Winemakers who make unexpected choices have always intrigued me, so it’s great to see a smattering of wines made from Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese varieties emerging across California. These wines, produced in very small quantities at micro-wineries, aren’t handled with loads of oak or overly-ripe fruit; they have distinct personalities with lively energy and lower alcohol. As the market opens up to a more diverse range of varieties and styles, some winemakers are seizing the opportunity to explore the terroir of their vineyards and select grape varieties to match, even if they aren’t the ones most often seen in the Golden State. That doesn’t mean that every swing is a home run, though. I’ve tasted Italian varieties grown in hotter pockets of California that don’t taste remotely like their savory, earthy counterparts from the Old World. But the four wineries below create some stellar selections that are well worth seeking out. 

Idlewild

Sam Bilbro founded Mendocino’s Idlewild in 2012 to focus on Piedmont grape varieties. He jokes that , “I loved all the old Italian Americans I grew up hanging out with around my dad. I thought they were real and crusty and old school in a way that I could tell was already going away.” Even though Bilbro’s dad Chris was a winemaker, he didn’t immediately follow in those footsteps. It was later, while working at a restaurant, that he had his first sip of Italian Nebbiolo and forever changed his path—he wanted to make that style of wine in California. And he did. Bilbro’s nebbiolo is the closest thing to Barolo I’ve tasted from the US. 

How is Nebbiolo so good in Mendocino? Bilbro’s theory centers around climate. While other California regions  are temperate, with 11 month growing seasons, Piedmonte has all four seasons, and gets very cold and very hot—which aid in producing Nebbiolo’s juxtapositions of grace and power, and structure and delicacy. Mendocino’s Yorkville Highlands mirrors these swings: higher elevations and exposure to Pacific Ocean breezes bring a strong cooling effect that clashes with the concentration of warm California sunlight. And in the cellar, Bilbro isn’t trying to push fruit to jammy, ripe levels which too often is the case in California. “A lot of people try to make a wine for who they think is going want it,” he says. “I don't want to sound flippant, but I don't give a shit. I'm trying to make Nebbiolo that tastes like Nebbiolo.”

Bilbro also grows Cortese, Arneis, Dolcetto and Barbera. He started in 2014 at Mendocino’s Fox Hill Vineyard, where he directed and managed the farming for Lowell Stone, a long-time advocate for obscure-for-California grape varieties. (In the 1960s, Stone planted Valle de Pena and what was then called Johannisberg Riesling before refocusing on Italian varieties like Nebbiolo and Dolcetto.) In 2017, Bilbro grafted the varieties onto his own Yorkville Highlands vineyard, Lost Hills Ranch. Before Stone passed away, Bilbro also helped graft Grignolino, Freisa, Favorita, Brachetto and Erbaluce at Fox Hill. He continues to buy those grapes, which are now farmed and managed by Chris Brockway of Broc Cellars, calling them his spice rack. They help to add complex flavors to his Flora & Fauna series, which are surprisingly textured and interesting for what’s intended to be simple house wines.

Wines to Try:

2023 Idlewild Flora & Fauna Rosé ($30)
A savory rosé. Bilbro co-ferments nearly ripe dolcetto and barbera with nebbiolo that is barely through verasion. The underripe grapes give the wine a driving, energetic grippiness. Throw in some white florals, blood orange, grapefruit and dried thyme and you have one of the most complex rosés I had last year. 

2022 Idlewild Lost Hills Ranch Cortese ($48)
While reading about Gavi, Cortese’s native home, Bilbro discovered its history of skin maceration. His version: to ferment 20 percent on the skins and directly press the other 80 percent before blending them back together. The technique creates a crunchy texture and earthy, clay-like phenolics. It’s nutty and leesy with fresh and oxidated yellow apple and white tea flavors—a wine that evolves with each sip. 

2019 Idlewild Lost Hills Ranch Nebbiolo ($60) 
Bilbro achieves his goal of creating a classic Barolo style: the wine is red brick in color, with a graceful body and powerful tannins. Cranberry and cherry fruit are secondary to rose, tar and earth flavors, but there's also little hints of Bay Laurel and dried dusty rocks— which Bilbro says, “is totally redwood—it's the Northern California in there.”

