Paso Wine Plunge

There once was a skilled winemaker from Santa Cruz that moved to Paso Robles to start a new wine brand. His name was Ben and he was an assistant winemaker at Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains and used to visit Paso staying with his friend Bender who made wine barrels. He thought he could make it work in the Pass of the Oaks because he loved the wine, soils, culture and the opportunity to be around world-class winemakers everyday. It would allow him to learn from the best and take advantage of Paso’s legitimate success in the wine world. He made wine on the side while at Ridge but did not market and sell to consumers, just shared and drank with his friends and family. It would be his first Paso vintage where he was promoting his brand Electros named after the music genre of electronic music with early hip-hop influence that used drum machines, synthesizers and funk music to create a unique sound in the late 70s and early 80s. To start, he bought fruit from the Adelaida District and Templeton Gap and was happy to get a chance to buy a few tons from each vineyard site. He made a bunch of money from a remote tech job he had in the past while living in Santa Cruz which allowed him to make wine and put everything on the line moving to Paso with only one friend living there. People thought he was crazy, which he was, but he was confident in making it happen, so after a lot of extensive research on the region’s terroir, he decided to sell most of his belongings and take the Paso wine plunge…

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