Amid the death and destruction delivered throughout Montecito by the 1/9 Debris Flow, the fine-wine world suffered its own silent yet momentous loss when the mudslide consumed the cellar at San Ysidro Ranch.
Packed with 12,500 bottles made by vintners near and far — with multiple vintages going back to the 1960s, not to mention a 1907 bottle of Madeira and an $8,100 magnum of 1982 Dom Perignon — the dark basement beneath the Stonehouse Restaurant contained more than $3 million worth of wine. But once the mud surged in, electrical power ceased, temperatures warmed, and the buried wines were ruined, chalked up to insurers as a total loss.
Todd Smith, the property’s wine director, learned that news a few days after the slide. “I didn’t have high hopes for the cellar,” he recalled, though his post-mudslide mind was understandably elsewhere until the property manager called to confirm his suspicions. “That was a huge disappointment,” said Smith, who later watched crude videos of the insurance agents smashing the tops off of coveted bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), vintage Champagne, and old Rioja, dumping them out, and tossing them into a pit. “But I knew with time we could rebuild.”