Though Santa Barbara County was earning a reputation for fine wine by the 1970s, the actual City of Santa Barbara only became a hub for wine culture in the 21st century. Up until 20 years ago, there were only two tasting rooms in Santa Barbara proper, which lies about 45 minutes south of where wine grapes are grown in the Santa Ynez Valley.
There was the granddaddy of it all, the late Pierre Lafond’s Santa Barbara Winery, which started making and selling wines out of a former fish processing warehouse in an industrial waterfront neighborhood back in 1964. Then in 1994, Jaffurs Wine Cellars launched a Rhône-inspired project out of a small building on the city’s Eastside, near the taquerias and autobody shops of Milpas Street.
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Today, the formerly overlooked neighborhood that Santa Barbara Winery found 60 years ago is a thriving food and wine destination known as the Funk Zone, home to multiple restaurants, breweries, a distillery and more than a dozen tasting rooms. The Eastside, meanwhile, picked up a handful more wineries as well, and so did the rest of town, from the promenade of State Street up to the Presidio Neighborhood and all the way out to the suburbs of Goleta.
There are so many tasting options in Santa Barbara now that you could spend an entire wine vacation within city limits and never get bored, especially due
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
