Stories

Lumen Stories

Immerse yourself in the captivating world of Lumen Wines and Santa Barbara Wine Country through our many stories.
We believe that the most balanced (and thus memorable) wines are made from fruit that is picked relatively early on the harvest calendar, the end result being a wine that is livelier on the palate, deeper in complexity, lower in alcohol, and more worthy of cellaring.
March 2, 2023
The Wild King (Pt 2): The Coming of Randall

The 2021 harvest was near. I called my winemaking partner, Lane Tanner, and asked her to find as many neutral oak barrels as we could gather - we had to accommodate extra fruit coming in. The quality in this new, mysterious vineyard was just too good to pass up. I dubbed the vineyard ‘The Wild King,’ […]

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November 10, 2022
The Wild King (part one)

I was always a believer that being wild was a good thing - to a point. Be it a confrontation with a bear on a remote surf trip in British Columbia in January, or a night spent adrift on the open ocean in a boat that had lost its engine, wild is exciting, invigorating, and […]

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September 19, 2022
Hey Ginger!

Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind were made by accident. Perhaps the best known (and beneficial) was made by scientist Dr. Alexander Fleming, who went on vacation for a few weeks and returned to see that his petri dishes had overgrown with mold. His discovery: penicillin. Other examples of benign errors include potato chips, […]

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May 23, 2022
Let's Get Technical

There’s a lot of geeky stuff on the back of a Lumen bottle - wine-geeky stuff. So why is it there? Not only are the basic facts listed - vineyard source, AVA, variety, clone - but also we share the pH, TA (titratable acidity), and Brix at harvest. What, you may ask, is the significance […]

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August 31, 2021
A Handful Of Sand

No two grains of sand are alike - or so a geologist will tell you - and the same goes for fistfuls. Take, for example, a microscopic photograph of grains of sand. What we believe to be a uniform substance (silica, just like the dictionary tells us), is in fact a random conglomeration of particles […]

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November 10, 2020
Warner's Most Transcendent Glass of Wine

tran-scend-ent/  adjective 1. beyond and outside the ordinary range of human experience or understanding 2. exceeding or surpassing usual limits especially in excellence In 1990 I flew to Portugal with my father, Warner, to visit port producers on the Douro River. As was customary for him, he had brought a number of books about Portuguese […]

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May 18, 2020
Orange is the New Pink

“Is that a note of melon or is it a hint of Goodyear rubber?”  For the past few decades orange wine has been steadily gaining followers in the world of wine, while also an ever larger stream of dissenters. What is it about a skin contact white that has everyone in such a tizzy? Why […]

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March 27, 2020
Clandestine Love

I’ll never forget the first time I fell in love with Grenache. I was at a fancy restaurant on an otherwise unmemorable date, and I decided to splurge on the tasting menu with wine pairing. The main course came with a glass of red wine, and upon my first sip my taste buds ignited with […]

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March 27, 2020
Orange Crush

LUMEN has officially kicked off the 2019 harvest with an early pick of Pinot Gris from Sierra Madre Vineyard, and Lane has once again donned her magic yellow boot. What seemed to me like a late year for harvest got a chuckle out of Lane. "This is a normal year," she said, which made me realize […]

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