“Every Sunday, I grew up eating sauce,” said winemaker Scott Sampler, who was raised in Los Angeles during the 1970s and ’80s by an Italian-American mother and African-American, World War II–vet-turned-commercial/fine-artist father. Hot on the city’s emerging culinary scene, they introduced good food and sips of wine to their son at an early age. By the time he hit Berkeley to study philosophy, fine art, and film theory in 1985, Sampler found that he was addicted to slow-cooked sauce and started stewing it himself as a cure for homesickness.
“The ingredients profoundly affect the outcome of your perceived skill,” Sampler told me a couple of months ago inside his slender slice of the Buellton Bodegas, the warehouses-turned-wineries complex where he’s made his Central Coast Group Project wines since 2013. Wine-wise, that means sourcing top-quality grapes, which he does from vineyards such as Larner and White Hawk. But sauce-making also taught him about the differences between a fresh concoction and one that’s cooked down to achieve richer textures and flavors. “It transitions the ingredients,” he explained. “You get a deeper essence.”
That lesson looms over Sampler’s winemaking, which blends the antiestablishment ethos of punk rock with old-school techniques from classic regions such as Barolo. While many winemakers allow their wines to soak on their grape skins for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, after primary fermentation to extract more color, flavor, and texture, Sampler lets his stew far longer — more than nine months, in fact, for certain lots of the 2015 and 2016 vintages. Though this isn’t completely unheard of in corners of the Old World, the super-extended maceration increases risk of spoilage on multiple fronts, especially when Sampler barely uses any sulfur as a preservative.