(published in the Santa Barbara News-Press on July 22, 2012)
In just a
couple of years, the St. Mark’s Cellar Classic may well have become the wine
auction of record in Santa Barbara County.
In its first two years alone, it raised more than a quarter-million
dollars – impressive by any local auction standard – in support of the
community-focused and non-denominational programs at St. Mark’s Episcopal
Church in Los Olivos. The third Cellar
Classic takes place this coming Saturday, July 28th, from
4-7pm. (Go to www.SMITV.org for tickets and information.)
The event
draws crowds for the fine food and wine that’s doled out generously throughout
the afternoon, and for the beautiful setting in the church’s picturesque
courtyard. And hobnobbing with stars of
Santa Barbara wine – from pioneers to TV bachelors – has its allure, too. But there’s no denying that the biggest
attraction of all is the wine, itself – a lineup of fine, rare and cult wines
that raise the eyebrows of even novice aficionados, and that have avid collectors
making the drive to the Santa Ynez Valley from all over the state. This year’s Classic features no less than
eight 100-point wines – a 1949 Leroy Musigny, a 1961 Chateau Latour, a magnum
of 1982 Lafite Rothschild and a 1999 Screaming Eagle, among them – which will
easily go to the highest bidder for thousands and thousands of dollars.
These wines
and many others like them – both at the Cellar Classic and at a bevy of other
auctions that benefit local non-profit causes throughout the year – are special
gifts from generous donors, of course.
Before they go on the auction block, they are part of someone’s
personal, private cellar. Before they
raise funds for a purpose, they were one wine lover’s careful investment.
So we were
inspired to open a few vault doors and take a peek inside some of the impressive
private cellars in Santa Barbara County.
The five featured here vary in size and bottle count, and in the types
of wines they house. They may or may not
be insured, or secured with elaborate alarms.
But they all contain at least a few – in some cases many – noteworthy bottles,
and they are, ultimately, a testament to one individual’s penchant for
something special.
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| Photo:Nik Blaskovich/SB News-Press |
For Dr,
George Primbs, the love of collecting wine was inspired by a Bordeaux he tasted
in 1959, and on bending the rules just a bit.
“That wine
tasted so great, I thought, ‘I should start collecting this stuff,’” recalls
the Santa Barbara resident who, in the 1950s, was an Air Force flight surgeon
stationed in Northern Africa. “I could
get French wines cheap there, but there was a rule we couldn’t bring it back
home.” So when he left the service in
1960, he got creative: from the same Plaster of Paris he used to fix fractures,
he devised five large doorstops, which he filled with his first favorite bottles
(and a lot of cotton for padding) and transported home to the States.
During the
first 10 years in his Santa Barbara home, he stored his budding collection in
the basement. But when an El Nino storm
in 1971 flooded it and jeopardized his stash, he began a 20-year project to
build a latticework of light-frame racks above ground instead. “I was on-call at St. Francis Hospital,” recalls
the man who’d go on to become a celebrated ophthalmologist, “and whenever I’d
have free time I’d come in here and, little by little, I’d work on these
racks.”
Today, two
converted garages are crammed with floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall furring strip
frames that house a lifetime collection of some 25,000 bottles. It’s rumored to be one of the largest wine anthologies
in the city. And that’s after he decided
to thin out his collection two years ago through an international online
auction, when some 20,000 bottles went to a Hong Kong company for the highest
bid of $700,000.
Dr. Primbs prefers
to stay tight-lipped about specific finds in his cellar, which he upkeeps these
days with the help of his lady friend of two years, Barbara
Gaughen-Muller. But he admits, “I love
collecting Bordeaux,” and many high-scoring releases dating back to the 1960s,
70s and 80s – French, mainly as well as numerous high-profile Californians – fill
his racks. Most have soared in value
over the years. “I don’t know how much I
paid for a lot of this stuff,” he says with a laugh, “but I could have spent,
say, $19 on a bottle back in 1961 and it could well be priceless today.”
