Lafond Winery & Vineyards

Pinot Noir sets the decision

Pinot Noir drives the sourcing decision: Bruce McGuire, winemaker at Lafond Winery & Vineyards in Buellton, has held this cellar post since 2000. His work here sits beside his role at Santa Barbara Winery, a split that he explains through capacity, geography, and fruit. Lafond gives the program a place in the valley where the vineyards are, and it gives the red wine work more room than the Santa Barbara facility could carry. McGuire has said he wanted control of more Pinot Noir sourcing because available fruit is scarce, and because Pinot is one of the most important grapes to grow oneself. That is a practical statement from the bench, not a romance of vineyard ownership. It tells the reader what matters here: a winemaker staying close to fruit, structure, and the limits of site over repeated seasons. At Lafond, his long tenure makes continuity part of the method. The same station asks for the same question in different years, how much the vineyard can give without losing its line.

A cool Region 1 vineyard under hand

The estate is built around a 97.5-acre vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills AVA, a cool Region 1 setting suited to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah. Those are the stated pillars of the house, with still red and still white wines carrying the focus. The production philosophy is conventional and the scale is medium, which leaves the craft language here in the decisions McGuire is willing to state: where the wine can be made, why the valley matters, and why growing Pinot Noir gives the cellar more command over its own blend. Sta. Rita Hills gives Lafond its working frame: cool air, estate fruit, and a cellar arranged around the need to make Pinot Noir with enough control to answer scarcity rather than chase it.

Mountain light and the barrel room

The tasting room keeps the work in view without turning the cellar into theatre. It is spacious, quiet, and set against mountain views, with a line of sight toward the barrel aging room. That matters in a winery where the case for the place is made through continuity rather than spectacle. The room, the vineyard estate, and the barrel room sit close enough for a guest to understand the chain of decisions: fruit grown here, wine held here, flights poured here. The atmosphere is rustic and classic, more settled than staged. In that quiet, the bench-side details have room to register, the slope outside, the stillness of barrels, the steady pull of Pinot Noir through McGuire’s program.

Continuity as the measure

Lafond carries a current award, and McGuire’s time at the same post and the vineyard discipline behind it. His stated next move is not a launch or a slogan; it is the same cellar problem returning with each vintage, making red wine in the valley where the fruit is grown. The close attention here belongs to Bruce McGuire, Pinot Noir, and the 97.5-acre Lafond vineyard.