Zaca University

Winemakers Reminisce About Their Days at Zaca Mesa Winery

One of the early pioneers in the Santa Barbara County wine industry was Zaca Mesa Winery. In 1973 Marshall Ream planted a vineyard on a plateau near the headwaters of Zaca Creek. It wasn’t long before he recognized the value of making wine from their grape harvest, and he brought in a young recent enology school graduate named Ken Brown as the first winemaker.

Over the course of 40 vintages, a slew of winemakers, assistant winemakers, enologists, lab techs, cellar rats, vineyard managers and vineyard workers have made valuable contributions to Zaca Mesa. In turn, the winery has offered them a place to learn, innovate and hone their craft—becoming a launching pad for many illustrious winemaking careers.

We brought together many of the talented individuals that have been a part of what they fondly refer to as “Zaca U” for the opportunity to clink glasses and hear about the winery’s early days… in their own words.

It took some courage to stake out an investment in the future of an almost unknown region at that time, but they did it and time has proven them to be prescient.

Daniel Gehrs

Ken Brown (1977–1985, winemaker): When I was at Fresno State as a graduate student I was co-director of the school winery, which meant that I also headed up all the research projects that Fresno State winery was pursuing. Historically, the first vineyard [planted in Santa Barbara County] was the Uriel Nielson vineyard, planted in 1964 in the Santa Maria Valley. The second generation of vineyards were planted by Firestone, a gentleman named Dean Brown and then Zaca Mesa—whose vineyards were planted in 1973. My research job for Fresno State was to work with the first crop of these new vineyards to see if there was commercial potential for Santa Barbara County wines. Marshall Ream, the owner of Zaca Mesa, was so impressed with those early wines that he offered me the position to both design his winery and to be his winemaker.

Ruben Camacho (1977–present, vineyard worker, vineyard manager): I came to Zaca Mesa looking for work in 1977 and they gave me a job driving a tractor. I didn’t know anything about grapes. Cayo Palomo was the vineyard manager and he taught me how to prune the vines, about all the diseases of the vines.

Daniel Gehrs (1993–1997, winemaker): It took some courage to stake out an investment in the future of an almost unknown region at that time, but they did it and time has proven them to be prescient.

Ken Brown: We built the winery in 1978 and the first harvest of estate Zaca Mesa wines was 1978 at the new winery. We needed to hire a staff, so I asked Fred Brander, the winemaker at Santa Ynez Winery, if he knew anyone I could hire to help me with the bottling, and he told me to call Jim Clendenen. Jim was the first person I hired when we started making the wines at Zaca Mesa. He was my assistant winemaker.

Jim Clendenen (1978–1980, assistant winemaker): It was my first winemaking job. I got called in with Ken and a couple of other people in the company and they told me I was so good at what I did that even though I hadn’t done anything yet—I had just run the bottling line—they wanted to make me assistant winemaker. And they wanted to put me on salary. I had no idea what that meant. I was going to be working between 60 and 100 hours a week, making wine. But on salary, not hourly, I got a dollar an hour! When I used to make $3.75 an hour working on the bottling line. I was so passionate that I didn’t care. I really wanted to work, and I worked.

Adam Tolmach (1979–1980, lab tech and cellar worker): I was hired in January of 1979 and left after the end of the harvest 1980. I was the third employee under Ken Brown, and I was hired as a winery worker and lab person. I did what I was told to do and tried to learn as much as possible. Ken was a patient and kind teacher.

Chuck Carlson (1981–1992, lab tech, winemaker): Many of those who have passed through Zaca Mesa have gone on to be very progressive winemakers.

Ken Brown: When hiring people I didn’t really care about resumes. What I cared about was if they were totally excited about wine and about the possibility of being in the wine business. We hired Bob Lindquist as soon as we started releasing wines. He managed the tastings in a makeshift tasting room in the barrel room and helped us in production when he wasn’t doing tastings.

Bob Lindquist (1979–1983, cellar worker, tasting room): At the very beginning, there was no tasting room. There was a board on top of a couple of barrels down in the cellar, and you’d write out a handwritten invoice. I was doing a little bit of everything—cellar rat, tour guide, sales…

Photos: Erin Feinblatt

Adam Tolmach: We had many wine tasting parties that Jim and Bob organized—they were lots of fun, and educational.

Ken Brown: At that time you had a difficult time becoming established and being considered a successful brand if you could not make a good Cabernet Sauvignon in California. We worked and worked to try to figure out—from the grape-growing perspective to winemaking—how to make a better Cabernet. Quite honestly, we never achieved the goal but, fortunately for me, the Chardonnays and Pinots turned out to be magnificent and that is always what I was interested in.

Jim Clendenen: We were really trying to make the best wines that you could make in California. Our interest was in pushing the limits of winemaking. Learning what to do, open-top fermenting… anything we read about, we were excited about. At Zaca Mesa in 1979 we all experimented with wine. Bob made a Cabernet, Adam made a Cabernet, I made a Pinot Noir, and those wines were… kind of remarkable wines. They were wines that were predating what California wines would become.

Ken Brown: Three out of four wines from our first release (the 1978 vintage) received awards—double gold, best of show, two golds and silver. For a brand-new winery that had never made wines before, we got a lot of instant notoriety.

I gotta say that I couldn’t imagine a more fun place to be in 1978, I couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling place to be in 1979—showing how fast you can grow things. We made great wine and got nationally known for making great wine.

