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producers, including Steve Clifton of Brewer-Clifton fame, who makes a Syrah under the Alder label, and Chad Melville, who serves as the viticulturalist for his family’s eponymous winery by day and makes several Syrahs with his wife, Mary, under the Samsara label. Melville shares his shed in the ghetto with three friends: Sashi Moorman and Peter Hunken, who pay the rent with jobs at Stolpman Vineyards, and Jim Knight, whose family owns Wine House, a Los Angeles wine store. Knight, a former rock-and-roll drummer and cellar rat at Lafond, makes a Syrah under the Jelly Roll label, while Moorman and Hunken’s label is Piedrasassi. (Confused yet?) And together they make a wine called Holus Bolus. “We’re all good friends,” Melville says. “We purchased equipment and formed an LLC. Our press and destemmer alone cost us $130,000. None of us could do it on our own, but collectively we could afford good equipment.”

The other HQ for the shedista movement is Central Coast Wine Services, a so-called custom-crush facility in Santa Maria, which provides winery equipment and storage space to many of Santa Barbara County’s low-budget oenologists, including Benjamin Silver and Seth Kunin, a transplanted New Yorker who bailed on med school to work at the Wine Cask in Santa Barbara, the retail headquarters of the local wine revolution. Kunin fermented his first batch of purchased grapes in a garbage can at the store and later got a job in the cellar at the Gainey Vineyard. As a fan of the northern Rhône, he was drawn to Syrah, and now makes several Côte-Rôtie wannabes under his own label while maintaining his day job at Westerly Vineyards.

You get the distinct feeling that this scrappy communal spirit and note sharing must be good for the wine. Some great juice is coming out of these unglamorous sheds, and at an average price of around thirty-five dollars for a single-vineyard, small-production wine they make cult Cabs seem grossly overpriced. Santa Barbara County in the first decade of the twenty-first century is sort of the oenological equivalent of Silicon Valley in the ′70s or Paris in the ′20s. If you want to get in on a very good thing, get on some of these mailing lists.

THE ROASTED SLOPE OF THE RHÔNE

I’m supposed to meet two different Côte-Rôtie winemakers on the same day in the same church parking lot in the same tiny village—one at eleven and another at two in the afternoon. Easy enough, except that they are former friends, i.e., mortal enemies. Their American distributor has repeatedly warned me not to mention the name of one to the other— they had a nasty falling-out over the purchase of a vineyard. I guess this is what The Oxford Companion to Wine means when it calls Côte-Rôtie “a hotbed of activity and ambition.”

As recently as twenty years ago, no one was fighting very hard to buy land on the steep hillsides above the village of Ampuis. Côte-Rôtie, the “roasted slope,” was so named because its southeast exposure provides brilliant, grape-ripening sun. These hillsides above the Rhône River can reach a gradient of 55 degrees; the picturesque, terraced vineyards, first cultivated during the Roman era, produce a wine celebrated for its perfume and longevity, attracting the notice of connoisseurs from Pliny to Thomas Jefferson. Along with Hermitage, some twenty miles to the south, Côte-Rôtie is the ultimate terroir for Syrah, which may be indigenous, although this is a matter of hot dispute in ampelographical circles. I think of Côte-Rôtie as Fitzgerald to Hermitage’s Hemingway; like Fitzgerald’s, Côte-Rôtie’s reputation was almost moribund at mid-century. The steep, rocky hillside vineyards require punishing manual labor, and after the Second World War many vintners abandoned the vines and planted apricots.

Any wine that can somehow harmonize the flavors of raspberry and bacon—not to mention aromas like violet and leather—is worth saving, in my book. The white knight in this story is Marcel Guigal, heir to the firm that his father established in 1946. Traditionally, the wines of Côte-Rôtie depended on a blend from different