kalawashaq wine cellars

Who: Tara Gomez and Mireia Taribó

Where: Lompoc, California

What grapes: Carignan, Grenache, Gamay, Syrah, Albariño, Grüner Veltliner and more!

How many bottles: 18,000

Key facts: Tara and Mireia met and fell in love making wine in Priorat. The couple founded a small winery in Lompoc that uses organic grapes from cool, high elevation sites in the Sta. Rita Hills AVA. They use natural yeast and believe in minimal intervention in the cellar.

Website: https://camins2dreams.com

Instagram: camins2dreams

“We fell in love making wine.”

Tara Gomez and Mireia Taribó are building a thriving commercial winery from a small footprint. The couple make 1,500 cases in a functional warehouse cellar in Lompoc, a sleepy small town close to the Pacific coast, north of Sta. Barbara. There’s a separate tasting room a few blocks away, in an oddly-named “wine ghetto,” which is really more of a cul-de-sac, and a third little warehouse nearby for bottle storage. The couple are piecing it together, as fledgling wineries often do. 

Tara’s wine journey is singular. BIPOC women are rare in the wine industry today, a disparity that was even more pronounced in the last decade of the 20th century. Of the hundred students that entered Fresno State’s enology program with Tara, only 12 graduated. Two graduates were women. “The others left for marketing programs, things like that,” she said. Tara was the only Native American to graduate from the program. Today she acts as a mentor to women who want to follow her path. 

Mireia grew up in Catalunya. Wine was a part of her everyday life. After graduating from the University of Barcelona with a degree in Chemistry, and the University of Rovira and Virgili with an Oenology degree, she went to work at Castell d’Encus, a winery in the Pyrenees where she remained an oenologist until 2014. Tara worked a few harvests there, too. 

After graduating in 1998, Tara worked for commercial wineries in Santa Barbara county, notably Fess Parker and J. Lohr winery. The duo met in 2006 while working at J. Lohr. Tara wound up working there for nine years. In 2008, they were able to work together in Mireia’s native Spain. Tara also staged in France and Germany in that period. But it was in Spain that Tara and Mireia fell in love. In 2014, After an eight year long distance relationship (eight years!!)  Mireia got a green card and relocated to California. The couple married. 

In 2010, Tara became head winemaker at Kitá, a winery started by her tribe. The Chumash Indians of Santa Ynez valley purchased 1,400 acres from Fess Parker winery (land they had inhabited for 9,000 years, according to Gomez) including a 250-acre vineyard at the eastern end of the valley. Until it closed in 2022, Kitá was the only Native American wine brand in the U.S.

After thirteen years of working with her tribe, essentially working two wine jobs for the last five years, Tara can now focus on growing the couple’s own winery. Early in her career, Tara established Kalawashaq wine cellars, the legal name her winery still uses on their back labels. The relationships with local farmers that Tara built while working in the valley for 25 years are now a real asset for the new winery. “They know me, they know I’ll show up with my own equipment” (to haul the harvested fruit.) “We get better treatment from a lot of the growers for this reason. They work to accommodate us.” 

2023 is a super-late harvest in the Sta. Rita Hills. Or a “normal” harvest, according to locals and old timers who witnessed the region’s early development in the 1970s. Because the vineyards are only 10 minutes away from the Pacific and receive a maximum of four hours direct sunlight per day, cool climate grapes are planted here in abundance. Fog rolls in late afternoon, so farmers grow Pinot and Chardonnay. 

But Mireia and Tara prefer something eclectic. For example, they make Grüner Veltliner, from two fields planted on opposite sides of a mountain. They pick their Albariño grapes in three stages, getting bright, champagne-like acids from the first pass, and super ripe tropical fruit aromatics from the last. They get a whopping 200lbs. of Graciano grapes, a variety associated mostly with Rioja, from a single field in Lompoc. 

It’s good they work in the Sta. Rita Hills. In the span of 30 miles, 70 grape varieties are planted. Bordeaux varieties thrive to the (hotter) east, and Rhone and Italian grapes are farmed in mass quantities in the center of the valley. Out west, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay dominate. But there’s space for much more. A challenge is getting slow-to-change growers to embrace organic agriculture. Today, only two fields that Tara and Mireia utilise aren’t organically farmed. They couple are giving themselves two years to complete the conversion to 100% organic, which is an admirable goal. “It takes (having conversations) starting fairly early on,” Mireia said. She’s excited about a plot of Mencia they will be using soon, a field that is grown using regenerative farming methods. 

