On a recent sunny, cool Buellton morning, a bit too early to pour wine, Standing Sun Winery owner and winemaker John Wright brewed locally roasted espresso, steamed some milk, and spoke over the beeping of a forklift moving barrels of wine. They were stacked to the ceiling of the industrial warehouse that stores his aging wine, wine-making equipment, and tasting bar.
“This place was built so that people could sit, taste wine, and see production,” Wright said. “You can see it all. A lot of wineries are beautiful up front, but you don’t see the working parts, and maybe they don’t want you to see it because it might be a mess, but that doesn’t really bother me; it is what it is. Part of making wine is making a mess.”
Still half a year from the next harvest, the open production floor is far from messy. Stacked speakers next to a plywood stage revealed signs of the previous weekend’s live concert, and the mid-morning calm was punctuated only by the bustling of Wright’s single employee manning the forklift.
The wine tasting bar, in which Wright brews local coffee and tea and pours his wines, feels like an outdoor patio decked out in aged, dark wood. Coming from a career in architecture, building, and restoration, Wright designed and built the rustic wine bar.
Next door to Standing Sun’s tasting room and production floor is the winery’s art gallery. Pieces hang on a number of movable plywood walls. A faux ceiling created by several white sails hides Standing Sun’s back of house, including a shipping and packing area, office, and kitchenette.
A vaulting staircase—also constructed with simple, bare wood— leads to a loft area, which hides a number of surf boards, guitars, an entertainment system, cots, and a couch. The area is for visiting bands and artists to hang out, relax, and even crash for the night if need be. The industrial, carpenter’s-bench style of the back area has a much less finished feel than the tasting room, but there’s a reason for that, Wright explained.
“When I was an architect and builder, I always found the process of building the house as interesting and as invigorating as the finished product,” he said. “So, I like things that are unfinished, because when it’s finished, maybe it’s no longer yours, the process is over.
“One of the weird things about wine is when is it finished,” he continued. “It’s an odd thing to make something that you call finished, and you bottle it, and say it’s finished, but it’s not really finished because it continues to evolve and age.”
As Wright’s wines silently ferment, constantly changing, so does his winery and art gallery. The gallery, which currently shows a variety of contemporary pop and fine art, will undergo a transformation when artist Felipe Molina arrives to hang his solo exhibition, which opens June 5. Wright and Molina will work together to find the best layout for the artists’ work, moving walls or making changes that the work calls for.
Molina and Wright are used to collaborating. The two met in New York City at the Outlaw Roadshow through Counting Crows frontman and singer-songwriter Adam Duritz. Molina created the album art for a number of Counting Crows albums, and Wright provided free wine to performers in the festival, which is the brainchild of Duritz and music blogger Ryan Spaulding.
One evening at a Greenwich Village loft following a live performance by the Counting Crows, a discussion started, the outcome of which is a unique collaboration between a winemaker, visual artist, and songwriter. Two new wines from Standing Sun Wines, the Wild Mouse Rhone Blend and Skyrocket Syrah feature front labels painted by Molina. The back label includes song lyrics by Duritz, from the song “Palisades Park,” which also served as the inspiration for the names of each wine.
All three collaborators hand signed each back label for the wines. Only 900 bottles of each wine were created, Wright explained, so the two wines are truly boutique, yet the bottle stands as an art piece, whether the wine is consumed or not.
“I guess what I love about this project is that it was hatched between three people with no corporation, no legal anything—there’s still no contract,” Wright said. “It’s just, straight up, three guys who said, ‘let’s do this.’ We’re splitting it all equally, it was all fluid and organic, everyone is happy, and there was no hang-up at all.”
The taste of creativity
The impetus to create the Wild Mouse and Skyrocket wines may have started in the Greenwich Village loft, but in order for collaboration to begin, Wright knew he had to at least get Molina out to Standing Sun to help select the wines that would serve as the inspiration for Molina’s label artwork and the names and lyrics by Durtiz.
Molina visited the winery last year, the artist explained, and spent several days with Wright tasting straight from barrels, learning about wine, and trying and suggesting different blends.
“I learned a lot, which was really exciting for me because it was all new to me,” Molina said. “By the end of the a day or so, I had a good idea and already knew what I liked.”
Preferring the reds, Molina helped Wright zero in on the syrah and the Rhone blend. Several bottles were sent to Duritz, and Molina took some back to his Kentucky studio to taste while he worked on the labels.
