Six Years in the Making: Introducing Our 2024 Tempranillo

Some wines announce themselves with a single great harvest. This one took six years and a lost year to arrive.

Our 2024 Tempranillo is finally here. It is the first standalone bottling of Tempranillo we have ever released, and the story behind it is inseparable from the wine itself. Understanding why it took this long, and what the mountain put it through to get here, is the only proper way to introduce it.

141 cases. 19 months in neutral oak. Harvested September 5, 2024. Bottled May 1, 2026. The mountain decided when it was ready.

The Long Road to a Standalone Bottling

When we planted Tempranillo at Ojai Mountain, we knew it was experimental, the whole vineyard was. The variety was always part of our vision for the estate, a Spanish grape that we believed could find an entirely new voice at 2,800 feet above the Ojai Valley. But wanting to make a Tempranillo and actually making one are separated by years of patient farming.

In our early vintages, the Tempranillo vines simply had not produced enough fruit to warrant a standalone bottling. What we harvested went into our Estate Red blend, where it contributed structure and savory depth alongside Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre. The wine was there, woven into the fabric of the blend, but it was not yet ready to speak for itself.

Then came 2023.

The 2023 growing season was one of the wettest in recent memory at the estate, following an extraordinary 54 inches of rainfall the prior year. The cold, wet spring resulted in difficult flowering conditions and poor fruit set — our Tempranillo block produced not a single berry. A complete loss. The vines were alive and healthy, but the conditions had denied us any fruit whatsoever. It was a difficult thing to accept, but the mountain operates on its own terms, and we have learned to respect that.

What the 2023 season did do, quietly, was build reserves. The deep soil moisture from two consecutive high-rainfall years gave our vines a resilience that would prove critical in 2024, when a late-summer heatwave forced rapid decisions across the vineyard. The Tempranillo responded with what our harvest notes called a "bumper crop," a dramatic rebound from the prior year's silence. We picked on September 5, 2024, and for the first time, we had enough fruit to let Tempranillo stand alone.

Tempranillo in America: Where the Grape Has Found a Home

Tempranillo is the fourth most widely planted red wine grape in the world, yet in the United States it remains something of a quiet discovery. The variety is grown across 36 of California's 58 counties, with total state acreage reaching 952 acres as of 2024. To put that in perspective: Syrah covers 13,688 acres in California, and Cabernet Sauvignon covers 90,040. Tempranillo remains a genuine niche, which is part of what makes the best expressions worth seeking out. Those expressions are concentrated in just a handful of places where the climate provides the combination the grape genuinely needs: warm days, cool nights, and enough elevation or marine influence to slow ripening and preserve acidity.

Where It Thrives

The American Tempranillo map is more interesting than most people realize:

• Oregon's Umpqua Valley is the variety's spiritual home in the Pacific Northwest, pioneered by Earl Jones at Abacela Vineyards, who relocated from Kentucky specifically to grow Tempranillo in the south of the state. Oregon now has more than 400 acres planted, and Abacela produces three distinct Tempranillos each vintage. The hot days and cool nights of the Umpqua mirror the continental rhythm of northern Spain more closely than almost anywhere else in America.

• Washington's Walla Walla and Yakima Valley host about 50 acres of Tempranillo, planted where the variety competes directly with Cabernet Sauvignon for the best sites. Results here tend toward structure and depth.

• Texas has become an unexpected force, with Hill Country producers earning double gold medals at major competitions and a growing critical conversation around the state's ability to produce serious Tempranillo.

• California's Central Valley and Paso Robles account for the bulk of state acreage, though the warm-climate expressions tend toward riper, more extracted profiles. The more compelling California Tempranillos come from cooler zones: the Santa Barbara region and higher-elevation sites where the grape can ripen slowly.

What nearly all of these sites share: diurnal temperature swings, elevation or marine proximity, and soils that stress the vine into producing smaller, more concentrated clusters. These are the same conditions that made Tempranillo famous in northern Spain.

The Rioja Comparison: What We Share, and What Makes Us Different

Rioja is the undisputed benchmark for Tempranillo. The grape has been grown there since at least the 1500s, and the DOCa Rioja covers more than 65,000 hectares of vineyards across three distinct subregions, each shaped by the interplay of Atlantic and Mediterranean climates along the Ebro River valley.

