Weed and Wine Come Together in Santa Ynez Valley

For 30 years now, Sunstone Vineyard has offered the Santa Ynez Valley one in every of its extra famously photographed touchstones, shifting from “Tuscan-inspired” villa in marriage ceremony albums to “futuristic French chateau,” no less than for functions of 1 current Star Trek present. 

This week, the brand new homeowners of Sunstone took it to the subsequent stage of improbability, saying they’d secured the required planning permits to domesticate hashish the place for 30 years natural wine grapes have been grown. This marks the first-time hashish and viniculture — usually offered as intractable foes — will coexist in peaceable industrial cultivation on the identical time and the identical place in Santa Barbara County. 

Maybe extra exceptional, Sunstone’s new homeowners managed to barter an understanding with seven neighbors — a number of of whom are massive names within the wine trade — and successfully defanged what might simply have escalated into one other drawn-out appeals battle waged in entrance of the Planning Fee and Board of Supervisors. 

This week, Teddy Cabugos, Sunstone’s new guiding drive, hammered out the ultimate particulars on a cope with potential appellants led by Tim Crist, proprietor of the Cinque Stelle Vineyard and chief govt for Kenai Drilling, a significant drive within the oil-extraction world of Cat Canyon and areas past. “We by no means needed to go to the Planning Fee,” a much-relieved Cabugos exclaimed after the deal was signed. “Not one time!” 

However Cabugos and Sunstone are hardly out of the woods. They nonetheless have to use for and safe the required enterprise permits, for instance, earlier than they will start cultivation. And it’s nonetheless too quickly to say the extent to which Sunstone’s new method — with a foot in each camps — displays a broader softening of antagonisms between such strikingly related however usually conflicting industries. 

At most build-out, Sunstone will probably be planting solely 6.5 acres of hashish. That’s hardly something in comparison with a few of the greater proposals wending their method by means of the county’s approval course of. And it is going to be phased in progressively over a three-year interval. Subsequent March, Cabugos mentioned, he’ll plant two acres; the 12 months after that, he’ll plant one other three. And the 12 months after that, one other one and a half. “I wish to ensure there aren’t any antagonistic results for my very own grapes,” he mentioned. 

And if, alongside the way in which, issues come up, say with odor, Cabugos has dedicated to creating the required changes. However to assist forestall that from changing into a problem, Cabugos additionally agreed to plant solely two harvests a 12 months at first, as an alternative of the three he might have gotten. Ought to it prove that’s not sufficient, he mentioned he’s ready to put in a brand new odor-control system, through which the olfactory assault of airborne hashish molecules are neutralized by important oils — eucalyptus, lavender, and citrus — shot skyward by vapor jets. 

This decidedly small-ball method displays a marketing strategy that’s “all about constructing the model,” in Cabugos’s phrases, slightly than maximizing manufacturing on giant swaths of land. And the model, he mentioned, is all about expertise and notion. “The expertise of strolling in a two-acre discipline of hashish just isn’t all that completely different than strolling in a 50-acre discipline,” he mentioned. “Fifty or two, it doesn’t actually matter.” What issues, he mentioned, is the sense of the expertise and the model that may be connected. 

Sunstone, Cabugos famous, sells wine made with grapes grown by 15 completely different vineyards. The identical may be completed, he added, with hashish. The precise processing — usually probably the most odoriferously intense facet of the hashish manufacturing cycle — will happen elsewhere and never on the Sunstone premises. About half the product will probably be offered as flower and bud, he mentioned, the opposite half rendered into oil that can be utilized to provide make-up, edibles, salves, tinctures, vape oil, sleeping aids, and non-alcoholic wines. 

On one hand, Cabugos is embracing the Sunstone model by partnering with Fred Rice, the vineyard’s unique founder, and his daughter Brittany Rice, the chief winemaker. However Cabugos has additionally been shifting the Sunstone picture, transitioning the tasting-room expertise from one dominated by the older whiter demographic to a youthful, extra ethnically various crowd. All through the pandemic, Sunstone’s out of doors tasting space has been incessantly packed. Both deejays are current or reside bands are enjoying.

In response to third District Planning Commissioner John Parke, the vibe is notably extra younger and enjoyable, a vital adjustment to the market realities confronting a wine trade intent on discovering new shoppers. Because the planning commissioner for a lot of the Santa Ynez Valley, Parke usually finds himself on the entrance traces within the battle between hashish and grapes. Over time, he’s sought to engineer kumbaya moments between the feuding factions. On this case, Parke urged representatives of the appellants to attempt to work one thing out with Cabugos. “Typically it’s higher to chop a deal than to lose on enchantment and never achieve this nicely,” he cautioned. 

Cabugos made some extent to lavish reward on the appellants’ lawyer, Courtney Taylor, for serving to make a deal occur. However Parke additionally credited Cabugos, a third-generation Santa Barbaran and former mixed-martial artist, for the relentlessness of his outreach to neighbors. Outgoing, heat, and endlessly enthusiastic, Cabugos went to native public colleges; he appears not simply to know everybody, however to be pals with them as nicely. Definitely it hasn’t damage that he’s shut with one of many lead attorneys representing the Coalition for Accountable Hashish, one of many chief appellants difficult county hashish permits. 

Cabugos has additionally teamed up with John Value, a significant participant in Santa Barbara industrial actual property and growth circles. “He’s bringing some horsepower,” Cabugos mentioned of Value. The pair simply gained the county’s competitors for a retail dispensary website, and when it opens store at a former fuel station simply spitting distance from the just lately closed Dutch Backyard Restaurant on Hollister Avenue, it should fly the Sunstone flag. 

Likewise, Cabugos is making an attempt to open a Sunstone tasting room in downtown Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone. The synergies are apparent. “From the Funk Zone to Sunstone,” Cabugos proclaimed. And Cabugos has been one of many first vineyard homeowners to embrace the nascent alternatives posed by the rising legion of electrical bike riders now taking to Santa Ynez’s rolling hills. He’s pledged to put in charging stations and restore bays, vital infrastructure for the rising e-bike crowd.

The size of Cabugos’s ambitions first grew to become obvious final 12 months when he joined with downtown property proprietor Ray Mahboob in proposing a four-story hashish emporium on State Avenue that would come with two flooring of indoor cultivation, a hashish museum, and a hashish lounge on the roof. That proposal went nowhere; it was seen as an excessive amount of, too quick, and too far exterior the scope of the town’s hashish coverage. The encounter ended with many noses out of joint and contributed to festering unhealthy blood between Mahboob and Anthony Wagner, the outspoken— and, extra just lately, exonerated — level particular person for hashish points with the Santa Barbara Police Division.

Cabugos took pains to emphasize that Sunstone just isn’t proposing to put in a hashish lounge as a part of its proposal. At the very least not now. “That’s all the time been a part of the long-term imaginative and prescient,” he mentioned. “However we all know now that’s not allowed. I imagine the long run holds these playing cards. And when the time comes, we’ll be prepared.”

Each day, the workers of the Santa Barbara Impartial works laborious to kind out reality from rumor and preserve you knowledgeable of what’s occurring throughout your entire Santa Barbara group. Now there’s a option to straight allow these efforts. Assist the Impartial by making a direct contribution or with a subscription to Indy+.

Add to Favorites