Among wine lovers, it’s likely that any conversation about Santa Barbara will turn quickly to Greg Brewer of Sta. Rita Hills winery Brewer-Clifton, where the energetic vintner makes celebrated single-vineyard Pinot Noirs.
As Brewer explained to the Wine Experience audience, his career began in the early 1990s while he was a French instructor at UC Santa Barbara; he saw a newspaper ad for a tasting room job at Santa Barbara Winery. He didn’t get the position at first: “I didn’t know Chardonnay was a grape, which was a setback,” he quipped. But he persisted in his efforts, and the winery’s manager eventually took him on. “One day behind the bar, I knew this would become my life.”
Brewer became a mentee and friend of Williams Selyem co-founder Burt Williams, and in 1996, he and Steve Clifton founded Brewer-Clifton on just $12,000. “We had a dream of what this would be, and off we went.” (Jackson Family Wines bought the winery in 2017, and Clifton has left to focus on other endeavors.) Today, Brewer also makes wine for his Diatom Chardonnay and Ex Post Facto Syrah labels. “In 33 years, I’ve never touched a grape outside of Santa Barbara,” he said.
For his Brewer-Clifton Pinot Noir Sta. Rita Hills Machado 2022 (96 points), which he served for the audience, Brewer tapped two Pinot Noir clones (known as 459 and 37, and used in equal proportions) he planted in Machado vineyard. “Most importantly, this wine’s whole-cluster fermented,” Brewer noted. “The mouthfeel [is] a derivative of the stems’ role.”
Brewer-Clifton's broader Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir bottling (the 2012 vintage was wine No. 8 of Wine Spectator’s Top 10 Wines of 2014) also relies on Machado vineyard as one of its sources and on whole-cluster fermentation, providing a more accessible look at the winery's style.
Offering a key principle for his winemaking, Brewer explained, “We’ve always raised the wines in a very monastic way, a very ritualistic way … with a lot of precision, with a lot of care.”
