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TECHNICAL REVIEW WINEMAKING A Winery With Personality Former restaurateur Doug Margerum outfits a Santa Barbara warehouse By Tim Patterson generic warehouse space in a generic warehouse park, as boxy as the day is long, with no vineyards in sight, on a street with the picturesque name "Industrial Way." But when it was retrofitted a little over a year ago as the new production facility for the Margerum Wine Co., a small but serviceable kitchen got priority treatment, turning out daily staff lunches that bond the operation together. It's a practice Margerum learned from one of Highlights • Margerum Wine Co. in Buellton, Calif., in the Santa Ynez Valley, runs a complicated, multi-label operation inside a no-frills warehouse space. • The facility turns out more than 10,000 cases of wine per year for three labels, along with several small side projects. • The keys to making this work are strong temperature control and plenty of small, variable-capacity tanks. 46 W IN E S & V INE S O CTOBE R 20 13 his winemaking mentors, Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, and one that traces back to the vignerons of Burgundy. Despite the address, the approach to winemaking is anything but industrial, offering a long roster of well-regarded small-batch wines. Warehouse wineries may lack the architectural pizzazz and high-tech bells and whistles of fancier places, but it's still possible to give a barebones operation its own personality. Tanks are tanks and barrels are barrels, but a place that offers hot meals for visiting trade members and journalists? Now that's my kind of winery. Moving into the business and the winery What got Margerum out of the restaurant industry and into the wine business was seeing up close that the Santa Barbara winemakers whose wines were prominently featured at the Wine Cask were having more fun than he was. So as he transitioned from home winemaking to trial production to 20,000 cases in 2012, his network of relationships meant he had ready access to some of the best vineyards ALL PHOTOS COURTESY MARGERUM WINE CO. Y ou can take the restaurateur out of the kitchen, but you can't take the kitchen out of the restaurateur. When Doug Margerum, former owner and impresario of Santa Barbara, Calif.'s high-end, vinocentric Wine Cask restaurant, finally got the chance to design his own winery, the part he worried most about was making sure it had a kitchen. The winery shell is a The people behind Margerum Wine Co. include (back row, from left) Travis Enholm (harvest intern), Sam Smith (cellar hand), Christina Panameno (office manager), Doug Margerum (owner), Jason Barrette (winemaker), Hugh Margerum (web/wine club), Michael Miroballi (assistant winemaker); (front row) Evan Margerum (Doug 's son) and Brooks Van Wingerden (general manager).