Where Small Is Beautiful for Syrah and Pinot Noir: Santa Barbara 2026 Tasting Report

The JamesSuckling.com team likes to take special note of vintage quality in our tasting reports, comparing one year to another to give readers solid recommendations on what years to prioritize when buying. This can be difficult, however, when two vintages in a row produce large numbers of highly rated wines.

That’s exactly the case with Santa Barbara County, California. As we follow up on our report from last October, which focused mostly on the 2023s from the region, this one looks primarily at the 2024 offerings – and it’s a tossup to say which year is better.

“2023 and 2024 were very similar in quality but ‘23 was a later harvest,” said Pete Stolpman of Stolpman Vineyard in the Ballard Canyon district of Santa Barbara, when asked to describe what differentiated the two vintages. “2024 gave a small crop of wines that are more decadent and rich, with more blue, black and purple fruits since it was warm in August and September, while 2023s show more tension and red fruit” owing to the long, cool growing season that year, a later-than-usual harvest and large crop.

He was talking primarily about conditions at his family’s 178 acres of vineyards, which are focused on syrah and other Rhone grape varieties. The Stolpman 2024s certainly confirm the excellence of this site. Our top-rated wine and five of the top 10 red wines we tasted are 2024s from this unique, limestone-studded vineyard.

The Stolpman Syrah Ballard Canyon The Great Places Ruben Solorzano 2024 is at the top of our ratings for its sinewy tannins around generous red and black fruit.  It is rich in aromas of blackberries and sour cherries, then bitter chocolate, dense black currant and black licorice flavors on an age-worthy structure.

It was just one of many ample recommendations for syrah, chardonnay, grenache, and a few other Bordeaux varieties in this report, although pinot noir remains the major category.

We visited numerous wineries this spring to taste new releases and interview the winemakers. We also tasted hundreds more samples delivered to our team. The report includes 455 notes on wines tasted since our last report and may omit some still-current releases that were tasted earlier, like those from Domaine de la Cote. The notes below include 298 reds, 135 whites, 12 rosés, nine sparkling wines and one orange wine.

Our winery and vineyard visits included two notable stops in the Santa Maria Valley AVA. One stop was the pioneering Bien Nacido vineyard property that encompasses 2,500 acres, 200 of which are in wine grapes. We tasted with owner Nicolas Miller and winemaker Anthony Avila.

Avila drove us over the rugged terrain to see 40-year-old hillside vines that go into their highly rated Bien Nacido Syrah Santa Maria Valley Estate The XO 2023. It’s an intensely flavored wine that’s surprisingly sleek and elegant in texture.

A simple-looking winery on the Bien Nacido property was the incubator for Au Bon Climat and Qupe wines several decades ago, and where many Santa Barbara winemakers first learned their craft. To show that not all the farming here involves grapes, a thriving avocado orchard occupies an adjacent hillside on the Bien Nacido property.

Nearby in the Santa Maria Valley, Paul Lato, the owner-winemaker of Paul Lato Wines, makes mostly pinot noir and chardonnay, several of which scored highly, with the standout being the Paul Lato Pinot Noir Santa Rita Hills Drum Canyon Vineyard Stand By Me 2023

We rated three of his 2024 pinot noirs just below the Stand By Me. “Both 2023 and 2024 return to charm and drinkability,” Lato said, comparing the two vintages with the previous couple of years.

For chardonnay, two Brewer-Clifton offerings from 2024 were among the top six of the variety that we rated. The Brewer-Clifton Chardonnay Santa Rita Hills Hapgood 2024 tastes concentrated, creamy and elegant, resting like a Sauternes (without the sugar) with great viscosity, length and yet a touch of flinty restraint. It is made from Hyde chardonnay clone grapes.

Assistant winemaker Sharde Shepherd noted that both 2022 and 2023 were heavy rain years, which complicated vineyard practices, and then 2025 had a few rain events during harvest. But she said she appreciated the generally warm and dry 2024 season.

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The other Brewer-Clifton chardonnay standout was the Chardonnay Santa Rita Hills 3-D 2024. Founder Greg Brewer’s protocol for many years has been fermenting chardonnay in all neutral barrels (he does this for his pinot noir, too) and preventing malolactic fermentation in the chardonnay.

In economic terms, 2023 was a bumper crop with high yields that fetched high prices per ton from wineries that don’t grow all their own grapes. The Santa Barbara Agricultural Commission’s data show that chardonnay led in tons produced and averaged 4.7 tons per acre.

Pinot noir yielded 3.5 tons per acre in 2023 and was second in overall tonnage. Other grape varieties brought the highest prices per ton, however, at $3,662 for grenache and $2,850 for cabernet franc.

By way of contrast, the county’s 2024 wine grape production from 12,126 acres “was markedly low, with reduced yields per acre culminating in a harvest only two-thirds the normal size,” the commission stated. Chardonnay averaged only 2.9 tons per acre and pinot noir just 2.1 tons.

Brandon Sparks-Gillis, the winemaker at Dragonette Cellars, captured the character of the 2024 vintage this way on the winery’s tech sheets: “Despite a second year of good rainfall, yields were down significantly across varieties,” he said. “The theory was that the cool spring of 2023 reduced the fruitfulness of 2024, as the vines grew fewer and smaller clusters than is typical.”

That not such good news for growers’ bottom lines, but signal that high-quality wines resulted. Small berries mean a greater ratio of skins to juice in the fermenter, giving extra flavor and texture, and loose clusters can mean lower mildew risk and “riper” brown rather than green stems for those doing whole-bunch fermentations.

The Hilt Estate Pinot Noir Santa Rita Hills Radian Vineyard 2024 is a great example of the year, rated among the top five pinots in this report. It’s rich, ripe and textured, with fine-grained tannins. Intense, dense and long in the finish.

Matt Dees, the winemaker at The Hilt, called 2024 a fabulous chardonnay year, too. At 2,200 vines per acre, he saw poor fruit set and low bud fruitfulness because of a cloudy spring. Early ripening kept the acids from falling and will help the vintage age well, he added.

The Hilt’s sibling 2024s, the Chardonnay Santa Rita Hills Radian Vineyard and Chardonnay Santa Rita Hills Bentrock Vineyard, are among the top-rated chards in this report. The Radian is chalky, mineral-driven, flinty and citrusy in expression, while the Bentrock offers dense and delicious green apple notes with a rounded texture and expansive finish.

The two vineyards are close together in the Santa Rita Hills AVA and within about 10 miles of the Pacific Ocean. The Radian vineyard may have the highest mildew pressure in California and is difficult to get ripe, Dees said, while Bentrock “is almost heaven for chardonnay.”

We turned up many other treasures in this tasting, which was JamesSuckling.com’s third dedicated Santa Barbara tasting effort in two-and-a-half years.

Outstanding sparkling wines came from Sea Smoke, Luna Hart (made from gruner veltliner), Barden and The Hilt, while a couple of fascinating whites included an aligoté from Sandhi, an enticing white blend from Au Bon Climat called Hildegarde and a brilliant, balanced Mazette Sauvignon Blanc Santa Ynez Valley Mutual Muse 2024.

Ironically, the highest-rated cabernet sauvignon in this sweep came from a Napa Valley winery using grapes from one of the top Santa Barbara sites: the axr Cabernet Sauvignon Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara Crown Point Vineyard 2023.

– Jim Gordon, Editor-at-Large

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. 

Note: You can sort the wines below by score, vintage and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.