Matt Dees: winemaking on the edge in Santa Barbara County

Given a choice between monitoring fermentations in his cellar or the progress of his vines outside, Matt Dees opts for the vines– any day of the week. That’s not to say that the winemaker gives his wines short shrift- ever.

Scroll down to see Sara Schneider’s tasting notes and scores for 11 Matt Dees wines

Dees is the winemaker, for sister Santa Barbara estates Jonata and The Hilt, in Ballard Canyon and the far western reaches of the Sta. Rita Hills, respectively. As the wines are the telling result of the interaction between vine and soil, the real action, in his book, is where that happens. ‘Walking the vineyards and spending time with the vines – that’s the best part of my day,’ Matt says.

This wine-is-made-in-the-vineyard mantra is more than a nod to the current doctrine for Dees. Growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, the self-described soil geek admits to letting more than a few balls fly over his head in the outfield, distracted by, ‘you know, digging up dandelions to see the root system.’

It wasn’t a matter of a romantic childhood connection to agriculture in Midwest wheat fields, he recalls. ‘Basically, I grew up in downtown Kansas City. The general kind of charmingly beautiful, slower pace of the Midwest aided my ability to focus on some of the most important minutiae of plant physiology, soil, and chemistry.’

And so, plant and soil science were a natural choice when he enrolled at the University of Vermont. As it turned out, Vermont—hardly a mainstream wine-growing region—would also shape his view of winemaking and the diverse wines of the world in unlikely ways.

Right off the bat, in the fall of his first year, Dees signed on at Shelburne Vineyard, helping partner Ken Albert plant the site. ‘I got bit by the bug in a peculiar state for making wine at the time,’ he says, though he admits he considered the hybrid grapes they were working with inferior. ‘They would grow those because they have to grow them,’ were his thoughts at the time.

Fast forward to a recent visit to Ken Albert, and the world looks different to Dees: ‘They’re crushing it!’ he says of winemaking in Vermont. And his new view of those hybrids? ‘Now I realise that some parts of the world get to use those grapes.’

California calls

It’s the kind of digression in Dees’ discourse that reveals his perpetual evolution and openness to the unlikely and dynamic innovations fueling an influential career now in California because it was California—or, more precisely, a bottle of Staglin Family Cabernet—that genuinely captured him. ‘It just knocked my socks off,’ he says of that 1995 (bought at Sherry-Lehmann in New York), ‘pointed my arrow to California. And get this, they put their phone number on the back of the bottle!’ Shari Staglin herself answered his call but had no job to offer.

Dees, though, already had a ticket in hand and showed up at the gate. As luck would have it, acclaimed winemaker Andy Erickson (he of Screaming Eagle, Harlan, and Dalla Valle fame) was on his way in, too, on his first day with Staglin. ‘I was behind his little black Volvo,’ laughs Dees, ‘and he’s like, ‘Are you that weird dude from Kansas who’s made wine in Vermont?’’ And that first job Erickson gave Dees, in the vineyard with legendary viticulturist David Abreu, served as boot camp. ‘I loved it, and it changed my life,’ Dees says simply.

It was Erickson, too, who later recruited Dees to Santa Barbara County in an unexpected call during one of his regular stints in New Zealand. His stateside mentor and friend had found a place – a plum job, actually – to make wine. ‘I was such an idiot, sitting on a crush pad in New Zealand,’ says Dees, ‘I had the gall to say, I don’t really know Santa Barbara. Is it nice?’

When he started in 2004 at Jonata (and also began making wines under The Hilt label), Dees found what his palate was looking for. Those were warm years in Napa Valley, with Cabernets outdoing themselves for ripeness and richness. At the same time, he had been exposed to ‘electricity,’ as he puts it, in New Zealand. ‘I think my heart looked for freshness.’ And Santa Barbara, it turns out, could deliver on that front. The first thing he did with his team was to buy ‘every bottle of wine ever made in Santa Barbara’ (his words, if a smidge exaggerated) and taste for weeks.

‘It was like the Three Little Bears,’ laughs Dees about the other regions in his experience. ‘That bed was a little too small, and that porch was a little too cold. Good lord, I love New Zealand and parts of Napa too. But it was obvious, tasting those [Santa Barbara] wines, that I was in the right spot. Here is where I needed to stay.’

Diversity in Ballard Canyon

The two brands Dees began managing diverge widely regarding climate, soils, and grape varieties they support. When he came to Ballard Canyon—an AVA nested in Santa Barbara’s larger Santa Ynez Valley—the neighbours quickly advised that he should only grow Syrah at Jonata. And indeed, Syrah was thriving in the area.

‘I’m convinced you could plant Syrah on the roads, and it would grow well,’ laughs Dees, ‘and you could make wines of honesty and sincerity and purity and pleasure.’ But Dees expanded the 10 varieties he started with to 15 or 16 across 34ha planted on the 240ha Jonata Estate: Bordeaux, Rhônes, Italian, and Greek.

