Au Bon Climat
Au Bon Climat
Santa Maria Valley, Santa Barbara County, California
Jim Clendenen was one of the first winemakers I ever met. It was 1998, a few months into my job as cellar master at Windows on the World, and he came up to the 107th floor to run a staff training. He tasted the wine team first, then the entire front of house. I was fresh out of culinary school, tasting next to some of the most experienced palates in the country. Everyone around the table had something to say about every glass. It was intimidating, and I was shy about offering an opinion in that company. Jim asked for mine anyway.
Somewhere in the lineup he turned to me and asked what I thought of the wine. I told him I liked it, but I did not know enough to say much more. He would not let it go. “You might not have the technical knowledge,” he said, “or have tasted all the Pinot Noirs you ever will. That takes time. But your opinion is yours alone.” He told us he made wine for everyone, the newcomer and the expert, and wanted my opinion. By then Jim had spent sixteen years preaching the beauty of Santa Barbara Pinot Noir at a time when most professionals only cared about Burgundy. He had a room full of those professionals ready to tell him what they thought, and he wanted to hear from the guy a few months into the business I have been in a lot of rooms since that day, and the producers worth knowing all do what Jim did. They ask questions to everyone. Most never learn to.
Jim left UC Santa Barbara in 1974 with a pre-law degree and a plan for law school. Six months in Europe in 1977, through Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy, ended the plan. In 1982 he and Adam Tolmach started Au Bon Climat in a former dairy barn outside Los Alamos. There was no money to hire anyone, so the two of them did all of it. Tolmach left to start Ojai Winery, and in 1990 Jim moved the operation onto Bien Nacido Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley, into a plain building he shared with Bob Lindquist of Qupé for the next three decades.
Inside that building Jim ran a Burgundy cellar. Open-top fermenters, whole clusters, malolactic in small barrels, long contact on the lees, no filtration. He picked for balance and said so to anyone in range. If you have seen Sideways, the Pinot Noir Miles cannot stop talking about is the style Jim had been making in Santa Barbara County for more than twenty years before the film came out.
Every day in that building there was lunch. Jim cooked. When he traveled, Enrique Rodriguez, his first employee, cooked. Cellar crew, growers, importers and visiting winemakers sat at one long table, and the bottles kept coming. Henri Jayer ate there. So did Jancis Robinson. Gavin Chanin, who spent a decade as Jim's assistant, said Jim mentored half of Santa Barbara County.
I sat at that table twice while Jim was alive. He died on May 15, 2021, and the next time I sat there was that July, a week before his celebration of life, with Susan beside me. Bob Lindquist was there, and so were Enrique and the whole wine team. We opened a bottle of sparkling wine and toasted Jim at his own table. Then, the way it went at every lunch, the bottles kept appearing. New vintages, old vintages, his and other people's, a Burgundy or two.
Jim Adelman, who has made the wines since 1991, and Enrique Rodriguez now own a share of the winery, with more than sixty years at Au Bon Climat between them. Jim's daughter Isabelle works on the business side, and his son Knox joined the cellar in 2022. Each has a Pinot Noir named for them. The wines taste the way Jim made them taste.
I have been drinking his wines for twenty-eight years. His Santa Barbara Pinot Noir is a staple in my house and has been part of every wine program I have run.
A visit to Au Bon Climat through Vineyard Confidential goes to the winery on Bien Nacido, not the tasting room in town. You walk the hillside blocks that have fed these wines since 1990 with the people who farm and ferment them. You taste from barrel with the team that stood beside Jim for thirty years, and then you sit down at the table where he fed the wine world. By the end of lunch someone will ask what you think, and they will mean it.
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FROM THE CELLAR
2023 Chardonnay, Au Bon Climat (Santa Barbara)
Whole-cluster pressed, aged in neutral French oak on its lees. Citron, apple blossom and grapefruit, with bright acid and no butter.
2024 Pinot Noir, Au Bon Climat (Santa Barbara). Bien Nacido, North Canyon, Rancho Real, Kick On and Los Alamos, each picked in several passes, eight months in François Frères barrels, 13.5 percent alcohol. This is the wine Jim built to prove balance does not require a special occasion. Red currant and blood orange, bay leaf and white pepper, and wonderful freshness.
2024 Pinot Noir, La Bauge Au-dessus, Au Bon Climat (Santa Maria Valley). The winery translates the name as a wild party upstairs. It began on the hillsides of Bien Nacido, and once his own Le Bon Climat vineyard proved itself he started blending the best lots of both every year. Five-ton open-top fermenters punched down daily, two years in barrel, egg white fining, bottled unfiltered. Cherry and cranberry up front, rose petal, earth and spice underneath.