Good Dirt in the City of Angels

15 questions for a daring, detail-obsessed LA vintner

“It was such a compelling story, and I couldn't figure out why nobody else was focused on it.”

When Patrick Kelley answered our phone call this month, he was rustling through the vines in a cool pocket of Ventura County, picking Grenache. These were his final grapes to bring in from the 2026 harvest, which wound down six to eight weeks early throughout California. 

Patrick founded Cavaletti Vineyards in 2016. The boutique 1,500-case winery operates from the city of Moorpark in Ventura, northwest of Los Angeles. If your eyebrows rose at “Los Angeles,” good – that’s what intrigued us about Cavaletti. The project is among a modest but gutsy wave of producers reviving Southern California’s largely forgotten wine tradition. These vintners are determined to uncover and celebrate the little-known terroir of one of the best-known locales in the world. 

Southern California is actually where California winemaking began, with Franciscan friars planting Mission grapes in the late 1700s in the San Diego area. By the mid-1880s, Los Angeles County’s wine industry had grown to several thousand acres of grapes. But viticulture lost ground as Pierce’s disease swept through the vines, navel orange groves replaced vineyards, Prohibition closed remaining wineries, and lucrative real estate development swallowed farmland. LA County now has a mere 150 acres of winegrapes.

Neighboring Ventura County has little winegrowing history and only a few dozen acres of winegrapes today, and Patrick has planted some of those himself. He is exploring the broader Southern California region within a 109-mile radius of the Cavaletti facility – from century-old vines in Cucamonga Valley to high-desert plantings in Antelope Valley to coastal vineyards in Malibu and Ventura, to the better-known Central Coast appellations of Sta. Rita Hills, Ballard Canyon, and the Santa Ynez Valley to the north.

In our shop, we’re featuring three Cavaletti wines from the latter areas: A wonderfully creamy, salty Chardonnay from the eastern-most vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills, replete with notes of yellow plum, amber resin, daffodils, honeycomb, hazelnut, and toasted brioche. A juicy Malbec from a cooler site in Los Olivos with exciting herbaceous depth – of which Patrick made just two barrels. And a Santa Ynez Tempranillo with lots of savory–floral personality.

Enjoy Patrick…

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People love to love LA, and people love to hate LA, but everyone knows LA has a cool factor. If I see “Los Angeles” on a wine list, I'm going to smile and try it. What about your locals – are they curious and proud to taste how the land translates to wine, or are they resistant? 

This is an exciting topic to talk about. I would say that Los Angeles County – let's just talk about LA County because that's the birthplace of the California wine industry – has been so urbanized that there are very few visual indicators that it was ever an agricultural area. I think people struggle to wrap their heads around it. They can't picture what downtown Los Angeles looked like in the early 1800s. There is still an avocado orchard one block off Sunset in Hollywood. People drive by all the time and they don't even see it – it's invisible. Really good sommeliers have fully embraced anything that we've done from Los Angeles County. They love the story, they've really appreciated the wines, and they find absolutely no challenge whatsoever in presenting them to their customers and selling them. 

I think there's been a gap at lower-tier restaurants – those buyers are like, “I don't know, this is unfamiliar to me. It doesn't feel right that you're growing grapes and making wine in the broader Los Angeles area.” What is right there underneath your feet and in your proverbial backyard sometimes can be like, “No, that can't possibly… wine has to come from a different place.” However, we have a distributor in North Carolina who said, “These are awesome. I think this is a super cool story.” 

What about the local wine enthusiast?

Consumers we work with directly have also been really interested. Over the last decade, I think we've really crossed the hurdle where it no longer seems as strange. I'm not really having argumentative, knock-down, drag-out conversations with people anymore about whether the wines can be good. They generally think, “Yes, it's a Mediterranean climate.” And once they have the wines, they're like, “Oh, these are delightful. These are every bit as good as wines that I get from Santa Barbara or Paso Robles or Northern California.” They're surprised by it. But once we put it in their glass, we don't have any trouble selling it.

You’re based in Ventura County, which has even less winegrowing history than LA proper? 

Ventura County is an agricultural powerhouse. But there has never really been a history of a lot of commercial grape production here. It's always been other crops… winter wheat at one point, walnuts, citrus, avocados. Today: strawberries, row crops, artichokes, you name it. 

