One cloudy morning earlier this month, Fred Brander walked through his Los Olivos vineyard alongside Highway 154 while his crew was planting a new batch of sauvignon blanc vines. As the Buenos Aires-born vintner spoke to the laborers in brisk but melodious Spanish, advising how best to mound the earth around each vine, he reflected on doing the same exact thing exactly 40 years ago, when first planting his family-owned vineyard in May of 1975.
Much is different about the process. In one hand, Brander shows me the modern fluorescent green vine tag, whose various numbered and lettered codes indicate which of the specialized rootstocks and clones he’s selected for these vines. Then the Santa Barbara-raised winemaker — whose parents moved to town in 1962 from Argentina, where his Swedish grandparents emigrated a century ago — pulls from his pocket an orange tag from a cabernet sauvignon vine he planted back in ’75. “Cabernet Sauvignon #1 Jumbo,” he reads aloud with a laugh. “The only clone you could buy back then was #1.”
But much is quite the same at the Brander Vineyard, where about 40 acres are planted two-thirds in sauvignon blanc and one-third in cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc. That was the basic ratio Brander bet on in the beginning, after he convinced his parents to buy the property around the time he graduated from UC Davis with a master’s degree in food science with an enology emphasis. He’d been fascinated with fermentation ever since graduating from a chemistry set to a home winemaking kit while still in high school at Laguna Blanca, and pursued that interest by studying chemistry at Harvey Mudd College. After spending time in France — where his grandfather Fritz once studied wine before moving to Argentina — Brander saw the rolling hills of Los Olivos, with their sand, gravel, and clay soils, as reminiscent of Bordeaux, where sauv blanc and both cabs thrive.