The Winery

Moveable Tanks

To conserve energy and natural resources, we’ve moved our production to our next door neighbor, Cambria Estate. Within their spacious cellars we’ve been able to reconstruct Byron. We have our own crush pad, our own individual barrel storage rooms and even our prized sorting table. Our focus continues to be high quality, hand-made, small-lot wines from Santa Barbara’s finest vineyards including our Estate Nielson Vineyard.

Byron will continue to produce balanced, opulent, and pure wines.

Sustainable and Organic Farming

For more than two decades, Byron has been an avid proponent of sustainable farming methods. We were environmentally friendly long before it was trendy. We have developed programs that have kept our land healthy and led to the production of higher quality, more authentic and site-specific wines. Click here to check out what practices we have in place.

Why isn't Byron certified sustainable or organic? While most of our vineyards (90+%) are farmed using sustainable or organic techniques, we still have blocks of old vines that were planted long before disease free vines and rootstocks were available and modern vineyard protocols had been established. While we could remove these original vines dating back to 1964, we feel they add a degree of character, complexity, history and perspective to Byron and our wines that can never be replaced.

Winemaking

Winemaking isn’t just a cellar affair. Our winemaker, Jonathan Nagy, spends many hours in the vineyard, making sure the vines have everything they need or don’t need to produce wines that are compelling and true to their terroir. Then he spends hours and hours sorting, stirring, topping, blending, tasting, and playing basketball in between to make sure the wine is great.

Chardonnay

  • Pre-dawn handpicking while grapes are at their coolest to retain fruit vibrancy.
  • Sorting in vineyard and again at stemmer crusher to ensure only clean, ripe berries.
  • Whole cluster pressing and settling for 24 hours to enhance textural purity.
  • Combining both wild and commercial yeast to add complexity.
  • Barrel fermentation (with the exception of Stainless Steel bottling) and aging in French oak barrels.
  • Weekly yeast stirring for several months to develop mouthfeel.
  • Bottling without filtration (whenever possible) to preserve the character of the terroir.

Pinot Noir

  • Pre-dawn handpicking while grapes are at their coolest to retain fruit vibrancy.
  • Sorting in vineyard and again at stemmer crusher to ensure only clean, ripe berries.
  • Destemming only with a 5% whole cluster inclusion in some lots for complexity, aromatics and chalky tannins.
  • Cold soaking for four or five days to extract additional flavor and color from skins.
  • Employing rack and return when sugar is present to create better cap management leading to more complexity and concentration.
  • Aging exclusively in French oak barrels.
  • Earlier bottling of Santa Maria Pinot Noir (10 months in oak) to preserve freshness.
  • Extended aging for single-vineyard wines (16 months in oak) to add texture and complexity.