Understanding what makes Rioja's best Tempranillo so distinctive helps explain exactly why we believe this site can produce something in conversation with it.

How Rioja and Ojai Mountain Compare

Rioja Alavesa is the subregion most often cited for producing Tempranillo with the freshness and structural tension we admire most. Its vineyards sit between 400 and 700 metres, benefit from the Cantabrian Mountains as a climate buffer, and grow in poor, stony, clay-limestone soils that force deep root penetration. The result is a wine with bright acidity and refined structure, the kind of Tempranillo that ages gracefully rather than fading quickly.

Our site shares the fundamental logic of Alavesa: elevation that slows ripening, soils that stress the vine, and a moderating influence (theirs from mountains, ours from the Pacific) that keeps temperatures from swinging into the extreme. What we bring that Rioja cannot is the Monterey shale beneath us, ancient seabed rock that imparts a mineral specificity unlike anything in northern Spain. And at 2,800 feet, we sit meaningfully higher than even the tallest Rioja vineyards, which top out around 2,600 feet in their most elevated enclaves.

The Soils: A Study in Contrasts

Both formations are marine sedimentary in origin — but they sit at opposite ends of almost every axis that matters for vine physiology and fruit chemistry.

Rioja's calcareous clay-limestone (Rioja Alta and Alavesa) is Tertiary-era marl and limestone-clay: alkaline, calcium-carbonate rich, with a clay fraction that buffers drought stress by retaining subsoil moisture. It is moderately fertile, forgiving in dry years, and strongly associated with retained acidity and firm tannin structure at ripeness — which is a large part of why old-vine Tempranillo from these soils ages so well.

Our Monterey shale is also marine sedimentary, but a fundamentally different animal: fine-grained, siliceous, often diatomaceous (compressed diatom skeletons, high in biogenic silica rather than calcium carbonate). It is acidic to neutral rather than alkaline, low in organic matter and nutrients, and fractures into thin brittle layers that roots can penetrate but that hold very little available water. It is the same formation found beneath parts of the Santa Rita Hills and the Central Coast — the geological source of what critics consistently describe as distinctive minerality in wines from this region.

The practical consequence: Rioja's limestone-clay does the restraint work through deliberate canopy management, because the soil is fertile enough to push vigor if left unchecked. Our shale does the restraint work automatically — low fertility and aggressive drainage naturally limit yield and concentrate flavor without intervention. This is why biodynamic, low-input farming at Ojai Mountain is not a marketing philosophy but a direct response to what the parent rock is (and is not) providing.

One honest caveat: the shale's low water-holding capacity means our driest vintages carry more exposure than Rioja's clay-buffered sites. There is no geological safety net here. What the mountain gives in natural restraint, it takes back in unforgiving conditions — which is precisely why the 2024 season, with its deep soil moisture reserves from two consecutive high-rainfall years, was the vintage that finally let this wine exist.

The critical difference is that Rioja has centuries of accumulated knowledge about Tempranillo. We have six years of vines and one extraordinary vintage. That is not a disadvantage; it is simply where we are. And the chemistry of this inaugural wine suggests the site is already doing something right.

Technical Notes on the 2024 Vintage

We let the numbers speak plainly, because in this case they tell a compelling story.

What the Chemistry Reveals

A pH of 3.74 is on the lower end for a California red wine, where many warm-climate Tempranillos push toward 3.8 or higher. Lower pH means more natural acidity, better structural integrity, and a greater capacity to age. Combined with a TA of 6.6 g/L, this wine has the backbone to evolve over years in the cellar, not just months on a shelf.

The alcohol at 13.7% is restrained for a California red and sits comfortably within the range of a serious Rioja Reserva. This is not a coincidence: it reflects the September 5 harvest date, an early pick driven partly by the 2024 heatwave conditions, and the natural moderating effect of our elevation. The mountain kept the sugar accumulation in check even as the valley below was baking.

How Our Numbers Compare to Benchmark Rioja

The most useful benchmark is La Rioja Alta, one of the classicist houses in Rioja Alta and the producer most associated with structured, long-lived Tempranillo. Their flagship Gran Reservas publish technical data that makes a direct comparison possible.

For context, winemakers generally regard a pH of 3.4 to 3.7 and a TA of 6 to 8 g/L as the ideal parameters for Tempranillo. Our wine sits at the edge of that range on pH and comfortably inside it on acidity.