There’s a large amount of diatomaceous earth in the soil of the Sta. Rita Hills, a distinct feature of its terroir. 

Tara and Mireia ferment all their wine in small batches, separated by vineyard. The fermentations start pied a cuve, using indigenous yeasts present on the fruit from individual sites. They use sunlight to get fermentations going, rolling their square fermenters out of the small cellar and into the warm courtyard behind the building. The fermenters vary in size from a tiny half-ton capacity vessel, to a (still tiny) 1.5 ton cube. All the fruit passes over a sorting table. Tara also tries to presort during the harvest, removing blemished or unripe clusters, and stray vegetation. Some of the fruit is fermented whole-cluster. There’s no set recipe. The couple only add small amounts of SO2 to their wines at bottling. They scrupulously steam clean all the winery’s small collection of neutral oak barrels, to avoid any contamination or off flavors. The meticulously clean workspace they inhabit speaks to an understanding of what is necessary to make natural, low-intervention wines without flaws.

Lompoc was founded as a temperance community. Something about the place suggested a strange backstory. I asked Mireia about the origins of the town, wholly ignorant of the history, but certain that something peculiar had shaped the place. The roads are wide and dusty. I feel a prevailing sense of isolation in the town. The place looks weathered, the vibe is “remote.” 

Which is nonsensical: Santa Barbara is a short drive south, Buellton and Solvaing are even closer. But the latter two places have odd energy as well. Solvaing feels like an off-kilter tourist trap, a warped funhouse Scandi take on a wine haven. Buellton is 100% a company town, a minor wine trade metropolis less luxe than comparable communities that dot the fashionable countryside of Northern California. Numerous wineries cluster in tourist-friendly (if not particularly bucolic) light industrial complexes, and make up for in density and variety what they lack in charm. 

Lompoc is an island. The road to Lompoc winds through ranges of steep empty hills. It’s probably a hiker’s paradise. I’m certain I’d get lost, or worse. The trees and scrub look more thorny than verdant. The passage from highway 101 to Lompoc is dramatic, evocative, and pretty intimidating. It makes sense that temperance leaders would pick this land for a settlement. There’s something sobering about the journey. I felt the indulgences of LA scrubbed away by steady wind and unremitting light. Shaped by eastern biases, Lompoc looks a tough spot for agriculture. Maybe that’s why vines thrive. They crave a challenge. I don’t. 

It feels quiet. Small bungalows, retirees on porches, unrefurbished strip malls, project cars in driveways. Wide avenues. More stop signs than stoplights. I saw a white Trans Am with the full-sized bird on the hood. Pretty normal stuff. We are miles from chateaux, though. The big middle of California viticulture is (of course) hardworking people in places like Lompoc. Wine pros who aren’t millionaires, and aren’t necessarily attached to a luxury brand. 

The day of my second-ever visit to Lompoc, Tara and Mireia were preparing for a night harvest. Eight p.m. was the start time at a vineyard on one side of the valley. The next day they’d be picking grapes on the other side of the valley, beginning at 6 a.m. A more diligent wine importer might have tagged along. But, if you’ve seen one harvest, you’ve seen them all! OK that’s not quite true. Scrupulous field methods are essential to preserve fruit quality, hence the cooler start times for this work, and Tara’s insistence on bringing her own fruit bins. What is true is that I’m too lazy for that schedule. So, after a few hours of tasting bottles, looking at fermentations in progress, even tasting some Grenache that was being whole-berry fermented, I took my leave. No good excuses, just a date with a big pile of delicious crudo and bivalves at a hipster hole-in-the-wall oyster bar in West Hollywood. I think Tara and Mireia were amused by my antics. I doubt many people drive out to Lompoc and back in a day. What can I say? The 101 along the Pacific is beautiful. Beaches, turquoise water, 1,001 Winnebagos. Didn’t see surfers. Didn’t stop, either. There’s food to be eaten, but it’s back in Koreatown.