Judy Adams: The Quiet Renegade

“Have you ever felt a cow’s tongue?” Judy Adams asks me. I am standing next to my hero at her ranch on a brilliant Saturday morning, nestled along Alamo Pintado, this exceptionally idyllic two lane road between Los Olivos and Solvang, sprinkled with farm stands and flowers. Judy represents stability, calm, compassion, toughness and perseverance. All hustle with a soft side. The kind of archetype built on the Western Prairie.

“Come here, Dolly,” she calls out as her lazy, gorgeous cow leisurely makes her way toward us. “She loves people,” Judy says. “People stop on the side of the road just to pet her.” It’s hard not to love Dolly seeing how much Judy cares for her. When Dolly approaches, Judy leans over to kiss her forehead. “Give me your hand,” Judy instructs. She takes my hand and Dolly gently moves forward. Her thick tongue licks my palm. Its roughness tickles my skin. I laugh at how silly and sweet the whole thing is.

I am sure many of you don’t know who Judy Adams is. She prefers it that way. Judy Adams is legendary in our local wine industry as one of the first grape haulers starting in the mid 1970s who is still active. Every generation of winemaker since has worked with her. When she first came to the Santa Ynez Valley as a young girl the area was all about horses. To me it’s like she was here before the railroad. She has witnessed the burgeoning wine industry evolve into one of the primary agricultural and tourism drivers of the region, even though our local leaders think y’all visit here to eat pastries in Solvang. The valley back then was a major Thoroughbred breeding and training area along with Arabian horse farms. According to some old-timers, the horse density population in our small valley rivaled that of Kentucky and Texas. Changing state and federal laws soon made that business untenable for many. Believe it or not, ostrich farms had a brief spotlight as the next big thing, though “where the water flows, the river goes.” Many ranches were soon sold for the shiny new toy—grapes—our age-old opportunistic economic system continually hard at work.

This is a story about one side of Judy’s dynamic life. She has been involved with the ranching community from the start, though I only know Judy through grapes. She has just rolled with it along the way, always staying true to her brand while the world around her dramatically transformed. I bet if you ask anyone in our local wine industry for Judy Adams’s contact, it is tagged in their phone. It’s like a badge of honor. She has an outsized influence in the zeitgeist of the area simply for being exactly who she is. When my husband, Greg Brewer, started his own farming company in 2007 for Brewer-Clifton winery, he decided since Judy Adams drives a dually, then that’s what they’d drive, too. “Judy was cool,” he said. “We wanted to get what she had.”

In those early days when vineyards didn’t have forklifts, Judy would park her truck at dawn among the vines and wait. The crew would lift heavy wooden picking bins onto the flatbed. They’d harvest directly into the bins, crews running up and down rows, picking grapes into buckets and climbing onto the truck to dump the buckets into the bins. Acres and acres worth. The original fee was $10 per hour for waiting, and $25 for delivery. While this style of harvesting is not uncommon around the world today, you can picture how this quickly becomes economically unrealistic with industry growth.

Most wineries on the receiving end had forklifts to offload the bins upon delivery, though for a select few who didn’t, Judy would help bucket the grapes out of the bins. We are talking 2,000 pounds per ton times several tons worth of grapes, which makes for a long, slow day. I’ve done it. Adam Tolmach of Ojai Vineyard was one of the holdouts.

“That was my job,” Judy laughs. “I was a lot younger then.” Quickly realizing how unsustainable this was, Judy started renting her own forklifts. Eventually, all the vineyards and wineries, including Tolmach’s, were equipped with forklifts. Judy’s routine became logistics and freight. For a while when Coastal Vineyard Care and Associates (CVCA), one of the largest vineyard management companies in our area, was expanding, Judy became their trusted hauling partner delivering one- to eight-ton loads across the county and state, from Napa to San Diego, for their clients.

“We have never been in competition with the big trucks and we don’t want to be in competition with them,” Judy said. Her business has been built on the boutique wineries that constitute the primary focus of the Central Coast wine growing region that she continues to serve today.

