There’s a good chance that you’re here because you’ve developed a discerning taste for wine.

I remember choosing the wine from the list for the grown-ups when I was ten years old. They thought I was cute. But I had a plan. I watched and I learned.  And maybe I sampled a little when they looked away, but that’s not the point. I wanted to know what made a good wine great. And while over the years my exploits brought me into different worlds, my parallel path was ever in my hand, begging me to learn more about the elusive magic behind a fabulous wine. That quest soon led to a decade of experimentation, trial and error.  And while learning to perfect any craft takes a great deal of time, it has been accompanied by a growing respect and fascination for the intricacies of fine winemaking.

My first label, Casa Pescador, was a crowning achievement for an amateur winemaker. But it was mostly a friends-and-family affair. The chosen grapes and methodologies worked well, yet the results were inconsistent. Having had a taste of the magic that was possible, it was time to take things to another level. My home operation had outgrown itself. It was time to move up to ‘boutique’.  And it was time to make a truly great wine, and all great wines start with the right grape I’ve been to just about every corner of California and beyond in my search for the right grape to make the wine on my mind.  To cut a years-long story short, I finally found what I was looking for in 2007, standing in a field in Happy Canyon, Santa Barbara County. The map that led me to Happy Canyon was drawn from countless conversations with wine lovers and vintners; both novices and experts whom I hoped could help me find what I was looking for. In Happy Canyon, the microclimate, the soil, the soft pacific breeze all combine to give birth to some of the finest Bordeaux grape varietals to come out of California. And I knew immediately that the craft which had chosen me long before had finally revealed something to me. I had found my grape.

With so many years of frustrated experience under my belt, I soon also found friends and accomplices in the region, each of them drawn to this point of convergence, each of them with a different wine on their mind. Their friendship, generosity of expertise and passion for the process has helped me bring my own Habit into the public domain. Handcrafted, using artisanal methods in a state of the art facility, Habit is everything I hoped it would be. The reaction has been overwhelmingly gratifying, and I hope you too enjoy our current selection as we work to perfect our future vintages. Feel free to email me and let me know what you think. Unless you’re ten, in which case you have a lot to learn, but don’t give up.