His main
motivator for continuing to collect, though, is “just having the rarities and
creating novelty for others.” In fact,
guests to his home are often known to leave with a bottle from the vintage year
of their birth. Dr, Primbs also moves
many of his bottles – including various he, himself, helps make under the
celebrated local home winemaking label, Los Cinco Locos -- by donating dozens
of cases a year to local charity events, including the Sansum Diabetes Research
Institute’s annual Taste of the Vine event.
And he readily enjoys his own collection, too. As his stands snuggly between his racks, he
admits, “I come in here and drink about a half bottle every other day.”
The charm of
the cellar at the Santa Ynez home of Richard and Pamela Harris is evident even
before you walk through the door.
Outside, it’s reminiscent of a quaint Provincial cottage, with empty
wine barrels stacked against the wall, surrounded by flowering bushes of
rosemary and lavender. The backdrop is a
bucolic landscape of rolling hills. And
adjacent to this small structure – which is attached to the Harris’ four-car
garage – is a budding vineyard where one of Santa Barbara’s most celebrated
wines is harvested every year.
It turns out
that this wine-inspired project – to tack on extra square footage to the home
they bought in 1996, including this quaint cellar – also included transforming
the backyard into a field of grapevines.
Some 619 vines in all, which produce the annual 50-case production of
the very sought-after Calzada Ridge viognier
The vineyard
was, in truth, a hands-on project for Richard Harris, who took viticulture
classes at Alan Hancock College in Santa Maria and planted the vines,
himself. But the decision to build a
cellar grew out of need. Major success
in Mr. Harris’s Tinsel Town career had resulted in a vast collection of wine
gifts. But there was a problem: “Now we
needed a place to keep them.”
Mr. Harris,
is an Academy Award winning film editor.
He won the Oscar in 1997 for “Titanic,” and his career gigs include
major films like “Fletch,” the “Terminator” series and “True Lies.” The latter was also a movie his wife, Pam,
worked on as special effects producer; among her previous work was the hit
comedy, “Ghostbusters 2.”
So as this
Hollywood connection began generating fancy gifts of wine, especially in the
90s, the Harrises’ collection began. Many
bottles – which are kept in simple racks and loosely organized by region or
producer in vertical rows – are actually labeled with a tag around the neck
that reads “Gift.” For example, “We
were totally knocked out with a Burgundy – an Echezeaux – that Jim [Cameron]
gave us once and that we drank during a Christmas dinner, just the two of us,”
Mr. Harris recalls. “It left a great,
great memory.”
Mr. Harris
and his wife are partial to Burgundies, although some fancy Bordeaux wines – a 1996
Latour, for example – also catch the eye.
And so do several older vintages of Central Coast wines, like the ’98
Julia’s Vineyard pinot by Foxen. Perhaps
their most prized possessions, though, are the complete lineup – bottles of
every single vintage – of their own Calzada Ridge wine, which saw its first
harvest in 1998; their very first – a bottle tagged “Bottle # 001” – is easy to
spot.
The cellar’s
décor is simple: a small round table for four in the center, a writing desk
stacked with winemaking books, a basket filled with hundreds of corks they’ve
popped over the years. A cooling system
keeps temperature steadily in the upper 50s.
And the racks, admittedly, seem to be going empty a lot more quickly
these days. Mr. Harris admits, “We’ve
definitely become the type of people who drink our collection.”
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| Photo: Steve Malone/SB News-Press |
There are
some wonderfully rare wine finds inside Richard Torin’s cellar, which stands to
reason. That’s the business he’s in,
after all. Torin owns Clarets, one of
the foremost players in the international fine wine trade, catering to collectors
with fancy tastes all over Asia.
“Many people
don’t realize it, but Hong Kong has been a sophisticated wine market for the
last 20 years,” he says while he sits in his Hope Ranch home, just two days
after returning from the fifth work trip of the year to the region. “In mainland China, on the other hand, it’s
more neophytes with new money.”
Torin
readily comes in contact with the high-end wines his Asian clients demand. Lots of French powerhouses like Chateau
Petrus and Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.
And several California cult wines, like Harlan Estate and Screaming
Eagle. The latter “can demand $1600 a
bottle in a mediocre vintage,” says Torin, “and $3000 in a good year.”
As fine
bottles have crossed his hands, Torin has naturally succumbed to the temptation
to buy some for himself. He was in the
English wine trade for many years before moving from his native London to Santa
Barbara, and launching Clarets, in 1992.
Storing his wine appropriately has long been a priority. So when he bought his current home in 1996, constructing
a carefully designed cellar – carving it, in fact, into the earth underneath
his house – made perfect sense.
On the
exterior, his cellar mirrors a chateau-inspired cave, with an arched wooden door
that leads out to a pool complex with sweeping views and enveloped by mint and
rosemary vines. Inside, it’s rustically
quaint, and warmly lit, with added brightness coming through a floor-to-ceiling
window. Smooth stones line the floor,
and contoured rocks line the walls. “And
I put in a sound system,” he says with a smile, as he points to a speaker in
the ceiling. Vintage Sinatra pours out.
About 800 to
1000 bottles, about 95% reds, are kept at a constant 57.4 degrees. Mr. Torin is especially proud of his 1982
Bordeaux wines. “It why I started in the
business in the first place, a benchmark for our trade,” he says. “The wines are of a fantastic quality.”
But while Mr.
Torin believes, naturally, that wine can be fruitful investment – “An effective
tool to see your capital grow,” he says – there is one bottle in his collection
he’ll never sell. “Ten years ago, I was
clearing out a private cellar in St. Louis for a client who’d gotten married in
1961,” he recounts. That year happens to
be one of the classic vintages of the 20th century in Bordeaux. “I ran across a Pomerol with the price tag
still on it -- $3.75 – which I thought was so funny, I asked to take a photo with
it.” Funny, because these days that wine
commands thousands. His client, instead,
gave it to him as a gift, with the promise he’d never sell it. Referring to his teenage son, he says
proudly, “I’ve earmarked it for the day Alex turns 21.”
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| Photo: Bill Morson/SB News-Press |
Fred Steck’s
wine collecting days began in the mid 1980s when, as a Bay Area-based financial
expert with Goldman-Sachs, he was introduced by a co-worker to a man by the
name of Gary Marcaletti.
“Gary has
got to have the best small specialty wine shop in California,” says Steck of
the well-known owner behind the San Francisco Wine Trading Company. “Maybe in the whole country.”
Over the
years, the wine-driven relationship between the two men has been a boon for
Steck. To this day, he depends solely on
the Northern California wine expert to tip him off to producers and vintages he
should buy. For the first couple of
decades of Steck’s collecting, when he didn’t have a private cellar, Marcaletti
stored the budding bundle of bottles at his own shop. And when it came time to build wine storage
at Steck’s Santa Ynez Valley home – he bought the property on New Year’s Eve of
1999, razed the existing house and erected a beautiful three-level home during
a multi-year project that ended in 2007 – it was Marcaletti who helped design
it.
“He and Alex
worked on it,” says Steck, referring to his 32-year old son, a recent MBA grad
who once worked for Marcaletti. “And the
sub-contractors I had on the project were fabulous.”
Steck’s
cellar is adjacent to the basement, close to 10 feet below the foundation’s
soil grade. It’s elegantly decked out,
with designer lighting and cabinetry.
The floor is made of tile milled in Mexico. And there are several cubby spaces where this
collector displays high-end bottles of aged spirits, like tequila and cognac.
