SANTA BARBARA COUNTY’S BLESSING AND CURSE

Twenty years ago, as a young journalist fresh out of college, I was dispatched from my newspaper desk in Santa Barbara to the Santa Ynez Valley to write a short report about the region’s emerging wine scene. After the 45-minute drive north, in a quaint Los Olivos tasting room, I met with Richard Longoria, who had started to make wine in the valley in 1976.

As I sipped through my first-ever proper flight, Longoria told fascinating tales of how Santa Barbara County’s geography is unlike anywhere else on the western coast of the Americas. Instead of the usual north-south orientation of mountain ranges, which block inner valleys from the sea, Longoria explained that the region’s Transverse Ranges cut from east to west.

That means Santa Barbara’s Santa Ynez and Santa Maria Valleys are open to the chilly, wind-whipped