Kunin Santa Barbara Syrah 2002

It doesn’t do any good to make great wine if you can’t get it into the hands and mouths of the public, so a good understanding of the entire wine industry is invaluable. After eight years in the restaurant business, armed with a dangerous amount of knowledge and passion, I got a job in the cellar at the Gainey Vineyards in Santa Ynez and learned volumes from both the vineyard manager, Jeff Newton, and the winemaker, Kirby Anderson. How they put up with my constant barrage of totally inane questions I don’t know, but I am certainly thankful that they did.

Kunin Wines will never make 5,000 or even 10,000 cases of wine for just this reason. I want to make the best wine possible from the best vineyards possible year after year. Unfortunately, the best vineyards don’t always have that many grapes, so it is a fact of life for me that Kunin Wines will always be small, and that our production of various wines from different vineyards may fluctuate from vintage to vintage. By staying small and letting vineyard and vintage quality dictate production levels, however, we will always be able to make the best wines possible from the best grapes available. When you open a bottle of wine with a Kunin label, you can be assured that, from the vineyard to the glass, as little as possible was done to obscure the purity of fruit and terroir that Mother Nature created.