone who is, in effect, fluent in two entirely different languages, Burgundian and Bordelais, and he’s equally eloquent in both.
His cool-climate pinots carry that translucent, red-fruited delicacy the variety demands; his Star Lane cabernets have the architecture and grip of wines built to age. The same palate, tuned to two different frequencies.
Zager and Evans imagined a future in which human agency had been swallowed whole. Jim Dierberg imagined the opposite: a future worth building toward, one vintage at a time. Tyler Thomas, it’s obvious after 13 years, is clearly the right winemaker for that kind of long game.
Dierberg Drum Canyon Vineyard Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay 2022: The nose announces itself with confidence: honeysuckle and white flowers riding ahead of subtle barrel toast that grounds the whole affair. On the palate, the texture is what you might call slickery, carrying ripe fig, bright lemo0,n and a whisper of tropicality through a finish that simply refuses to self-disarm and lay down its weapons.
Dierberg Drum Canyon Vineyard Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir 2022: The color alone is a promise the wine keeps: It’s deep and saturated in a way that telegraphs what’s coming: ripe cherry and cocoa notes that are simultaneously luscious and complex, coating the mouth with the kind of generosity that would shame zillionaire Warren Buffet.
Star Lane Vineyard Happy Canyon Sauvignon Blanc 2024: Ripe and generous at the outset, with melon taking center stage before a subtle herbal thread weaves through. The real pleasure here is the interplay: lushness and zing in productive tension, neither overwhelming the other. Herbs, melon and citrus converge on a focused, clean finish that practically calls out for un plato de mariscos mixtos.
Star Lane Vineyard Happy Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon Estate 2021: Broadly luxurious. This is a cabernet that spreads out on the divan and makes itself comfortable. The structure is there, doing its necessary work, but it never intrudes on the pleasure, functioning more as a quiet frame around succulent red fruits that dominate the conversation. Backbone without bluster, generosity without excess, opulence without smugness.
Star Lane Vineyard “Astral” Happy Canyon Cabernet Sauvignon 2019: If the Estate is luxurious, the Astral is transcendent. Cassis and black cherry arrive in copious quantities, framed by spicy barrel accents that add dimension sans distraction. The texture is the thing, though, a quality so seamless and enveloping it borders on the unfair: supremely concentrated, impeccably balanced, knee-weakening. Comes with its own unspoken rude hand gesture to Napa.
See dierbergvineyard.com and starlanevineyard.com.
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