Jim Clendenen

Jim Clendenen: What we were most known for was Chardonnay. The 1978 Chardonnay won the top gold medal at the L.A. County Fair, and the top gold medal at the Orange County Fair. Turned out that wine had residual sugar, a lot of new oak, it was kind of a funny wine. But it launched Zaca Mesa.

Jim Adelman (1982, cellar worker): Then they made Zinfandel, which was really unusual.

Bob Lindquist: There were some really good Zinfandels.

Jim Clendenen: The 1978 was a rockin’ one. It was the single wine of the tasting experience when you came to taste at Bob’s table. French oak aged Zinfandel.

Bob Lindquist: We made a Sauvignon Blanc in ’79 that was as good as anybody’s in California.

Photos: Erin Feinblatt

Jim Clendenen: I gotta say that I couldn’t imagine a more fun place to be in 1978, I couldn’t imagine a more fulfilling place to be in 1979—showing how fast you can grow things. We made great wine and got nationally known for making great wine.

Jim Adelman: When I was 17 I worked for Bob Lindquist at a tasting room in Camarillo. That was my introduction to wine, then I kind of goofed around in a couple of wine stores, and I was at that point where I had to choose a college major, so I went to work at Zaca Mesa for a year to make sure that is what I wanted to do. And at that time I lived with Jim Clendenen so I also learned a lot about winemaking from Jim at home.

Lane Tanner (1981–1983, enologist): In 1980 I started working for Firestone. I then met Ken Brown—he was the winemaker at Zaca Mesa at that point—and he convinced me if I came to Zaca Mesa to be his enologist I would have a lot of fun. So I did.

Mike Brown (1982, cellar worker): Zaca Mesa was the first big winery I worked at. I had worked at bigger wineries in Australia, but more of a single-position type of thing. At Zaca Mesa you were there from start to finish, you were there at crushing, you were there in the barrel room, you were there on the bottling line. You pretty much got to do it all from the beginning of the process to the end.

Lane Tanner: At the time, it was just our life—we didn’t think of ourselves as pioneers.

Jim Adelman: I drove the forklift. I sulfured a lot of barrels with those sulfur wicks. I was a cellar guy.

Gale Sysock (1986–1992, winemaker): Zaca Mesa attracted talented and passionate winemakers with a pioneering spirit and a willingness to express themselves both in the wines and vocally.

Ken Brown: I planted the first Syrah in Santa Barbara County at Zaca Mesa. I brought the cuttings from Gary Eberle’s Estrella River vineyard in 1978 and made the first wine in 1983. The Syrah was very impressive from the first vintage and we knew we were on to something very good.

Chuck Carlson (1981–1992, associate winemaker): In 1988 we made the decision to change towards a Rhône focus. We planted and grafted much of the vineyard to the mixture of Rhône varietals that they have now. We also kept Chardonnay in the vineyard as that was a variety that was still doing well in the marketplace. They had already had some Syrah planted and it proved to be a very good variety for the region. We took this a bit further and really expanded this—pioneering efforts.

Gale Sysock: I trimmed down the focus on wines to make varietals that worked well for the area and pushed to have our home vineyards develop more Rhône varieties. Then I passed the torch on to the next team to see it evolve further along.

Daniel Gehrs: When I got to Zaca Mesa the big varietal there was Chardonnay. While the Chardonnays I made for Zaca Mesa were commercially successful, where we really made our mark was Syrah, which was a big surprise.

Ruben Camacho: A long time ago we picked grapes by machine. Dan Gehrs decided he did not want to harvest with a machine. He said a machine picks up everything—all the green stuff, all the leaves, lizards, worms… When Dan came, Zaca Mesa sold the machine. Now it takes 35 people, every day, for the harvest.

Daniel Gehrs: During my first vintage the Mare Fire started not too far from the winery. It burned tens of thousands of acres in the fall of ’93. All the firefighting traffic made it difficult at times to get our picking crews into the field to harvest the crop. One of the blocks of Syrah got over-ripe due to these delays. After blending it into our Zaca Vineyards Syrah the wine was just magic! I’ve always thought maybe the fire had something to do with the quality and success of that wine—the 1993 Zaca Vineyards Syrah was named Wine Spectator’s #6 wine of the year in 1995 and really stirred up a lot of interest and excitement in Santa Barbara County for this varietal.

Clay Brock (2001–2008, winemaker): Dan’s Syrah coming in #6 in the Wine Spectator brought recognition to the entire Central Coast.

Daniel Gehrs: I urged management to reposition the brand away from Chardonnay, which made only a standard-quality wine at that location, and to concentrate more on Rhône varietals, Syrah especially.

Benjamin Silver (1994–2000, associate winemaker): When I was at Zaca Mesa, Dan Gehrs taught me how to construct a wine from the palate. He was the person who taught me how to make wine.

Clay Brock: I wanted to get rid of Chardonnay and be solely Rhône-focused. And I learned a lot about the viticulture side of the business.

Eric Mohseni (2001–present, enologist, winemaker): Instead of graduate school, I felt it was very important to get into the industry and start learning winemaking. Clay Brock called me and told me he’d started working as winemaker at Zaca Mesa and asked if I would come on board to revamp the lab. That was January 2001, and I have been at Zaca Mesa ever since.

Scott Osborn (1982–1983, cellar master): I loved working at Zaca Mesa. It was one of the more peaceful places to work, and people like Lane and Chuck Carlson and Angel Vasquez and Ken Brown—they were all wonderful people to work with.

Scott Osborn: Zaca Mesa taught me the fundamentals. It gave me the background, and the courage to go off and do what I did—making wine in the Finger Lakes.