Sip & Savor: The Originals

The Originals

Stewart McLennan and Doug Minnick, founders of the Garagiste Festival Championing the

Micro-Winery Movement

Call them the original garagistes: Stewart (Stew) McLennan and Doug Minnick have a come a long way since 2011 when they launched their first festival at Paso’s Windfall Farms. From a 25-winery participation the festival has grown to some 50 wineries, yet the attendance is kept well under 1000.

Celebrating its 11th festival in November 2022, Paso’s homegrown wine festival has been on a trajectory spotlighting the micro-winery movement powered by small lot artisanal winemakers, now dominating the Central Coast wine scene.

The key to the festival’s success lies in its intimacy.

“One of my big thing was let’s not grow too deep, its not really a good event when people who come here are not able to talk to the winemakers,” McLennan told me when I met him to explore the arc of this runaway success. In the last few years, the festival has branched out to Solvang, Sonoma and Los Angeles.“Our primary goal is to give the wineries of that region a presence, keep it local.”

The growth has been organic. It’s not so much the large attendance but the number of small production wineries showcased at these festivals that reflects the success of the movement.

“A more relevant number would be that we have more than 750 wineries in our orbit,” Minnick commented in a phone conversation from his Hoi Polloi Winery tasting room in Newhall.

Most wine festivals generally draw crowds upwards of 2,000 people, McLennan noted.

“At large festivals people are rushing in like running of the bulls,” McLennan mused on the large crowds. “Nothing’s wrong with showcasing the wines, but they sell too many tickets.”

Garagiste festival, on the other hand, is dictated by the venue and its intimacy.

“A place with character, no hotel ballrooms,” Minnick asserted, giving examples of the Solvang and Sonoma festivals, both held at Veterans Memorial Hall and the Los Angeles festival staged in the circa 1930s Glendale Memorial building.

“If we were interested in attendance and selling tickets, we would put out tents in a field,” Minnick laughed.

The flagship Paso is the largest festival held at the Event Center but still controlled under 1000 attendance.

At most festivals, McLennan noted, the participating wineries usually send their representatives but not the winemaker. “So you’re not making a direct connection with that wine, people want to have that interaction and they value that.”

To that extent, winery participation is capped between 50-55.

“We always have a waiting list. We turn them down,” said McLennan, who founded Sharpei Moon Wine with his wife Michelle.

McLennan was inspired by the garagiste concept when he read a piece in Robert M. Parker’s Wine Advocate journal where the wine guru spotlighted few of Bordeaux’s lowly winemakers producing wine in their garages - and so the name garagiste.

A light bulb sparked and McLennan and Minnick were the first to shine a light on the American garagiste winemaker launching their festival in 2011.

According to Wines Vines Analytics reports, the number of small, limited-production wineries along the Central Coast has more than doubled (61 percent) to 753 since 2010, with the number of limited-production wineries (under 1,000 annual-case production) having grown a whopping 73 percent.

Is the Central Cost the heartbeat of the small lot production, I ask Minnick?

“There’s no more a diverse region between Santa Barbara and Paso in the world,” Minnick answered.

An abundance of grape varieties give the experimental winemaker an ability to craft small lots.

“This festival is the best place for people to learn about wine in one day because of the range of wines,” Minnick noted. “This is our 40th festival, and I’m still finding new varieties.”

The festival kicked off at Pavilion on the Lake in Atascadero, with a Rare Reserve Tasting, featuring 50 special wines. Following day, the festivities began at the Paso Robles Event Center with a morning seminar titled “The Many Sides of Syrah” moderated by McLennan.

Why the focus on Syrah? Because of all the Rhône varieties syrah is the master of Rhône, McLennan noted. “Syrah is to Rhône what cabernet is to Bordeaux.”

McLennan shared that syrah is one of his favorite wines especially when blended with cabernet sauvignon.

“There’s a lot of Paso wine that is cab syrah blend, but it began in Australia,” remarked the Aussie.

The post-seminar Grand Tasting brought together over 50 winemakers pouring 200 plus wines produced from some 20 wine grape varieties. In addition to local Paso wineries, other participants included Napa and Sonoma wineries.

Proceeds from the festivals support the Garagiste Festival Scholarship fund of the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo Wine and Viticulture Department.