History
David Thompson chose the Alisos Canyon site with Juventino Cervantes and planted it between 1989 and 1991, only the third Syrah planting in Santa Barbara County. His cuttings came from the Estrella River material tracing to Chapoutier's holdings in Hermitage, famously brought over in a suitcase, and went in ungrafted. From the mid 1990s the fruit built the county's great Syrah designations: Adam Tolmach's Ojai, Craig Jaffurs, and Joey Tensley, whose first vineyard-designate Syrah was a single 1998 barrel of Thompson. Noah Rowles bought the vineyard in 2014, founded Dovecote Estate Winery on it, and initiated the petition, written by Wes Hagen, that made Alisos Canyon an AVA in August 2020.
The Site
The parcel at 9229 Alisos Canyon Road covers about 138 deeded acres with 43 acres of south-facing vines on sandy limestone soils, roughly 42 acres of them mapped in the state crop survey. The canyon runs along San Antonio Creek southeast of Los Alamos, warmer than Santa Maria Valley and cooler than Ballard Canyon, the balance Hagen called the Goldilocks Rhone zone, and its sandy ground is why the own-rooted vines survive.
Vines and Blocks
Own-rooted Syrah leads, one of the county's only ungrafted plantings, with Grenache alongside.
The Wines
Thompson Syrah is the county's dark benchmark: blue-black fruit, smoked meat and firm, age-worthy structure. Tensley and Jaffurs have bottled every harvest since their first, and Dovecote's estate Noumenon now carries the Alisos Canyon designation on the labels.