Rootdown Wine Cellars at Cole Ranch

“It’s white-knuckle farming out at Cole Ranch,” says its winemaker Mike Lucia. The extreme elements of his property include cold, wet clay soil, the risk of heat and frost damage, and a motley crew of deer, turkey, and boars grazing the vines. “If anybody has a hunting license, I let them use the vineyard,” he laughs. The vineyard sits at 1500 feet, on a plateau nestled in the hills between Ukiah and Anderson Valley. While vines on Mendocino’s valley floor can budbreak as early as the first week of March, Cole Ranch budbreaks in April, giving Lucia only about a month during growing season for soil work and grafting.

With just 180 acres—of which only 55 are under vine—Cole Ranch is also the smallest AVA in the US. It was a wetland until John Cole, a real-estate appraiser from Ohio, moved to California in 1971 to pursue grape growing and discovered the plot of land. He damned up a natural spring, creating the vineyard and a water reservoir 300 feet above it to gravity feed the vines, moderate temperature, and control frost. In 2019, Lucia purchased the property, which then was  planted with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Riesling. While Lucia still makes wine from those old vines, he felt that the cool site surrounded by high pitched hills would be well-suited to French alpine varieties. I first tasted Lucia’s wines at a dinner at Los Angeles’s Kato and was struck by their prettiness and restraint. The fruit was tart to fresh, with complex textures—like a Savagnin that had both electric acid and a round, honeyed finished. Better yet, with his wines in the 11% -13% ABV range (even his Cabernet clocks in at 12.5%), it’s easy to feel good drinking a bottle with dinner. 

Lucia’s interest in Jura and Savoie started in 2010, when he couldn’t afford Burgundy and found that Trousseau and Mondeuse were delicious, crunchy and wallet-friendly. In 2020, he got ahold of suitcase clones of Trousseau and Savagnin and planted them at Cole Ranch. Then he travelled to Savoie and visited Domaine Chevillard. While pruning Jacquère, Lucia joked that it would be great to take some cuttings home. His wish was granted and he smuggled some back to the US, after wrapping them into his snowboarding pants and stuffing them into the middle of his suitcase. He started with 18 of these vines at Cole Ranch—there’s now more than a hundred—and produces 12 cases of Jacquère a year for wine club members, though last year frost damage forced him to pull and replant some of those vines. 

Wines to Try:

2022 Rootdown Wine Cellars Cole Ranch Savagnin ($37)
Fresh pear and lemon fruit flavors meld with a wet stone minerality, but it’s the texture that grabs you. It walks a taut tightrope between electric acidity and oils from rich Marcona almonds, which coat the tongue and linger on the long, long finish.

2023 Rootdown Wine Cellars Cole Ranch Trousseau ($37)
An alpine style wine—its cranberry and cherry fruit is cool, restrained and secondary to a stemmy, earthiness that could trick you into believing this is from Jura. Spritely and energetic, there’s also a structural backbone of fine tannins to bolster its light body. 

La Marea

Ian Brand has a colorful, vagrant past that encompasses everything from planting vineyards at Santa Cruz’s Big Basin to failing as a pool boy for the heiress of an RV fortune. He’s also friends with all the winemakers on this list. “There’s a particular personality that can make it as an independent winemaker, especially doing weird stuff,” he says. “A lot of us that have and survived are trauma-bonded.”

Some of Brand’s “weird stuff” includes Arinto, and Albariño, and he openly disdains the likes of  Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chardonnay, calling them “commodity grapes.” Instead, he aims to find old plantings and steer them in new directions. For Brand, Monterey’s climate, with an average high temperature of 75 degrees, long growing seasons, and cool breezes, produces grapes with natural high acidity, brightness and salinity, along with a phenolic ripeness at low sugars. Initially, he’d enlisted Steve McIntyre of Santa Lucia Highlands’ McIntyre Vineyards in his search for grapes that could better fit this cool terroir. McIntyre pointed him towards a small block of Albariño at Kristy Vineyard, sandwiched between some Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. While the site didn’t look special to Brand at first look, the small amount of wine he made sold out within three months. “I decided I needed to learn how to make Albariño,” he laughs. He not only learned how, he excelled. His Albariño is zippy, crunchy, and salty—like wet stones from the sea. 