Alcohol at 13.7% lands squarely between 890's leaner, more classic profile and 904's riper, more powerful one. Good company either way.

TA at 6.6 g/L tracks almost exactly with the 890 (6.65) rather than the riper 904 (5.4). That is a meaningful signal: our acid retention looks more like classic Rioja Alta than the fuller-bodied 904 style. Given that the 2024-25 season came in at roughly 46% of normal rainfall, holding that acidity is a genuinely good outcome. The shale's low water-holding capacity and our dry-farming approach are still landing us in a fresh, structured zone rather than the flat profile that heat and drought stress often produce.

pH at 3.74 runs slightly warm relative to both the general ideal and the 904 (3.61). This is worth understanding rather than dismissing. pH and TA do not move in lockstep: you can carry decent titratable acid while still running an elevated pH if potassium uptake is high, which is plausible on our site. As grapes mature, potassium moves into the berry and displaces a proton, nudging pH upward. Our numbers land in an interesting middle zone: Rioja-Alta-like acid retention with a pH nudged upward, possibly a shale-potassium interaction worth tracking across future vintages rather than a red flag in isolation.

What we can say is that Tempranillo generally has thinner skins and larger berries than Syrah, which is why classic Rioja often looks relatively translucent in the glass even from great vintages. Our 2024 Tempranillo runs darker than that — deeper in color, less translucent than what you would expect from the variety. That points toward the shale-driven small-berry effect: low fertility and aggressive drainage on Sulphur Mountain likely compress berry size and concentrate anthocyanins well beyond what Tempranillo typically delivers on Rioja's limestone-clay. The shale is doing work that the grape's own genetics would not.

Drinking Window

Based on the chemistry and style, we'd frame the aging window at 8 to 20 years, with the best drinking window likely opening around 2028 to 2032 and holding comfortably beyond that if stored well. The 13.7% alcohol, 3.74 pH, and 6.6 TA point to a wine with real structure, but it will age more on its freshness and acid spine than sheer tannin weight.

Expected evolution

2027–2030 (Release to 3 years) Fresh and vibrant. Red cherry, black plum, raspberry, dried rose, and sage dominate, with youthful tannins and bright acidity.

2031–2037 (Peak drinking) The fruit becomes more integrated as leather, tobacco leaf, dried herbs, and iron emerge. The wine gains complexity while maintaining freshness and structure.

2038–2042 (Mature) Primary fruit gives way to dried cherry, forest floor, leather, and earthy mineral notes. Tannins soften, and the finish becomes increasingly savory.

Winemaking: Neutral Oak, 19 Months

Erich Bradley aged this wine for 19 months in neutral oak, the same philosophy that guides every wine we make: no new wood, no oak flavor, no distraction from what the vineyard produced. Neutral barrels allow slow, gentle oxidation that builds complexity and integrates tannins without imprinting the wine with vanilla or toast. What you taste is Tempranillo, the mountain, and the vintage. Nothing else.

This approach aligns with the direction the most serious Rioja producers have been moving for decades, away from the heavy American oak that once defined the region and toward neutral vessels that let the grape's inherent character emerge. At 141 cases, this is a wine made with the attention that production of that scale demands.

Why This Matters for the Estate

Every winery has a moment when a variety it has been quietly nurturing finally steps forward. For us, that moment is now.

Tempranillo has been part of our Estate Red blend since our earliest vintages, contributing savory structure and a distinctive earthy note that complements the Rhône varieties at the core of our portfolio. The 2022 Estate Red, for instance, includes Tempranillo alongside Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre, and the Vinous 94-point score it earned reflects in part what this grape brings to the blend.

A standalone bottling is a different statement entirely. It says: this variety, grown here, on this soil, at this elevation, is worth encountering on its own terms.

We believe that is true. We also believe we are at the very beginning of understanding what Tempranillo becomes at 2,800 feet on Monterey shale, 10 miles from the Pacific. This first vintage is not a definitive statement. It is an opening argument.

141 cases is all there is. Once it is gone, the next chapter begins with the 2025 vintage, which we are watching with great interest.

If you are a Wine Club member, you already have priority access. If you are not, this is a compelling moment to consider it: our allocations are managed first for members, and at this production level, the window for the general release will be brief.

We are grateful that the mountain finally let us make this wine. It was worth the wait.