Clementine Carter pours cool climate Rhônes from the Sta. Rita Hills in Los Alamos

No two vintages of Clementine Carter are the same. 

“You should be able to read each vintage in each bottle,” owner and winemaker Sonja Magdevski said. “Everything that happened that year should be in this bottle.”

The soil, sun, wind, rain, frost, temperature. The hands that tended the vines, the decisions that were made and when. 

“All of those are variable and flexible, I believe,” she said. “How do we exemplify that in each vintage and make it taste good in the end. … You’ve got to thread that.” 

It’s about taking cues from the environment and forming a wine based on those inputs, not forcing through an idea about what a wine should be. 

In 2020, she said, one section of a vineyard she worked with experienced sunburn during a late season heat wave. The vineyard manager talked about thinning out the sunburned clusters prior to harvest. 

“I said, ‘Well don’t do it too much, because we can’t pretend that it didn’t happen,’” she said. “We can’t pretend that we didn’t have any sunburn. We can’t pretend we didn’t have any heat spike.”

Winemaking is a labor of exploration, discovery, and creativity, said Magdevski, who also leans on experience and knowledge built by about two decades in the industry. The confidence she gained in that time also helped when it came to rebranding her longtime winery, Casa Dumetz, to Clementine Carter in April 2024. It was time, she said, to look to the future. 

She’s continuing the pursuit she started at Casa Dumetz: working with Sta. Rita Hills vineyards that produce cooler climate Rhône varieties and showcasing the resulting wines out of her downtown Los Alamos tasting room, which cuddles up next to Babi’s Beer Emporium—also a Magdevski creation, dishing up cheese plates and light bites alongside cider, beer, wine, and Champagne right on Bell Street. 

Casa Dumetz, which debuted in Los Alamos more than a decade ago, pulled its name from a Malibu vineyard planted in 2004 with pinot noir. That place no longer exists. The climate, she said, just isn’t right for wine grapes. It’s too foggy for too long as clusters start to set at the beginning of summer. By 2014, the property the vineyard was on sold and “everything changed,” she said. But she had just opened her tasting room in 2011. 

With the place where she started making wine gone, she was uncertain of how to move forward, but Magdevski said she didn’t have the confidence at the time to pull the trigger on a rebrand. 

“Last year was our 20th year making wine, and I thought, ‘Well, you know, I’ve earned the right to call my name whatever I want it to be,’” she said. 

Clementine Carter is a character in Magdevski’s favorite Western, My Darling Clementine. Her father loved Westerns, and she loved them through him. They watched the film maybe 20 years ago, she said. 

The 1946 film is one in a long line of Wyatt Earp movies about the shootout at the O.K. Corral, but Carter isn’t part of any of the other films, Magdevski said. Carter travels across the country looking for love, and she arrives in Tombstone, unrequited. Yet, Carter builds a new life for herself, pushing through hardship and establishing herself in town—a character arc Magdevski said is similar to her own.

The Clementine Carter line initially was introduced in 2016, so, for customers, it was a name they already knew. The wines Magdevski produces under her label are the ones she’s already known for. 

Grenache, graciano nouveau, roussanne, mourvèdre, syrah, pinot noir, and picpoul blanc from vineyards that stretch the length and width of the Sta. Rita Hills in Santa Barbara County. All of it done with an eye for experimentation and the search for what is right, what works for each vintage from each vineyard, because they’re all unique. 

“I’ve worked with almost every grenache vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley, but I joke that I don’t really know what grenache tastes like,” Magdevski said. “Everything I do I sort of approach with a beginner’s eye. Not like I have the answer, but like I’m looking for the answer.” 

Without a vineyard, she works closely with production vineyards like Robert Rae, which grafted an acre of mourvèdre and an acre of roussanne for Clementine Carter in 2020. 

“It sort of just shifted our whole perspective and our priorities and our goals and what we want to focus on,” she said. “We’ve been doing this for 20 years, and what’s for the next 20 years, hopefully?”

This year, Robert Rae Vineyard is planning to put in more vines for Clementine Carter: picpoul blanc, grenache blanc, and more roussanne. 

“It’s been this goal since then to gently encourage growers to plant these grapes for us,” Magdevski said. “I just want to sort of show something different and defy the expectation a little bit of what we think things are supposed to taste like.” 

In a region known for its chardonnays and pinot noirs, she’s pushing the western edge of wine with 2,000 cases of what’s possible when you try something a little different. 

“They’re not widely planted, and we love them, and they’re unique and sexy, and they have a fun drive growing in our climate, and so it’s about that fun exploration,” she said. “I’m not here to change the world, I’m just here to try new things. … It’s something that keeps me going.”

Editor Camillia Lanham is a little different. Send new things to her at clanham@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Jul 24 – Aug 3, 2025.

Because Truth Matters: Invest in Award-Winning Journalism

Dedicated reporters, in-depth investigations - real news costs. Donate to the Sun's journalism fund and keep independent reporting alive.

CONTRIBUTE