When Dave Potter launched Municipal Winemakers in 2007, Santa Barbara’s wine scene grew exponentially cooler and infinitely more approachable. The brand’s colorful, stylish labels with names such as Bright White and Fizz settled with ease into his pioneering Funk Zone tasting room(s), where hipster-ish wine geeks sipped indoors and out on fresh, affordable wines that didn’t require special vocabularies to enjoy.
Yet Potter didn’t want to just go down in history as the proprietor of the “cool guy” brand and was confident that he could make wines to compete with the upper-tier, single-vineyard expressions of the region. The Rancho Cucamonga–raised UCSB global studies grad boasts legit winemaking chops, having entered the industry at Sunstone’s tasting room in 2000, worked for Santa Cruz’s Byington Vineyard and Fess Parker Winery here, and toiled for six years in the cellars of Australia, where he also got a grad degree in enology and viticulture. So as Muni Wine rose in popularity and profitability, Potter simultaneously plotted a new project to more eloquently express Santa Barbara County vineyards such as Kick-On Ranch, Tierra Alta, and Sanford & Benedict that he’s come to know and love.
The result is Potek Winery, which opened in August as the first tenant of The Mill, the food-and-drink hub on East Haley Street at Laguna. “This is the best stuff we can make,” said Potter a few weeks ago as harvest wound down, with forklifts rearranging barrels in the courtyard and cellar rats spraying fermenters nearby. “It’s all single vineyard; it’s the best barrels; it’s the best sites.” Each bottling is only about 50-100 cases (so about two to four barrels), and the inventory is sold straight to consumers, without any distribution to retailers or restaurants. “They come and go,” said Potter, “and that’s it.”