Brand also works with the Pierce family, who planted Portuguese varieties in the San Antonio Valley. He feels that Arinto grown in the heat of this warmer climate is an example of matching vines to a particular place. He started making wine from it—which he calls Cachudo, a synonym for the grape used in Madeira referring to the vine’s little horns. (It means “horny wine.”) Brand currently makes 220 cases of his Cachudo and 1,600 cases of Albariño and just planted Assyrtiko with McIntyre in a calcareous hillside previously planted to that commodity Pinot that he loves to hate. 

Wines to Try:

2023 La Marea Albariño ($25)
This wine’s strength is its salinity and wet seashell minerality, which gives it a crunchy, vervy energy. Fresh lemon citrus and green honeydew fruit flavors integrate with the racy acid and a salty almond skin texture, making this great for shellfish and platters of fruits de mer.

2023 La Marea Cachudo ($28)
There’s a decadent, seductive quality to this wine as it slinks and slides across the palate. Ripe pineapple and macadamia nuts play within its honeyed roundness, and it manages to maintain lifted, mouthwatering acid within its unctuous casing. 

Giornata

Brian and Stephanie Terizzi started Giornata in 2005 with one barrel of Nebbiolo. In 2006, while interning at Red Car Wine, Brian was gifted six two-year-old Gamba barrels, so they were able to add Sangiovese and Aglianico to the roster. Today, those six barrels have grown to 5,000 cases of wine produced each year and more varieties: Barbera, Nero D’Avola, Falanghina, Ribolla Gialla, Vermentino, Trebbiano and Friulano. The wines are juicy and powerfully structured with Italian characteristics—there’s a slight balsalmic quality to their Sangiovese and peppery, animalistic funk in their Aglianico—while remaining distinctly Californian. They also make a killer orange wine from their Falanghina.

Stephanie oversees the farming and Brian the winemaking. The couple met at Fresno State, where they were studying enology and viticulture, and share Ian Brand’s disdain for commodity wines; Stephanie says that a recent Pinot Noir they opened, redolent with cherry cake flavors and lots of oak, was “a real snoozefest.” They prefer to make wines that match the Mediterranean foods they make at home. They also own a pasta factory and Italian market. 

The two set up shop in Paso Robles for its diverse microclimates of rolling hills and multi-faceted exposures. “You can find a pocket to do anything here,” Stephanie says. This gives her the freedom to experiment with, say, Frappato: “On sandy soil it’s ladylike, perfumey, and light. If you put it on a heavier clay soil, it’s this muscular version. We have both kinds of soil in Paso Robles, so we can choose what we want to express.” And, due to its position on the Pacific Plate–the tectonic plate that moves three to four inches a year—the soil here is still evolving. Recent earthquakes unearthed ancient soils, which include fossilized oyster shells and whale bones, and moved them to the surface, Stephanie says that when the calcium rich marine soils mix with Paso’s positively charged clay, it helps keep the pH level low and her wines acid driven. Success leads to expansion: this summer, Stephanie is planting Cesanese—a rare variety grown in Lazio, and one I’ve not encountered in California before. 

Wines to Try:

2023 Giornata Falanghina ($35)
A skin-contact orange wine, but not an overly-funky, just-for-natty-fans orange wine—it’s bright and springy with apricot, orange blossom and almond flavors. The acid is generous, while texturally it has just the right amount of gritty phenolics from its six to eight weeks spent on its skins. 

2022 Giornata Sangiovese ($40)
A sangiovese with a warmer California twist. Juicy cherry, strawberry and rhubarb flavors hit first, backed up by dried plum fruit leather and firm, structured tannins that still coat the tongue well after the last sip. While it’s hard to enjoy a young Brunello without some kind of fatty food, this has enough fruit to be enjoyed on its own, or with a simple dish of spaghetti and meatballs. 

2022 Giornata Aglianico ($40)
Wild, animalistic, and savory, with deep blackberry and blueberry flavors. Aglianico’s tannins often punch you in the cheek and this is no exception. It’s intense and firm but since the wine goes through partial carbonic maceration, the fruit balances its intense structure. Drink it with lamb ragu or a ribeye.