I think it's one of the greatest Syrah climates on Earth. We get really complex flavors. We've got great natural acidity because our climate is so moderate here. It’s very consistent month over month…. so we get a really long growing season. We get full phenolic ripeness, but because it doesn't get too hot, we’ve got great natural acidity. 

And as for where I work across this broad region, we go from Rancho Cucamonga in the south all the way to Los Alamos and Santa Barbara County in the north. We can mix and match across regions and blend it to whatever style we want, which has been really, really helpful.  

The three Cavaletti wines we’re featuring come from more familiar appellations, in Santa Barbara County. Do you consider these Southern California? 

I do. There's a distinct difference between Santa Barbara and its climate, and going further north to Paso Robles or Monterey. Santa Barbara is really a coastal climate. I think when you talk to people in Santa Barbara, they think of themselves as either the southern part of the Central Coast or the northern part of Southern California. 

Why did you venture up there for fruit?

In Los Angeles County and Ventura County, there are not a lot of options for us. We've had to plant out a lot of the vineyards that we work with – they just didn't exist previously. So while that's coming on board, you still want to be able to produce enough wine, you want to be able to offer your clients something. That led me into Santa Barbara, where I've built relationships with a number of growers and continued working with those same vineyards for about 10 years. Now it's a strong part of the portfolio and I don't think it'll ever go away. There are lots of wonderful whites up there, and pretty much every variety you could possibly want. So that's exciting and fun to work with. It gives us a lot of diversity. 

Let's say we get a strange rainfall during harvest in Ventura County, and our grapes are not exactly what I want. I still have Santa Barbara where I can go and harvest a month later. It gives me a long growing season, it gives me a lot of different options to work with, and it gives me a built-in safety net where I can be sure that I'm going to get all the grapes that I need for a given season. 

Where did you grow up? 

Southeastern Connecticut. I graduated college with a degree in biology, worked for two years on the East Coast, and I just picked up and moved to Los Angeles without a job, without any contacts. I said I'd figure it out when I got here. 

You founded Cavaletti in 2016. When did you have the realization about the lost viticultural story of the LA area, and the potential? 

I would say it was around 2014. Like a lot of small wineries, I got started just being curious about making wine, and I made a little bit of wine at home and it wasn't very good. But I was curious as to why it wasn't very good, and then that led me down the rabbit hole of exploring all the vineyards in Los Angeles County, and the history. I thought it was such a compelling story, and I couldn't figure out why nobody else was focused on it. Why did this stop becoming a thing? There's always a story behind it, and it's not always super simple, but it's fascinating. I just jumped in with both feet and said, “You know what? I think this is something we can make our own.” And it's proven to be true. 

Do you own or lease vineyards?

I do. We own our own small estate vineyard, and we have relationships right here in Ventura County – five different vineyards that we farm. 

We have your Rio Vista Vineyard Chardonnay, aged in neutral puncheons. How long can our collectors cellar an extra bottle or two? 

I haven't found the backside of any of the white wines yet. You sort of expect that they're going to have a narrower aging window. That's a 2023 vintage… you're good through 2029 at least. We haven't made the wine long enough to say it will go beyond that. You're looking for two things for ageability: one is tannin and concentration, and the other is acidity. Those vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills just really hold wonderful acidity. Whereas if the Chardonnay comes from a warmer climate, that's not always the case. 

You only made 50 cases of the 2023 Stag Canyon Malbec, so we feel pleased to have some. We find that people love Malbec when it's in their glass, but might not think of themselves as Malbec drinkers. Do you encounter this? 

That completely resonates with me. Malbec rose to prominence from Argentina. Those are super pleasurable, fruit-forward, wonderful wines. They're exceptional. But it's less familiar to people than Cabernet Sauvignon. They haven't had as much of an opportunity to experience it. So it literally has to be put in their glass or they won't grab it. If someone hasn't had it before, they look at the cost of a bottle and say, “I don't know. Is that going to be good? Do I want to risk it?” Those of us who are adventurous, we try it. The people who are maybe a little less adventurous, or a little less confident in wine generally, will skew towards something they're more familiar with. It's a shame – it's a great grape. 

Where is your Malbec vineyard?