After a round of phone tag, Ben Merz, one of the owners of CVCA, left a long message describing how much Judy means to him. “She has been such a staple in our wine industry. I have been working with her since 2001, when I started my career. I am proud to say she is the person who taught me how to drive a forklift properly. Many hours of loading her trailers and her giving me advice on exactly how to load those bins on straight,” he laughed. “She has carried away thousands and thousands of bins of grapes that we grow and everyone loves her and respects her.”

Eventually, it became standard practice for vineyard management companies to control the entire process from end to end, farming to delivery, for efficiency, labor and cost. When I began in 2004 working with John Belfy of Buona Terra Farming, that was the norm. Picking grapes is strenuous and the variables surrounding those conditions are sometimes out of your control. If you set a pickup time with the driver at 8:00am, though half your crew doesn’t show up, or if they’re tired, or the pick takes longer because the clusters are tiny—any combination of variables can swing your outcome. Meanwhile, the clocks are running while the driver waits. Judy was very generous with a $10 per hour wait time, even back then.

I first met Judy when I had a grape contract that read Roadside, which meant you were responsible for pickup. “How am I going to pick up two tons of grapes in my Subaru?” I asked the vineyard manager. He laughed and said, “You call Judy.” Word of mouth has always been her style. She had never advertised—carefully expanding and contracting her business over the years based on industry needs. As I interview her today, 48 years after she started hauling fruit, she keeps a humble grip on her accomplishments and her emotions. As we sit inside the house she and her husband built in 1967 on the five-acre property they bought on their wedding day, I am struck by the genuine intimacy of it all, and her powerful connection to this place. When giving me directions for our meeting, I asked Judy for the gate code. “There is no gate code,” she laughed.

Judy knew from a very young age she belonged in the country. Her grandparents moved to the Santa Ynez Valley in the 1950s from Pasadena to work for the Davidge family ranch along Refugio Road near where Kalyra Winery stands today. Judy was very close with her grandparents and immediately fell in love with the landscape when visiting. As her parents moved from city to city for work, they, too, almost landed in Santa Ynez. During the planning process, knowing Judy’s love for the valley, her grandparents persuaded her parents to let Judy move ahead and live with them when she was 10 years old. The area then was more country than it is today, known for cattle ranching, orchards and citrus. Judy thrived. She rode horses, worked cattle, joined 4-H and grew up living her dream on a ranch. Her parents never ended up building their home, yet Judy stayed.

“The lifestyle is what I needed, I knew that from a very young age,” Judy reminisced. “I don’t know how I knew that. I just loved the country and the animals. I was not a city girl.”

The ranch eventually evolved into one of the first vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley, called Viña de Santa Ynez, planted jointly between the Davidge family and their neighbors the Bettencourts. I used to source Gewürztraminer from Viña de Santa Ynez from 2011 to 2014. It was self-rooted with the bones and soul of an old vineyard that I chose as an homage to my grandmother, Ilinka. I wanted to honor her, and Gewürztraminer was the closest relative to her native Balkan Traminec, which she would have had growing in her Macedonian village. The vines produced compact, tiny clusters that hung like chains of ornaments the size of gingerbread cookies around the trellis. We skin-fermented the rose-gold-colored fruit for 30 days. With each punch down, the color became richer and the aromatics more outrageously perfumed. We aged the wine in barrels, and with time the tangerine creamsicle hue mellowed, transforming into this golden-strawed summer sunset that smelled like fresh apricots, jasmine and wild roses.

As Judy graduated from high school, the Davidges offered to pay for college. She respectfully declined, intent on figuring out a steady country life. She began working for an animal feed company and once she and her husband, Dick, married, they started their family and their working farm. They had three dairy cattle and delivered raw milk to 25 families around the valley. Cattle feed was expensive on a retail scale so Judy asked the Bettencourts, who ran a dairy on their land, if she ould source grain from them wholesale. Soon, in proper Judy fashion, she was helping other local families with their grain needs, ordering and delivering, until the feed salesman finally told her to open her own business. A + B Feed started in 1976 based on the Avon cosmetics model. She and her partner did all the work with their friends. At the beginning of the month her crew would call their clients and by the end of the month they’d deliver feed.