Molina experiences synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that leads him to identify colors in a number of sensory experiences. His tasting of the wine was accompanied by strong senses color, the artist explained.
“Well, it’s not just limited to taste, there’s other things that elicit color responses from me, like music or emotional things, I get big walls of color, and it’s usually the same color for each different thing,” he said. “The red wine has a brown feeling, it just tastes like brown to me. It sounds almost obscene to say that, but I don’t get to choose the color.”
The two original art pieces created for the bottles were inspired by the taste, and so was Durtiz’s selection of song lyrics, Wright explained. The two wines reminded Duritz of his song “Palisades Park,” which is about memories of a boardwalk amusement park. The wines are named after rides found at the park, and Duritz hand wrote lyrics for each wine, which were recreated on the back labels.
The boutique wines will debut with the opening of Molina’s exhibition at Standing Sun Wines, which includes the artist’s latest work. His stay at the winery and at Wright’s property last year also inspired some of the work in the upcoming exhibition, Molina explained.
“An image really got in my head, and I’m being really honest about this, but I started painting these horizontal shapes, these rows,” he said. “I didn’t even realize what I had done until it was done, but it was all the vines, where they lay. It just had such a feel to me, a vibe, a sensation, that it stuck in me, and I made a painting with that image and feeling, reproduced, line after line after line.”
Feeling at home
Another important aspect of life at Standing Sun for Wright is music. He regularly employs local musicians to play a variety of events, but he began a concert series specifically for touring singer-songwriters and bands. The Live in the Winery series has featured more than 100 artists whom Wright has met personally at festivals like the Outlaw Roadshow and South-by-Southwest in Austin, Texas.
“My philosophy with the series is that you can see local bands around here, there are a lot of places to see them, but I wanted to create a series that is for touring bands, with the idea that you would, communally, support traveling bands and give them a home,” he said. “It’s a community space for outsiders, and to give them a home, because I know what touring and traveling is like on the road, and when somebody opens up their house to you, it’s a really big deal.”
Wright specifically constructed his semi-private loft space in order to give traveling bands a comfortable place to relax. The area includes cots, an entertainment system, and instruments and allows artists the freedom to seclude themselves or descend into the winery and mingle.
Though he prefers traveling indie artists for his concert series, Wright’s generosity has extended to one local group in particular, The Caverns, from Santa Barbara. The power trio—guitarist Sam Culchin, drummer Maxton Schulte, and bassist Alyssa Davey—met Wright through the Rock Shop Academy in Santa Barbara. Wright’s son takes lessons at the academy where the trio began as students and became counselors, and Wright has seen the classic-rock-emulating group grow from teenage rockers to a professional band of young adults.
“The Caverns, they’ve played here a couple of times, and I wanted to do something for them because they don’t have much online that you can watch,” Wright said. “I was talking to them and said, ‘Why don’t we just do a live album? It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’”
The group performed the live show on May 24 at the winery, which was recorded with high definition video and multi track microphone placement. The album will be the first release on the Standing Sun record label, Wright explained, which could go on to feature other local groups or perhaps a traveling band performing for Live in the Winery.
The Caverns, who also have a studio EP in the works, have enjoyed a Buellton following after multiple performances at Standing Sun and Figueroa Mountain Brewing Co., which co-sponsored the album. The attitude of creative fostering found at Standing Sun is a rarity among local venues, explained The Caverns’ Culchin.
“I don’t know a lot of venues like it really, that have that passion for helping bands,” Culchin said, “not only on the level of being a venue, but coming at it from a personal level. They are very passionate about music and want to support bands as much as they can, and other venues don’t necessarily have that same agenda.”
Wright’s agenda, which doesn’t exactly churn out profits, the winemaker candidly explained, is designed to maximize the quality of experience at Standing Sun. Giving a home to traveling artists, whether visual artists or musicians, is just something Wright enjoys. The concert series and art gallery have steadily grown in popularity, he explained, but he isn’t obsessing over the numbers.
Wright hopes to offer a fertile topsoil at Standing Sun from which breaking buds of creativity can grow, where artists feel free and comfortable to express themselves. With his wine swirling at the center of the artistic vortex, Wright is happy to sip, talk, listen, and enjoy the creativity that flows through his ever-changing winery.
“It’s a wild place to be,” he said, “because I don’t know exactly where it’s going to end up.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 4-11, 2015.