Foxen Vineyard and Winery

The founding hand in the trade

A bottle leaving the counter still carries Dick Doré’s founding hand: founder and Director of Sales at Foxen Vineyard and Winery in Santa Maria, he has kept the house tied to its origins since 1985. His station is not the crush pad alone, nor only the tasting room. Doré’s work sits where lineage meets the market, in the judgment that helps a family-owned winery hold its shape while its wines travel beyond Foxen Canyon Road.

Foxen began in 1985, and Doré’s name remains attached to the build as well as the trade. That double role matters here. The winery sits on Rancho Tinaquaic, a 2000-acre ranch, and the place has kept two faces in view: the original rustic Shack tasting room and a modern solar-powered facility. One speaks to the early hand-built character of the house; the other to the practical discipline of sustaining a small-production winery without turning its back on the land around it. Doré’s title has stayed steady, but the work inside it asks for repetition, patience, and a clear sense of what belongs under the Foxen name.

Minimalist work on Santa Maria fruit

The program is built around still red and still white wines from Santa Maria Valley AVA, with Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Syrah, and Cabernet Franc in the house vocabulary. Foxen describes its philosophy as sustainable and small production, with sustainable and dry-farmed sourcing named as part of the method. The house also points to minimalist winemaking, a phrase that only carries weight when the cellar accepts restraint as a discipline rather than a style note.

For a place like this, the measurements that matter are not only in tanks or barrels. They are in continuity: 1985 to the present, one founding role held through the changing expectations of Santa Barbara County wine. They are in scale: a 2000-acre ranch setting rather than an anonymous industrial address. They are in the split between the Shack and the solar-powered winery, two rooms with different tools but one line of custody.

The Shack and the solar room

The tasting room life at Foxen has a quiet tempo. The original Shack gives the place its rougher edge, wood and ranch air rather than polish for its own sake. The newer solar-powered room changes the light and the equipment around the work, but not the sense that this is still a winery grounded in Foxen Canyon. The room feels intimate because the land remains visible in the mind of the place, even when the glass in front of you is the object of attention.

That setting matters to Doré’s role. Sales, in this context, is not a detached language laid over wine after the fact. It is the work of carrying those wines from a specific ranch road into other rooms without sanding away the place that made them. It ends on the bottle, then, and on the route back to Rancho Tinaquaic.