Several rack
options allow for storage in varying sizes, from single bottles to magnums to
box cases. Most of the 1500 spaces are
taken, mainly with classic French, Italian and Spanish wines organized in vertical
fashion. “Old World wines are more
tannic, more patient, and you can experience them over time,” Steck says, and
then reaches into a case of 1996 Rioja on the floor. “I haven’t touched these yet, and it’ll be
really good in another 10 years.” The
impressive French labels include a 1978 Chateau de Pommard, a 2000 Lafite
Rothschild (“A great year,” Steck declares) and a 1988 Domaine de Montille, one
of his favorites.
There are
some notable California inclusions, too, like multiple vintages – in some cases
stretching back to the 70s – of Opus One, ZD, Robert Mondavi , Jordan and
Colgin.
As he
glances around his cellar, Steck makes an admission. “If I could do it again, I would not have
used cement down here,” he says. “It’s
not efficient for conducting cold.” The
cooling system, which keeps the mercury at a steady 59 degrees, is kept on
consistently. “I would line the walls
with brick, instead.”
Regardless,
this vault is clearly a source of pride and enjoyment for Steck, who also
raises quarter horses on his property and handles private equity in the natural
pharmaceuticals industry these days. “I
love being able to pull a bottle at dinner and have people say, ‘Wow,’” he
admits, “and seeing wine increase in value.
That’s definitely part of the fun.”
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| Photo: Bill Morson/SB News-Press |
When Steve
and Catherine Pepe bought land in the now-famed Santa Rita Hills near Lompoc in
1994, they had plenty of work to do. The
barn would have to be razed to make way for what would one day become some of
the most sought-after pinot noir and chardonnay in the county—Clos Pepe Vineyards. And a home would have to be built, and it
would have one no-brainer feature: a wine cellar.
Mr. Pepe
began his avid compilation of wines after he moved out to California from New
Jersey in 1968. “We were renters then,
so our cellars were those under-the-kitchen-counter refrigerators,” he
recalls. But as they purchased homes
throughout Southern California in years to come, they invested in more formal
cellaring. And in the new home in Santa
Barbara wine country – they moved in full-time in late 2005 – their new cellar
was designed with functionality in mind.
“The basic
job of our cellar is to store wine and not to look pretty,” says Mr. Pepe, who
added a deep, narrow 200-square-foot space to the garage that currently houses
wine in double deep case racks, rather than a single-bottle system. A cooling system keeps the thermometer at a
steady 55 degrees. And there’s a
humidity monitor, thought the weather is mild enough so that it’s rarely
needed. “You don’t want the humidity to
drop below 60% because that’s when the corks will dry out,” he cautions.
The size of
his collection varies on the number of get-togethers they host each season, but
the cellar is currently stocked to about two-thirds of its 3000-bottle
capacity. And it’s divided pretty
evenly, based on how the Pepes’ tastes
have evolved over the years: 1/3 is vintage port, which they preferred in the
70s and 80s, 1/3 is fine Bordeaux, which they preferred to drink in the 90s,
and 1/3 is fine Burgundies, which is their drink of choice today. He keeps tabs on his assortment by numbering
the bins and using a computer program called Cellar Tracker.
Among his
favorite finds is a bottle he acquired as part of a mixed case at a tasting in
the late 90s with Aubert de Villaine, part owner of Burgundy’s uber-famous
Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. He
remembers paying $2,000 for the 12-bottle collection, which included one
selection now valued, on its own, at about $10,000. “Everyone says, ‘Sell it, sell it!’” says Mr.
Pepe. “But I’m not a flipper. I buy wine to enjoy it and drink it. That wine is coming into prime now so I’m
sure we’ll find a special moment to open it.”
Enjoyment
aside, Mr. Pepe has reached into cellar for wines to donate to myriad charities
over the years. Most recently, that
includes the Cellar Classic, which he launched with fellow wine collector
Brooks Firestone, to benefit St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley church in Los Olivos. “There was pent up demand locally for an
auction of this caliber,” he says. This
year, he donated a case of unique Burgundies to the Classic, and a 1961 Chateau
Haut-Brion, a 100-point wine worth thousands.
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