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Buy Wine from Phelan Farm
Just three miles from the Pacific, where sea mists snake up canyons and dissolve into east-facing hillsides, lies Phelan Farm in Cambria, on California's remote San Luis Obispo coast. This place, which looks more like a botanical experiment than a traditional vineyard, has escaped the radar of conventional critics, but has become one of the quietest and most influential epicentres of innovation in contemporary Californian wine.
When Greg dreamed of free-rooting
It all began in 2007 when Greg Phelan, driven by a late obsession with viticulture, decided to plant Chardonnay and Pinot Noir direct-rooted, without rootstock, defying convention in degraded slate and granite soils. But it was with the arrival of Rajat Parr in 2019, renowned sommelier and key figure in natural wine in the United States, that the estate took a radical turn. Parr didn't just lease the property: he reimagined the vineyard from the ground up, introducing an almost unknown palette of cool-climate varieties -Trousseau, Poulsard, Savagnin, Mencía, Mondeuse, Gamay -grown with a deeply regenerative approach.
There is no monoculture here, no rows of vines lined up to the millimetre. Biodynamics, permaculture and regenerative agriculture set the pace. The soil is not worked; it is protected. The vines coexist with fruit trees, wild leguminous plants and indigenous flowers. Applications include compost teas, fermented plant preparations and mineral clays. Everything is designed so that the ecosystem is self-regulating, and so that the vine grows not as a production machine, but as a living being fully adapted to its environment.
Wines that don't ask for permission
In the winery, the philosophy is coherent: minimum intervention. The grapes are harvested by hand, fermented with indigenous yeasts, aged in neutral barrels and bottled without fining, without filtering and -in most cases- without adding sulphur. The result is not "easy" wines, but profoundly lively, volatile, sometimes untamable, demanding attention and time. Wines that do not seek to please, but to provoke.
It is not California. It is something else
The paradox of Phelan Farm is that, despite being in one of the most renowned wine regions in the United States, it is nothing like the rest of California. There are no solar wines here, no extraction, no new wood. The extreme oceanic influence, nighttime temperatures that can drop to single digits even in summer, and poor soils, result in wines that are light but structured, taut, with vibrant acidity and an almost alpine nerve.
Rajat Parr often says that he does not make "natural wines", but wines of place. And Phelan Farm is precisely the purest expression of an unusual place: a remote corner where the vineyard is forest, the soil is life and the wine is a living language that cannot easily be translated into scores or labels. An estate that is quietly making its mark on the Pacific coast
Buy Wine from Phelan Farm
Just three miles from the Pacific, where sea mists snake up canyons and dissolve into east-facing hillsides, lies Phelan Farm in Cambria, on California's remote San Luis Obispo coast. This place, which looks more like a botanical experiment than a traditional vineyard, has escaped the radar of conventional critics, but has become one of the quietest and most influential epicentres of innovation in contemporary Californian wine.
When Greg dreamed of free-rooting
It all began in 2007 when Greg Phelan, driven by a late obsession with viticulture, decided to plant Chardonnay and Pinot Noir direct-rooted, without rootstock, defying convention in degraded slate and granite soils. But it was with the arrival of Rajat Parr in 2019, renowned sommelier and key figure in natural wine in the United States, that the estate took a radical turn. Parr didn't just lease the property: he reimagined the vineyard from the ground up, introducing an almost unknown palette of cool-climate varieties -Trousseau, Poulsard, Savagnin, Mencía, Mondeuse, Gamay -grown with a deeply regenerative approach.
There is no monoculture here, no rows of vines lined up to the millimetre. Biodynamics, permaculture and regenerative agriculture set the pace. The soil is not worked; it is protected. The vines coexist with fruit trees, wild leguminous plants and indigenous flowers. Applications include compost teas, fermented plant preparations and mineral clays. Everything is designed so that the ecosystem is self-regulating, and so that the vine grows not as a production machine, but as a living being fully adapted to its environment.
Wines that don't ask for permission
In the winery, the philosophy is coherent: minimum intervention. The grapes are harvested by hand, fermented with indigenous yeasts, aged in neutral barrels and bottled without fining, without filtering and -in most cases- without adding sulphur. The result is not "easy" wines, but profoundly lively, volatile, sometimes untamable, demanding attention and time. Wines that do not seek to please, but to provoke.
It is not California. It is something else
The paradox of Phelan Farm is that, despite being in one of the most renowned wine regions in the United States, it is nothing like the rest of California. There are no solar wines here, no extraction, no new wood. The extreme oceanic influence, nighttime temperatures that can drop to single digits even in summer, and poor soils, result in wines that are light but structured, taut, with vibrant acidity and an almost alpine nerve.
Rajat Parr often says that he does not make "natural wines", but wines of place. And Phelan Farm is precisely the purest expression of an unusual place: a remote corner where the vineyard is forest, the soil is life and the wine is a living language that cannot easily be translated into scores or labels. An estate that is quietly making its mark on the Pacific coast