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WINEMAKING TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT 30 WINES&VINES July 2017 T he new Riboli Family Winery is equipped with a set of sophisticated crush pad equipment, brand new tanks and all the technology and infrastructure one would expect in a well-funded, high-capacity winery. It was also designed to accommodate future growth while accounting for the growing cost and scarcity of water and labor. Throughout the large winery located east of downtown Paso Robles, Calif., are equipment and design touches to save re- sources and make it easier for fewer workers to do more. Completed in time for the 2016 harvest, the winery is one of the newest in the Paso Robles region, but the owners have been in the industry for a century. The Riboli family produces more than 500,000 cases of wine under a variety of labels in- cluding San Simeon, Opaque, Maddalena, La Quinta and others. In addition to domestic wines, the Ribolis also produce and import wines from Italy including the brand Stella Rosa. The company started in 1917, when Italian immigrant Santo Cambianica founded San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles, Calif. A contract to supply the Catholic Church with sacramental wine helped the family-run business survive Prohibition, and it con- tinued growing even as a revived California wine industry found its focus in the northern half of the state. A new winery for new estate vineyards To supply the growing winery with grapes, the Ribolis purchased vineyards in Monterey County and Napa Valley and began buying grapes from growers in the Paso Robles region in the 1970s. Starting in 2015, the family began buying land in Paso Robles for vineyards and now own five of them: three in the El Pomar District and two in the Creston AVA, for a total of 400 acres of vineyards with about 250 acres bearing. The family has plans to plant several hundred additional acres during the next few years. The existing vineyards mostly are planted to Cabernet Sauvignon along with other red Bordeaux varieties and Sauvignon Blanc. In tandem with the vineyard investment, winemaker and part-owner Anthony Riboli said the family wanted to build a new winery to have even more control of its production process. From the start, he said the plan was for the winery to have a flexible design that could handle all kinds of varieties and winemaking styles and be set up to run with minimal labor while conserving resources. According to the Wines Vines Analytics winery database, the company is producing around 550,000 cases of wine per year and was No. 29 on Wine Business Monthly's 2016 Top 30 list, which is produced in part with those same database figures. Riboli declined to confirm the company's current case produc- tion, but the new winery is definitely equipped for high-capacity, high-quality winemaking. The company's winemaking team is comprised of Riboli, who holds a master's degree in viticulture from the University Riboli Family Winery Paso Robles winery designed to be flexible and require little manpower By Andrew Adams TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT