A Bordeaux blend from Santa Barbara? Surely not, I thought. Or at least, not a drinkable one.

Santa Barbara winemakers have earned a reputation over the last 20 years for their cool climate varietals like pinot noir and chardonnay. Their few attempts to make cabernet sauvignon or similar Bordeaux-style blends have not exactly bought acclaim raining down on their collective heads. The climate is just not warm enough.

But then there’s Happy Canyon. One of America’s newest and smallest AVA’s (American Viticultural Area), it’s carved out of the much larger Santa Ynez Valley AVA at the extreme eastern end of the valley. Its vineyards are at a higher elevation, so they escape the cooling sea mists that envelop their neighbors closer to the ocean.

This allows them to grow the Bordeaux varietals that make up this week’s Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week, the Cimarone, Le Clos Secret 2007 ($60).

Doug Margerum

“It’s a very distinctive area within Santa Barbara County” explains Doug Margerum, Cimarone’s winemaker and a driving force behind the new AVA designation.  “We had a group of vintners in an area that was a lot warmer than the rest of Santa Barbara County who had made a commitment to plant (Bordeaux varietals) and we felt we really had to have a separate designation because the grapes we were growing here are so different from what is grown in the rest of Santa Barbara County.”

The Le Clos Secret is certainly different. It has that real pungent Bordeaux-like earthiness that’s missing from most New World meritage blends, while still being packed with the sort of lush fruit flavors like blackberry and cherry one expects in a California red.

As Margerum observes, the Le Clos Secret is not Napa and it’s not Bordeaux. Though regardless of how they’re are defined, expect to see a lot more happy wines from Happy Canyon in the coming years.

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