Castoro Cellars

The same hand since 1990

Estate fruit sets the frame before Tom Myers begins his cellar work as winemaker at Castoro Cellars in Templeton. He has held that post since 1990, long enough for the job to read less as appointment than as discipline: the same region, the same house, the same need to carry a season from vineyard to bottle without letting cellar decisions blur its origin. Myers’ Paso Robles record reaches back to 1978, and that span places him inside the region’s working memory rather than just its present market. Michigan State University and the University of California, Davis gave him the academic base, but the longer education has been time on the tools in Paso Robles. At Castoro, the role is not described through spectacle. It is estate-grown work, produced and bottled from vineyards belonging to the house, with Myers responsible for keeping grape, cellar, and finished wine in conversation. His Winemaker of the Year recognition in 2002 sits inside that longer measure, one marker in a practice defined by repetition.

Organic vineyards, estate bottles

Castoro Cellars works from a large estate of over 1,400 acres of certified organic vineyards, a scale that changes the maker’s problem. The question is not how to invent identity from scattered fruit, but how to keep a wide estate legible across varieties, blends, and vintages. The house names Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Chardonnay, Primitivo, Pinot Grigio, and Albarino among its wines, with still reds and still whites forming the main line of the program. That breadth asks for restraint from the cellar. Myers’ task is to let each wine hold its place without turning the portfolio into a set of cellar signatures imposed from above. Castoro’s stated belief that wine belongs with the daily meal matters here. It pulls the work away from trophy language and back toward use, where acidity, structure, and repeatability matter because the bottle has to sit beside food. In that register, estate production becomes more than a claim of control; it becomes the method by which the vineyard remains close to the glass.

Gardens around the tasting room

The tasting room sits in the middle of Cobble Creek vineyard, Mediterranean in form and held by gardens, mature oaks, and vine rows. The setting is quiet rather than theatrical, with the kind of pastoral scale that lets the estate announce itself slowly: oak shade, planted edges, vineyard views, the tasting room set among the rows rather than apart from them. That matters for a house whose wines depend on place as their organizing fact. The visitor sees the same vineyard surroundings that give the cellar its raw material, and the room does not need to explain the connection too loudly. Castoro’s rustic and scenic character comes from that proximity, not from styling. The craft begins outside the door, in the certified organic acreage, and Myers’ work brings it back inside as Pinot Grigio and Albarino.