It was a let’s-see-what-works mindset with a focused approach (as opposed to a ‘willy-nilly, ooh, this sounds fun’ romp, as he describes it). The site’s mild winters, drastic diurnal temperature shifts during the growing season, wind, and complex aspects among the hills support the astonishing diversity. But the driving force for Jonata, according to Dees, is its unique soil—pure Careaga sand. And that sand supports an ever-widening range of grapes (‘We’ll get our first Assyrtiko this year, our first Xinomavro …’) and the ability to dry-farm vines on their own roots.

‘We’re starting to tear out some old plantings,’ he says, ‘and just put sticks in the ground. We’ve gone to 660 vines and no water for five or six years. We’ve dry-farmed Syrah for five years and are about to get our first dry-farmed Cabs—head trained!’

As the original plantings at Jonata have matured, now 14 and 15 years old, Dees has taken advantage of their range. Shaped by a myriad of aspects throughout the vineyard to build complexity and depth in a lineup of bottlings dominated mainly by a single grape, with splashes of complementary varieties.

One notable exception to the dominant-grape pattern is a blend he calls ‘Todos,’ or ‘All,’ which he describes as ‘50% Syrah, 30% Cabernet, and 20% chaos.’ While the percentages vary from vintage to vintage, Todos starts with the two primary varieties and then includes all others planted on the estate (including white wine grapes). It is, in essence, a field blend.

This wine is far from the kitchen-sink effect of California’s ubiquitously popular ‘red blends.’ Which are invariably sweet-leaning and generic; Jonata’s Todos is counterintuitively focused and precise. It carries Syrah’s distinctive wild and voluptuous spiced blueberry character hanging on the structure of Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Outer Limits in Sta. Rita Hills

For The Hilt, Dees captures an entirely different expression of terroir in the extreme. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from the Sta. Rita Hills was the brand’s focus from the beginning, but with no estate vineyards at the time, Dees worked with fruit across the region for an entire decade. ’10 years of research,’ he calls it, because ‘making soulful wines off our vines’ was always the goal. The region, running west to east from very close to the Pacific Ocean to Buellton near Highway 101, is a prominent place, and where a vineyard sits in it matters more than a little. Dees—fully supported in the search by owner Stan Kroenke—very quickly honed in on the southwest corner of the AVA, on the 1,400ha Rancho Salsipuedes, which they purchased in 2014.

With screaming winds off the Pacific, cooling maritime fog, and diatomaceous earth soils that look like so much lunar dust, the estate’s two north-facing vineyards, Radian and Bentrock, require extreme farming (‘to the hilt’). But the extremes feed right into Dees’ preferences for the two varieties. For Pinot Noir, it’s some elbows, some edges—what he calls ‘the hint of corruption.’

He’s looking for more than an innocuous red that everyone enjoys but no one remembers once it’s gone. ‘What I admire,’ he says, ‘is that incredibly seductive power like smelling a violet, where you smell it, and then you can’t smell it anymore, and all you want to do is keep smelling that violet. Pinot Noir should draw you into that bottle the same way a violet draws you in, to get pollinated.’

And Chardonnay from those cool, windy, ocean-adjacent vineyards? ‘You’re harvesting liquid sunshine, that refrigerated sunshine that everybody talks about.’ Sipping The Hilt Chardonnay with incredible acidity is like eating citrus, according to Dees. Or ‘like eating an oyster, then realising you forgot to drink the nectar, then you drink the nectar.’ That’s Sta. Rita Hills Chardonnay at its best, in his book. Including the saltiness that implies: ‘The wines are 100 per cent electric,’ he says. ‘I’m buying Sta. Rita Hills Chard stock all day because I think it’s the finest in the US.’

Listening to the land

Serendipity played a matchmaker between the character derived from this land and Dees’ taste. You can’t talk about Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, he argues, without talking about Burgundy (the same isn’t true of Cabernet and Bordeaux, in his view), which he and his team drank a lot of ‘back in the affordable days.’

He says that what he came to crave in Chardonnay is ‘that combination of just enough pleasure from the fruit to carry you just over the wave of freshness.’ And for Pinot Noir, ‘I always wanted to find the mushroom side. I wanted sous bois (‘undergrowth’)—the things that were not fruit. I wanted complexity and, again, that hint of corruption. That’s a hook, and you can’t stop smelling; you can’t separate yourself from the glass.’ As luck would have it, they bought a property capable of giving them all this in spades.

But Dees didn’t descend on The Hilt Estate or Jonata to impose a style. ‘We’ve never been a winemaking team that came into a place and said, ‘Ooh, we should make a wine like this out of these grapes,’’ says Dees. ‘And we don’t over-romanticise or simplify it. But for both Jonata and The Hilt, we’ve said, ‘This is what these wines taste like, cool. That’s great.’

At times following the lead of the land has pushed Dees and his team beyond conventional comfort. ‘In some cases, we’ve sat around thinking about bottling Radian Vineyard Chardonnay and have had to pause and be like, Oh boy, is the world ready for a wine that’s so fresh and so electric that it might shatter the bottle it’s going into?’ he laughs. But the answer is yes. That’s the kind of wine this place makes. ‘We’ve just become very good listeners when it comes to flavours inherent in the vineyards.’

Matt Dees: tasting notes and scores for 11 top wines

Wines are listed in estate order, via style and score

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