Stolpman Vineyards

From kitchen timing to cellar patience

The cellar decisions stay close to touch and sequence. Sashi Moorman, winemaker at Stolpman Vineyards in Los Olivos, brings that discipline to estate fruit from Ballard Canyon. His route to the bench did not begin in a vineyard. Vassar College came before restaurant work as a cook in Washington, D.C. and New York, where heat, repetition, texture, and restraint were part of the daily station. That sense of timing carried into wine.

Moorman trained in the cellar under winemaker Adam Tolmach at The Ojai Vineyard in Ojai, California. The shift from service to fermentation changed the clock: a decision made by hand in the cellar may not show its full consequence for months. At Stolpman, the work is tied to an estate rather than a buying program, with farming, fruit, and cellar choices all answering to the same ground. The house works from 173 acres of vines on a 220-acre property, planted beginning in 1992, with 18 different varieties in the ground. The bench here is not separate from the slope.

Ballard Canyon fruit, handled without disguise

The estate’s center of gravity is Ballard Canyon, where rare limestone soils and dry-farmed, organic viticulture shape the material before it reaches the cellar. Syrah sits at the front of the conversation, but the vineyard also carries Roussanne, Grenache, Sangiovese, Mourvèdre, Chardonnay, Gamay, Trousseau, and Sauvignon Blanc. That range matters because it keeps the cellar from becoming a single-variety exercise. Each lot asks for its own degree of restraint.

Moorman’s broader practice has long joined farming, making, and stewardship rather than treating them as separate trades. At Stolpman, that idea has a practical frame: estate-grown Rhône varieties, still red, white, and rosé wines, and a worker profit-sharing program that keeps the labor of the vineyard visible inside the finished bottle. The property’s scale gives the team room to work with parcel difference, but not enough room for anonymity. A wine from this place has to answer for its site, its farming, and the hands that moved it along.

A tasting room kept close to the field

The public face of the winery stays plain. The outdoor tasting area sits under trees in Los Olivos, with basic seating, a patio feel, blankets on cool days, and bottles served from coolers. It is a room without much room around it, more bench-side than stage. Conversation carries at a low level; the setting leaves space for the wine rather than filling the pause for it.

That casualness suits the work. Ballard Canyon can sound abstract until Syrah, Roussanne, or Grenache is in the glass, and the tree-covered patio keeps the tasting close to the rural atmosphere that made the wine possible. Nothing in the setting tries to separate the bottle from the property. The concrete fact remains the vineyard: 173 acres of vines on the Stolpman estate.