At that same time her feed business started booming, Viña de Santa Ynez started producing fruit and needed someone to haul grapes for their winery clients. Judy already had the trucks and the relationship. She traded hay for grapes during harvest season and called her friends again. “It’s not unlike the feed business, except I was in control of that schedule,” Judy said. “I am not in control of the schedule for the grape business.” She ran the feed and grape business simultaneously until 1990 when her husband needed open-heart surgery. She gave up feed and kept the grapes. The camaraderie is what has kept her going. “I just love helping people,” she repeated during our conversation. “I am a country girl. Harvest feels like a roundup. It’s the same excitement and fun. Everyone is jazzed up. I am helping people that I have grown to know. Helping people has been my joy through life.”

In 2023 the Santa Ynez Valley Foundation recognized Judy as one of their Champions of the Valley. Each year they honor a man and a woman for their exceptional volunteer work “who tirelessly enrich the Santa Ynez Valley and Los Alamos … whose efforts exemplify the vibrant spirit of our community.” Judy said the award has been one of her biggest joys since being here.

“I was blown away because all I’ve really done is sort of been nice,” she said. “I belong to lots of groups and go to a lot of meetings and I have accomplished a bunch. I have always been involved in the community. Road projects, horse groups, cattle groups ….” Her voice trails off. “Why is that valuable to you?” I asked. “I enjoy helping and we can accomplish a lot of things by doing things together,” she said. “Everything is local, and I like being local.”

At 77, Judy laughed that she always wondered what it would be like to retire. Today, she still manages her grape business with her friends by her side. With the relatively recent institution of night picking for most vineyards when someone figured out how to put lights on tractors, this has changed their schedules dramatically. Their days used to begin at about 8am and go until 10pm. Today, in the frenzy of harvest their days begin at midnight and go until noon or 1pm the following afternoon. She is in full control of her schedule now as she cherry-picks the deliveries she wants to choose during her favorite time slots, which generally starts at 5am, and no longer travels out of county for deliveries. She’s earned it. Her only rule, that she of course regularly bends because she’s Judy, is to require winemakers to schedule a delivery before 3pm the day before. “Some winemakers want to taste the fruit right up until the very last minute,” she justified.

When her husband passed away in 1995, she divested from her day-to-day working ranch life and sold off the cows, lambs, pigs and sheep. She framed the outbuildings with decorative Western themes. She wanted something pretty to look at to relieve her grief. Today, Dolly; her other cow, Red; and her darling white miniature horse, Frosty, keep her ranch alive, along with the frequent visits from local preschool kids who, for more than 50 years, have regularly visited her farm to get a taste of country life.

“Frosty loves kids,” Judy said. “He walks alongside them so they can pet him.” In addition to her grape-hauling business, she boards horses and has a bookkeeping job on the side. Her family lives all around her and she is a new great-grandmother.

Back outside after Dolly licks my hand, Judy pulls her flannel shirt toward me seeing that I am slightly uncomfortable with the saliva covering my hand. “You can wipe it off on me,” she says. In the meantime, two women drive through the front gate with no gate code and saddle up their horses for a ride. We visit briefly with Frosty, who runs out to greet me. “Can kids ride Frosty?” I ask, thinking how fun it would be for a 4-year-old to ride a mini horse. “No,” Judy says, in her signature sweet way and I quickly realize that was a stupid question from a city girl.

As she walks me back to my car, I realize we haven’t talked at all about wine, the main reason she has been working in the industry for close to five decades and counting. “Do you drink wine, Judy?” I ask. “A little bit,” she beams. “I like the Moscato. Sorry. My drink of choice is a Margarita.”