The vineyard is only 4 acres planted, and we've made wine there since 2020. Technically, it's in the Los Olivos District of the Santa Ynez Valley. There is a set of hills that divides the Santa Ynez Valley proper with Happy Canyon. Stag Canyon sits right up against that set of hills, and I like it in particular for Bordeaux varieties because it's warm enough. We get enough hot days that we get full ripeness. But it's also cool enough, and it sits in the fog belt, that we preserve pyrazines really well. And so you've got this great blend of acidity and ripeness and tannin and complexity that I think is hard to find overall in Bordeaux varietals, and you tend to lose it when you get to a warmer climate. 

Excellent – a winemaker friend in Sonoma was just complaining to me about the lack of pyrazine edge in California-grown Bordeaux varieties. Moving on to your Tempranillo, it was bottled unfined and unfiltered, which we love. What percentage of your wines are unfiltered?

Almost all of the reds. We typically do two years of elevage. So once a wine's in barrel for two years – our storage room is relatively cold – you have natural stabilization, where all the lees will drop out of the wine. So you can get away with it being unfined and unfiltered. If you need to push a wine out to market earlier for whatever reason, that’s where you get into needing to filter a little bit to clarify the wine. 

Where does the name Cavalletti come from – it’s Italian for “little horses”? 

The hardest part about owning a winery is actually coming up with a name for the winery. Everything is taken – every name you could possibly ever want to come up with on Earth is trademarked, copyrighted, used by somebody else. We struggled to find a name for well over a year, and then one day my wife said, “What about the word ‘cavalletti’?” My wife and daughter ride horses, so I knew what a cavalletti was. I reached out to an Italian colleague and asked him what the literal translation was. And he said that in Northern Italy, the translation is easel, or as he said it, “the thing that holds up the artwork.” It was not taken, it’s metaphorically beautiful, and we just ran with it. 

There is a lot of energy, and serious attention to detail, in the Cavaletti communications. To me, that indicates high standards in the cellar and passion for your project. Or, how do you explain it?

It comes up a lot – I don't understand! People say, “You just have such intense energy.” I don't feel that way because obviously it's me, that's just the way that I normally am. But I personally have high standards. And it's challenging making wine from a region people haven't been focused on. So to really try and do something world-class requires quite a bit of focus, a lot of patience, endurance. I'm proud of the wines that we've made, and I'm proud of where we've come from and where we're going with the winery. 

By my nature, I’m also a little academic at times, so I will overthink and obsess over details. And I try to be an open book. Our customers always say they appreciate everything they learn when they come in here; I'll get into the intricacies of yeast selection, when we should harvest, how long we should age something and the reasons why. I bring my full energy and being into making the wines, and I try to communicate that as much as possible. 

Being outside wine country, we have to work really hard to win customers. And I find that the more information I can give people, the more comfort it gives them around coming to visit us for the first time, or buying the wines, or trying them out somewhere. I realize that's part of the customer journey. I think in a lot of other regions, they can rely on tourism and foot traffic. We have to fight for every customer that comes to see us. 

Your tasting space is in the production facility itself – that’s especially nice for geekier customers. 

There’s also community. Yesterday we had a wine club release – a couple sat down next to this other couple, and then they spent the next three hours talking to each other. They'd never met before. I love that kind of community and energy. I was in Barolo a week ago. I spent a long weekend in the village of La Morra. And I came to realize the joy of wine is sitting down and enjoying it with another person. It is not really in the beverage itself, and sitting by yourself. It's in sharing a glass of wine or a bottle. 

This sales manager for one of the wineries I was visiting said to me, “The problem with wine today is that people think what they really want is a bottle of a cult wine, or some wine that they couldn't possibly obtain. But I'd rather be sitting here drinking this $30 bottle of wine with you, and us talking about our families and our experiences, and what it's like to make wine in California versus Italy. For me, that's the magic around wine.” I thought that was eloquent. 

You know what else was great, the Italians speak in such superlatives about their products that come from their local areas. “Oh my god, we have the greatest hazelnuts on earth. We've got this amazing soil. It only happens here.” They're so proud of it. They just put it out there and live it. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

*The next time you are in the LA area, please let us know so we can arrange a VIP Wine Tasting at Cavaletti for you.